Barrel Fever

BARREL FEVER

SHORTLY after my mother died, my sisters and I found ourselves rummaging through a cabinet of papers marked “POISON,” and it was there, tucked between the pages of a well-worn copy of Mein Kampf, that I discovered fifteen years’ worth of her annual New Year’s resolutions. She took up the practice the winter after my father died, the same year she found a job and bought her first rifle. Every Christmas afternoon, after placing the artificial tree back into its box, she would grow reflective. “Do you think I overuse the word ‘nigger’?” she would ask. “Was it wrong of me to spit on that Jehovah’s Witness girl? Tell me the truth here. I need a second opinion.”
On New Year’s Eve she would sit with her notes and a coffee cup of champagne, glancing at her watch and tapping a pencil against the legs of her chair. She would write something on an index card and, moments later, shake her head and erase it. The process was repeated until she wore a hole through the card and was forced to start fresh on another.
The next morning I would ask, “So, what was on your list, Mom?”
“Smother those homely teenagers who call themselves my children is at the top. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
I always got a great kick out of my mother, but my sisters, for one reason or another, failed to get the joke. They have grown to be humorless and clinically sensitive: the sorts of people who overuse the words “rage” and “empowerment” and constantly ask, “What do you really mean by that?” While I would often call and visit our mother, they kept their distance, limiting their postal or telephone contact to the holidays.
“Did I tell you what your sister Hope sent me for my birthday?” my mother asked during one of our late-night phone calls. “A poncho. Who does she think I am that I might want a poncho? I’ve written her back saying I’m sure it will come in very handy the next time I mount my burro for the three-day journey over the mountains to the neighboring village. Poncho, indeed. I’ve thrown it into the garage-sale box along with the pepper grinder Joy sent me. The thing is two feet long, black and shiny — what do I need with a thing like that? It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to recognize that pepper grinder for what it truly is. I bet she spent weeks knocking that one around with her therapist. And, oh, it arrived in a fancy box wrapped in tissue paper. You can bet she paid out the ass for it but that’s Joy for you, thinking she can impress people with the money she makes ‘consulting.’ That’s what she calls herself now, a consultant, as if that means anything. Anyone who answers questions can call themselves a consultant, am I wrong? A telephone operator is a consultant, a palm reader: they’re all consultants. I thought I’d seen it all but then Faith sent me a subscription to that trade paper she’s working for. She calls it a magazine. Have you seen it? Why would anyone subscribe to a magazine devoted to adobe? Is this a big trend? Is there something I’ve missed? I’ve got a house made of bricks but who wants to read about it every month? Adobe? She circled her name on the first page where she’s listed as ‘Features Editor.’ When people ask what she’s up to I always tell them she’s a secretary — it sounds better. So then, a week after my birthday I got a call from your sister Charity …”
Faith, Hope, Joy, Charity, and me, Adolph.
See, she just couldn’t help herself.
While my mother might threaten a yard sale she was not the type of person to invite people onto her property or make change. Following her death my sisters were horrified to discover, sealed in boxes, every gift they had given her.
“How could she not want a first edition by M. Scott Peck?”
“I made these wind chimes with my own two hands. Didn’t that count for anything?”
“What did she have against pepper grinders?”
Aside from a few stiff wallets fashioned in summer camp, there was nothing of mine in those boxes as, at an early age, I discovered that postage stamps, cartons of cigarettes, light bulbs, and mail-order steaks are the gifts that keep giving.
“How could she possibly be so cruel?” my sisters asked, coming upon the unmailed notes and letters stored in the “POISON” file. “I am not the ‘missing link,’ I am not, I am not,” Joy chanted, holding a draft of her graduation card. “I am not ‘God’s gift to fraternity beer baths,’ I am not, I am not, I am not.” Charity and Faith gathered round and the three of them embraced in a circle of healing. There were letters to me, comparing me unfavorably to both Richard Speck and the late Stepin Fetchit, but in all honesty it really didn’t bother me too much. We all entertain hateful thoughts every now and then, and afterwards they either grow stronger or fade away. From one day to the next, in tiny ways, our opinions change or, rather, my opinions change. Some of them anyway. That’s what makes me either weak or open-minded, depending on what it was I promised the last time we talked. I’m sure that Richard Speck had his share of good qualities and Stepin Fetchit was a terrific dancer, so I try not to take it too hard. My mother hadn’t mailed those letters; she simply left them to be discovered after her death. Hey, at least she was thinking about us.
I have posted some of my mother’s notes on my refrigerator alongside a Chinese take-out menu and a hideously scripted sympathy card sent by my former friend, Gill Pullen. Sympathy and calligraphy are two things I can definitely live without. Gill Pullen I cannot live without or, rather, I am having to learn to live without. At the risk of appearing maudlin or sentimental it was mutually understood that, having enjoyed each other’s company for seven years, we were close. Seeing as he was my only friend, I suppose I could go so far as to call him my best friend. We had our little fights, sure we did. We’d get on each other’s nerves and then lay low for a couple of days until something really good came on television, prompting one of us to call the other and say, “Quick — outstanding IV on channel seven.” IV stands for innocent victim, usually found shivering on the sidewalk near the scene of the tragedy. The impact of the IV is greater when coupled with the Wind-Blown Reporter, a staple of every news team. Prizewinning IVs have no notion of vanity or guile. Their presence is pathetic in itself but that is never good enough for the WBR, who acts as an emotional strip miner.
“How did it make you feel when that man set fire to your house?” the WBR asks, squatting to the level of the dazed and blanketed five-year-old. “I bet it really hurts to watch your house burn to the ground, a nice house like yours. Somebody told me your cat was in that house. That’s sad, isn’t it? Now you’ll never see her again. You’ll never see your cat or your shoes or your mother’s boyfriend ever again. Can you tell me how that makes you feel inside?”
A PCD was another common icebreaker. Nothing pleases me quite so much as the ever-popular Physically Challenged Detective. Nowhere else on television do you find the blind, deaf, and paralyzed holding down such adventurous and high-paying jobs. Gill once had an idea for a show about a detective in an iron lung called “Last Gasp for Justice.” The clients, eager to track down their kidnapped daughter, would gather by the bedside and stroke his forehead, begging him to take the case.
Gill was always full of good ideas. So it shocked me when he changed so suddenly. I never saw it coming. We made plans to meet for dinner at an Indian restaurant that doesn’t have a liquor license. You just buy it down the block and carry it in with you — it’s cheaper that way. So Gill and I were in the liquor store, where I asked him if we should buy two six-packs and a pint of J&B or one six-pack and a fifth. Or we could just go ahead and get the two six-packs and the fifth because, why not? I was weighing the odds when, out of nowhere, Gill started twisting the buttons on his coat and said, “Forget about me — you just buy something for yourself, Dolph.” Dolph is the name I go by because really, nobody can walk around with the name Adolph. It’s poison in a name. Dolph is bad too, but it’s just box-office poison.
“You go ahead, Dolph. Don’t worry about me.”
Later in the restaurant, figuring he’d changed his mind, I offered Gill one of my beers. He grew quiet for a few moments, tapping his fork against the table before lowering his head and telling me in fits and starts that he couldn’t have anything to drink. “I am, Jesus, Dolph, I am, you know, I’m … Well, the thing is that I’m … I am an … alcoholic.”
“Great,” I said. “Have eight beers.”
Gill became uncharacteristically dramatic, pushing the hair off his forehead. He leaned toward me and said, “I can’t have a drink, Dolph. Don’t you understand anything at all? I can’t.”
He said it as though he was the recently paralyzed lead dancer in a made-for-TV movie and I had just commanded him to take the lead in tonight’s production of The Nutcracker. I responded, acting along in what I considered an appropriate manner. “You can do it,” I said. “I know you can do it. But, oh, you’d rather sit there on that chair and be a quitter. Take the easy way out. That’s right — you’re a loser, a cripple, but when the lights go up on that stage, when all the other dancers are in place, I want you to know the only thing keeping you in that wheelchair is yourself.”
Gill’s face began to buckle. When he began to sob I realized he wasn’t joking. People at the surrounding tables lowered their forks and looked over in our direction. I pointed to our plates and said in a loud whisper, “Whatever you do, don’t order the tandoori chicken.”
Ever since then things have been different between us. He quit calling me and whenever I called him I got his machine. His old message, the “Broadway doesn’t go for pills and booze” line from Valley of the Dolls, had been replaced. I know he is home, screening his calls but I always hang up at the point where the new Gill’s voice encourages me to take life one day at a time. What has become of him?
I took a train home and talked it over with my mother, who, at the time, was spending a week in the hospital, recovering from surgery to remove cancerous lymph nodes. The cancer was nothing compared to the punishment she endured from her roommate, a lupus patient named Mrs. Gails. The woman never said a word but watched television constantly and at top volume. Possessing no apparent standards she’d watch anything, expressing no more interest in a golf match than a nature program.
“You got any questions about the grazing habits of the adolescent North American bull moose?” my mother asked, fidgeting with the plastic bracelet on her wrist. “I complained to the nurses about the volume but all they do is point to their ears and whisper that she’s got a hearing problem. If she’s got such a hearing problem then why are they whispering about her? She can hear the food cart from down the hall. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. She perks up and rubs her hands together and over what? That foraging moose of hers will sit down to a better meal than anything she’s likely to get in this place. I want that woman dead.”
I talked for a brief while about my problems with Gill until my mother lost interest. “Did I tell you that your sister Charity called me? I hardly recognized her voice because it’s been, what, three years since she’s phoned me. It seems she lost her job at the suicide hot line and is looking to borrow some money. I said, ‘Hold on just a few seconds, darling. It’s a bit difficult to reach my purse with this IV in my arm.’”
I listened to her stories with the understanding that the moment my back was turned I would likely become the chief character in her next complaint. I fully expected her to turn to her radiologist and say something like, “Isn’t that sweet of my only son to travel all this way so he can whine about his pathetic little friend? Maybe if I weren’t strapped to my deathbed I could muster up the strength to give a damn.”
That’s the sort of thing that destroys my sisters but doesn’t bother me in the least. I expect it in a person and am constantly amazed to hear someone refer to it wrongly as gossip and get all bent out of shape about it.
An example: until fairly recently I had the misfortune of holding down a job in the offices of Vincent & Skully Giftware, distributors of needlepoint beer cozies, coffee mugs in the shape of golf bags, and more insipid novelty items than you would ever want to know about.
I equate the decline of this nation with the number of citizens willing to spend money on T-shirts reading “I’m with Stupid,” “Retired Prostitute,” and “I won’t go down in history but I will go down on your little sister.” The Vincent & Skully employees were, with the exception of me, perfect reflections of the merchandise. The offices were like a national holding center for the trainably banal, occupied by people who decorated their cubicles with quilted, heart-shaped picture frames and those tiny plush bears with the fierce spring grip that cling to lamps and computer terminals, personalized to read “Terri’s bear” or “I wuv you very beary much!”
I don’t know how it is that people grow to be so stupid but there is an entire nation of them right outside my door. I lost my job a few months ago when Alisha Cottingham went off the deep end and cornered me in the mail room. Alisha is in the marketing division and she tends to use what she considers to be concise, formal speech. Listening to her speak I imagine she must type it up the night before and commit it all to memory, pacing back and forth in her godforsaken apartment and working to place the perfect emphasis on this or that word.
“Mr. Heck,” she began, blocking me off at the Xerox machine. “It has come to my attention here at V&S Giftware that you seem to have some problem with my chin. Now, let me tell you a little something, sir. I am not here to live up to your stringent physical qualifications. I am here to work, as are you. If my chin is, for any reason, keeping you from performing your job here at Vincent & Skully then I believe we have a problem.”
I was thinking, chin? What chin? I said something about her neck. Alisha’s chins are another story.
She continued. “I just want you to know that your deliberate cruelty cannot hurt me, Mr. Heck, because I will not allow it to. As a professional I am paid to rise above the thoughtless, petty remarks of an office boy who takes pleasure in remarking upon the physical characteristics of his coworkers, many of whom have fought valiantly against both personal and social hardships to make this a company we can all be proud of.” Eventually she began to sob and I might have felt sorry for her had she not reported me twice for smoking dope during the three o’clock break. So I made some little remark and it got around. So what? Did Alisha Cottingham honestly believe that by sitting beside me and sharing a bag of potato chips our bond would grow so strong I would fail to notice she has a neck like a stack of dimes?
There seemed to be no stopping her. She finished her speech and started it all over again from the top, each delivery louder until the manager arrived, suggesting I might be happier working somewhere else. Happier?
I called Gill that night to tell him about it. He must have been expecting a call because he answered it on the first ring. Rather than discuss our difficulties I just plowed into the story as if nothing had ever happened. I talked for maybe two minutes tops before he interrupted me to say, “Dolph, I’m sorry but I really don’t want to talk to you when you’re drunk.”
Drunk? I had, you know, some drinks but I wasn’t slobbering or anything. I wasn’t singing or asking in a weary voice if I will ever find love. I probably couldn’t have passed a Breathalyzer test but what does that matter if you’re sitting in your own home? It really ticked me off. How come he gets to make all the rules? “I’ll talk to you when you’re sober.” So I said, “Yeah, well maybe I’ll talk to you when you have red hair and a beard down to your f*cking knees.”
I had more to say but he hung up before I could complete my thoughts. It bothered the hell out of me, but eventually I came to my senses and realized that sooner or later he’s bound to have a relapse. I’ve read the statistics, and if I know Gill it’s just a matter of time before he throws in the towel and starts drinking again. In the meantime I’ll just keep my distance.
I had just become comfortable with this prediction when I ran into Gill at a restaurant, and this time I was really drunk. I was at the take-out counter giving my order when I noticed him sitting over a finished meal with three people on the other side of the room. He was wearing a shirt printed with dice, possibly the ugliest shirt I had ever seen on a North American male but still, I was glad to see him. I approached the table and said in a loud voice, “Jesus, Gill, where have you been? Your parole officer has been looking everywhere for you.”
Everyone in the restaurant looked up except for Gill, who shook his head and said nothing. Against my better judgment I pulled up a chair and joined their table, introducing myself as an old cellmate from Rikers Island. “Those were the days, weren’t they? I think of that bunk bed every day of my life. Remember T-Bone? Remember that guy we all called ‘The Rectifier’? Oh, what a time!”
Nobody said anything. Gill rolled his eyes and adjusted the napkin in his lap, which, I assume, sent the “secret coded” message that I was not to be taken seriously. These were the new friends he had met at his meetings, the same type we might have made fun of a few weeks ago. Suddenly, though, they were his people.
A very thin, spent-looking woman with shoulder-length hair gathered in a ponytail cleared her throat and said, “Like I was saying earlier, I thought that Timothy person was very nice. I liked him an awful lot. He’s a people person, I could see that right away.” This woman was missing one of her front teeth.
Another woman, younger, with heavily moussed blond hair fidgeted with her chopsticks and agreed, saying, “Are you talking about the Timothy with the olive-colored turtleneck and the denim jacket? Oh, I loved that guy. What a nice guy. Was he nice or what?”
“I’d say he’s one of the absolute nicest guys I’ve met in a long time,” said the sullen Abe Lincoln lookalike sitting next to me. He paused, scratching at his beard, and small stiff hairs rained onto his empty plate. “I liked Timothy right off the bat because he’s just so damned nice how could you not like him?”
“Talk about nice, how about that Chip?” Gill said.
“A chip off the old block,” the ugly bearded man said, at which point everyone broke into laughter.
“Ha, ha,” I said. “A chip off the old shoulder.”
Gill and his companions ignored me until the skinny hag turned to me and said, “You, sir, are standing in the way of our evening and I for one don’t appreciate it.” I suddenly understood why she was missing her front tooth.
Gill said, “Dolph, maybe you should just try to keep quiet and listen for a change.” I nodded and leaned back in my chair, thinking, Listen to what? He’s so nice, she’s so nice, aren’t they so nice. Nice is a mystery to me because while on some mundane level I aspire to it, it is the last thing I would want a table full of dullards saying about me.
“Nice job, Byron.”
“Hey, Kimberly, nice blouse. Is it new?”
“I love your haircut, Pepper. It’s really nice!”
I don’t understand nice. Nice is a lazy one-syllable word and it says nothing at all. I prefer to surround myself with more complex words, such as heroic and commanding.
“That Dolph, is he a national treasure or what?”
I sat at Gill’s table for another ten minutes or so during which time I heard the word “nice” twenty-three times until I couldn’t stand it anymore. When I finally left, the idiot with the beard called out, “Nice talking to you,” which I guess brings the tally up to twenty-four.
I wrote Gill after my mother died, hoping he might pick up the phone and give me a call but instead he chose to mail this hokey calligraphed sympathy card, which I fear he may have actually made himself.
My mother chose to be cremated and the memorial service was sparsely attended — just me, three of my four sisters, my mother’s boss from the collection agency, and a few of her acquaintances from the firing range.
During that time at our mother’s house my sisters were remote and mechanical, acting as though they were hotel maids, tidying up after a stranger. They spoke as if a terrible chapter of their lives had just ended, and I felt alone in my belief that a much more terrible chapter was about to begin. I overheard them gathered together in the kitchen or talking to their husbands on the telephone, saying, “She was a very sad and angry woman and there’s nothing more to say about it.” Sad? Maybe. Angry? Definitely. But there is always more to say about it. My mother made sure of that.
Three days after the memorial service we met with her lawyer, an energetic woman with very long fingernails painted to resemble American flags. Someone, her manicurist I suppose, spent a great deal of time on the stripes but the stars were a mess, a clot of glitter.
She opened her briefcase and informed us that my mother’s house, car, and personal possessions were to be sold at their current market value. That money would be added to her life insurance, pension plan, and bank holdings and, according to her will, would be donated to her specified charitable organization, The National Rifle Association.
After the initial shock had worn off, my sisters found themselves plenty more to talk about.
I thought it was funny but, then again, I guess I could afford to think of it as funny. On the afternoon of my last visit, after the radiation and chemotherapy had left her with what would soon become pneumonia, my mother handed me a check for forty thousand dollars and warned me to cash it fast. Mrs. Gails’s television was blaring a rerun of a vile situation comedy in which a pleasant-looking, vapid teenaged boy acts as the gamekeeper of four terminally precocious children. “Leave,” Mom said, pointing to the door. “And on your way out I want you to shut off her television. It’ll take the nurses a good twenty minutes to turn it back on. Give me the gift of peace. It’s worth the forty thousand dollars, believe me.”
As I left the room she offered to double the money if I smothered Mrs. Gails. “Use the pillow,” she called. “The pillow.”
I didn’t mention the money to my sisters as, like my mother, I may be mean but I’m not stupid. The money has allowed me to take my time and relax a little before stumbling into another meaningless job. I really appreciate it and every afternoon when I roll out of bed I look up at the asbestos ceiling and silently thank my mother.
For most of my adult life I’ve held some sort of a regular daytime job so I’m really not used to being at home during a weekday. With all this time on my hands and neither Gill nor my mother to talk to, I find myself watching a great deal of daytime television and drinking much earlier than usual. It had always been my habit to watch television after returning from work. I knew about detectives, lawyers, police dramas, laugh-track comedies, infomercials, movies both good and bad, pageants, commercials, late-night public relations festivals disguised as talk shows, and the valium of anything presented as educational. So it was with great joy that I entered the world of daytime television. Why, I ask, are these programs broadcast when most people are off at work? Daytime TV is a gold mine of pathological behavior.
I move the television from room to room, captivated by just about everything that appears before me. At first I found myself watching with the volume turned to a whisper, lying on the sofa with the TV eight inches from my face. There were times when, in order to reduce the strain on my neck, I actually placed the portable TV on my stomach. I realized later that I’d been thinking about Mrs. Gails. Watching anything at top volume meant that I was, somehow, like her. I pictured my mother’s ghost on the other side of my living room, stuffing Kleenex into her ears and calling for the nurse.
“Day and night he’s got that TV going. He’s brain dead — what more evidence do you need? Pull either his plug or mine because I just can’t take it anymore.”
All of my neighbors work during the day so little by little I found myself turning up the volume and living a normal television life. I start with what is left of the relentlessly cheerful mid-morning advice and interview shows, move through the soap operas, and arrive at the confessional talk shows, which are my favorite. It is their quest for issues that makes these shows irresistible. Recently I watched as a sweatshirt-wearing family appeared to discuss the mother’s hiring of a hit man.
“Yes, I set your mattress on fire but only because you bit me on the head.”
“I never bit you on your damned head.”
“Don’t you lie to me. You bit me on the head and I’ve got the scars to prove it.”
“I never bit anyone on the head unless maybe they deserved it because they came home all messed up on needle drugs.”
Regardless of the truth I am captured by the story: How could you bite anyone on the head? How could you open your mouth that wide? More interesting are those shows where only one of the guests feels it necessary to state his or her case. I watched a program dedicated to medical mishaps where a denim-clad woman was interviewed alongside her helpless, elderly father. The father, an alcoholic, had received thirty-seven shock treatments following an episode of what his daughter referred to as “Barrel Fever,” the D.T.’s. The man sat stooped in a wheelchair, random tufts of dirty white hair clinging to his blistered scalp like lint. He spent a great deal of time clearing his throat and examining a stain on his trousers while his sixty-year-old daughter proudly faced the camera to recall the torment he had visited upon her life. Her father drank and drank until the fever set in, at which point he mistook his wife and children for insects.
“He thought we were bees,” the daughter said. “He thought we lived in a hive and came to carry him off to our queen. Remember that?” she asked. “Remember that, Daddy?”
The old man touched his sock and licked his lips. The shock treatments had left him weak and muddled but still his eyes were bright. Whatever his stories he was determined to carry them to his grave in a dignified manner. He remained silent, nodding with pleasure each time his drinking was mentioned.
Given the rarity of truly bizarre acts, the daytime talk shows are forced to pretend that one story is as compelling as the next: the women who have made a lifetime commitment to wearing caftans appearing on Tuesday are equal to the posse of twelve-year-olds who murdered a neighbor’s infant son on the grounds that he was ugly. I’d rather hear about the twelve-year-olds and had, in fact, looked forward all day to watching that show when someone dropped by and ruined it for me.
Since losing my job I have become acquainted with my building’s super, a pale, burly, red-headed guy by the name of Tommy Keen. He’s big all over — tall and wide — dressed in undersized T-shirts that reveal the pasty, sweating flesh of his arms and stomach. Every now and then I’d hear a rap and answer to find Tommy swabbing the tiles outside my apartment, pretending he had knocked accidentally with the mop handle. The guy obviously needed a drink, which was fine by me — I’m not cheap that way. Tommy’s problem was that he wasn’t content to drink alone. I’d hand the guy a beer and the next thing I knew he’d be hanging out for hours, ruining my afternoon lineup by talking through all my programs. Anything on TV reminded him of a long story revolving around what he referred to as “the women.”
“Oh, Dolph,” he’d say, watching the paroled rapist face his victim. “The women are going to be the death of me, and you heard it here first.”
With Tommy it was never any particular woman but, rather, the entire worldwide lot of them whom he seemed determined to conquer on an intimate basis, one by one, if it took him the rest of his life. I would listen, taking into consideration the fact that you really have to wonder about any male over the age of fifteen who still prefers to go by the name Tommy. I endured him a few afternoons a week until the day I had planned to watch the youth posse, when he actually pounded on my door, begging to be let in. He looked hungover, washed out, more pale than usual, a sweating mess. Tommy brushed past and took a seat on my kitchen table, his hands trembling so bad he could not light his own cigarette.
“So, Tommy,” I said, thinking about the program I was certainly going to miss. “So, Tommy, what’s shakin’?” He put his doughy head in his hands and kneaded it with his fingers for a few minutes before telling me he’d been having trouble with blackouts.
“Blackouts? What do you mean by that? Was there a power failure in the building that I don’t know about?”
Tommy looked at me and shook his head. He released a sigh of hopeless disgust and rose briefly from the chair before settling back down and proceeding to tell me this story: The last thing he remembered it was Sunday evening at around 7:00 P.M. and he was in his living room, having a few drinks and feeding the fish. The next thing he knows it’s Wednesday afternoon and he wakes to find himself tied to the radiator with a pair of panty hose. His apartment is completely empty of furniture. He is naked and there are four piles of human shit on the carpet.
Now that’s a good story.
We are quiet for a few moments before I say, “Gee, Tommy, it sounds like you’ve got a real mystery on your hands.”
His shoulders began to tremble and I thought, Please don’t cry, please, please, please don’t cry. He of course began to sob, a painful protracted lowing that, I am fairly certain, stopped in their tracks any species of moose or elk in the surrounding tri-state area. Something told me I should touch him, place my hand on his shoulder but he was my super and he was sweating so I decided to light another cigarette and wait for him to get this out of his system.
He came out of it, finally, choking the words “I … just … needed to … tell … somebody and I … figured you would … understand.” His eyes shifted to my trash can, brimming over with empty beer cans and dead bottles of scotch. “I … figured you … might … know where I was … coming from.”
And that irritated me beyond belief, that he might claim to know me. The last thing I need is a diagnosis from some wasted crybaby who drags a f*cking mop for a living. The only reason I ever gave him the time of day was because I felt sorry for him. It ticked me off so I said, “You know, Tommy, I don’t quite know how to tell you this but on Tuesday night you came to my door and literally begged me for one hundred dollars.”
Tommy lowered his head and shook it slowly from side to side.
“Then you said that if I wouldn’t lend the money you’d be willing to earn it the old-fashioned way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘old-fashioned way’? What are you talking about?”
“Then you sank to your knees and made for my belt buckle.”
“No,” Tommy moaned, placing his hands over his ears. “That’s not possible. You know I’m not that way.”
“Well,” I said, “you really didn’t seem like yourself that night but, then again, I’d never seen you wearing a skirt before. You just seemed so damned desperate that I pulled out my wallet and gave you the hundred dollars.”
Tommy rocked back and forth, hugging himself with his freckled arms. “No, God. Oh, please, tell me no.” But while Tommy cried “No,” some small voice deep inside his tiny brain whispered “Maybe, maybe, maybe.”
The following morning I found an envelope containing five twenty-dollar bills slipped beneath my door. Chump. I should have told him five hundred.
A while later I was returning from the Laundromat when I noticed a different guy cleaning the halls. He introduced himself as Eightball and we got to talking. I asked about Tommy and was told that he had checked himself into a rehab center somewhere in New Jersey.
“That Tommy,” the new janitor said. “He’s a real wild card, isn’t he?”
“He sure is, Eightball.”
I figure that, wherever he is, Tommy will at least have a good story. If he plays his cards right he’ll be wowing them at AA meetings for years to come.
Gill’s story, on the other hand, isn’t going to impress anyone. I don’t even think that being an alcoholic was his idea. It’s something he got from his supervisor at work. This guy noticed Gill had been having a couple drinks during his lunch break and called him into the office for a little talk. That night in the Indian restaurant Gill told me how the supervisor had closed the office door and handed him a list of alcoholic warning signs, telling him that he would definitely have to answer “yes” to the question “Does my drinking interfere with my job?” The whole thing was a setup if you ask me. The supervisor spilled out his own story and offered to accompany Gill to a meeting, where, Gill said, “I really started thinking about my life.” Then he started magnifying everything, which is a big mistake because if you think too hard about anything it’s bound to take the fun out of it. That’s what happened to Gill. He’s no fun anymore.
I remember saying, “So your boss gave you a quiz — so what? Do you think it’s the only quiz in town? I could sit down right now and hand you a pamphlet and say, ‘You’ll definitely have to answer “yes” to the question “Does my not drinking interfere with my friendship with Dolph Heck?”’ Take my quiz, why don’t you? Why would you listen to some a*shole of a supervisor before you’d listen to me? He’s just trying to recruit people, that’s all. He’s a so-called alcoholic so he wants everyone else to be too. Can’t you see through that?”
Gill looked at me and said, “I’ve come to see through a lot of things, Dolph. I’ve come to see through a lot.”
After that there was nothing left to say as nothing gets on my nerves more than someone repeating the same phrase twice. I think it’s something people have picked up from television, this emotional stutter. Rather than say something interesting once, they repeat a cliché and hope for the same effect.
Seeing as Gill doesn’t have a decent story, I guess he’ll be forced to surround himself with people who pride themselves in their ability to understand. It’s fine to understand other people but I think it is tiresome to pride yourself in it. Those are the types who will bend over backward to make Gill feel “special,” which is sad to me because Gill really is special. I tried to tell him but he wouldn’t listen. Actually I probably didn’t say special, a word that, outside a restaurant, has no value whatsoever. I think I used the term rare, another restaurant word.
While Gill is worthy of attention, his story is not. He hasn’t even had any blackouts. I’ve had a few. More than a few, but they always take place in private and they’re nothing to write home about, nothing like Tommy’s. The closest I’ve come to the Tommy zone was three weeks ago when I received a telephone bill listing quite a few late-night calls to England. The curious thing is that I do not personally know anyone in England. I thought they’d made a mistake and considered protesting the charges until a few days later when, leafing through a stack of magazines on the living room floor, I came upon a heavily notated page torn from the TV Guide. I saw where I had circled and placed seven stars beside that week’s three-part PBS “Mystery” presentation. At the bottom of the page were a series of oddly arranged numbers, which looked like locker combinations. These matched the numbers on the phone bill, leading me to assume that I must have actually dialed international information and phoned Scotland Yard at the end of each program to congratulate them on another job well done. Still, though, that’s nothing to get worked up about. Exceptional would be to find yourself on a plane headed to England, wearing a tweed cap and demanding that the stewardess put you in touch with Chief Inspector Tennison.
Since receiving my last phone bill I have taken to fastening the telephone to its cradle, using some of the threaded packing tape stolen from what used to be my job. In the rare event of an incoming daytime call I can always grab a knife or scissors, but luckily the task appears to be too strenuous during my ever increasing personal mystery hours. Another problem solved with simplicity and grace.
My next project is to fashion a cushion to the hood of my vacuum cleaner. Again this morning I woke on the kitchen floor with my head resting against the hood of my ancient Hoover.
I ask, “What were you thinking?”
“Mattress, Dolph?”
“Don’t go out of your way on my account. I’ll just stretch out on this cold tile floor.”
“Pillow?”
“No, thanks. This hard plastic vacuum hood will suit me just fine.”
This morning, in addition to sleeping on the floor, I awoke to find I had once again wet my pants. It’s been happening much more often than is necessary lately and it’s beginning to really scare me. This time the urine was induced by a dream in which I had been presented with two citizenship awards, the ceremonies back-to-back. The first award was in the shape of Tommy Keen’s head. Made of gold-plated lead it was all I could do to carry it off the stage and into the waiting limo for the next ceremony. It was goofy, the way dreams are. Gill was the limo driver but he didn’t seem to remember me. I asked him please to pull over somewhere so I could pee and he kept saying I could use the bathroom at the Pavilion. We argued back and forth until he hit a red light and I jumped out of the limo, leaned against a building, and unzipped my fly. The next thing I knew my face was pressed against the hood of a vacuum cleaner and I was lying in a puddle of urine. I didn’t even get to find out what the second prize was. This morning I woke on the kitchen floor in a puddle of urine and understood that something has to change as I am not about to buy rubber sheets or adult diapers. This simply cannot continue.
After my mother’s death the most shocking discovery in the box marked “POISON” were not her letters, but the stack of New Year’s resolutions she’d spent so long composing. Each of the fifteen cards was dated in the left-hand corner and, in her slanted, childlike writing, each one read the same: “Be good.” It shook me up as, in the three years that I myself have been making such lists, mine say the same thing, relatively. I have taken to softening my approach as a safeguard against failure. The last one reads: “Try to think about maybe being good.” “Try” and “maybe” give me the confidence I need in order to maintain the casual approach best suited to my ever-changing circumstances.
I looked up at my tightly bound telephone and told myself that I would remain on that floor until someone called, at which point I would answer and redirect my life. Whoever they were and whatever they wanted, I would take it as a sign.
After what seemed like hours, I got off the floor and took a shower, keeping the bathroom door open so I could catch any incoming calls. On the off chance my caller would tell me to quit drinking, I positioned myself on the sofa with two six-packs and a bottle of nice scotch. Then I turned on the TV and ate a sandwich made from leftover chicken lo mein. I call it a Chanwich. At a pivotal point in “One Life to Live” my telephone rang. A woman who introduced herself as Pamela was determined to woo me away from my current long-distance carrier.
“We’ve been observing your calling patterns, Mr. Heck, and notice that you seem to have several European friends. Did you realize that our company can save you up to twenty-three percent on overseas calls?”
I wound up switching to her company because, seeing as I had made a commitment to change, it seemed cowardly not to honor it. After our conversation I hung up the phone, expecting it to ring again a few minutes later. I thought I was on a roll and that — who knows? — anyone might call, anyone at all.
The phone didn’t ring again until sometime around ten in the evening, by which point I was pretty well potted. It was a woman’s voice and she started in immediately saying, “All right now, I realize you probably don’t remember who I am, do you?” She gave me a moment to guess but I could not begin to identify her.
“It’s me, Trudy Chase. I used to be Trudy Cousins. Chase is my married name even though I’m no longer married if that makes any sense! Anyway, I don’t live in Piedmont anymore but I still have the good old Post-Democrat delivered to my door every day and that’s where I read the obituary on your mother. I know it’s been a while but I just wanted to tell you that I’m very sorry to hear about it.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“You really don’t remember me, do you?” she said. “It’s me, crazy Trudy who used to sit beside you in Mr. Pope’s senior English class. Remember me? I was the crazy one. I was the one who wrote ‘Don’t follow me — I’m lost too’ on the back of her graduation gown. It’s me, crazy Trudy.”
Suddenly I remembered her perfectly. Even at eighteen she struck me as hopeless.
“So, Trudy,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, you know me. I’m just as crazy as ever. No, I take that back — I’m probably crazier if you can believe that!”
I thought for a moment before saying, “Oh.” Because that’s really something I can’t stand — when people refer to themselves as crazy. The truly crazy are labeled so on the grounds that they see nothing wrong with their behavior. They forge ahead, lighting fires in public buildings and defecating in frying pans without the slightest notion that they are out of step with the rest of society. That, to me, is crazy. Calling yourself crazy is not crazy, only obnoxious.
Trudy went on to tell me that she’s lived here in Manhattan for three months, having been transferred from the home office in Piedmont. She chuckled, adding that the people here think she’s just about the craziest person they’ve ever met. She’s so crazy that she planned an office party for Lincoln’s birthday and petitioned her boss to free the slaves in the accounting department. And she even wore a tall hat and a fake beard! The members of her tenants association thought she should be committed after she hosted the last meeting … by candlelight!
“Ha, ha,” I said. “That sounds pretty scary.”
“Nothing scares me,” she said. “That’s how crazy I am.”
On my silent TV I watched as a defeated wrestler shook his hairbrush at the referee, obviously screaming for a rematch. “Nothing?”
“Not a damned thing,” she said. “Nada. Othing nay.”
The very idea that, out of nowhere, a member of my 1975 graduating class would call me and speak pig latin created a mixed sense of repulsion and endless possibilities.
Trudy spoke of her involvement in any number of organizations. She is, for example, volunteering to walk the dogs of recent stroke victims. “I usually walk with a woman named Marcie, and, Jesus, if you think I’m crazy, you should meet her! We call ourselves the Poop Troop, and next week we’re getting our uniforms. You should join us sometime.”
I pictured myself wearing an “I brake for hydrants” T-shirt and a baseball cap decorated with a synthetic stool.
On top of everything else Trudy also finds the time to play on her company volleyball team, iron for her crazy arthritic neighbor, and teach underprivileged children to make fudge. She didn’t say it in a boastful way. She wasn’t looking for a medal or trying to make me feel selfish. She invited me over to her apartment for a get-together, but I bowed out, claiming I had a business meeting to attend.
“Well if your meetings are half as crazy as mine you’re going to need all the luck you can get,” she said.
She asked if she could call me after my meeting and I told her to hold on a moment as I had another call coming in. She’s been holding for fifteen minutes now and I still can’t make up my mind. I look over at my mother’s card on the refrigerator. BE GOOD. But she never specified: Be good to whom? If I’m good to Trudy Chase, I’ll tell her never to call me again. If I’m good to myself, I’ll wind up making fudge and walking the dogs of stroke victims. Which is worse?