By estory
James Teagle, shaved and dressed in his best suit with the red tie and gold cuff links, was sitting with his eight year old son at the kitchen table, reading his morning newspaper. While his wife prepared their toasted bagels in the background, he read through the sports pages and his son, in his baseball cap, kept peppering him with questions.
"Do you think the Yankees have the pitching this year, dad?" the hopeful boy asked.
"If everyone stays healthy," Teagle answered, deliberately vague.
"It's going to come down to the Red Sox and the Yankees, right dad?" the little boy asked again, his face illuminated by an innocent emotion.
Teagle turned a page. "It might at that." He said. He fidgeted a bit as the boy kept looking at him. He picked up his hazelnut coffee and took a sip. "Then again, Detroit and Toronto are threats too." He looked back at the boy over his newspaper with a wry smile.
"When can we go to a game?" the boy inquired, brimming over with excitement.
His mother turned to them from the toaster. "It can't be on a school night," she said, insisting on making sure her priorities were considered. "It'll have to be on a weekend."
Teagle cleared his throat and shrugged. "I could see about some tickets on a Sunday afternoon. What about that? I'll have to check when the Red Sox are in town."
The boy practically leapt out of his chair. "Yes! The Red Sox! Get Red Sox tickets, dad!"
Teagle folded up his newspaper, glancing at the clock. "Yes. But you keep up your grades, young man." He gave his wife a conciliatory look as he said this.
Mrs. Teagle placed a brown paper bag on the table in front of her son. "Alright, alright. You can talk about baseball later. You've got to get ready for school. The bus leaves in fifteen minutes. Get going, Adam." She stared at her husband as she said that.
Adam jumped up and grabbed his books. But before he left, he sidled up to his father. "Get the box seats, dad," he said enthusiastically, "On the third base line. I'll get all A's, I promise."
Teagle looked sheepishly up at his wife for a moment. "Yes; well, I'll try, Adam." Then, he stood up in turn, looking at the clock and picking up his briefcase. "I've got to get going too, hon." He gave his wife a peck on the cheek.
"Don't forget to see about the new entertainment system. You promised you'd stop buy Best Buy on the way home. And then we wanted to go down to the dealership after dinner. I want the new Mercedes by spring."
"Sure dear, sure," Teagle said absent mindedly as he made his way to the door. He gave Adam a last hair tousle on his way out. He did have a lot on his mind that morning. The big meeting was to be held at the office at nine o'clock sharp. He was, after all, a member of the company that managed the major league baseball television contract and not only would many details of the upcoming season anticipated by the fans be decided that morning, but details of his own compensation as well, on which hinged his abilities to meet his family's expectations. Outside, his spirits rose in the light, spring air, and he couldn't help cocking an interested ear at the fans in the street buzzing about the upcoming season as he bought another cup of coffee at the local deli.
Crowds of commuters in their coats and jackets, carrying their briefcases and cups of coffee began making their tedious way through the maze of New York streets; stockbrokers in their business suits, construction workers in their blue jeans with their lunch boxes and hard hats, women reading magazines, and kids on their way to school shouldering their backpacks. On his way to Madison Avenue, Teagle was pleased to note that almost everyone seemed to talking about the prospects of the two local teams, the Mets and the Yankees, who were contenders for the championship. Two lawyers were discussing the box seats they would share, right off first base. Some members of a construction crew debated the recent free agent signings, and whether or not they would pay off in success. One of them grumbled that the subscription rate of the TV service had gone up, but he had renewed it anyway. Some kids were arguing over which team was better, and both sides had some valid points. Teagle had to agree on that.
He passed by them with an amused smile but said nothing, content to walk in the background, as it were; eavesdropping. Since he had taken this job, he had become aware of the machinations of the sport's inner workings and it always amazed him how much money people were willing to spend on it, to satisfy the emotional attachment they had to this pastime. Richer or poorer, intense or merely involved for the entertainment of their time, these fans from all walks of life in their jerseys and baseball caps seemed caught up in the drama and struggles of the season, rising and falling with the wins and losses, immersed in the actions of a childhood game. Even if they had to pass up on a PTA meeting or a dinner and movie out with their wives, if there was a real big game on, they would open a beer, plop down on the couch and stare at the TV until they had risen in victory or fallen in defeat.
With that thought, Teagle continued on his way through the crowds along the sidewalk of Madison Avenue, on his way to the meeting. He made his living off of this animal, as he called it sometimes, and in the best interests of his wife and son, he needed to do his duty; whatever the innocent emotional involvement of his son. This morning was the biggest meeting of the year; they would be discussing the prospects of lining up advertisers and that was the grease that made the whole wheel turn, so to speak. Up ahead, the grey lines and windows of Madison Plaza rose above the crowds very much like a cathedral, and his gaze moved ever upwards to the lofty windows of the suite where he and his colleagues would be gathering. His sense of the people around him grew thin, and his purpose and resolve seemed to sharpen. Somewhere behind that glass, the fate of the season would be decided, in the presence of and under the direction of Teagle's boss.
Far up in the room behind the window there that served as a magnet for Teagle's attention, a tall man in a dark suit gazed quietly back out, watching the people moving like ants along the street with a channeled intensity. There wasn't much of an expression on his chiseled face; to him, the crowds were a source of money, and he welcomed any edge that he could gain in the accomplishment of that. They didn't call him the King of Madison Avenue for nothing, even though his real name was Lance Stone.
Mr. Stone turned from the window and walked back into the recesses of his office with his arms folded. Today, he would be presiding over a meeting meant to reconcile the expectations of the advertisers with the financial demands of the holders of the rights of the season's baseball games: namely, the league, and its teams and players. As the chief arbitrator between these two sides, there was quite a lot of pressure on Mr. Stone to come up with a plan that would produce equitable results. His modus operendi was to leave nothing to chance. His own success hung in the balance and even though he had achieved a measure of it, he was not the type who entertained the thought of letting any of it slip away.
Mr. Stone sat down at the end of a large, polished oak table and glanced at the clock. His subordinates were due to report to him soon. He grimaced at the prospect. With his hands tightly clenched in each other, elbows firmly on the table, he seemed prepared to wring as much in the way of results out of them as he could.
The door opened and Teagle walked in, carrying his briefcase. He glanced nervously at Mr. Stone and Mr. Stone stared back at him. Teagle was well aware that Mr. Stone was the King of Madison Avenue, and that any path upwards in the firm would depend on his blessing. Mr. Stone, his hands still clenched together on the table, seemed equally aware of this, and his ability to use it as leverage over his somewhat intimidated subordinates.
"Morning, Mr. Stone," Teagle said as he set his briefcase on the table and drew up a chair. He tried to sound as cheerful as he could.
"Are you prepared, Teagle?" was Mr. Stone rather terse and business like reply.
Teagle opened his briefcase. "Of course, sir," he said, "and I think we're going to have a great meeting. The people down there are all talking baseball. They're buying tickets, hats, and TV coverage. We should have great ratings to work with."
"You think so, Teagle?" Mr. Stone said, sarcastically. "I'm glad you are my expert on this kind of stuff. I just hope we don't find any wrinkles in our plans."
Teagle was taking out his papers and leafing through them. "Wrinkles?" he asked.
Mr. Stone grimaced again. "Every season dies, doesn't it?" he said.
Teagle was saved from further needling when the door opened and two more young gentlemen in suits entered, carrying their briefcases. They nodded in greeting, and took their seats at the long table, opposite Teagle. Mr. Stone looked them over with the air of a seasoned poker player. They were soon followed by a woman in a business suit with her briefcase. They could have been any of the people out there on the street just a moment before. When she sat down and arranged her papers, Mr. Stone called the meeting to order. He didn't welcome them or exchange pleasantries with them; in his long career he had seen enough of them come and go, and by this time, he dispensed with the trivialities and got right down to the business at hand.
"Johnson," Mr. Stone said, nodding to the man in the brown suit opposite Teagle, "I believe you have something rather important to report."
Johnson cleared his throat nervously, leaned forward, and glanced at the faces of those who had come here to orchestrate this preoccupation so many called 'the national pastime.'
"Well," he said, "The final numbers are in, and the ratings for last year's world series were down 5 to 6%, depending on gender and age bracket, and what region of the country you lived in. We lost more women viewers than men, and more youth than seniors. The world series was between Cincinnati and Minnesota, so we had pretty good numbers from the Midwest, but we were down in the big eastern markets, especially Boston, New York and Florida. It was a five game series, so we didn't get the ratings of a game seven. There wasn't a lot of drama to the season, no big hitting streaks or home run records were set, and the races were not that close. There's definitely a sense that enthusiasm could be down this year."
Mr. Stone leaned back in his chair as Johnson imparted this knowledge, looking around at the faces of his staff, reading the tea leaves there, it seemed. Like the great poker players though, his hands didn't move, his face never flinched. His eyes now turned to the young woman sitting next to Teagle.
"Which tells us what, Ms. Smith?" he said flatly.
Ms. Smith, who might have been called beautiful in another setting, frowned. "I've tried to play all the angles, Mr. Stone," she said, somewhat apologetically, "But I'm having a hard time getting some of these big companies to line up at the plate. First of all, the league's figures, in terms of what they want for the rights, are astronomical. Everyone knows it translates into huge dollars per minute for TV ads, and there is a lot of concern about getting the bang for the buck. Coca Cola is talking about cutting back on time. Kraft foods is cutting back. Bud looks like it will fill the usual slots, but Maybelline and Coach are dropping sponsorships. Ford and GM are cutting back. Nintendo isn't sure they will match what they did last year, and they had a great ad with one of the biggest stars. The ratings just aren't there, especially for some of these demographics. What can I say? Without the ratings, it's going to be tough."
With that, Ms. Smith let out a sigh and leaned back in her chair. Mr. Stone, his hands still clasped, his elbows on the table, leaned forward. "Sounds like it won't be as easy as you think, Teagle," he said, looking his optimistic charge in the eye.
Teagle cleared his throat. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "It seems to me that we just need to ratchet up the excitement a little bit, that's all. The hard core fans out there are interested, believe me, and they are going to watch, especially if we can get something going among some of these old rivals. We need to generate a bit of a buzz to get some of these marginal demographic groups in front of their sets more often."
Mr. Stone flashed him a wry smile. "That's interesting. Drum up some more excitement. What do you think of that, Kimball?" He turned to look at the fourth member of their group, who so far, had been silent.
Kimball looked at Teagle. Then, he looked at Mr. Stone. "It sounds easy. But what are we talking about here? A hitting streak? A record number of home runs? A horse race to the pennant? I mean, is that really going to help us pull in some more of these women, and these kids? I mean, those are the ones who are sitting on the sidelines, right?"
Mr. Stone looked at each of them in turn, then, he unclasped his hands and stood up. "That's right, Kimball. And that's why we have to think out of the box this year."
They all stared at him, wondering what the great King was thinking. What rabbit would he pull out his hat this time? Teagle expressed the thought for all of them. "What do you mean, Mr. Stone?"
Mr. Stone walked over to one of the great windows that offered a wide, sweeping view of the crowds on the street below. Clasping his hands behind him and turning his back on them, his voice rose as he espoused his unique vision to them. "We need to create some extraneous angles this year. Hang some hooks out there that will reel in some of these groups of viewers by appealing to their particular interests. What would you say interests women, Ms. Smith?"
Ms. Smith straightened up in her chair as she was addressed. Her eyes darted from face to face around the table as she gathered her thoughts and prepared to articulate them. "Well, women are interested in clothes, refining their looks, men..."
Mr. Stone turned and raised an eyebrow when he heard that. "Men," he said, "yes, and romance, perhaps, Ms. Smith?"
She had to nod in agreement. "Sure," she said sheepishly.
"So can we create a relationship between a couple of these star baseball players and a couple of beautiful, young actresses? Maybe even a triangle of sorts; two women who find themselves fighting over the same star, and in a competition for his affection, perhaps? Something mysterious, something controversial, that we can unfold over the course of the season in installments, of sorts, leading to a confrontation or a climax near the end of the year. That way, we can hook them early and keep them interested. What do you think of that, Ms. Smith?"
Ms. Smith was writing notes now, jotting down the outline of a something like a soap opera plot. "I think it would be a good idea to orchestrate something like this in a couple of cities that might not make the pennant race this year, Ms. Smith," Stone said, "That way we can spread the ratings out across the spectrum. Make a note of that as well, will you?"
Ms. Smith nodded in agreement. "It sounds good, Mr. Stone. I'll make a few phone calls to some Hollywood contacts I have, and I'm sure if we're willing to drop some bucks, we can find a couple of high profile divas who would be interested. As for the ballplayers, I've never known them to turn down fringe benefits."
The guys around the table chuckled, and even Ms. Smith couldn't resist a sarcastic smile. "Just don't spend too much, will you, Ms. Smith?" Mr. Stone intoned. Of course, he had to keep the bottom line in mind.
Teagle raised his hand. He was ready to his part. "Speaking of which teams are to be considered for pennant races, am I right in assuming you want the bigger, east coast markets in it this year?"
Mr. Stone stuck his hands in his pockets and began to pace back and forth across the room. Some of his biggest decisions, they all knew from experience, were decided this way. "You would be right in assuming that. But I want more teams involved this year. Let's suggest we get several teams up there, and keep them close. Let's have a heck of a pennant race this year, Teagle. Tell them up at the league we need a couple of old rivals, Boston and New York, decided on the last week of the season, Detroit and Chicago changing the lead a couple of times, Los Angeles beating out San Francisco on the last day of the season. Stuff like that. Tell them if they want their money, that's what we've got to have."
"I still think we could use a hitting streak," Johnson chimed in, "Somebody maybe threatening the home run record."
"I don't see why that wouldn't help," Mr. Stone agreed. "Work on it. Let's call Spalding and tell them to juice up the ball this year. Get the umpires to close up on the strike zone. More offense. Runs."
Johnson jotted it all down.
"But we need some other angles," Mr. Stone added, "A human interest angle, something that will appeal to people's heart strings. Get people interested who have no interest in baseball at all. I propose that we script in a health issue. A career threatening injury to a player these kids idolize, early in the season, who struggles to regain his form. something that can have ups and downs, something we can play for drama through the year. Teagle, work on that, will you? Find someone popular, some name everyone knows, and make it dramatic. Make it really look like his career, his livelihood, might be over. Bring his wife and kids into it. Then, he can start coming back, as the season progresses. The pennant race shapes up. He can make a return in a big game against a division rival, with the season on the line."
Teagle looked up from his notes, which he had been writing diligently. "This sounds like something for a pitcher, a crucial player. Someone critical to a team's world series hopes, and someone likeable."
Mr. Stone sat back down in his chair, leaned back, and smiled. Things were shaping up. "Exactly, Teagle. And I think we should script another story somewhere else, some family turmoil, a divorce, or trouble with the kids, surrounding a big star in one of these smaller markets. A son diagnosed with cancer. A daughter arrested for shoplifting. Something that will get in the news and maybe hook some of these marginal viewers into watching a few games and following the story."
"I'll work on it," Teagle said.
Kimball raised his hand. "So what do you want me to tell them for the World Series?"
"In the end," Mr. Stone said, "After a long fight, where we keep some of the smaller markets in the hunt for most of the way, we end up with say, New York versus Boston, and Detroit versus California, a couple of seven game series, with New York facing California for the pennant. New York wins it in seven. We need the draw of a deciding game seven in a couple of big markets to sell it to the networks. And have them win it with a home run in the bottom of the ninth, something dramatic. Make them watch all night, a close game, with four hours of advertising we can sell. In the other league, the same thing. New York versus Florida. That will get people thinking there might be another subway series. St. Louis versus Chicago. Have it end up Florida against Chicago. That way we can get the northeast, the west coast, the south and the Midwest interested. Anywhere in the country, you'll have someone to root for. Something for everybody to watch. Keep them on the edge of their seats."
Ms. Smith nodded in agreement. "Now that's something I can go back to the networks with, and they can sell it to the advertisers. The advertisers get the ratings, the networks get the ad revenue, and the league and the players get the fees they need to keep them happy."
"Good, Ms. Smith," Mr. Stone said, turning to Johnson. "I'm sure the league and the ballplayers will be happy with what we've come up with. Well, we've got some stuff for you people to work on. I suggest you get busy."
He turned and walked over to his window view of Madison Avenue and his subjects, as it were, while his subordinated gathered their notes and packed up their briefcases. They exchanged simple good byes, and left the room, one by one. The dark outline of the silhouette of the King of Madison Avenue made an impression on Teagle as he left.
He made his way down the hall to the elevator, and then down to street level. As he left the building, he felt defined by a sense of purpose and driven by ambition, but when he stepped out through the revolving door into the sunlight his heart misgave him. As a couple of fans wearing baseball caps walked passed him, he was reminded of his son, and the innocent anticipation the child possessed. Like the looming structure of Madison Plaza, blotting out the sunlight on the street, the meeting he had just taken part in betrayed their trust.
All the way home, whenever he heard someone talk about the season, he couldn't help feeling that the strings he held in his hands, that none of these people knew about, manipulated their very innocent emotions. Their simple faith in this pure struggle of sport at once filled him with disdain, and sympathy. Couldn't some of them at least, guess that it was all really just a business? It was the thoughts of his son that troubled him the most. What would the world of kids like him be like, without faith in this season, their teams, their heros? He tried to take his mind off of it by reading a magazine on the train, but the articles in the sports section at the end pulled his mind into all kinds of directions. The promises of the predictions of the pundits had been compromised, but the hopes and dreams of these kids were still there, and Teagle felt at once head and shoulders above the faithful as the orchestrator of these events, and guilty for having betrayed their trust.
Still, as he remembered the entertainment system his wife wanted, and the Mercedes Benz that they wanted to drive around in, he had to admit that his ultimate loyalty was to his himself, and his own family. He would get those Red Sox tickets for him and his son, and he could watch his son's excitement, feel secure in the happiness they would share in the end, since he knew how it all was going to turn out.
| Author Notes | This is a story about the hollow world of corruption, the greed that motivates it, and the damage it does to the innocents in the world. I tried to write it in stark terms, to underline the stark theme, with mechanical dialogue focused on the business at hand, and grim descriptions of the buildings contrasting with the innocence of the fans in the streets. The personal involvement of this corporate player, Teagle, and the needs of his particular family, complicate the story I think. Who doesn't put their own family first? You have to do what you have to do; but in this case, it's a sorry state of affairs. estory |
By estory
I went away to college because I wanted to meet new people. Lots of people go away to college for that. I wanted to meet beautiful girls, fall in love and hang out with exciting new friends that played music and ate out together and drank beers in their dorm room while talking about all the girls and music. I sent an application to a college upstate and when I got accepted, I was excited. The college was far enough away to stretch my umbilical chord, so to speak, and close enough that I could come home for the weekends. It was big enough that it had a competitive football team, a nice student center with a new cafeteria, roomy dorms, and an art gallery and a performing arts center. It was small enough that it had ivy covered little cottages for classrooms and just outside its parameters were the mountains.
I can't help thinking now, that all these little things that influenced my decision of where to go to school led me to meet Ed, someone from somewhere else who I would never have dreamed of meeting.
I had no idea what I really wanted to study, but I was sure about the part of wanting to meet new people. As a boy, I grew up in a family that revolved around itself in many ways; birthdays and holidays shared with cousins across town, going to school and going to church. I was baptized and confirmed and took communion in the same old church that my parents had always gone to for years and years. It's not that I wasn't happy with that life. I loved my sister and my cousins, and I enjoyed going to church. Especially at Christmas and Easter, when that message of hope and redemption seemed to resound in the hymns and the light in the stained glass windows. I had always believed in Jesus and His story of hope for the downtrodden, His message of forgiveness and rebirth. But as I got older, the excitement of the outside world, with its rock concerts and movies, it's promise of exploration, was also enticing. I was tired of singing the same old songs, tired of playing the same old melodies on my acoustic guitar. I had known all the girls in Sunday school for years; none of them seemed to hold out a hope for me. My cousins were planning on going away to all kinds of schools and my friends were going away for various reasons.
So at the end of the summer of my eighteenth year, I packed up my little pinto with suitcases and boxes, my guitar case and my notebooks, my camera and my cassettes, and said goodbye to my parents and sister on the front porch of our house. My mother cried, and I promised I would call every week. My father shook my hand and wished me luck. My sister said she would keep me informed of all the goings on of our cousins and friends. She would even play me chess by letter. On the one hand I was trembling with the excitement of heading off into something new, but with one foot firmly standing still on that porch, knowing there were people who loved me waiting for me when I got back. I could always go back to that old church next summer.
When I arrived at the dorm, and got my room assignment, the lady gave me the key and told me I had a roommate. The dorm was on the second floor so I had to carry all my things up there and it took a couple of trips. I fumbled with the keys, I remember, at the door; half tired of all that carrying the past up there, and half wondering what I would find on the other side. When I opened the door, I saw a young man in a bat man t-shirt sitting on a couch in front of a video camera in the living room. The camera was hooked up to a computer on a desk in the corner. He was obviously doing some kind of video feed, in the middle of saying something to some kind of audience out there on Youtube or Facebook, and he stopped abruptly when I came in, as though he were doing something exclusive. He looked at me as if I had just walked in on a movie set in Hollywood. He turned off the camera.
"Hi," I said, putting down my suitcase and my guitar case. "I'm Bill. I guess you're my roommate. They said I had a roommate."
I couldn't help thinking how much he looked like an average kid who wanted to be a movie star. He had a fashionable hair cut. He was wearing designer jeans. He had a little goatie like you see on those movie directors sometimes. He didn't say anything right away. He just looked at me, and I got the feeling that he felt I was crowding his space. He got up, and turned off the computer. Then, he sat down on the couch again, crossed his legs like a movie director, and said: "Do me a favor. Knock before you come in."
"Knock?" I said.
"Yea. I was in the middle of this webcast. I do this webcast."
"No kidding?" I said. "Well, that's cool, I guess." I asked him what his name was, and he said his name was Ed. And that was how I met Ed.
Ed was from Pittsburgh. That's about all he ever told me of his background. He never mentioned his family, his friends, or a girlfriend. He watched a lot of TV. He had a TV in the living room, a small TV that he kept on the windowsill in the kitchen, and another one next to his bed. We got into an argument about it one night because I couldn't go to sleep while he watched and watched into the morning hours. In the end, I moved my bed into the living room.
He told me he couldn't sleep without it.
Mostly he watched family sitcoms, like Roseanne, Family Ties, Reba, or The Dick Van Dyke show or Father Knows Best. In the morning he watched I Love Lucy reruns. In the afternoon, he watched soap operas. At first I didn't think too much of it, and then I noticed that he was watching reruns of the reruns. The same things, over and over.
"Dude," I asked him once, after dinner, in the middle of another rerun of George Lopez, "Why do keep watching the same things over and over? Don't you ever get tired of it?"
He didn't say anything right away. Then he said something like, "It's like watching home movies," or something.
It was funny sometimes, I got that. But the guy really didn't do much else, other than shoot this webcast. I had to leave the room when he did that. For some reason, he couldn't do it while I was there, and I got tired of arguing with him. So I made a habit of going down to the library and then getting something to eat in the cafeteria. It was down there that I met Christine. She was a literature major from Vermont, into poetry and music, and we hit it off right away. I got to bringing down my guitar and we'd go outside and I'd play her something romantic, and she'd sit on a bench and laugh. She was also close to her family, and called her mom every night. She went to church and we started going to this little Lutheran chapel in the town. We'd listen to the gospel and the sermon, bask in the light of the stained glass windows, and sing all the old hymns we knew together. For some reason, I never thought of asking Ed to come with us. I don't know why. I guess because he seemed so creepy.
One night while we were in the cafeteria, I saw Ed sitting at a table in a corner of the room, by himself. He must have been done eating, but he just sat there, with his hands folded, looking around at the other students eating their dinners and the girls and guys fooling around together at their tables. I was sure he had seen us. I thought of going over there with Christine, and introducing her, and then, I thought better of it. I don't know why.
Once I asked him if he liked music. He said he didn't know. Can you imagine someone telling you that they didn't know if they liked music? He watched me once playing my guitar, like one of the judges on American Idol.
"So that's how you're going to become famous?" he asked me.
"Well," I said, "I don't really play guitar because I plan on becoming famous doing it. I just like music."
"It's easier to get famous playing music," he said, matter of fact like. "Lots of people get famous that way."
I shook my head. "Ed, is that why you're on the web, so that you can get famous?"
He shrugged.
"So how many people actually follow your show?" I asked him.
"I have to study," he said, and got up and went into the bedroom.
I asked him once what kinds of things he talked about on his webcast, but he wouldn't tell me. I thought of going online and watching it once, but I never did. Maybe I was afraid of what I would see. I don't know. After all, I lived with the guy.
I never knew what kind of classes he was supposed to be taking either. Sometimes he went out, and he would stay out for a while. It seemed like he was going to class. But I never saw him doing any homework. Once one of his teachers called, and asked me if I knew why Ed hadn't been to his class for the last three weeks.
"Is he sick or something?" the guy asked me.
"No," I answered.
"Tell him that I called, will you?" the guy said, "Tell him I want to talk to him."
So when Ed came back, I told him.
He just shrugged.
I followed him once, after that. I was getting curious about what he was really doing. He ate his Wheaties, in his Superman t-shirt, put on his jacket, grabbed his knapsack, and opened the door and went out like anybody would do on their way to a morning class. I grabbed my jacket and slipped out after him. He had taken the stairs down to the first floor, and when I got down there, I could see him walking across the parking lot towards the campus. But instead of continuing on the path out to one of the colleges, he got into his car, a little grey Honda. So I cut over to my car, got in, and kept following him, out of the parking lot, and onto the main road that led into town.
He drove through the town, to the shopping mall, and pulled into the parking garage. I followed him all the way to the top floor, and watched him park up there in one of the corners. He got out of the car with the knapsack. He set it carefully on the ground. He opened it up and took out his video camera and tripod. He set up the camera on the edge of the parking garage, overlooking the entrance to the mall. Then he started filming the shoppers as they walked into the mall.
I was getting worried about Ed. There were times I felt sorry for him, and times I was scared of him. I didn't know what to do. So I went to talk to one of the guidance counselors at the college.
"So what seems to be the problem with your roommate?" she asked me, picking up her cup of coffee.
"He's strange," I told her. "He does weird things. He watches TV all the time."
"Has he threatened you?" she asked me, putting down her cup of coffee. "Has he damaged any of your things?"
"No," I said, carefully. "He hasn't threatened me. But one of his professors called once, and asked why he hasn't been going to class."
"That sounds like an issue between him and his professor. It doesn't really involve you."
"You mean I should mind my own business?"
"If it doesn't concern you."
"I followed him once, to see what he's doing. He went to the mall. He just stood there, filming people going into the mall from the parking garage."
The counselor shook her head. "That kind of behavior can be described as stalking. Maybe there was an explanation for his actions. Maybe he is working on a class project. Maybe he needs to just get off campus for a while. I don't think you should feel the need to follow him around and see what he is up to. People need their space, sometimes."
"I don't know. He once told me he didn't know if he liked music."
The counselor shrugged. "Maybe he just doesn't like music."
I looked out of the window. It was a grey, cloudy day, I remember. "I guess you're right," I said.
The counselor smiled and picked up her cup of coffee again. "I'm sure there is some innocent explanation to all this. Don't start jumping to conclusions. But if you really feel that uncomfortable, maybe I can get you a new dorm assignment.
I stood up. "I'll think about it," I told her.
I left the counselor's office and started back for the dorm room. It was getting windy, and cold. The brown leaves of last summer were rattling as they blew along the sidewalks, and people hurried passed me bundled in their coats, heads down, silent.
As I got nearer to the dorm, I noticed a crowd of kids and security guards standing around the front door. Some of the girls were crying, and people were calling their parents on their cell phones. There were police cars in the parking lot, with their lights popping on and off. I asked one of the guys what was going on.
"Some kid hanged himself in a closet in his dorm, while he was doing this webcast," the guy told me.
"That's my roommate!" I shouted.
One of the security guards approached me and told me I had better go up and talk to the police. Everyone was looking at me as I went through the door; the girls crying, the guys staring, whispering. The security guard told the police I was Ed's roommate, and they took me up to the room. The detectives and the officers were all crowded around the computer, watching this horrible image of Ed, swinging from a rope in the dorm closet. They had already taken down his body, but they were watching it over and over.
"You were the roommate?" they asked me. I told them I was.
"Did you know anything about this webcast he was doing?" they asked me.
Then they showed me the video, the last video Ed had made. He started by sitting in the chair, the way I had seen him the first day I met him. He talked about how he had always wanted to be somebody. How he had wanted to be famous. An actor, a movie director. He had started this webcast, but hardly anyone watched it. He felt nobody was noticing him. His father had left. His mother was dating someone and hardly talked to him. He had no friends. He wanted everyone to know what they had done to him. This was how he could tell the world how he felt, and get famous doing it.
Then, he got up from the chair and opened the closet door. There was a rope hanging from the bar where we hung our clothes, tied into a noose, with a chair under it. He climbed onto the chair, put the noose around his neck, and said: "Goodbye, everybody,". Then he kicked the chair out from underneath him. I looked away.
"What did you know about him?" the detective asked me.
"Nothing," I said.
| Author Notes | This is a story that asks questions about the responsibility we share in helping people who are troubled and need help. It's a story of the isolation our society breeds and maintains sometimes, in the honoring of a person's space and privacy, and the difficulty we have in breaking through it. It's a story of the obligations we have and feel to share the redemption of Christ with people who need it, and the walls people put up around themselves to keep it out. It asks questions of where our obligations end, and the respect for the individual begins. These are tough questions, ones that I would not presume to answer, and maybe there are no answers. But asking tough questions is the obligation of the writer, I feel. This is not a story that actually happened to me; but it is a story we are all well aquainted with in many news stories. These things happen. They could happen to anybody. And they are life changing events, even for the survivors. Hence the title, Near Death, as in coming close to the proximity of death in your life. estory |
By estory
I woke up early in the morning again, in a cold sweat, out of the same nightmare I had been having. I had gone over to Julie's house. Someone there told me she had moved. They gave me directions that took me to a strange, urban neighborhood, with menacing people sitting on the steps of the stoops, watching me. I kept driving around in circles. Finally I pulled over and this tough looking guy walked up to my car with his hands in his pockets. When I rolled down the window, and asked him if he knew where Julie was, he pulled out this hand gun, pointed it at me, and fired.
I couldn't sleep, and after a couple of hours of tossing and turning, I finally got out of bed, put some cereal in a bowl, and made a cup of coffee. I sat at the table and looked up at the picture of Julie on the opposite wall. It was taken in happier times. She was smiling, waving at me. I couldn't tell if it was hello or goodbye.
Julie was in rehab. It was the second time she had been in, and this time she had been in for a little over a month. I missed her, I wanted her to come home; but sometimes it felt that she would never be really back. There was this side of her, you know, this part of her that seemed like something dark that I would never understand. And even if she did come back, I could never really be sure that it was 'her'; you know what I am saying? If you haven't been in love with someone who does drugs, or don't have a brother or a sister on drugs, you probably don't know what I am talking about.
Julie and I met at work. I was stocking shelves on the overnight shift in a grocery store, and she was the overnight cashier, and if there were no customers, she was supposed to help stocking shelves. She looked lonely to me, someone who needed somebody. She was always asking for help trying to find where things go on the shelves. I would go and help her. She had these soft looking brown eyes, I thought, and whenever she saw me, she smiled, like she was glad to see me. When there was nobody in the place in the dead of the night, we got to talking. She liked music. She wanted to go places. I told her I would take her away, to Florida, California, anywhere she wanted to go. When I told her that, she smiled. I think I liked the fact that she seemed to need me. We started going out, after work, first for coffee at this late night diner, or maybe out to one of the fast food restaurants on the strip. We would sit there at one of the tables, past midnight, looking at each other and talking. She told me she didn't get along with her parents, that she wanted to move out. She didn't like it at home. I told her everyone's got to move out sometime.
I met her parents once, when I went over there to pick her up. Her father seemed cold. He was sitting in his living room recliner watching a game on TV, drinking a beer. I don't think he shook my hand. He looked at me like I was trouble, you know? He frowned at Julie and told her not to stay out too long. When Julie came downstairs from her room, her mother lectured her about cleaning her room and doing her laundry, and Julie just looked at me and got red. She ushered me out the door and when we were outside, she grabbed my hand and told me she didn't want to come back home.
Sometimes we'd go to a movie, but mostly we just drove around. We'd park somewhere in a lot and listen to music, or just talk. We started talking about saving money and getting an apartment together, one of those basement places in a house. We could split the rent and save, and someday we could go to Florida. We'd leave her parents behind. There would be no more winter. It would be summer all the time. We could get married if we wanted to.
My mother was always asking me when I was going to get married. "Someday," I'd answer. I asked her what she thought of Julie, and she shrugged her shoulders.
"What do you think of her?" she asked me.
"I love her," I said.
"What do you love about her?"
I thought for a moment. Then I said, "She needs me."
"Do you need her?" My mother asked.
"Everybody needs someone," I said.
Even now, I'd say that was true.
After breakfast, I cleaned off the table and looked out of the window. It was a grey, overcast day, but still, it was brightening. I looked out over the rooftops of all those houses, over the grid of the streets, and it seemed like the world stretched away forever, around me. I could go anywhere. I could get another apartment. I could meet someone else; someone beautiful, young, and different. Someone who wanted to have kids. But then I thought of Julie sitting in that little room in the rehab, waiting for me. She would be looking forward to it. I had to go up there and see her. She always smiled when she saw me. She would say she was feeling better. She would tell me she was almost ready to come back home.
But I couldn't be sure if she was telling me the truth, or not.
She did a good job of hiding the drugs while we were going out. It was pot and coke she was on, by the way. She never did them when I was around. I would have never imagined it. Maybe it was because I didn't want to believe what she was doing. I had this image of Julie, like all people have visions of the people they love. We'd get married, someday. We'd have kids. We'd decorate the Christmas tree together, she would make Sunday dinners, wrap the kids birthday presents like my mother had done when I was a kid. We would take our kids to little league games and make burgers in our backyard and play board games like Scrabble and Parchesi. I didn't see this broken part of her. This girl that ran away when someone tried to get close to her, and wouldn't let anyone touch her. Or hold her. And I wanted to hold her.
I needed her.
I got dressed and made some brownies. Julie liked brownies. We made them a couple of times on rainy days while we were living together. I liked bringing her something. She didn't like flowers or balloons. I felt funny going up there empty handed, so I brought brownies. While the brownies were in the oven, I looked out of the window again, It was a grey, cold day, a little windy. It looked like early November. It felt like early November.
Last year, when Julie and I started dating, it was great. I felt like I was in love, and she was in love with me. She seemed happy. She sang along to songs with me, she laughed when I mimicked the managers in the store. We talked about Florida and living like hippies on the beach, going to concerts and sitting under the palm trees. One night, I put my arm around her and kissed her. She smiled at me, but then she got quiet. Then the next night, she called and said she couldn't see me because she was sick. A couple of nights later, it was her mother. Then it was her grandmother. I didn't think anything of it at first. She would be back a couple of days later, looking tired, but then after work we'd go out to the diner and she seemed fine. She'd laugh. The manager of the store would get mad and call her to the office, but she would tell him how sorry she was and how it wouldn't happen again and he would just shake his head and tell her to get back to work. She would walk passed my aisle and flash me a smile.
She would come up to me in the aisle, pick a can up off the shelf, and put it back up there with the label facing out, like it was supposed to look, and ask me if we could go to the diner. She would tell me how sorry she was that she had missed our date. I would tell her to forget about it.
"Maybe you should see a doctor," I told her. "Get yourself checked out. Find out what's wrong."
She would put her hand over her heart. "Maybe I should," she told me. But she never did.
Then came the time I bought her that gold necklace. It was on the anniversary of our first date. I spent a lot of time picking it out for her, I wanted it to be something special. I kept imagining how she would look when she saw it. How she would smile. Then, when she opened the box, she looked at me and started crying.
"What's wrong?" I asked her. I reached out to hold her, but she leaned away, like she was scared, or something.
"Nothing," she said. "It's beautiful." Then she gave a quick kiss and smiled. But she got quiet after that. That weekend she called me and said she had to help a cousin move. She wouldn't be able to see me.
I was a little mad. I had made reservations at a restaurant. I wanted to take her to the movies, and then get a bottle of wine and go back to my apartment. I was looking forward to it. I was thinking of asking her to move in with me. I thought it was something she wanted.
"Julie," I said, over the phone, waving my hands in the air. "You keep doing this."
"I know," she said, on the other end, softly. "I'm sorry."
"Sometimes it feels like whenever we are getting somewhere, you pull away from me."
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, "I have to go."
I had thought of leaving her, of breaking up with her. I asked my mother about it.
"If you don't think the relationship is getting to where you want it to, then you have to think about leaving her, and finding someone who will get you there." she told me.
I folded my arms and leaned on the table, staring out of the window at the wide, but empty sky. "Find someone else," I murmured. I could picture Julie, sitting in her room, crying, after I broke up with her. Seeing all her dreams disappear. Wondering what she would do without me.
"Where do you want to go in life?" My mother asked me. "What kind of relationship do you want?"
The trees outside the window were empty of leaves. I shrugged my shoulders.
The brownies were done and I took them out of the oven to let them cool. I looked at the picture of Julie on my kitchen wall, then I stared back at the brownies. It seemed sometimes that I was doing a lot for her, that I was the one who was reaching back for her, and getting nothing in return. I was wondering if I should go see her or not. I looked back up at the picture.
It seemed she needed me and I couldn't let her down.
Then came the night we were going to this coffeehouse to start planning our trip to Florida. It was back in the spring. She called me an hour before we were supposed to meet and told me that her aunt had been rushed to the hospital, and that she couldn't come.
"Julie, this is what you said you wanted to do forever," I told her, "This is what we've been talking about for months. Getting away. Starting over."
"I know," she said, on the other end.
"I don't know what to think anymore," I said, my voice rising a little. "I don't know if I believe you anymore."
"I have to go," she said, and hung up.
I don't know why, but after an hour, I drove over to Julie's house and parked down the block. Her car was gone. I didn't know what to think. I looked out of the windshield at the stars above the streetlights and the telephone wires. They seemed impossibly far away, out of reach. I wanted to tell her to make up her mind. I wanted to tell her to tell me if she wanted to go with me or not. To tell me what was going on.
After a while, I saw her car pull up. She didn't see me. She parked ahead of me, and turned off the lights and then she turned off the car, but she didn't get out. She just sat in there. I was beginning to wonder what she was doing, what she was up to. I waited another five minutes. She was still sitting in the car. So I got out and walked over there. I bent down and looked in the window.
She rolled down the window. "What the hell are you doing here?" she exclaimed.
On the seat next to her was a mirror with a rolled up dollar bill and a razorblade, and two lines of coke on it.
So that was how I finally caught her. She just looked at me. I turned around and walked away and got into my car. I could hear her calling after me. During my drive back home, I decided to break up with her. I told myself that I couldn't trust her. I couldn't deal with the problems of a drug addict. How could she be the mother of my children?
When I got back home, Julie called. The first time, I paced back and forth in the living room, and didn't answer it. The second time, I heard Julie's voice in my head, pleading with me to answer the phone. I remember looking out of the window at all the stars in the sky that stretched beyond the skyline of the buildings around me, and for one moment, all that space, the freedom to go anywhere I wanted and meet someone else, seemed to rush into the room with me. It was like a wind, at once fresh and exciting, but as it picked me up, I could feel my feet reaching for the ground. I could see that look in her face. I answered the phone.
Julie was crying. "I'm sorry," she said, "I need help." I sat down in a chair at the kitchen table.
"Julie," I asked her, "Is this what you've been doing all those times you said you were sick?"
"I'm sorry," she said, "I know I have problems. I need help."
"I don't know if I can help you," I told her.'
"Please," she said. "Don't leave me. I'd die. I need help. Call somebody."
So that's how she went into rehab the first time. I called this place, a place that took her in, no questions asked. We had to use the money we had saved for Florida, but the insurance from work covered the rest of it. Her parents were mad. She packed up her things and I waited outside in the car for her. Her father came to the door and yelled at her. Then I drove her over there. I don't think they came to see her; maybe they went once when I wasn't there. I went over there every other day. If I didn't go to see her, I'd sit in my apartment and imagine her sitting in that room by herself, waiting for me.
She did alright. It was a three month program, and she seemed happier as it went along. They taught her how to play the guitar. They gave her painting classes. Things to express herself, they said, when she couldn't talk to people. She had a counselor, and he talked to her and got her to come to grips with all these things with her parents. He said it would be best if she moved away from them. So I told Julie she could move in with me. It would be a new start. Everyone needs a new start sometimes, the counselor said. She could go back to work, and we could start saving for Florida again.
At first, things were great. She was sober. She moved in with me, and went back to work like we planned. We opened a bank account and started putting money in for our trip. We looked at maps. I showed her how to cook things. We cleaned the apartment together. One night we went to the diner, had a few beers, and went back to the apartment. We were alone. I kissed her. I thought she kissed me back. Then we went to bed and made love.
Making love to her was strange. It felt like making love to someone who had cheated on you, and afterwards I had to wonder if she loved me more than the drugs. She got quiet again. She started coming home and telling me she had headaches. She told me to sleep on the couch.
Then one day, she didn't come home from work. She didn't call. I kept walking back and forth in the apartment, looking out of the window, looking for her car, as the night grew darker and darker. I called her parents, but she wasn't over there. Eleven o'clock and twelve o'clock passed, and when I went to bed, I started thinking the worst. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, imagining her out snorting coke somewhere in a parking lot, getting arrested, passing out on the street somewhere, alone. She had left me. I was angry at her, and angry at myself for trusting her. I told myself I had to move on. I had to break up with her and find someone else.
That morning, I woke up half hoping to find her in bed with me. But she wasn't. I got dressed and looked out of the window. Her car was still gone. No message on the answering machine. I got something to eat, made a cup of coffee, and still there was no call from her. I got in the car and went down to the bank. Sure enough, the teller told me that a young woman had withdrawn the money from our account yesterday afternoon. She had taken our Florida money.
I got back in the car and just drove. I felt like getting as far away from there as possible, far away from Julie and all the things and places that reminded me of her, and the time I had wasted with her. When I got back home, there was a message from her. She said she had messed up, she knew she had messed up, she didn't know why, but she would make it up to me. She sounded like she was crying. I wiped my eyes and deleted the message. Before she could call me back I put on my jacket and went out to the diner.
I had a beer there, feeling sorry for myself, and looked around for some company. I was looking for someone new, I remember, someone that would take my mind off of Julie, someone with whom I could go off in a new direction. Then, I saw this pretty brunette come in, and she sat at the bar and looked at me and smiled. All I had to do was buy her a drink, say something, tell her she was pretty, ask her about her day; anything would start me down that road. I know part of my wanted to, said I deserved it. But somehow in the face of that moment, I thought of Julie. Sitting somewhere waiting for me to call. Her only hope. Crying. I left a tip, put on my jacket and walked out, without saying a word. I went home. When I got home, Julie's car was parked in front of my house.
My heart was pounding. I got out of the car, and saw her sitting on the stoop, waiting for me. When she saw me, she started running over to me. She was crying. I just stood there and waited for her.
"Julie," I said, "How could you? What the hell were you thinking?"
"I don't know, I don't know," she said, "I'm sorry. I know I messed up. I'll make it up to you. Just don't leave me, OK? You're all I have."
"You took our Florida money, Julie!" I yelled.
"Please," she said, "I still have some of it left. I'll give it back to you. Here. I'll go back into rehab, anything." She looked at me. She looked at me like I was her only hope.
"Oh Julie," I said, embracing her.
And that's where we are now; her second rehab.
I picked up the tray of brownies and put on my jacket and headed outside to drive over and see her. The sky was still grey. It looked like it would never clear. I got in my car, started it up, and started driving. I knew I could go where I wanted to. I could leave her. But then I would leave her in that room, waiting for me, bowing her head when she realized I wouldn't be coming.
And I knew I would go and see her.
The rehab center was big, brick building; it looked like a prison. In a way, it was. I went in and said hello to the nurse at the desk, and smiled back at her when she checked me in. The halls of the place went around the corners of walls, in their endless pathways, passed the open doors of rooms where you could see kids waiting for their parents, husbands waiting for their wives, wives waiting for their husbands, and people sitting in their rooms by themselves. I thought to myself that at least, Julie and I had each other, and my step got a little lighter.
Her door was open. She was sitting in a chair by the window, reading a book. I knocked on the door and walked in. She looked up and smiled.
"You brought me more brownies," she said.
"I did," I said, sitting beside her. "How are you doing?"
"Good," she said. "They say I can go home soon. I want you to know, I'm glad you didn't leave me when you could. It saved me. I've been doing a lot of thinking. I want to stay clean, for you. I love you."
She put down her book and leaned forward, and I kissed her.
"Julie," I said, "I need to know. Are we ever going to get out of here? For good, I mean?"
She looked out of the window. I looked out of it with her. Outside, it seemed, on the western edge of the world, there was a thin, bright break in the clouds.
"I hope so," she said.
| Author Notes | This story of two people who need each other is one my favorites. It's a story of compassion, through the struggle of drug addiction, of two people holding onto each other as they walk through the maze. Will they ever get out of it? I think everyone ends up rooting for them; maybe we'll never know, but we end up rooting for them, and their compassion and need for each other. Love is about forgiveness, about giving up yourself for the other person, about hope, about light in the darkness. I wrote the story in a stripped down minimalist style, inspired by the short stories of Raymond Carver and his many incredible stories of suburban America. I wanted a believable, conversational style, one that draws you in and makes you feel that this could happen to you. To anybody. And in this maze of life, and its struggles, our only hope is each other, and the love we have for each other. estory |
By estory
Jessica lived in Tucker Lake, New Hampshire, up in the woods, high on the mountains, along the shores of the lakes and in the snow covered valleys. Her mother had been a somewhat confused ex-hippie who had never really married her father, and he had left for California before Jessica could form any memories of him. Her mother used to tell her, rather disdainfully, that he had something to do with selling microprocessors and that he lived somewhere in Silicon Valley. He never sent a dime of child support back, never wrote, never sent any pictures. If he had, Jessica probably would have used them as dart boards. Her mother, on the other hand, was somehow drawn into eastern religions and practiced yoga as a form of self improvement. Instead of pictures of Jesus, there were statues of fat, laughing Buddhas around the rooms of her apartment. She believed in tuning out the parts of the world that created anger and discomfort for her, and sometimes that included Jessica too. There were many days when Jessica came home from school to the apartment her mother rented from one of her aunts and finding it overwhelmed with the scent of incense so strong she had to go back outside. She didn't know it, but in many ways she really had more in common with her father than her mother. While her mother was content to work as a cashier in a grocery store, sit around in her parents' old furniture, and listen to tapes of the The Who and the Yardbirds dressed in tie dyed t-shirts and sneakers, driving around in an old Volkswagen bug, Jessica was on the look out for something better.
The life she had with her mother at the apartment gave her no real connections to the family she had been born into. Her mother knew nothing of the family recipes in the cookbook of her grandmother, and Jessica was fed a steady, mundane diet of cans of ravioli, macaroni and cheese, sloppy joes and Kellog's cereals, with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches thrown in her paper bag for lunch. At the holidays, her mother would plug in an artificial Christmas tree a week before Christmas Eve and buy a bottle of Jim Beam and spend the night watching cartoons on TV. At Easter, she would bring home a bag of outdated jelly beans for Jessica and sit on the porch in a yoga pose, lighting up a joint in celebration. It was the same for the Fourth of July and Halloween. Often Jessica spent such times walking around the neighborhood by herself, looking into the windows of the houses at a life she could scarcely have imagined.
She went through elementary school and high school and after that she got a job at the Windy Hill Resort at the mountain on the other side of the lake. It was a small town, she felt she had reached her limits in it, the end of her leash, so to speak.
There wasn't much to do in Tucker Lake, and there weren't many people to meet either. In fact, everybody knew everybody else, said hello to each other once a week in the grocery store, and by the time they had finished high school, everyone had bowled with everyone else, everyone had gotten drunk together at least once, and everyone had gone skiing together. The winters were long and snowy, and life there revolved around skiing. The Windy Hill Resort was one of the bigger resorts in the White Mountains; it was in a beautiful spot, right on the lake, in a tight notch between steep mountain ridges that rose up to the ski slopes. In the summer, they rented out canoes and rowboats, they maintained a few hiking and biking trails that led up to the summit of Tucker Mountain, they had an indoor pool with a Jacuzzi and sauna, and they had the only five star restaurant in the county, complete with a cocktail lounge and everything. In the winter, they operated the ski lifts and the chalet at the top of the mountain. In the summer, parents from Boston would drive up with their kids to spend a couple of weeks in the wild country, and in the fall, they got bus loads of leaf peepers, mostly senior citizens, armed with their cameras. So there was a transient air about the place, with strangers always coming and going, people who you could never really latch onto as they travelled away into the wide world.
Jessica started at the resort after she graduated high school. At first, she waited on tables and quickly learned the time honored art of hustling the patrons for tips. The older girls taught her how to ask people where they were from, and then telling them that she had an aunt there, she had spent the summers there while on vacation as a kid. They taught her the knack of asking them what they planned on doing in Tucker Lake and then telling them she had skied the mountain, she had gone canoeing in the lake so many times, she loved it; you could get some lovely pictures if you went to the little brook on the far side. She learned to wear low cut blouses and lean over the table next to the men, and she would tell the wives that whatever they were wearing, they looked so beautiful.
Of course, she really could care less about these transient tourists; they were just a means to an end. Jessica was stashing her cash, as much of it as she could, in a shoe box she hid in the back of a closet in the basement of her apartment. So was Marlene. Marlene was one of the other waitresses, another lost soul stuck in the dead end of Tucker Lake, who longed for adventure and escape. The long nights and endless weeks of waiting on the tables of demanding strangers really was a monotony, and as the months dragged on, through the short summers and the brief, dazzling autumns, and the long winters, the endless parade of bus loads and car loads of guests began to wear on their sense of accomplishment. After work, they indulged themselves in the only real release they had available: getting drunk back at Marlene's apartment with a couple of waiters from the resort. Sometimes they would hang out at the diner, or bowl down at the alley in town, and sometimes they would make out in the back seat of one of their cars, but it was just a form of diversion in the end. Jessica knew none of these guys would be able or willing to take her out of Tucker Lake. She had made up her mind that she didn't want to spend the rest of her life listening to the ancient, endlessly repeating cabaret music in the lounge, while old timers from all over the country danced their last waltzes in the pathetic gloom.
The resort had all sorts of oldies bands and cabaret acts and comedians that provided entertainment in the lounge, playing their awkward and somewhat stale versions of old Barry Manilow numbers and Neill Diamond hits. Jessica and Marlene and the other waiters and waitresses would watch the senior citizens and their spouses recreating jitterbugs and sock hops, in somewhat halting steps, from fading memories out on the dance floor. On disco nights, they'd see the parents hustle and gyrate while their kids stared at them from the tables as if they didn't want to be recognized as being their children. Sometimes they couldn't help laughing. Sometimes Jessica would grow somber and thoughtful, especially when she was alone. It seemed to her that she was watching the revelation of her future, and she wondered what she would be like at their age. The thought of ending up stuck here, listening to Barry Manilow after staring at the leaves all day, mortified her. She had seen enough of the leaves too.
What was really forming at the bottom of her mind was trying to figure out a short cut to get out of Tucker Lake, and keep going, for as long and far as possible.
One night, the girl who served as the bartender in the cocktail lounge called in sick, and when they asked her, Jessica jumped at the chance to fill in. She knew how much money you could make in tips up there, and after all, she liked making money and didn't mind shaking up drinks and making small talk to get it. She was an immediate hit, especially with the men. She made them stiff drinks, she looked great in her tight jeans and low cut blouses, and she had the knack to make them feel that she just might have once been interested in them. It wasn't long before she had the regular spot. Jessica would gently push her frail patrons into oblivion, one drink at a time, and pick up the money they lost track of afterwards, while Marlene would work her parties for as much tips as she could. Together they counted it up and folded it away. After the place closed, they would sit at one of the tables, make themselves a couple of scotch and sodas, and give air to their dreams.
Those nights, in the dim quietness of the lounge, when the shapes of the trees outside the big, picture windows seemed more like spirits than anything else, and the empty tables and chairs looked like dancers frozen in an endless waltz, were some of the happiest moments in Jessica's life. She and Marlene would talk about singing together, and travelling the country playing in all kinds of bars and resorts and casinos; maybe they could make it to Vail or Lake Tahoe or someplace exotic like that. They would catch the roving eyes of some rich playboys, maybe pro football players or actors, and they would drive off in their convertibles to LA or Palm Springs. They would shop the fashion stores along Sunset Boulevard. They might get into a rock video. Maybe someone from Tucker Lake would see them on TV someday. That would be something.
"Do you think some of the people who come up here have real money?" Jessica asked Marlene one night, while they were sipping their drinks in the darkened lounge.
"What do you mean by 'real money'?" Marlene asked.
"You know, like they're a millionaire, or something."
"I don't know," Marlene shrugged, "maybe. Some of them look like they have real money. They act like it, sometimes."
"Wouldn't it be something, to find a millionaire's credit card, or a bank roll, under one of the tables?"
Marlene laughed. "You don't just find millionaire's credit cards under tables. You've got to come up with something better than that."
Jessica was looking at the shapes in the night on the other side of the window. She thought she could see a woman in a toga with a bow and arrow, carefully stepping between the trees, stalking something. "It would be great though," she demurred, "It would be our ticket out of here. We could go wherever we wanted. We could go to California."
"And then what?" Marlene said, looking at her friend.
"Then we could change our names. We could hire a talent agent. We could do an act."
"What name would you pick?" Marlene asked her, curious.'
"I'd be Windy. Like the girl in the song. Windy Day. Who would you be?"
Marlene shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe I'd be Brenda Starr, I guess."
She didn't tell Marlene, but Jessica was beginning to keep an eye out. As the nights wore on and the crowds of tourists changed from evening to evening, she began to think of the men who crept up to her bar in much the same way as a panther thinks of a deer creeping up to a pond for a drink. Some of them seemed to know, to sense that there was something crouched under the shrubbery nearby, ready to pounce on them. They definitely had their ears pricked up and their eyes peeled. The slightest snap of a twig or a crunch of a leaf, would set them bounding off, drinks in hand, for their wives sitting at the tables around the dance floor. But she was just as sure that the law of nature would work out for her, that her patience would be rewarded, that one of them would not be so careful, would let their guard down for just that one instance she needed. Her chance.
One night in the fall she was working the bar in her little black dress, shaking up drinks for a bus load of middle aged leaf peepers when a man with short, grey hair, in a snappy, sports jacket, sat at the end of the bar and smiled at her. He was alone. She smiled back. She asked him what he wanted and he ordered a scotch and soda. Unlike the others, who took their drinks back over to their wives and girlfriends waiting at the tables, he stayed on his stool, lingering, carefully sipping his drink and stealing glances at her while her back was turned. He didn't know it, but she could see him in the mirror behind the bar. She had lots of practice. She moved over next to him and asked him whether he liked the music.
"It's a little slow for me," he said, "What do you think?"
"Oh, I'll listen to anything," she said, "We don't get many big acts up here."
The man leaned forward. "Do you like it up here?"
"It's alright," she said, "if you like the peace and quiet. Sometimes I get tired of it. Where are you from?"
"California," he said, with a smile, "From LA."
"I've always wanted to go to LA," she said, sighing.
"So what's keeping you?"
She shrugged. "No time, no money."
The man gave her a long, wistful look and took out a bill and laid on the bar. He ordered another drink. "Well, it's like anyplace really," he mused, "Anyplace can get boring, depending on whether you have someone to share it with."
"Do you have someone to share it with?" she asked him, as she poured his drink.
He shook his head. "Haven't been that lucky." He looked at her rather intently, studying her face, looking into her eyes. "What I wouldn't give to have someone like you out there."
She laughed, watching him take his drink with a flourish of his hand. "And why is that?" she asked him.
"Because you're beautiful. You'd make a good model."
She stuck a hand on her hip and ran her fingers through her hair. "Do you think so?" she asked, with a smile.
He finished his drink and smiled at her. "Oh I know. I'm a photographer. That's what brings me up here."
She took his glass and casually poured him another one. "You came to take pictures of me?" she asked coily.
He laughed. "I do fall foliage. The leaves and the little white churches, the covered bridges. Things like that."
"We have plenty of that up here," she said, sounding bored. She watched him open his wallet again for some more bills.
She listened to him as he described the pictures he had taken of Yosemite Falls and the Mission San Luis Rey. As he told her about catching the right light, and how he hiked off the beaten track to get the perfect perspectives, drinking up the glasses she pushed under him one after the other, he seemed to fancy himself a prospect for her. He told her about his apartment in Hollywood, his sports car, and his trips to Canada and Hawaii, how much more fun it would have been if she had been with him. He told about the beaches, the palm trees, the pools and the shopping malls, as if he could lay them all at her feet, if only she would come back to LA with him. Out beyond them, the show was over, the band was packing up, and the elderly dancers were gathering their things and heading back up to their rooms.
"I'd love to come out to LA someday," she told him, as he staggered to his feet and slipped his arms, awkwardly, into his rumpled jacket.
"I'll give you my number," he said, and he wrote it down, in a shaky hand, on a scrap of paper she gave him. "Call me."
"Sounds good," Jessica said, smiling at him. She watched him, with a pounding heart, as he ambled off out of the lounge and down the corridor. There, on the bar where it had fallen out of his wallet as he shuffled around his bills, was his debit card. It was laying right in front of her. She picked it up quickly and put it in her pocket. Then, she turned out the lights and turned her back on the lounge. She felt the weight about her feet, her rusty ties to Tucker Lake, breaking and falling away. The darkness seemed to lift into the stars over her head as she left the resort and started her car.
The first thing she did was call Marlene. She told her to meet her over at her place, and bring some clothes.
"What's going on?" Marlene mumbled into the phone.
"We're hitting the road, babe," Jessica told her. "I've got our ticket out of here. Just get your things, and I'll pick you up at your place in five minutes. We don't have much time. We've got to make tracks and get out of here."
"Where are we going?" Marlene asked.
"West," Jessica said, "We're going west. Vegas, Vail, LA. All the places we've been dreaming about."
Even though the headlights were on, Jessica couldn't really see where she was going, or how she was going to get there.
| Author Notes | This is a story of lost souls, of people living without connections and foundations and purpose, latching onto some pipe dream and finding a way to achieve it. It's a story of people coming from the middle of nowhere and going nowhere, looking out for themselves, following their instincts as they go along. It's really the story of many young people, nowadays. I was influenced much by Carver, Cheever and Joyce in some of the construction of this, as well as elements of the style. The idea came from a trip I once took to the White Mountains, and a night I once spent in a resort there. I found myself wondering what kind of lives the staff lived, what kind of places did they come from, and what kind of dreams did they have. I wanted it to come across as a conversation of someone we all may have once knew. estory |
By estory
The Joneses, Mickey and Sue, lived like most of the people in the suburbs of New York, devoting much of their time and energy into making a better life for their son, Paul. Sue went to PTA meetings at Purcell Elementary to advocate for his inclusion into science fair contests and spelling bees, spent most of her spare money on designer jackets and shoes for him, and bought him the latest computer games and laptops to make sure he was not falling behind the others in his class. Mickey got him onto one of the local little league teams, and pushed and prodded the coaches into playing him in dramatic situations that would get him noticed by the high school scouts. You could never underestimate the value of a scholarship to a major university, even if it was early in the boy's career. And then there was the possibility, remote as it was, that he might make it to the big leagues and become a star. One of those stars that sell soft drinks or sneakers on TV, or get their picture taken with the mayor of the city when they bring home the championship.
Mickey was descended from a line that had long claimed fame from association with major league baseball stars in New York; his father, Lou, had been named after the great Lou Gehrig, and he in turn had named Mickey after the incomparable Mantle. The old man did not speak of it anymore, but he had once harbored a dream that his son would follow his namesake out onto the sacred ground of Yankee Stadium. He had often sat up there in the upper deck with Mickey, munching on hot dogs and French fries, contemplating the day when he would be there alone as his son walked out onto that field and he could point him out to the fans around him. It hadn't quite worked out that way and for a time, the old man could hardly conceal his disappointment, but in the end, he had gotten over it. He attended Mickey's graduation, his wedding, and his grandson's christening. Still, whenever there was a ball game on, if you watched carefully, you'd see him pour himself a drink and walk out onto the patio.
Mickey had been a star on his little league team, a star right fielder who hit a game winning home run and threw someone out at home once in a Pee Wee championship game. The team did not even make it to Williamsport for the World Series, but their picture was in the local newspaper, on the back page, and Mickey had it cut out, framed, and put under glass. It still hung in the Joneses living room wall, above the TV set, where everyone who came over could see it. Family who were long familiar with it would duck into the den or out onto the deck to avoid it, but Mickey saw to it to invite enough of the neighbors or friends from work over to have a chance to explain to them his moment in the sun when they asked about it. It was an important part of how he saw himself in the world, in some ways, and when his son came into the room, he began to see it as an idea, an inspiration for Paul, who had been named, incidentally, after the great Yankee star of the late nineties, Paul O'Neill.
Over time, as he got older, the sport had been less kind to Mickey. In high school, even though he made the team, he often found himself relegated to the bench, watching his team mates hit game winning home runs and throw people out at the plate. It was hard for him, and both he and his father blamed the coach at the time, although it must be said in the coach's defense that he had to have the team's best interests at heart. Mickey was distracted by girls, hot rods, beer and marijuana cigarettes by this time and he committed too many errors on the field, he fouled out too many times, and he had a bit of a tempter that he could not control. Once, during a game in which he had been thrown out trying to steal second base, he punched the kid who tagged him out in the nose and was ejected from the game.
After that, Mickey had to settle for the relatively unglamorous position of plumber, specializing in the installation of natural gas boilers. He had met Sue, one of the high school cheerleaders, at a game and one thing led to another and they ended up getting married and having Paul. After Paul was born, they bought a house in Levittown, where, oddly enough, there were five little league teams. Was Mickey thinking of Paul's impending stardom already? Did he have an eye on one of the coaching spots? He never admitted it in an interview. Or at one of the birthday parties they threw for their son. But there could be no denying the mit and the cap and the bat Paul received as gifts, from his grandfather and his dad. The neighbors began to see them together playing pepper games out by the garage, or tossing the ball back and forth in the backyard.
"I think Paul's got talent," Mickey told his wife one day, leaning up against the refrigerator with his arms folded, like one of the managers from the old days. "I think he could go places, with that arm. And he sure can run. If I work on his hitting, his swing, he'll be the whole package. I bet if I went down there, one of those little league teams would love to have him."
"Mickey," Sue replied while picking the glasses up off of the table, "You sound like a talent scout. Be realistic. It's only little league."
"Yeah, but you got to start somewhere. If someone on a high school team notices him in little league, that could get him a spot where a college scout could see him. And once you're in the NCAA, then the pro scouts see you."
Sue rolled her eyes at him. "Mickey. The pros? Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?"
"Well, what about a scholarship? He might get a scholarship at least."
She couldn't argue with that. She sighed. "As long as he's having fun, I don't care. I just want him to enjoy himself. But a scholarship would be something." She looked at her son, sitting on the sofa, watching the ballgame in his Yankee cap. "As long as he's happy."
"Sure, sure," Mickey said, straightening up and unfolding his arms. He leaned into the living room. "What do you say, Paul? You ready to be a star in Little League?"
"Sure dad," Paul replied, looking up at his father.
It was hard to say what Paul really thought about all of this. He seemed to follow his father around enthusiastically enough, but if you watched him closely, from the bleachers, you would see that the boy was distracted by planes flying overhead, cars driving by fast, or girls climbing on the monkey bars in the playground behind the field. At such times Mickey would yell at him to pay attention to the ball. With his bat slung over one shoulder, one couldn't help thinking that Mickey was striking the pose of one of those old managers, the ones that used to be players, and not very good players at that, reliving their careers through their proteges.
That summer, Mickey enrolled Paul in little league, and he had to give up the innocence of the playground and his bicycle for the boot camp of baseball practice and the pressure of the big games. All this pressure was compounded by the fact that Mickey did indeed join the coaching staff of the team. Most of the other little league fathers and neighbors shook their heads at his antics. He would make suggestions on where to play Paul to the manager, he would complain when Paul did not play. At games, you would see Mickey standing in the dug out with his arms folded, scowling at the action on the field, barking out orders to the confused kids on the field. Or if Paul did play, he would clap and whistle so enthusiastically every time Paul came to bat that the spectators couldn't hear the announcer calling the plays. There were plenty of times when the umpire had to turn around and tell him to cool it, or the manger asked him to sit at the end of the bench and take a breather.
Sue attended the games as well, of course, and when she did, it was hard to see her cringe when Mickey carried on like that. She shook her head at him as he argued calls with umpires, or shouted beratements at the opposing players. Once, she climbed down from the bleachers, went into the dugout and asked him frankly if he could take it easy.
"People are staring at you," she hissed at him, "They're talking about you."
Mickey shrugged. "I just want them to win the game," he said.
"But Mickey, it's just a kids game. It's only little league. Look at the kids sitting there. They look miserable. You're putting too much pressure on them."
"Well, if you don't win games, you don't go to tournaments. And if you don't go to tournaments, the scouts don't see you."
"I think half the time he would rather be out riding his bike."
"If he gets a big hit in one of those big games, if he throws someone out at home, someone might notice him."
"You should listen to yourself. What is this, a tryout for the Yankees?"
Mickey turned back to the action on the field. At that moment, there was a flurry of activity. One of Paul's teammates was sliding into second base and the ball came flying over the pitcher's head at the same time, and both were lost in a cloud of dust.
"Out!" yelled the ump.
All of the kids on the field seemed to look around in bewilderment, along with the kids in the dugout. Only Mickey's excited voice rose above the hum of the traffic.
"He was safe! He was safe by a mile! You need to get your eyes checked, ump!"
Sue heard the man sitting to her say to his wife, "Who the hell is that guy?"
The ride back home in the car that day was a little tense. Paul climbed into the back seat, fiddled with his glove, and looked out of the window at the passing traffic. Mickey, still wearing his baseball cap, gripped the wheel and frowned as he stared ahead at the road and the traffic in front of him. It did not seem to be moving fast enough for him. Sue fidgeted with her purse and looked like she couldn't wait to get out of the car. Finally, Mickey looked over at his wife and said: "What's eating you? What I said at the game?"
"Why do you have to carry on like that?" Sue blurted out. "Why do you have to make such an embarrassing scene at a little league game?"
"Oh come on now." Mickey said.
"You were ranting and raving like a lunatic about some kid getting thrown out at second."
"It cost us the game."
"It's a kid's game, Mickey. The kids are supposed to be having fun."
"They are having fun. Aren't you having fun?" Mickey looked back in the rear view mirror at his son in the back seat.
"Baloney," Sue said. She also turned around and looked at Paul. Her son shrugged and looked like he did not know what he was supposed to say.
"This is really about you, isn't it?" she asked him.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Mickey said.
"Mickey, I think you should cool it with this coaching stuff and just let the kid play ball with his friends. I think you should quit the team."
"What?" Mickey said. "I love coaching those kids."
Sue shook her head. "Do whatever you want," she said, "But in my opinion, you're taking this way too seriously."
When they got home, Sue got out, slammed the door of the car and trudged into the house. Paul jumped out, went to the garage, got his bike and pedaled out of the driveway. Mickey watched him go. Then he got out, walked into the backyard, and slumped into a chaise lounge chair. He folded his arms behind his head and looked out over the uncut grass and the garden that needed weeding, the deck he had promised to stain. It made him wince. He closed his eyes and imagined the lawn a baseball diamond, the deck a stadium grandstand, the picket fence in the back, the edge of the outfield. If only the neighbors could hear the crack of his bat, or Paul's, they would leap to the picket fence and cheer. If only he could turn on the TV and see his son with that reporter in that interview...
Of course, he could not really give up that coaching job. And he could not give up pushing Paul. He continued to drag Paul off to the diamond to work on his swing, to follow through, to slide into home. Over time, through sheer perseverance, Paul made progress. He had his first base hits. He scored some runs. He even threw someone out at second.
The team started winning games and rose in the standings, as the season drew to a close. Mickey was ecstatic. He talked so much about baseball around the kitchen table with his son that Sue would take her dinner into the living room to watch Jeapardy and Last Man Standing. Then she would go out and work in the garden, until they came out to play catch. Mickey tacked up a copy of the team's schedule and the standings and circled the team with red ink on it. They were going to make the playoffs. Paul had a chance to be a hero, after all. Mickey was already talking to the neighbors about a scholarship, playing in the NCAA. Maybe a pro tryout.
But there was one muddy patch on this field of dreams. The first place team, the team Paul's team had to play, had this pitcher, Kevin King, who struck Paul out every time he faced him. Mickey had tried everything. He had coached Paul to take pitches, make the kid throw strikes. He had yelled distractions from the sidelines. He gave Paul batting practice till it got too dark to see. Sitting in the yard one afternoon, with the big game coming up, Mickey sipped a beer and began to think that he had to take drastic action. All he really wanted was for his son to succeed where he hadn't, to be in that picture on the back page of the newspaper, and then to get that scholarship, that major league tryout. It was true that it was only a little league game. But there was more to it than that.
The night before the big game, Mickey was pacing back and forth in the kitchen. "I wish you would stop doing that," Sue told him, "You're making everyone nervous. You're making Paul nervous. Do you want him to be nervous tomorrow?"
Mickey looked up at her. "Maybe you're right," he said. "Maybe I'll go watch the Yankee game down at the bar." He put on his jacket and went out.
When he came back later, he seemed in a hurry to get his clothes off and jump into bed. "Where have you been?" Sue mumbled from the bed.
"Nowhere," Mickey said quickly, "Watching the game."
"Did the Yankees win?"
"Yeah, yeah, they won," he said offhandedly. "I just want to get some sleep now. It's a big day tomorrow."
The next day was a bright, sunny, late summer's day, the perfect day for a championship ballgame. Sue had washed Paul's uniform, and she took a picture of him in it before they headed for the park. At the field, the other kids were gathering to get in a little extra batting practice, and Mickey sent Paul over to them. Instead of keeping an eye on Paul, as he usually did, Mickey kept glancing over at the parking lot, where the other team was arriving in their van. When the manager got out, with a scowl, and strode over to the umpire with a piece of paper, looking very upset, Mickey breathed a sigh of relief.
"What's that all about?" Sue asked him, looking at him suspiciously.
"Nothing," Mickey said, heading for his dug out.
When the umpire announced the starting lineups, there was a surprise that drew a moan from the other team's fans. King would not be pitching. He had not made the game. Suttcliffe would substitute. That was great news for Paul's team.
For Mickey, the game was a dream come true. Suttcliffe had problems with his control, as he sometimes did, and Paul walked once and had a base hit that drove in two runs. They were winning. Mickey saw the reporter from the newspaper get his camera ready, and take out his notepad and pen for the interview of the big star. Mickey sat next to his son and dusted off his uniform. This was going to be his moment in the sun.
Until the cops came. They went into the dug out and asked for Mickey Jones, and slapped their handcuffs on him, right in front of his wide eyed kid. Seems a neighbor of the King's had seen Mickey in their driveway the night before, slashing their car's tires and doing up the brakes. They had a picture of Mickey's car with the license plate and everything, across the street, and a picture of Mickey getting into it.
Later, when she was arranging his bail, Sue asked him, "What the hell did you have to go and do something like that for? What's wrong with you Mickey?"
"I don't know," he said.
| Author Notes | I thought this might be a good moment for this story, at a time of much controversy over scholastic sports, and the corruption and intrigue surrounding it due to the outsized reverence so many people have for the fame and money associated with it. I've read a good many stories in the news about events similar to this, and some that actually involved brawls between parents at kid's games. I think it's important to have things in perspective, and not get sidetracked by the 'win at all cost' 'hurray for me screw you' attitude. estory |
By estory
This is a story about four kids who started a rock band. They were just your average, run of the mill kids, with average, run of the mill parents. Their names were Eddy Beckenbried, lead singer; Pete Langella, drums; Dave Tucker, lead guitar; and Tom McDermond, bass. Eddy's father was the pastor of the local Presbyterian church, St. Luke's. Pete's dad was a plumber, Dave's worked as a certified public accountant, and Tom's owned a gas station. So in many ways, you could say they came from all walks of life. If you walked passed one of their houses, they would seem like any of the other capes or colonials in town, with a boxwood hedge and a two car garage.
Basically, these parents were saving their hard earned money all their lives to send their prodigals to college, dreaming that they would become lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers or engineers. Rock music was something that they heard over the airwaves, with some trepidation. It seemed like a phenomenon that would come and go like long hair or miniskirts. It did not seem like a viable career choice, despite the fame of the Beatles at that time.
The rock band was Eddy's idea. In many ways, it was his dream; maybe of escape, maybe of a cry for attention. When he was a boy, he sat in the first pew of his father's church, with the rest of his family, and watched his father preach. Maybe he didn't listen to the sermon as much as he observed the waving of his arms in that eye catching robe, his voice rising and riveting the attention of everyone else gathered there. Much to his father's chagrin, Eddy didn't think of himself as a Luther or a Wesley as much as a Mick Jagger or a Robert Plant. After all, not too many of the girls at school, particularly the cool ones, seemed as interested in the philosophies of Protestantism as they were in The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. But when Eddy became a teenager, he would lock himself in his room, stand in front of the mirror, and wave his arms and preach to himself. Sometimes he would sing, looking strangely and eerily like his dad, even if he didn't think of himself in that vein.
The other guys were schoolyard chums, guys Eddy read comic books with, or played handball with, during recess. Their neighbors might have remembered them for playing kick he can so loudly on all those summer nights. They all wore the same tie dyed t- shirts and listened to the same records. They always seemed to be the ones watching girls from a distance, as they flirted with the members of the football team and the marching band. Perhaps, when Eddy broached the idea to them, the rock band sounded like something that might break the ice at parties or in the lunch room.
Dave was the only one who had any real formal education in music. Dave's father had once paid for piano lessons, so he knew how to read music, at least. The tutor who gave him the lessons was a rather condescending, stiff gentleman who for some reason always wore a jacket when he went to the homes of his students. He was constantly having to call Dave's attention away from what was going on outside the window or on the television set his sister was watching. Dave's father, when he was around, used to sit on the living room couch and listen to the lessons with his arms folded. The piano lessons that he himself had been forced to take as a boy galvanized the sense of discipline in him that led to the accounting career, so he felt it was a duty that he needed to perform for his child. In the end, after a six week trial, he must have seen how hopeless it was and gave Dave his release. So you can imagine his father's surprise when five years later Dave informed him that he was becoming a musician and joining a rock band.
"What are you going to play? The piano?" he asked his son.
"This isn't Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, dad," Dave said, as if those unfortunates had been dead and buried for long enough.
"So what are you going to play, then?"
"The guitar. The electric guitar."
"What do you know about playing the electric guitar?"
Dave shrugged. "It's really not much different than the piano."
"Well, don't you guys electrocute yourselves. So Eddy's in the band too? What's he playing?"
"He's not playing. He's singing."
Dave's father had to laugh at this one, but Dave was not amused.
"Why does everything we do seem like a joke, dad? Don't you think we're capable of doing anything on our own?"
"It's just that I've never heard Eddy sing. But I guess if it doesn't interfere with your college entrance exams, it's alright. You might learn something."
Pete's father was watching a ball game when his son told him about the band, and he seemed more interested in the balls and strikes than his kid telling him something about buying a drum set.
"Just don't play it in the house," he said, cracking open another beer. "I want to hear the play by play of the game."
Tom's dad, Mr. McDermond, spent so little time at home and so much time at the garage, and missed so many little league games and Christmas Eves that he was always enthusiastic and supportive of his children's endeavors. When Tom asked him if they could use part of the garage to practice in, he backed the car out himself.
"Sure you guys can use the garage," he told Tom, "are you sure it's big enough for a band?"
"It'll be fine, dad," Tom told him. They both stood together for a moment, looking around the place, Tom's father's hands fiddling with loose change in his pockets.
"So what's the name of the band?" he asked Tom.
"The Spotlights."
"The Spotlights, clever," Mr. McDermond repeated. "You think of that?"
"No, dad; it was Eddy's idea."
"Eddy. So what's Eddy doing in the band?"
"He's the lead singer."
"Why does he have to be the lead? What are you doing?"
"I'm playing bass."
"Well, I guess you have to start someplace. You can start with the bass, and work your way up, I guess."
"You don't work your way up in a band, dad," Tom told him, somewhat incredulously.
Tom's father shrugged, and began to walk away. "Well, good luck. If you need anything else, let me know," he said, over his shoulder.
Eddy's father, the pastor, was not at all thrilled when his son informed him that he was starting a rock band, and was, in fact, going to be the lead singer.
"Those people are a bunch of pot smoking, pill popping drug addicts," he lectured Eddy. "They live a loose life style. They sleep around, they burn American flags. I won't have any of that in my house. I'm a pastor of a church, for crying out loud."
"We're not going to practice here," Eddy told him. "Tom's dad said we could use his garage."
"I don't care where you practice," the father retorted, raising his voice and waving his arms, "It's not about where you practice. It's about what you're doing with your life."
"That's what I'm doing, dad, I'm living my life, not yours," Eddy was raising his voice and waving his arms now.
"I've been saving all my life to send you to college, and that's where you're going. Understood? This rock band stuff isn't going to interfere with that. I don't care if you don't go up to the seminary like I did. But you can be a teacher or a counselor, at least."
"I don't want to be a teacher," Eddy insisted, storming off down the hall for the front door.
"And get a hair cut!" his father yelled after him. "Mrs. Clarkson asked your mother if you were a hippie, the other day."
"Then I'll stay out of church!" Eddy yelled defiantly back. He slammed the door behind him, for effect.
Over the course of the next few weeks, the band began gathering in Tom's garage, pinning up Pink Floyd and Who posters, gradually assembling their amps and microphones and coaxial cables, and their rented instruments. Dave's father bought him a guitar for his birthday, but Pete and Tom had to take jobs stocking shelves for Save Mart at night to save up for the payments on their base and drum sets. Eddy was impatient with the progress. In the meanwhile, he began to show up in the clothes he referred to as his 'costume.' This included a pair of leather breeches, a pair of suede cowboy boots, complete with spurs, a black waistcoat with tails, a frocked shirt, a bow tie and a top hat. He put up a full length mirror that he borrowed from his sister in one corner of the garage, and practiced a repertoire of karate kicks, ballet spins, leaps and microphone swings in it. He scowled and grimaced and growled to himself, he combed and teased his hair. He may not have sounded the part, but at least he looked it.
The guys sat around in the garage, smoking joints, and talking about music and girls. They had moved an old sofa, a coffee table and a couple of folding chairs into the place, stuff they found out at the curb next to their neighbor's houses. They did make some progress on their logo. Every band had to have a logo, Eddy told them. The Spotlights would have a silhouette of a man with long hair playing a guitar in the cone of a spotlight shining down from above his head. It was something Dave had designed with a black magic marker on a sketch pad in art class. They traced it out on white t-shirts they bought for themselves, and wore them to school.
"Who are the Spotlights?" kids asked them in the halls.
"We're The Spotlights," Eddy would answer, pointing to the logo with his thumb.
There were a couple of girls who began to hang around with them at lunch and after school, so that was a step in the right direction. Their names were Evelyn and Christine, and they had been known to quaff a few brews at parties, and smoke cigarettes at recess, little things that were just enough to keep you guessing about their character. Eddy invited them to the garage to watch them practice, and the boys were more than happy to accommodate them. They bought a lava lamp from a home décor store and put it on the coffee table. By now, they had begun to figure out how to hook up the equipment and play the instruments. The girls came over, one rainy Sunday afternoon, and sat on the couch watching the boys plug in the microphones and tune up their guitar and bass.
"How long does it take for you to set up?" the girl named Christine asked Eddy after a half hour or so, running her fingers through her long, blond hair.
"We want to get the sound right," Eddy said confidently, "For you."
The girl named Evelyn, who was wearing a blouse without a bra underneath, leaned forward impatiently. "Are you going to play us a song?" she asked. She looked sideways at Dave, who smiled back sheepishly, as he plucked a few strings and worked his pedals.
"Sure we can play you a song, right guys?" Eddy turned to his bandmates, who straightened up into their poses.
The girls listened as they bashed out a number that Eddy called "Going For Broke." It was a loud, cacophonous affair, and near the end, Eddy tried swinging the microphone out in the space over the girls' heads and almost whacked Evelyn in the head with it. He waved his arms and stomped around, and they watched him do that. Pete ended it with a long drum roll and a crash of symbols that made them jump.
"So what did you think?" Eddy asked the girls, sitting there staring at them.
"It sounded like Stairway To Heaven," Christine told him, "Kind of."
The girls may have been too kind, but Eddy was encouraged. After all, the band had a couple of groupies and everything. They might be going places. It was something he could tell his father about.
"So, have you thought about what schools you're going to apply to?" he asked Eddy at dinner, one day.
"I'm putting a couple of shows together," he answered his dad, looking up quickly from his plate. "I'm taking the band on the road."
"Out on the road?" The old man leaned over when he said this. Eddy's mother sighed. His sister looked as if she wished she were somewhere else. "Are you nuts? You're sitting around in a garage, Eddy. Playing for a couple of hippies. What the heck do they know about music?"
"It's our music," Eddy proclaimed. "They know about our music. Rock and Roll. It's here to stay. And we're not nuts either." He got up without finishing his plate and stormed out the front door.
"You come back and finish the dinner your mother made for you!" Eddy's father yelled after him.
His mother got up and scraped his plate off into the garbage.
"Where did I go wrong?" the old man asked his wife.
"You yell at him too much, George," she told him.
Eddy told the guys he had taken a demo tape over to Friars, a bar that staged open mike nights on weekends in town. They were excited. Of course, they told the girls, and Christine and Evelyn were excited too. All kinds of people hung out at that bar, they told themselves. Sometimes people from the radio station, WLOR, were there. The girls would be seen with them. They talked about what they would wear.
"Let your friends know," Eddy told them. "This is going to be cool."
"OK," said Christine. "We can make some posters."
"We'll hang them around school," Dave said. Maybe we can even hang them up on the telephone poles around town."
"Sure," Eddy said.
He insisted that they practice every night after school. Tom's father even watched them play one night. He stood there for a couple of songs with his hands in his pockets, fiddling with loose change. "Keep up the good work," he told them. "If you need anything, let me know."
The night of the big show came before they knew it. The problems started almost right away. Pete's father let them use his van to drive their equipment over to the bar, but he was late showing up at the garage with it because of a stopped drain across town, and the loading of the stuff got rushed and confused. In all the running around, no-one kept track of whether they had all their microphones and cables, their guitar pedals and their high hat stands. Then Christine called and said her friends weren't coming. Some of them said they were sick, and some of them said they were going to the mall.
"Who would go to a mall when you have a chance to see the start of something big?" Eddy said incredulously.
Pete and Tom were getting nervous. You could tell by the way they kept asking Eddy how crowded he thought the bar would be, and if the show would be broadcast over the radio.
"What, are you guys chickening out on me?" Eddy asked them. "Come on. Pull yourselves together."
When they got to the bar, they found out they were the second of five bands that would be playing that night, and their set would be only two songs long. The stage was the size of a cafeteria table. The dressing room was in the Men's room.
"This sucks," Pete said, "There's no room. Somebody's going to fall off the stage."
"This is the way everyone gets started," Eddy said firmly. "Quit whining. We don't have time to argue about this. Anybody see the girls?"
"There they are," Tom said. And sure enough, there they were, talking to some metal heads that were with another band, on the other side of the bar. The metal heads had bought them each a beer.
Eddy grimaced. "To hell with them."
The manager of the bar came up to them and told them that they would be up next. He told them to get their equipment ready. That's when they discovered that they had forgotten the coaxial cables for the amps, and that they were missing the high hat stands.
"I can't believe this," Eddy fumed. "Didn't you guys check the list of stuff before we left?"
"That was supposed to be your job."
"Bullshit. Now we're going to have to borrow some stuff from someone else."
Eddy went up to the metal heads, who were making Christine and Evelyn laugh at the bar.
"Forgot your stuff, huh?" The tall guy with the tattoos said. His friend with the beard laughed. The girls giggled.
"Sure. We'll let you use ours. We always help out the newbies. We'll keep an eye on you from the front row. Don't break anything. Is this your first time on stage?"
Eddy nodded. "Kind of."
The guy with the beard laughed again. "Don't crap your pants now," he said, slipping an arm around Evelyn's waist. "There's someone here from WLOR."
"So what are you guys going to play?" Christine asked, blowing out the smoke from her cigarette.
"Going For Broke and Paths Of Glory," Eddy said.
The girls giggled again. The metal heads shook their heads. "Sounds real catchy," the guy with the tattoos said. "Good luck."
Then the manager of the bar came over again and told them to hurry up. If they couldn't get it together, he would put the next band on stage. They fiddled with their instruments while the crowd began to snicker and sneer. They straightened up on the darkened stage.
"Geez," Pete said, "Everybody's watching us."
"What did you think they were going to do?" Eddy snapped at them.
"Lighten up," Tom replied.
The manager announced them, and the spotlight went on, illuminating the band on stage. And there was no sound.
"What did you guys do?" Eddy yelled, as the crowd began to boo and laugh.
"I don't know," Dave said. "There's something wrong with the sound."
The manger came over again. "Guys, we have to get going here. We have three other bands on the lineup. If you can't get it together, get off the stage."
"Hey," the tattoed guy yelled from the crowd, "Give us our cables back."
The Spotlights left, Eddy yelling at Tom and Dave and Pete, Tom and Dave yelling back, and Pete looking over his shoulder at the girls. They broke up not long after that.
Tom ended up working at his father's garage, learning how to fix cars and grass cutters. Years later, after his parents retired and moved to Florida, he took over the business and you can still see him there sometimes, late at night, fiddling under the hood of someone's skylark, in the lights. Pete stayed on at the Save Mart, where he eventually became the night manager. Dave enrolled in his father's alma mater, and got a job in his father's firm. Eventually, he went out on his own, moved to California, and married a secretary.
Eddy couldn't accept the demise of his dream and the failure his father predicted. He began to drink, and smoke pot. He was arrested for possession of a controlled substance, and got out of most of his sentence when the judge remanded him to a recovery program. While in the program, he met a girl named Jennifer who was a born again Christian. She talked him into going to the seminary after all, and he became a pastor with a ministry to drug addicted kids. So his father forgave him, of course.
And in the end, the apple doesn't fall that far from the tree, after all.
| Author Notes | This is a coming of age kind of story, told in a lighthearted tone, sort of in the style of John Cheever, one of my many idols. It's another one of these suburban parables gathered from experiences growing up in New York, but it probably could happen just about anywhere in the late sixties and seventies, in that unsettled time that shaped us. All sorts of winds blow you in all sorts of directions, confusing your parents, but somehow, in the end, you never seem to end up that far from the tree that bore you. estory |
By estory
I am sitting in a chair on my porch looking over my pumpkin patch. How, do you ask, did I get here? Where are the wife and kids? What about your job? As I look back on it now, from this perch, the life I lived before growing great pumpkins seems like it took place on another world. I think about the people I once knew, sure. But not very often anymore.
I think it all started the year my mother died. She had dementia, and one of the last things that I could connect with her in was gardening. She always had a beautiful garden, out back behind the house. Petunias, black eyed Susans, tiger lilies, Iris, daffodils; all kinds of flowers, blooming from spring to fall. I loved the colors when I was a kid. I used to help her put down the bone meal, spread the mulch, pruning the roses. Then we would sit together sipping iced tea and enjoying our handywork. Watching the butterflies and the hummingbirds. It was always so peaceful, like a little bit of the garden of Eden, or something. She also grew some vegetables; peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, squash and cucumbers. I used to love picking all those things and bringing them into the kitchen and washing them and cutting them up with her. It always tasted more delicious, I thought, than the store bought stuff. After she got sick, she couldn't even remember my name, but I could still sit out there with her, pointing out the sunflowers and the morning glories, and she would nod and smile. I'll never forget that.
After my mother died, I started a garden in my backyard. When I married Catherine, we moved about fifty miles away, so I didn't get to see as much of my parents after that. There were times when I would be sitting out there in my garden, among all my green and growing things, and feel that my mother was sitting out there with me. I think maybe it felt like she was trying to tell me something, or that there was something I wanted to tell her.
My father had a stroke about two years after my mother died, and we had to put him in a nursing home. I drove up maybe about once a month to sit with him, read him the newspaper, play him a game of chess. Things like that. He couldn't talk much. When I was a kid, I remember him vaguely lecturing me about what courses to take in college, what kind of woman to marry. Maybe I should have listened to him. I think he had some kind of dream that I was going to discover I had some skill, and open a business and become amazingly successful at it. My wife did not get along with my parents and she never came with me when I drove up there. And then, about two years after we put him in the home, seven years ago now, I guess, I got a call from a nurse's aid telling me that he had passed away.
At the funeral, I remember my brother Lenny asking me about the will. Lenny was always interested in money. I remember my wife whispering in my other ear, imploring me to make sure I didn't come up with the short end of the stick. When I ended up with the short end of the stick, in her eyes, and she gave me hell over it, I started digging over the rest of the backyard for a pumpkin patch.
I had seen one of those giant pumpkin contests at a county fair once, a contest where people brought their giant pumpkins from all over tarnation and weighed them off against each other to see which was the heaviest. It was something that I found inspiring, somehow; like watching sherpas climbing Mount Everest or surfers edging themselves into the perfect wave pipe. My wife told me I was nuts. I wouldn't say growing giant pumpkins is 'nuts.' It requires research, discipline, determination and yes, even imagination. Sometimes you have to think out of the box. You have to be smart.
As you might imagine, my wife moved out, I guess about six years ago now. She took the kids with her, and I suppose it was mutually beneficial. They needed attention, and there simply was no more room in my life for them anymore. Anyway, the more she demanded that I give up my hobby and remodel her kitchen, or get a second job to put the kids through college, or have
an operation to eliminate my snoring, the more I went down into the basement to prepare nitrate calcium food for my pumpkins. Sometimes I would just sit in the garden next to them, training the vines onto stakes so that they would snake a certain way through the yard, or injecting them with feed solution, or measuring them to see just how much they grew overnight.
Of course I still have the photographs, things like that. Pictures of my wife and kids, friends I used to have; you know, people who used to mean something to me. But I haven't talked to any of them in a long time. I don't know that I really miss them either; what seems to remain, like a kind of aftertaste, are the disappointments, the arguments, the pain. There is a calm sort of evenness to my life now. A predictable order. A certain satisfaction in achieving the simple things I set out to achieve, and a level of control that I have over the process.
You might ask me, in light of what I have told you, what I have actually gained in all of this. It is true that my wife left me, and she took the kids with her. I don't talk to my brother anymore. My friends, who were not interested in growing giant pumpkins, to say the least, stopped asking me if they could come over and watch ballgames or go out for fishing trips. But what I have to say is this: how much did any of these people really care about me? It seems to me now that when I stopped being what they wanted me to be, when I stopped giving them what they wanted, when I lost interest in their scheming and ambition, they lost interest in me. It's like finding out that someone only comes over because your willing to watch something with them on your 42 inch high definition television set, or someone who lives with you only because they need you to give them money to buy groceries or cars or living room furniture.
I don't need those things anymore, and I don't have the desire to go back to people who don't care about me. My parents cared about me, and I cared about them, even though we never really got around to telling each other how much we cared; and now they are gone. In many ways it felt like without them, I was alone in the world. They seemed like the only ones who worried about what I wanted, how I felt.
At first, after Catherine left me, I used to call her and ask about the kids. But then she always ended up asking me if I was still working or if I was maintaining the house. What the hell did she care if I was still working or if the house was falling apart? She didn't live in it anymore. And the kids would end up reciting their Christmas lists, and their birthday present requests, and it just seemed like they only cared about what was in it for them. So I stopped calling. And lo and behold, they stopped calling me too. Little by little, the memories of their faces, their voices, began to fade into the long sequence of sunny days, rainy days, the endless ritual of fertilization, cultivation, weeding and harvest. Sitting out in the garden, alone with my pumpkins, whose lives I can meticulously control, there is a sense of peace, of self determination and accomplishment. I cherish that feeling now.
I think what I really like about growing giant pumpkins is the process, the steps of the procedure, which, if you get carried away by it enough, fill up your life until you don't have to make choices or think about anything else anymore. It's all determined for you, by the results. And that's nice. You just follow the instructions, and let nature take its course. You have something tangible at the end of the day, that no-one can take away from you. A great pumpkin. No abstracts like wondering whether your business partners can be trusted or whether your wife really loves you, or what kinds of people your kids are going to become.
In some ways, amazingly enough, pumpkins are a lot like kids. You nurture them, you feed them, you give them space to grow, and in the end you stand there and look at what they have become. You can be proud of them. But there is a degree of uncertainty in raising kids that you don't have with pumpkins. Kids can do drugs. Kids can elope with garage mechanics. They can discover Buddhism and Communism. And they can become entangled in divorce proceedings. They can become pawns on a battlefield, messengers of pain that your wife sends you just to make you feel more wretched than she does. They can stop loving you. They can be withheld from you. Pumpkins don't metamorphisize into trolls, and they don't betray you or let you down. They just sit there and grow. If you talk to them, they don't talk back.
When I first started, I spent hours, even days, searching for the right seeds. After all, I wanted to do this right. And the seeds are the building blocks, the foundation of everything. I learned early on, after talking to other growers at those first few contests, that the truly gargantuan pumpkins that are everybody's holy grail come from a few hybrid strains of seeds that are hoarded by a few growers and marketed on the internet. Can you believe that? I couldn't come up with $5,000 to take care of my sleep apnia, but I once spent $2,500 on a package of seeds. I bought them from a guy who called himself Linus Van Pelt, of all people; a guy who demanded the money up front, in a certified check, to his address in Missouri. I always thought the Van Pelts were supposed to live in Minnesota, but I didn't dare offend him. Someone in a gardener's chat room told me he had once grown a thousand pound prize winner from one of his seeds.
I sweated it out, sending that check. But eventually, after a couple of weeks, a little box did arrive from him. The package was wrapped in three layers of orange Halloween gift paper, all covered with jack o'lanterns and black cats. Underneath that was a jewelry box covered in tin foil taped shut with masking tape. It took me a half an hour to cut through it all with a pair of scissors and a knife and finally get the damned thing open. Inside, were five, flat, white pumpkin seeds, with fairly sharp, pointy ends. I remember turning them over and over in my hands, running my fingertips over their cool, smooth shells, squeezing my palms around them until the points dug into my hands. The phone was ringing again, but I didn't answer it.
After that, I planted them in a mixture of peat moss, cow manure, compost and top soil picked clean of any debris, and perfectly ph balanced. I let them germinate in the basement, in a planter I made out of one of my wife's old suitcases. I put a heat lamp on them, and watered them morning and evening. After they sprouted, I kept a close eye on them. There is always one seedling that stretches a little more than the others, has a little broader leaves. Gets a little more robust. This one plant, you separate out into a clay pot, filled with the same soil mixture and fertilizer. The others, you can keep as backup. But this plant is the star, the chosen one. You can't do that with kids, but with pumpkins, you can. I named mine, Max.
In the next few weeks, I kept watering Max, fertilizing him, talking to him. I put him in the windowsill, and let him have his first real taste of sunshine. Of course, he never actually said anything, but I knew he loved it. He took off. I let him trail all around the sink, and the drain board. I deleted the phone messages, I let the mail pile up. I called in sick to work. I sat with Max, watching him grow, watching him take over the kitchen, fascinated with his ambitions. After a month, I transplanted him into the yard and let him spread his wings. Pumpkins love to spread their wings. Just like people, they like to take over, I guess. That summer, those months sitting out in the yard with Max were some of the happiest days of my life. All the tension, all the anxiety, all the pressure just disappeared, somehow. I stopped worrying about what my wife was going to demand next, or what my kids were getting themselves into, or what my brother was trying to embezzle from me. I was free, in a way. And I enjoyed it.
I did simple, amusing little things, like counting how many new leaves he sprouted each day, and writing all the numbers down on a calendar that I kept in the shed, comparing the growth rate, and watching the growth rate accelerate. Then, I would count the blossoms, as they started appearing. I kept track of those numbers too. Finally came the magical day when I noticed a little swelling behind one of the faded blossoms. That was the tell tale sign. The flower had been fertilized, the gourd was beginning to grow. In a way, Max was pregnant. I was proud of him, proud of myself. I even bought a six pack of Octoberfest beer in celebration.
Of course it meant that the other blossoms, fertilized or not, would have to go. I had read, during my long hours of research, that pruning would force the plant into putting all its energy into that one, surviving gourd, and would, in fact, double the weight of it on that strategy alone. To top it off, I milk fed him. One of the guys at the county fair had shown me that trick years ago. It involves cutting a slit in the vine just above the stem of the gourd and wrapping it in a towel or rag soaked in milk. The fat from the milk adds biomass, or weight, to the pumpkin. Only I used a special high protein milk solution on a tip from another grower on the internet. And instead of using a towel, I used a modified hyperdermic needle attached to a plastic aquarium filter hose, running out of a five gallon tank of solution mounted on a ladder in order to provide a steady stream of nutrition right to the gourd. It was something I came up with myself, and I was proud of it. It might give me, or Max, really, that edge that would lead to a championship. I even dreamed of how I could tell the other growers about it when they asked me how I had done it.
Day after day, I would sit there next to Max, and watch my creation develop. It was like creating a monster. After it passed the size of a beachball, in early July, and than a metal wash tub, I started measuring its circumference. I would add those numbers down onto my calendar, hanging in the shed. 60 inches. 62 inches. 65 inches. It was amazing that he was actually growing 2 or 3 inches a day. By the end of summer, he had become a yellowish orange, misshapen behemoth that, laying on its side, stood almost as tall as my fence, and covered a good five feet on the ground. One of my neighbors leaned over the fence one day, staring in amazement and horror, and said: "What the hell is that thing?" It was as if he were afraid of how much larger I was going to let it grow and that it was going to affect his property value. But I didn't care. When I asked him whether he would give me a hand getting it up to the fair, he disappeared fast enough.
In the end, when the day finally came, the day of reckoning, when Max's weight and rank in the world of pumpkins would be determined, I had to hire someone from a local construction company with a forklift and a flat bed truck to haul him down to the fair grounds. The guy's mouth fell open when he saw what I was moving, but he agreed to do it when I told him I would pay him what he wanted. It took me a few minutes to saw through the stem and then we had to take down part of my fence so that the forklift, with Max on it, would fit through and out of my backyard. I could see my neighbor watching it all, aghast, from his bedroom window. Then we had to call two more guys from the construction company to roll Max off the forklift blades and onto the flat bed. They were all looking at me as if I was crazy. One of them asked me how much the prize money was. I was honest. I told him it really didn't do much but cover the expenses. They shook their heads.
But we always attract a pretty good crowd, all of us giant pumpkin growers, and as usual they were all staring as I drove passed and parked alongside my fellow mad scientists. They were the only ones with whom I feel any affinity now. They looked over Max, and nodded approvingly, understanding, and I nodded approvingly, understanding, back. Just eye balling things, between the really great pumpkins, of whom there were four or five, I felt things looked pretty even up. But you can never tell with just volume estimates. It's the final weigh off that determines the official results.
Max came in at 832 pounds, good enough for third place. The other growers shook my hand, and I shook theirs. We respectfully congratulated the winner; a gargantuan 1,237 pound state record breaker. The other guys told me I had done pretty well, it was my best effort yet; but there was still something to hope for, to shoot for. More to achieve.
And that's the way I think I wanted it.
Afterwards, I chopped up Max with a chainsaw, and buried him in the compost heap. I hung my head, and closed my eyes, and crossed myself. But I saved a handful of his ivory, sharp seeds, and put them in a jar, to save for next year. Max would live on, would give his genes, his traits, to the next generation. And the whole process would start over next spring. There would be no time for family or friends, no time for my job, for worrying about what people thought of me. If there were any inquiries into my state of being, my welfare, I could say, with some firmness, 'I'm growing the great pumpkin.'
| Author Notes |
This is a story inspired from a documentary I saw once about people who grow giant pumpkins. I was really amazed at how this ambition took over their lives, ruined their marriages, and cost them their jobs. It got me thinking. I decided it might make a good framework for a story about a person who is withdrawing from the relationships around him, because of suspicions of what they really feel for him, and the pain they cause him. Little by little, as he sheds these relationships and these people, he still finds himself driven by a need for some kind of gratification, and he finds it in growing great pumpkins. The level of control he has acts as a bandage on the pain he felt from not having control. I decided to write in a little wry humor, at certain times, to lighten up the dark comedy mood. Stylistically, it owes something to Jessica Anthony's story The Rust Preventer, from Best New Amercan Voices 2006, a story I was fascinated with as it delved into the issues of loneliness and social isolation. estory
|
By estory
Now that I am sitting in the bean bag chair of my old bedroom in my parents' house again, nobody from my high flying days seems to call me anymore. Except for the collection agencies. They still call. But it's a fact that since the BMW was repossessed and my credit cards were closed, my penthouse apartment neighbors disappeared. The last thing I heard from my girlfriend was: "I'll call you," and I haven't heard from her since.
I suppose that's what they mean by 'human nature', and I guess, in the end, people can't help looking after themselves. So I don't blame them anymore, any more than I blame myself. I just sit here, listening to records I used to listen to when I was a kid, on the old stereo my father saved up in the attic along with all the other things he couldn't throw away. I look out of the window at the people walking in the street under the trees. Somehow the trees, turning colors in the crisp, fall air, seem more substantial. I used to think it would be nice to hear from people I called friends, especially someone I spent thousands of dollars on jewelry for. But that's how it goes.
That's all turning out to be a part of the world that existed before the Great Recession. Before the market crashed. There definitely is a 'before' and 'after', everybody who went through it knows that. We are definitely in the aftermath, the after effect, now. It's funny how, in the aftermath, you come to see so many things that you once thought were so indispensable, so many people you thought you couldn't live without, turn out to be so insignificant. Even the dreams of comfort and ease that you once hung all your ambitions on seem to have blown away like leaves in the wind, and now, all that matters is the sky outside the window, your pulse, and the person who will listen to what you have to say in any given moment.
I used to be a market analyst. Even just saying that makes me laugh. As if being a market analyst is something akin to being a steelworker or a carpenter. But back then, back in the roaring nineties, when I graduated college, it seemed like something. My parents didn't know what to make of it. My father was a small business owner, and put all his money in the house. My mother, ironically, was born in the Great Depression. But I thought I was going places. I was going to be one of those guys in the suit, carrying a briefcase and commuting to Wall Street, mysteriously making money appear, literally, out of thin air. Or at least off of a computer screen.
The people I went to school with all thought we were going places too. We were all going places together. I remember how we used to hang out in the bar after our final exams, dressed in our sports jackets and silk pastel shirts, toasting each other with glasses of Glen Livet scotch and Stolichnaya vodkha, talking about the new BMW's we were going to buy, the condos in Palm Beach we were going to own, the rich socialites we were going to date. We'd watch some girl walk passed the window in a Chanel one piece with pearls around her neck and a perfect coiffure, and tell each other what we'd do to land her.
When we graduated, we all got jobs in brokerage firms like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. It's amazing how much of a lifestyle the job was. Every day we would have lunch in Fraunces Tavern, around the corner from the Stock Exchange, and talk about the future of the companies everyone else was working at. Citibank, Macys, and Krispy Kreme donuts. We saw ourselves as the people pulling the strings behind the scenes, making the make or break decisions. I don't remember ever talking to the employees, the people who worked in those places, saving their paychecks for their dream houses or their kids' college education. For us, it was all about product acceptability, marketing plans, cost structures and revenue leverage.
You might well ask, what the hell is it that a market analyst actually does? Well, a market analyst analyzes companies; their products, their production capacity, their profit margins and revenue, divides it by the shares outstanding, or the 'float', and tries to come up with a forecast of what the earnings, or profit per share, will be. If it sounds like looking into a crystal ball or reading tea leaves, I guess you could say it was. I mean, I was right out of college, and what the hell did I know about making mortgages or managing donut shops? But I looked at the numbers, did the math, and made the predictions. The market went up. Maybe it was a self fulfilling prophesy, I don't know. But people sure paid us to come up with those forecasts.
And money attracts people. Not really the money, but the things you can buy with it, the places you go, the cars you drive, the restaurants you eat in, the hotels you stay at. It's all about the status. That's how I met Jeanne, my girlfriend. She was one of those smart ass, sexy young cats with the disarming smile in the DKNY dress and the high heels that catches your eye as soon as she walks into the bar. The girl with the immaculate hair you're just dying to run your fingers through, the girl with the porcelain skin and the knock-out figure. I guess I was the guy with the high powered Wall Street job, the suit with the Italian shoes, the BMW she wanted to drive around in. At the time, she seemed perfect for me. It was like we were made for each other. Ah, those were the days. Walking around Columbus Circle in the light of the streetlamps, French kissing on the promenade of the Top of the Rock, with St. Patrick's Cathedral and the skating rink glittering beneath us.
There didn't seem to an end in sight, back then, and our dreams expanded with the money we were making into a super highway steaming across the continent. We were at the epicenter of the world. Jason and Carl, my friends from the brokerage, and
Rebecca and Taylor, Jeanne's fashionista buddies, we were the Caballeros. We even had our own table at one of those Italian restaurants on Mulberry Street. We went to Cancun together. We made love, Jeanne and I in a chaise lounge out on a balcony of that hotel, under the Mexican moon. We drank martinis till dawn. I bought her a gold necklace, and she told me she loved me. As if love were a trinket anyway.
It all changed, when the market crashed. None of us saw it coming, though I guess we should have, with our knowledge of technical analysis and Elliot Wave theory. One day the market just started going down, and it kept going down. It became a torrent. A waterfall. People sold everything. Big companies went bankrupt. Our firm merged. And I was laid off in the merger.
I was living with Jeanne in a condo on Riverside Drive when it happened. It was a nice condo. You could see across the river from the balcony, and we could jog around under the trees along the river in the evenings. It had a pool, a spa, and a health club. When I told her I lost my job, she dropped her Coach handbag and collapsed onto my leopard skin couch. When I told her I was going to have to leave the condo, she packed up her things and told me she would call me.
And I never heard from her again.
As the banks foreclosed on my condo, and repossessed my car, and cut my credit lines, I saw less and less of Jason and Carl. Carl survived the layoffs. He was the son of one of the managing directors, and I heard he actually got a promotion and a raise out of the whole thing. Can you imagine that? Jason got a job in Charlotte as a bank branch manager and moved. They took their suits with them, in their new capacities, and kept driving their BMWs and dating their fiancees, they were able to maintain their membership in the country club. I realize now, after I lost those things, how much of ourselves, or our sense of ourselves, is a creation of the people around us, the status of our job, and the money we make there. If you don't believe me, then walk into a bar and tell one girl that you're a market analyst, and tell another one that you're homeless and unemployed, and watch the difference in the reaction.
What I think I came away with is the transient nature of that kind of success, and how much of our perspective depends on that success, or failure. When it's gone, you are left with the man in the bean bag chair, listening to old records, trying to ignore the stark unknown opening in the space in front of him. You have to fall back on your own wits and faith in something else, a higher power, the hope for redemption, and transformation, the hope for a new kind of success. You gain respect for the mother and father who took you back in, who lend you money for a used car to go out on job interviews. Blood is thicker than water. You don't wave at the people who drive passed in their BMWs anymore, and they don't wave back either. They seem quite irrelevant now, in the after effect.
With Jeanne gone, and the banks serving me with foreclosure notices, and looking around for a place to live, it was like being in the eye of a storm, and the wind stripped away my dreams, all my pretense, and left me with the day to day struggle for survival. Life became an exercise in procuring a box of macaroni, a bag of cheese, and a jar of tomato sauce, one day at a time. I forgot about travel, and retirement plans and expensive liqueur, designer clothes. I packed up a suitcase full of jeans and t-shirts and moved back home. After I got there, the wind started to die down, as it does after a storm, and the dust began to settle. The sun came out of the clouds again.
I appreciate the sunshine a little more now, I think. I go outside and help my father weed the garden, like a penitent convict on a work detail. We talk about simple things. Grubs and fertilizer, whether to plant cucumbers or zucchini. When he goes back inside, I like to sit out there with the plants. I enjoy watching their simple craving for the necessities of life, sunshine and water, and I appreciate what they have to give me; peppers and eggplant and butternut squash. I am content with whatever they give me that day. Tomorrow is another day.
Lately I've been going for walks with Sarah. Sarah is the librarian who befriended me. She saw me sitting out there on a bench in the library park one afternoon, staring at the petunias, wondering what was going to become of me, and I guess she felt sorry for me and came out on her lunch break to talk to me. She asked me if anything was wrong, and I told her no; I had just lost my job. But she didn't walk away. She took me inside and helped me rewrite my resume, and fill out job applications. She helped me post them online, at the library computers. As the result of all her help and encouragement, I took a job as a night manager in one of those pharmacy chain stores. It's not what I was used to, but it might lead to a store manager's job some day. The pay is enough, not more, but it's enough to take Sarah out to the diner once in a while.
Sarah is a couple of years older than me, and not exactly as striking as Jeanne was, but she is single, and I'm beginning to think of her as more than a friend. That's human nature too, I suppose. We all need someone to hold onto, whether we're in a penthouse apartment or a basement rental. The big difference is, Sarah cares about me because of who I am; the meatloaf I buy her to pay her back for the resume coaching, the jokes I tell her when she has a bad day, and not because of the clothes I am wearing or the car I drive. See the difference?
One day I think I will walk up to her, sitting at her library desk, in her spectacles, and say: "Sarah, how would you like to go for a walk on the beach with me? Let's go for a walk at the beach, right around sunset. What do you say?"
And I have to believe that she will smile, she might even laugh that laugh of hers, and say: "You want to thank me for all those times I sat on the park bench with you?"
And then I will say: "Oh no, it's more than that Sarah. I want to start living again. I found someone to live for."
| Author Notes | This is another parable type narrative similar to Growing the Great Pumpkin; a story of someone who learns a life lesson in the difference between superficial relationships, and relationships based on caring, compassion, and need. It's about finding out the hard way that looks can be deceiving, and facades can lead to empty rooms. A plate of spaghetti is worth as much as chicken cordon bleu. It is in a style influenced much by the great John Cheever, one the writers I admire most. His modern late twentieth century short stories were parables of our time and place, in my opinion, and I recommend reading them for anyone. estory |
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