I Don't Try to do Things That I Know I Won't Be Good At
grooveamatic
Posts: 1,374
I Don't Try to do Things That I Know I Won't Be Good At
My Aunt Sophie-before she died-grew cucumbers. Not because she liked cucumbers. She herself loathed them. She grew them to sell to folks by the roadside, folks who didn’t want them. In fact, Aunt Sophie’s cucumbers were probably smaller and less cucumberish than those at the A&P, but I believed her when she told me hers’ were magnificent, and worthy. I was rightly impressed. When I had to spend the day with her, which was often, I’d eat them, raw and cold and dipped in Honey Mustard or Werthers Jelly, while I sat in front of the television. I ate them because it made her happy, and hence it made me happy. It wasn’t because I liked her cucumbers.
As for the folks who bought them by the roadside, well, you will always have fools who think that quality isn’t important, as long as the money doesn’t go to the Fat Cats, but to the women wearing pink drapes like a dress under awnings made of astro-turf by the roadside.
I’ve always known, it seems to me, that everyone is crazy. I’ve also always known that I was no better than anyone else. Maybe I’m better than the crazies or the loonies, but maybe not…and I think not. I’ve always known, however, that it is smart to act like you are better than everyone else, or at least act like you think you are better than everyone else.
That’s the way it seems to me, anyway.
Y’see, Aunt Sophie, way deep down where it counts like checkers, knew there was nothing special about her cucumbers. The important thing was acting like there was something special. I believed her. I played along.
I know better now, of course. She was looney, like the rest of us.
When I was ten, my parents moved to this new old house in Medford. It was a decent place for a ten year old to live, except I’d never go back there now, not for a million bucks. We lived in what they (my parents) called a house, but I’d never call it that. As my mind developed, I recognized the word squalor once in front of my father, and I got punched for it. I wasn’t an abused child, don’t get me wrong. But that really pissed him off.
Anyway, about the house: The windows were as thick as cheese cloth. You could have charged a funhouse admission to the stairs, as sure as we were of their hold and stability. The shingles were in vast disrepair…my father called the roof Scurvy’s. Anytime it rained, regardless of force or volume, water would search its’ way through the coves and wateralleys hidden in the ceiling and drop like secrets into strategically placed coffee tins which my father had used to store his moist pipe tobacco in. Anytime it rains now, I smell Burlingtons’ Red Cherry Realman Pipe Tobacco.
Even in hospitals.
It was in that house in Medford that Father first began to go on rants. About the government, the environment, the esoteric. Eventually, he would soliloquize.
His was a gradual madness. At first he would evoke anti-Congress statements, then anti-Democrat, then anti-Republican, anti-sex, anti-sleep, anti-everything. First once a week, twice a day, then always, ever-present and voluminous, just always something anti, and it didn’t matter what. His anti’s were a dime a dozen, and the man had a lot of dimes. Or perhaps a lot of dozens.
The strangest thing of all was that he had no apparent reason for this. We were poor, yes, but we had never been “fucked” by the government, nor had we, as father liked to put it, been “hypocricized.” Mother and Father paid taxes. They voted. Regularly. Beyond that, the only interaction my family had with the powers that be was that my father was pissed at them.
Eventually, after being angry for so long, Father bought guns. Plural. He did it because he could, because it was his right. No one, not even the government, could stop him from this, this obligation.
He polished them. He cleaned them. He tinkered with them. And then he mounted them. He didn’t shoot anything. At first.
He had three breechblock rifles, two bolt-action. He preferred the breechblock for the bigger stock, but also liked the bolt-action for no good reason. He used to sit at the big bay window aiming, aiming.
One time, Father and I actually went to hunt, with the guns. Neither of us had a liscense but, you know, screw the government.
It was a two-hour drive to Eagle Mountain, where we’d be hunting Loon. It was, of course, illegal. Loon were out of season (and don’t forget our liscense situation). The legality of it was never discussed. I thought about it a lot, though.
It was a two-hour drive to Eagle Mountain, and we got there in one.
When we finally got to the pulloff at the top of the mountain, he glanced hurriedly at me as I was bringing down the guns. “Put ‘em back. Bad day to hunt.” He got back in the truck. We turned around and drove home. Still without firing a gun.
The first time my father fired a gun, I was in the living room in Medford watching The Price Is Right. It was raining monsoonlike that day. Dreary. Of course, the shot registered right in the middle of Plinko! It rattled the windows, and Bob Barkers’ face, like someone had slammed the world with a gigantic sledge. The blast sent the coffee tins sliding out of place, setting off a subsequent Drip sound that was unique, simultaneously throughout the house, as the water drops, like secrets, landed on dry hardwood floors instead of their targeted cans. Even now, Bob Barkers’ face makes me hear that sound in my head.
Somewhere my sister Alice screamed. I ran to the kitchen. No one was there. Then I heard Mother scream.
The bathroom.
I blindly ran up the stairs to the bathroom. When I got there, I didn’t make a sound. Red. Lots of it. In the sink especially, and on the mirror. Ground Beef was everywhere. Mother fell to her knees and actually-frantically-tried to put the Ground Beef back together, jamming it with her palm into the gaping rear of Fathers’ head, but it wouldn’t stay there, it kept tumbling out. Every time she pushed some in, some white chalky skull would crumble off, and the hole only got larger. She was screaming the whole time, of course. Alice ran to help her. They, for a few seconds, were actually jockeying for position by the open skull, their hands scurrying over the top of each others’ hands, their screams and cries echoing off the tile floors and walls. They even pushed each other once or twice, to get closer to the head. For a moment it was like the old days, when Mother tried to teach Alice how to cook. That is exactly what it looked like.
Silently, I went back to the living room, changed the channel, and didn’t bother to change my pants. I got out Mothers’ sewing needles. I tested my arm, then my thigh. I watched the crimson ooze out. I licked it and tasted it, while listening to the grinding and shuffling of the Ground Beef overhead, a vain attempt to piece together a ruined madness.
Now, when it rains, I smell Burlingtons’ Red Cherry Realman Pipe Tobbacco and I see Bob Barkers’ face and I hear the Drip. Even in hospitals.
There wasn’t a note.
Mother stopped waking up when her alarm went off in the mornings. I honestly think she didn’t hear it. Some people suggested she ignored it. Oh well. It all amounted to the same thing.
Alice and I would get up for school and listen to Mothers’ alarm beepbeepbeeping. As soon as we’d call her from the hall, she’d wake up. Sometimes, though, she left the alarm going off anyway.
After awhile, she would waltz downstair and pretend to cook us breakfast. I am not exaggerating. One day Alice and I sat down, in expectation of eggs or pancakes, and Mother simply busied herself among phantom pots and spatulas, making wild histrionics in the air over the stove as if she were a ginsu TV chef flipping eggs with a pen-knife. Then she abruptly turned to us and asked if we were finished. She did this a few times. Always at breakfast. She cooked us real dinners, with real meat. And it was usually pretty good.
My best friend Ted Flannagan stopped visiting me on weekends to play video games, and we had always got together and played video games on weekends. Mother would make him tie double-knots in his shoes before he could eat with us. She also made him spit before entering the house, in order to “ensure hygeine”. She made everyone do that-except herself-and offered no further explanation. These habits were new to Mother.
I didn’t notice these quirks at the time. Or rather, I noticed them, but didn’t feel one way or the other about them. They seemed to be small slices of a natural progression, and that progression was neither good nor bad, but essential and mutable, like air or socks. Her flippant, sometimes hysterical behavior, seemed no more out of place to me than Rod Roddys’ tie-sequins. With Alice, though, it was a different story. Alice took precise mental note of all Mothers’ jabbering and hawing. You could see her young womans’ eyes calculating, in dollars, cents, and damnations, just how much each of Mothers’ embarrasments were worth to her, and how long they would take to be repaid. One day, her little eyes would say as she glared at Mother making Ted Flannagan spit on the porch, you will realize that you owe me.
Once, Mother took the old S-10 pickup truck into town to pick up some groceries and probably six magazines, like she usually did. She should have been gone thirty minutes at the most, but three hours later she pulled back into the driveway.
In a seven year old Chevy Nova.
When I asked her whose car this was, she answered, “It’s Timmys’ old truck, you weiner!” She referred to Father as Timmy, even though that had not been his name.
“ Mother,” I said calmly, “this is a car, not a truck.”
“ It’s Timmys’ old truck, you weiner.”
“ I have rode in the truck many times, Mother. This is not the truck.”
Alice poked her head out of the living room window. “ You are fucking insane, Mother! Do you realize that you are insane? Do you know it?”
Mother slowly, and without perturbance, turned her head toward Alice. “ There will be time for you, girl. Time enough. Where are your galoshes?”
“ What?” Alice and I asked in unison.
“ You heard me, Ferdinand!”
“ Mother, now who is Ferd-“
“ This is Timmys’ old truck, and I’ll not hear another-“
“ Mother, did you borrow this from-“
“ She’s completely looney! She’s-“
“ Shut your pumpkin-lip, girl, galoshes or no-“
“ Mother, did you borrow this from Aunt Lacey? She has a Nova-“
“ Listen to her, Ray! Ever since Dad…”
Silence, even from Mother.
No one had ever called him Dad, be he alive or dead. And he certainly wasn’t mentioned very much at all by any name, not since Mother had begun acting strangely. Alices’ comment floored everyone. I think it even caught Alice quite by surprise.
We had some people come to the house, and there was a van. No arm-restraining jacket though. She wasn’t that bad. We payed for it out of Fathers’ pension.
Mother was gone two days.
We never found out where she got that Nova.
When I was a very young little boy-just old enough to start remembering things, really-Mother and Father had their wedding vows renewed. They had only been married something like eight years at that time. They renewed their vows that early because Mother had some family that had been living as missionaries in Peru at the time of their wedding. Something like five cousins and two uncles, and I never even found out what ilk of missionaries they were. They were odd folk. I never asked questions about them.
But I do remember the ceremony quite well for how young I was. I don’t know how they paid for it, but it was rather opulent. Large floral settings, seemingly hundreds of candles, professionally printed invitations and programs-the whole nine yards. And the thing I remember the most is the kiss. It was so long! To a little boy it seemd they’d kiss forever. It was probably only thirty seconds, a minute at the most, but when was the last time you kissed someone that long? I was mezmerized, but also terrified. I had never seen them do that. They had kissed in front of me before, sure, but Father kissed Mother the same way I kissed her, with a little bit of tentativeness bordering on uneasy. But not that day. That day they kissed and they meant it, right in front of all those people and the eyes of God Himself.
I cringed then, and the memory for years made my skin itch. Now, I smile a big goofy smile.
One particularly wet Saturday morning, shortly after Mother had gone away in the van, I was watching my regular Saturday morning cartoons (I still watch them to this day) while cleaning my ears, just like Mother had showed me when I was younger. Place the swab gently in your ear canal and spin it clockwise, one rotation around the inside of the ear. Take it out. Look at it. If there is wax on it, obtain a new swab. Repeat until your swabs go in the ear clean, and come out the ear clean. Do this once a week (Saturdays) or you may-or may not-go deaf. I knew that this was dumb.
This Saturday was peculiar, however. Mother was in the living room with me. She normally escaped to the City on Saturdays to view various revues, or whatever it was that she did in the City. This day, however, she sat on the couch across from me, intently reading a book. “Night”, by a person named Elie Weisel.
Mother never read. Never.
I changed the channel to sports. Sometimes the cartoons can get on your nerves. I watched seven innings of an Orioles game. Mother read the whole time. It concerned me.
Slumber had just begun to creep up on me when Mother broke her long silence.
“ Surviving is nothing.”
This startled me. “ What, Mother?”
“ Jews, slaves, Russians, explorers, castaways…they all make a big hullabaloo over surviving. I see nothing wonderful about it. No sir, nothing wonderful at all.”
“ What’s this now, Mother?”
“ Don’t act like you don’t know.”
“ Know what? What, Mother?”
“ The secret.”
“ Which one is that, Mother?”
“ The secret.”
“ Now, Mother, I’m afraid I don’t-“
“ We die. We all die, Ray. You knew that.”
I stared at her. It seemed to me that she may have said something nearly intelligible. I was not prepared for it.
“ Just what are you saying, mother?”
“ Darned all the leather.”
I was afraid I had lost her again. “ Leather, Mother?”
“ Yes! We are all surviving in order to die, Ray! But we all act like we don’t know that, see? We all know it but refuse to know it. This Elie Weisel, and that Frank girl I’ve heard so much about, thay had themselves fooled good.”
I just looked back at her, baffled.
“ Mother, what is that book about?”
“ Batteries.”
“ Batteries?”
“ Remind Timmy to pick some up in town, will you?”
I had lost her.
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Why would a dog do that?
But they do. They do it. Sometimes in patterns, and sometimes randomly. I wondered that night, if I was a dog, would I do that? Bark at nothing? If Mother were a dog, would she be a quiet dog, or would she bark at nothing? Which was more crazy: to bark at a definite something, or to bark at a definite nothing?
What if Father had been a dog? He may have bitten himself, or maybe thrown himself in front of a car. Would that be crazy, or just a good way to prevent the need to bark at nothing?
I was listening to the insects, too, that night. They don’t bark at nothing, they buzz and chirp at nothing. Buzz and chirp. Buzz and chirp. All night. Folks’ll tell you that they are talking to one another, that they are somehow communicating, but they’re not. They are buzzing and chirping at nothing, at the great void above their heads, at the lighted houses they cannot enter, at the glowing fires they are drawn to but cannot truly join, it is all truly nothing. Buzzing and chirping at nothing, at what is there but cannot be there, what can be had but is unhaveable. Buzzing and chirping at the unmoveable.
I stood up and walked around the yard. A bird somewhere said “Pee-Plo! Pee-Plo!” I heard, “People! People!”
And then I thought it strange how grass can get wet, even soaked, without one noticing it. My shoes and socks had become soaked without my noticing it, just by walking around the yard for a few moments. It wasn’t wet when I had come outside. How does that happen?
And darkness. Perhaps it is the darkness the dog barks at, and the way it happens without one noticing.
And I stood there, in the back yard, listening in the dark. I felt the damp on my knees and shins as I noticed I was kneeling. My eyes focused on the moon, and I opened my mouth and lungs to howl, to scream my insanity to the world.
I didn’t. That would have been stupid. I would have felt cheesy.
My apartment was only a few blocks down from the old house, in Medford. I hadn’t especially wanted to move out. Mother had said it was time. So I suppose it was.
I lived in a building that in older times would have been called a house. There were five other rooms. Dick Smokli occupied one of them-he was the owner of the building. I paid my rent to Dick Smokli. The areas’ Middle School music teacher, Belinda Wheeler, occupied another one of the rooms. The rest of the rooms were empty.
Dick Smokli. Now there was a piece of work. That man would never have admitted to causing the slightest of disturbances in Medford. In my mind, however, Dick Smokli was Medfords’ very own Satan. He wore a lime-green or sky-blue suit with long, long tails every day of the week, with a matching bow-tie. He called lazy white boys niggers, and girls in puberty, he called whores.
On Tuesdays and Thurdays (after One AM) you could always hear porno movies coming from the other side of Dick Smoklis’ door. Not regular porno movies, though. Ones that were illegal to sell or even make. Ones with kids. And animals. Or at least, that’s what some of them sounded like.
Dick Smokli also (lime-green suit in tow) accosted the elderly. Those on social security who had rightly and justly retired from their lives’ works, he called vagabonds. To their faces, often. He told them to get a job, get off their ass, learn how to drive, stop loitering, pay their taxes, get out of the damn mall, appreciate the lottery, and then occasionally, he’d cuff them on the ear.
Dick Smokli didn’t just own the building I had moved into. He was also Medfords’ mayor.
Belinda Wheeler, the music teacher who lived down the hall from me, was a kind enough woman. Fat, though. Horribly fat. But nice, very very nice. She had taught me to draw Treble Clefs and play a kazoo when I had gone through Medford Middle School, shortly after we moved there. After I had lived in my “apartment” for a few weeks, Belinda and I began to strike up a friendship. We were two lonely people, I think. I stopped by to visit her about once a day, and she would tell me about her day at the school, and I would describe to her my day, which usually consisted of job hunting. She always listened carefully. She asked about what I liked. She asked about my family. I asked about hers. She had a son, who had been taken away from her by the state when he was born. Belinda gave birth to him when she was very young, and very broke, and the people who decide such things decided she was unfit to raise him. Eventually, she worked her way through college and got her music degree. She later went back and got certified to teach it. By then, though, it was too late. Her son had grown up enough to know that he felt abandoned. She had maintained a small amount of contact with him, but any healthy mother/son relationship was lost to her forever. She tried to be pleasant about it. I could see that it upset her greatly, though.
I told her the truth about my family, too.
Belinda Wheeler and I were friends, if a forty-five year old fat music teacher and a young man from a family of looneys can be friends, then I suppose we were friends.
I still stopped by the old house to see Mother once a day. Everything there seemed old and yellow, though. I did not belong in that place.
One Sunday Belinda and I went to a concert. She had been waiting for weeks and weeks with high anticipation as the date of the concert drew nearer, and through her telling me about it over and over again, I had gotten interested, and she had invited me along. It was a classical concert, by a man named Johann Strauss. He didn’t play any of the classical music that had been written for centuries by dead European men. He wrote his own classical music, and then payed an orchestra to play it for him while he flailed his arms like a madman swatting flies. Belinda just thought this man, this Strauss fella, was wonderful. Once I saw him in action, I didn’t get it. He didn’t seem to be doing anything; there was no discernable pattern to his gesticulating. But Belinda sat there smiling the whole time, clutching her purse with the tips of her fingers when the musicians got to something she called a crescendo. I mostly daydreamed, and imagined myself an usher at the auditorium, and what such a job would be like. Cleaning out the balconies after a show and maybe finding things people had left behind by accident, like bracelets, cigarette lighters, or maybe love letters written on pink stationery with a drop of perfume near the top of the page.
When we were walking back to her car afterwards, I asked her what she found so fascinating about the man who flailed his arms so wildly. She said, “ He’s got passion, Ray, passion.”
It was not as if I wanted to live with a man like Dick Smokli. It wasn’t a great place to live, not at all. But it was cheap. It was the cheapest place in town to rent, and I wasn’t exactly raking in the dough. The apartment was one room: bed (generously furnished by Mr. Smokli) television (generously furnished by Mother) an end table (generously furnished by Mr. Smokli) an open gray suitcase (generously furnished by me) and a window facing Pablo Street. The suitcase was my closet.
My room always kept a thin layer of dust dispersed throughout it, despite my best efforts with a rag and Pledge. I have no idea where this dust came from. The same happened to Belindas’ room. It was as if the dust moved in at the beginning of each day, and was settled down and ready to stay by the end of the night. To clean it meant only that your room was open to new tenants, who always came but never paid.
Belinda and I shared a bathroom at the end of the hall. We would have shared it with even more people, if there had been any other boarders at Dick Smokli’s place. The bathroom had a sink with only hot water, and a shower with only cold. If you flushed the toilet repeatedly while showering (a feat in itself!) you could manage to have a hot shower, but then, of course, it was too hot.
We had to clean the bathroom ourselves, of course. We did this on alternating weekends. Sometimes I really wished there were more renters living there, so I’d have to clean the bathroom less. But usually I didn’t wish that.
As for Dick Smokli himself, the man hated me. Hated the family I came from. He had known Father-before his madness-and found him intolerable. He had known Father after his madness and found him worse. He claimed, directly to my face, that he had fucked Mother. On a whim. He had found her distasteful and smelly, and later, looney. I believed none of this. Smokli was a foul man. Who also lied.
“ There’s the freak of the town, eh, Ray? Welcome home from a shitless shiftless day, crazy-boy,” he’d say as I walked through the front door.
“ Hello, Mr. Smokli.”
“ Got your girlfriend with you?”
“ Who’s that, Mr. Smokli?” I was always polite.
“ Why, that fat whore Belinda. Oh, not with you, eh? Naked on your bed, then, waiting for your slender cock to make her sing the right notes? You the piano tuner, then? The insane fucking pussy tuner?”
“ Exactly, Mr. Smokli.”
Smokli knew Belinda and I were just friends, and always persisted in this game. I think he did it so he’d feel better about his own filthiness.
“ Ooooh..so he admits it! The bannanas pussy tuner admits to it. I suppose you’ll be selling the videotapes to your mother, then?”
I tried to squeeze past him further down the hallway. “ Perhaps, Mr. Smokli.”
He put his lime-green arm out to bar my passage. “ You know I do you a favor by letting you stay here, right? Your family being as bannanas as they are-or were-you know I take a chance by renting to you, right?” This close to him, I could smell the Pabst Blue Ribbon coming off him like he had just worked all day at a gas station that pumped sub-par brew into your car instead of gasolene.
“ Yes, Mr. Smokli, I have told you many times, I am very grateful to you.”
“ Belindas’ turn to clean the bathroom, right?”
“ Yes, Mr. Smokli.”
“ Well, make sure that fat whore girlfriend of yours doesn’t sing while she’s cleaning the shitter…she sounds like a bouncing Venice Monkey.”
I didn’t know what that meant.
And Belinda had a beautiful voice.
Smokli would occasionally have guests over for dinner. Prominent townspeople, school board members, that sort of thing. He told me to stay out of their way; stay in my room if I could. When I had to leave and I chanced by them in the hall, Smokli would invariably say something teeming with ridicule and ridiculousness. “ Good evening, Mr. Milkman,” he said to me once in front of the towns’ Water Commisioner, “have you met Bill Hickock here?” and Smokli and his guests quickly moved on. After a while, I barely noticed such incidents.
I began to spend a decent amount of time with Belinda, visiting her more than once a day. She was lonely, but not in a sad way. Lonely in that way that looks like acceptance, when really it is joy in the solitariness of things. Not many people genuinely have that kind of lonliness, but most people pretend to have it. I was pretending to have it. I hated solitary things, but since it seemed my main lot in life was mainly to be alone, I might as well put on an act, right?
Belinda took joy in the solitary, sure, but that didn’t mean she was without need for others. Hence, our friendship blossomed. She would tell me stories as we sat in her room. She’d pour herself a glass of whiskey (she’d call it a glass of whiskey, most people would call it a plastic cup of whiskey), light herself a Merit Ultra-Light, and tell me stories. They were mostly stupid, and allegorical, but I liked to hear her talk. She’d tell her stories long into the night, sometimes making things up as she went along, and sometimes telling stories she knew from before. She had tried telling her son stories during the brief period that she had tried reconciling with him, but it hadn’t worked, she said. He had been restless, and too curious, always finding the holes of logic, or questioning her deus ex machinas when she used them.
I found her soothing. Sometimes she was smart. She’d make things up and remember stories that her father and her mother had told her, sometimes until the sun was coming up, and she’d have more whiskey and more Merit Ultra-Lights, and I’d go back to my apartment happy, and fall asleep right away.
One day, in the summer when she didn’t have to work (she didn’t bother getting a summer job like most teachers her age, she said she “didn’t mind living like a hobo with a room.”) we sat in her apartment in the middle of the day, while she told me stories. Her oscillating fan wasn’t enough to keep us remotely unmiserable, but it was of some mental comfort in the stifling heat. She was nursing a smoke and a vermouth.
After she had finished an especially long story about a snake who lived in the clouds and ate the sun for dinner one night, she asked me if I could tell a story.
“ No.”
“ Why not?”
“ I can’t make things up.”
“ Sure you can, Ray. Just try.”
“ No.”
“ Have you ever tried?”
“ I don’t try to do things that I know I won’t be good at.”
“ That’s absurd. You have no way of knowing what you will or won’t be good at until you try.”
“ I don’t have the imagination. I would embarrass myself,” I said.
“ Then I’ll not tell anymore until you tell one.”
“ That’s fine. We can talk about other things. What does whiskey taste like?”
She looked very insulted.
“ Don’t you like my stories, Ray?”
“ Well…yes, I like them, but if you won’t tell anymore we might as well talk about something.”
“ Won’t you try to tell just one, Ray?”
“ There’s enough stories in the world. Why add a bad one?”
“ Because even a bad story is a story, Ray, and it wasn’t there before. Besides, your story might not be bad at all.”
“ Alright, for you, Belinda, I’ll try.”
She took a long drag of her vermouth and cigarette. “ Thank you, Ray.” She made her sometimes-sour face. I thought for a few seconds about my story before I began.
“ Well…OK, yes…that will do. Here we go. Once there was a Prince named…Him. Prince Him. And Him lived in Detroit. And one day Hims’ car slid off the freeway and Him died.”
Belinda stared at me. Then she laughed. Harder.
Father chewing Burlingtons’ and telling us jokes on the glass-bottom boat. Mother throwing pennies at our heads in the hotel room. Father walking along the beach in green plastic sandals and laughing so his bare belly shook when I buried Alice up to her neck in the sand. We all went to see a movie together, and Alice spilled the popcorn and Father went to buy some more anyway. Father not spanking us after we threw out hotel soap. Mother asking for directions from a teenage Mexican girl wearing an oversized hot-pink sombrero. Father speaking calmly to the Mexican policeman after a fender-bender with an old couple in a Jeep with an Alaskan liscense plate. All of us watching the sunset over the ocean as we lay on our Disney and Nintendo beach towels, that we had bought once we got there. Alice asking me in the middle of the ocean if God had to trim His fingernails. I laughed at her and told her it was a stupid question. I later went and asked Mother the same question and she told me that God could choose to trim Her fingernails or not. That confused me.
We got lost a lot. But on this vacation, Mother and Father didn’t argue. They laughed. And bought us ice cream and Bic pens. We got home two days late and Father didn’t mind his lost wages. We laughed for weeks about the Mexican doctor who had “treated” Alice for a jellyfish sting but kept saying, “ You see man who did this? You go to police!” It was hilarious.
It was fun.
It was a vacation.
I would never knowingly walk into Belindas’ room when she wasn’t there. She was always there on Saturdays, though, right around noontime, and if I was home around that time, I would usually just walk right into her room, as she would be expecting me anyway. I always walked right in.
Always.
Except this particular Saturday, she wasn’t there when I walked right in. Her stuff was gone. No milk-crate full of shampoo and other foreign girly accoutrements in the corner. No bottle of whiskey on the nightstand. No half-moon porcelain ashtray on the floor by the bed. Her black-leather CD book was missing, also. Her blankets were still on the bed, and that was the only trace I could find of her. I ran over to Dick Smokli’s door and pounded on it. No answer. I knocked again, this time a bit more calmly. Now, I could hear him rising from his La-Z-Boy, nice and slow and drunk and foul to answer the door.
“ Ah, Bungalow Bill, what do you want, Crazy?”
“ Mr. Smokli, sir, did Belinda move out?”
“ Who? Miss Wheeler?”
“ Yes!”
“ Big fat whore stinky girlfriend?”
“ Yes!”
“ No, she hasn’t gone anywhere. Didn’t say anything to me, leastways.”
He slammed the door shut.
Well, where the hell was she then?
She hadn’t had all that much stuff, and she had left the blankets, so she hadn’t necessarily moved out. There was hope. I found myself thinking only one thing: who will tell me stories?
With little else to do besides hypothesize over her location, I walked down the street to the old house to see Mother, in the hopes that I could get my mind off of Belindas’ disappearance.
Mother sat on the front porch haranguing and yelling at passer-by.
“ Oh, nice fancy car, Mr. Brenneman. Perhaps you stole it! I think the authorities may be interested in knowing about this. And Miss Vanderhorn-“
I waved from down the street to get her attention. “ Hello, Mother!”
“ Timmy! Hello! You’ve been out so quite long! Sit here with me and the dog and tell me where you’ve been.”
“ Mother, we haven’t a dog.”
“ Why are you calling me Mother, Timmy?”
She stood to embrace me, with her lips pursed in a comically exagerrated way, like those old wax lips you’d buy at the five-and-dime store when you were a kid.
I just stood there, looking at her as though she were a curiosity, but nothing of import, like she was, perhaps, a mechanical bull.
“ Timmy, what has gotten into you?”
I turned around and walked back to my apartment. She screamed at me until I was out of earshot, but she made no attempt to follow.
Belinda came back four days later. She showed up at my door around midnight, and she appeared very maudlin. She had been crying, it seemed. I told her I’d come over to her room after I put some pants on.
She had been to visit her son. It had not gone well, apparently. She came back with more whiskey. And lots on her breath. And less cigarettes, which upset her even more. I wanted to scream at her, ask her why she had not told me she was going, why did she have to scare me like that?
“ He’s dead.”
I didn’t understand that. “ Who is dead?” I asked.
“ My son. For two weeks now. I found out by telegram. He’s dead.”
I sat on the bed next to her. I cradled my head in my hands. She began to lightly cry.
“ How?” I asked.
“ He…did it himself. Oh Jesus.”
We sat in a total silence for quite some time.
“ And why didn’t you tell me you were going away?”
“ Excuse me?” she asked through her whimpering sobs.
“ I said, why the hell didn’t you tell me you were going away? I was worried sick! I even went-“
“ Ray, my son is dead!”
“ And what of it? I was worried sick! Do you hear me?”
Her mouth turned up almost imperceptably into a smile. I slammed the door, with her there alone on the bed, and I went to buy her more cigarettes.
(end of story)
Thanks! It's nice to be here!
Enjoy Constantine....I haven't seen it but I want to!
tell me,what's really on your mind?
very inspiring,by the way,g.
Thanks so much, Felicity. It is nice to see you again!
What is really on my mind? Hard to say.
What is the story about to you?
I'll come back and read them tonight.
So interesting!!!!!
your story makes me think of that frustration you get when you want things to feel secure and run smoothly,thing to thing to thing.but it never goes like that.there's always something to deal with-crazy parents greedy siblings drama after drama.people drinking,doing drugs,sex-obsessed,thinking other people must be brainless to not feel the same pain of being human.soon the crazy ones sound right.
so do we want to be the crazy ones who go through life oblivious to the real insanity around us,or try to numb the agony while still thinking we're sane?
i felt it.i really did.beautifully.
http://www.myspace.com/alotalotbetweenus
splendid isolation.....another of your themes which you dealt with nicely.....I love being alone.....without a partner......without a man......a husband......when I get my baby back......my solitariness will be less, but it's so beautiful......not to miss someone who's in the other room......because they couldn't care less about you......splendid isolation.......
you dealt with a lot of other ideas in the piece......and I especially liked how you dealt with Belinda's son......these things are so difficult.....and we really don't know how to treat them with grace, after all we're only human.......it's so horrible to lose your mother at an early age, and difficult to try to re-create a relationship with her when you're older......and resentment sneaks in.....and it really drains your energy.......and it drains the energy of the new relationship......cos maybe you were abused, and she feels guilty.....and if magic sparks happen after a few years......then you're blessed......but there are so many sad stories that need to be told and heard.......and sometimes, they can be heard......thanks for your story.......:)
The fact is, I have little to no experience with the type of things that happen in this story. My life has been nothing like this. BUt I found the characters and their actions to be a tremendous outlet for emotions of mine that have arisen through other experiences. It was cathartic.
When I write short stories (which is rarely) I often find I have little control over what happens who who inhabits the stories. I just sort of follow the action. It's exciting! It was fun watching Ray become a man--I hope you agree.
Cheers!