“Hey, Joe!” I yank my head up and Joe looks right at me.
“I’m not Joe, you schmuck,” he spits through his mustache.
He’s aged, grey-hair and glasses, so I assumed he was the Joe of Joe’s on Broadway, but I guess I’m wrong.
“Oh?” I say, disappointed. “Where’s… where’s Joe then? Where’s good old Joe?”
“Graceland Cemetery, asshole. Been there for years—eleven, in fact.” His voice is gravelly, thick with Chicago accent. He leans on the bar toward me.
“Graceland? Where they buried Dolly Parton?”
“What? Dolly Parton ain’t dead, you dodo. Graceland, the cemetery just north on Clark from here.”
“Joe’s… dead? Really dead?” I ask, this news affecting me a little too much.
“Yeah. What is this, twenty questions?”
“Oh? Oh, I’m so… so sorry. My condolences. But, Joe,” I continue, pointing behind me at the anchor hung on the wall. “Do you really have free beer tomorrow? That seems… seems like a terrible business model, I must say.”
I suppress a hiccup with a swig of whiskey. The bartender shakes his head in disgust, asks Benoit what he’s doing hanging out with a guy like me, then walks down to the end of the bar to talk to a regular—or who I imagine to be a regular. I’ve only been in here a handful of times in the four years since I moved into the apartment on Pine Grove around the corner. The regulars are all middle-aged to ancient, all with worn wrinkles and dull, wet eyes. They’re usually wearing cheap sweatshirts from Walgreens that have local sportsball team logos on them, or pictures of glittery kittens or stoic silhouettes of wolves. Old, faded, paint-splattered ball caps cover their bald spots—even the women who wear gaudy beaded necklaces and rhinestone rings. Their fingers are as yellow as their teeth. And the bartender likes them more than me!
Benoit leans over again and tells me the “Free Beer Tomorrow” sign is a joke. “Tomorrow is always a day away, dipshit,” he says, tossing back his whiskey and signaling to Joe that we need another round even though my whiskey’s half full and I’ve barely touched my bottle of PBR.
“Oh,” I say, finishing off my whiskey because Benoit’s ordering me to do so. It burns but I’ve never felt more greater in my whole darned life! I might become a whiskey connoisseur, in fact. I can bring class to this here golden beverage by connoisseuring the hell out of it. I’ll buy a wet bar and collect the finest bottles of the stuff. I’ll invite my brother down from Minnesota to join me for a night of whiskey drinking, relishing the finest scotches, bourbons, ryes, and Irish blends. Then I’ll sweep his fake leg out from under him and kick his face in and ask him how it feels to be so goddamned popular. HOW’S IT FEEL TO BE LOVED BY OUR PARENTS!? HOW’S IT FEEL TO BE LOVED AT ALL?!
“Oh…” I say again, snapping out of it. Benoit’s focused on the bartender, leaning over his empty glass and beer bottle, anxious for more. “That’s… that’s funny. I hadn’t thought of that. Free beer tomorrow. Ha. Funny.”
I swivel off my stool and bounce into a very small, older woman with Mount Everest-sized breasts. I apologize and she grins like a half-wit and sips her Long Island Ice Tea. I walk over to the jukebox and put in a couple dollars and tell it to download and play “Take These Broken Wings,” and I tell it to put me first in line. Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues” ends and those familiar warm synths of Mister Mister take over. Smiling, I put an arm atop the jukebox and lean my face against its cool touchscreen and close my eyes until Benoit’s yanking me back to my stool and ordering me to do shots of Jägermeister with him.
“I’m an amnesiac,” Benoit tells me just as I force down the last bit of sickly sweet liqueur. He stares me down with grey eyes. Not blue. Not black.
“Wha…” I motion to Joe and ask for a glass of water.
“I don’t really know who I am,” Benoit continues.
“Do you like this song?” I ask.
“Huh?”
“Mister Mister. They’re great. Under… appreciated. They’re really really great.”
“Are you listening to me?” He squeezes my shoulder.
“Ow,” I say, and halfheartedly pull away. “Yeah, I’m… listening. I don’t usually… you know… drink this much. In fact, I never drink whiskey or… or Jäger or any… anything like that stuff.”
“You’ll be alright. Just keep up.”
After avoiding Benoit for some days, I came home tonight, ready for another quiet weekend, and again I found him waiting for me, ready to play FIFA and drink beers. We played a few games (I even managed a draw in one) then he suggested hitting the town. He said he has a bar he goes to just around the corner. He said he wanted to buy his friend a drink or two. He said it was about time.
I couldn’t say no, obviously, but now I’m a drunken drunk drunk drunk. And in a bar where no one knows my name and Woody would never show his face. Nor Frasier, who I’d probably get along with a little better. But who doesn’t love Woody? Nobody. That’s who. Nobody doesn’t love Woody. You can quote me on that.
“What do you mean you’re an amnesiac?” I ask Benoit, sitting up straight, attempting to catch my breath and at least give the air of someone in control (keeping up appearances!).
“I don’t know who I am, Ian.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re getting philo—philosophi—philo—”
“I’m not speaking in goddamned metaphors, man.”
“You’re really an amnesiac? Like, in every other episode of Days of Our Lives? Speaking of—do you think that Bo is a vampire? I mean, that guy just doesn’t age. Or is it the goatee? It might be the goatee. Keeps you young. Maybe I should grow a goatee before I get too old?”
“I don’t know who I am, Ian. Jesus!”
“How? How’s that possible?” I ask.
“I was attacked, six years ago. Brain damage or something, but no one can figure it out. No one really knows why I can’t remember—can’t remember shit!” he says, becoming agitated.
“Oh!” I say, throwing an arm around his shoulder and pulling him close and squeezing. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Benoit! I’m so sorry! You’re OK now, though, right?” I release my grasp and he shrugs me off and grimaces.
“Yeah, I’m fucking great except for not being able to fucking remember who I fucking am.” He’s unamused.
“Oh! Is that why you keep a journal? To try and remember?” I lean forward and ask Joe for another glass of water because I’m so so so thirsty, I tell him. He obliges without saying anything. I think I’m growing on him.
“Journal?” Benoit asks.
“Yeah, that crazy stuff you type up on your typey typewriter.” I sip my ice water through a straw and the cold hurts my teeth. “Ow,” I say again.
I turn my attention to the large storefront windows. There’s no traffic, foot or car, out there. It’s just a dead street alit in moonlight and street lamps.
“How do you know about that?”
A shot of adrenaline from nowhere cascades through my veins and brings the picture into focus.
“I… uh… you left your manuscript out in the living room one time?” I say, like it’s a question.
BOOM! CRACK! SSSSsssssssss
A summer thunderstorm lacerates the evening sky and elephantine raindrops abuse the sidewalk and street outside. Everyone murmurs excitedly as lightning-flashes saturate the bar, turning the room into a negative of itself for a split second. The windows rattle.
These summer thunderstorms are very violent in their sudden wakening, and not uncommon. And one has come on to punctuate the moment, just in time.
“No. No, I didn’t, Ian.” He has his tracksuit jacket off so I can see the veins in his arms raise just as the veins in his neck do. The scar behind his left ear pulses and turns a darker red. He’s not interested in the storm outside.
“I went… I went into your room one day when you weren’t there and I read some of it. I’m… sorry.”
Benoit slams his fist into the bar just as more thunder rumbles. He knocks ove
r his beer and when he stands his stool flies backward and hits the wall. He grabs me by the back of the neck and squeezes, leans in, his breath hot in my ear, ready to utter my death sentence, I imagine. Then he bounds out of the bar.
Quick on his feet, old Joe rights Benoit’s beer bottle and sops up the liquid with an old yellow rag.
I feel terrible. I feel really bad. I feel like I just betrayed my only friend in the world. My guts are swirly and my heart’s beating fast. I almost run after Benoit when, through the front windows, I see he’s out there pacing and smoking, though the cigarette goes out quickly in the downpour as he raises it to his lips. I swear his shaved head is steaming out there in the Chicago night, even as a hard rain comes down to douse the fire.
Still, I feel sick. I feel like I really, truly did something wrong. Is this what guilt feels like? I’m not sure I’ve felt this before.
“First things first,” Benoit says upon returning, jabbing his dripping finger in my face. “I don’t keep a goddamned journal, man. That shit’s for fags.”
“I don’t… like… that… word,” I tell him.
“You’re in no position to censor this goddamned conversation, roomie.” Benoit turns to Joe, or whatever his name is, and apologizes for spilling the beer. Joe says it’s no problem and sets a fresh, frosty bottle of PBR before him and hands him a fresh hand towel. “Secondly,” he continues, wiping his face with the towel, “what the fuck are you doing going through my shit, man? You know I can gut you in your sleep, right? You know I can do that in such a way you’ll live for a good ten minutes after, just trying to shove all that slippery, ropey shit back in your belly.”
“I… I was just curious. I don’t know. I don’t know why I do the things I do, Benoit. Sometimes I do things and I just… do them. And I tell myself it’s OK. I say, It’s OK, Ian, because you’re doing it to someone else, and not yourself.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” he asks, standing, leaning sideways against the bar, his tanktop soaked through, his face giving away that I’ve amused him somehow.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ben. I’m just… sorry.” I make eye contact because Madelyn tells me in order to really connect with people I should do that.
“Did you just call me Ben?”
“Did I?”
“Yeah. No worries. It’s fine. No one’s called me Ben. I like it. It seems alright.”
“OK, Ben. So, you’ve not known who you are for at least six years?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t know anything at all?”
“No. I have dreams, sometimes, and I wonder, but, you know, they’re just fuckin’ dreams. Who knows what they mean.”
“So, you know, that stuff you write—and, again, I’m really sorry I read it. But that stuff, that’s not a journal of your memories or anything like that?”
“No, man. No. I mean, sometimes I think I remember something and I write it down, but that stuff I do on the typewriter…. Let me says this, when I woke up in the hospital, I didn’t know who I was. I did know I wanted to write stuff down—like my thoughts and stuff. I figured, you know, maybe I was a writer or something. Maybe writing would trigger my memory. That was one of my first ideas about who I might have been before. So, that’s all there is to it. I’ve kept it up, trying to write, ever since. I write whatever comes to my mind. I’m trying to form something… but it’s still all so fractured and shattered. I have a hard time really getting all my ideas to gel and, you know, make sense. I’m guessing I probably am not a writer. And never was. It’s just become force of habit at this point.”
“Ben, how is it that they’ve not figured out who you are? That doesn’t make sense. Somebody has to know you. Somebody has to be able to identify you even if you don’t know who you are. Somebody has to have reported you missing.”
“Nope. Nobody.” I think his grey eyes water when he says that and I feel just terrible. I think I understand exactly what that must feel like—to disappear and have no one notice. To be completely dispensable.
“Fingerprints?” I ask as the room again floods with a flash of light and the windows quake.
“I don’t know. They couldn’t bring up anything on me by my fingerprints,” Ben says, handing the towel back to Joe.
“That’s terrible—not knowing who you are.”
“It’s worse than you know, man. I don’t even have a social security number.”
“What?”
“Yeah. They don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I am. So, you know, no goddamned social security number.”
“They can’t give you a new one—I mean, under the circumstances?”
“No such luck. They absofuckinglutely will do no such thing.”
“That’s crazy. How do you get a job? How do you get a bank account? How do you buy a car and all that junk?”
“I, my friend, have to resort to the underworld.”
“You’re kidding,” I say, though I have it on good authority, of course, that he isn’t.
“Nope. No social, no way for me to do any of that shit unless I work under the table and buy stuff like cars from less than reputable persons.”
“Like, people on Craigslist.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah,” he says, downing his whiskey.
“So, like, the government—they just gave up on you? They’re not helping at all?”
“They said they were trying. They wanted to keep me as a ward of the state, though, and, man, that kind of shit is just like jail. And I’m not doing jail just for losing my memory. That kind of living—having to check in and let them know my every movement; having to accept their pitiful government checks for picking up garbage, like an inmate, on the highway—no way, man. No way.”
Just then the thunderstorm quells and the outside world grows quiet in its newfound sheen.
Ben tosses a twenty on the bar, gestures at Joe, and pulls me off my stool, dragging me toward the door with him. “Let’s get out of this shithole. You owe some expensive drinks.”
SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT!
I’m about to throw the fourth egg when it cracks in my hand and the goop runs down my arm to my elbow. I’m seeing double right now, but I think I was able to hit my target.
“Did… did I hit my target?” I ask Ben.
We’re crouching behind a parked silver Jaguar across the street from Taylor’s house in Oak Park, this Chicago suburb where Hemingway was born and cross-dressed for the first eight years of his life before becoming every man’s man’s-man by warring, boozing, womanizing, and torturing animals.
Taylor doesn’t live far from his birth home and, just like that one, hers is pretty fancy. It’s a three-story Queen Anne-style house. It looks like a doll house or something out of a Tim Burton movie with its polygonal tower, Dutch gables, overhanging eves, and large porch with classical columns. After Taylor left me, she married a lawyer. She would have ended up with a house like this, anyway. When she was with me she started up a sports agency and was soon representing college kids getting drafted into sportsball leagues all over the world that pay millions—and she got ten percent, or something like that. Anyway, she was on her way to big money just when she decided I was no longer good enough for her.
Figures.
Ben’s slouched up against the car’s front tire, sipping from the pint of Johnny Walker that we picked up (my treat), along with a dozen eggs (his idea), at the Jewel a few blocks away. He’s laughing and not really paying attention to me. Distant traffic murmurs and fills silences.
“Did I hit the house?” I ask again, focusing, trying to make the two versions of Taylor’s house merge into one. The dim street lights aren’t helping.
He shimmies up the side of the car and peeks his head over its hood.
“Yep,” he says, shimmying back down and sipping on the scotch.
“I did?” I ask, proud.
“You hit it once. The other two hit her neighbor’s.”
; “Shoot,” I say, crouching down alongside him and taking the scotch. “I don’t want to mess up innocent people’s houses.” I take a large gulp of the scotch and find I like it a lot better than the well whiskey we were drinking at Joe’s.
“No such thing as innocent people,” Ben says, somber, and grabs the whiskey bottle away from me. “What’d you say this chick’s name was?”
“Taylor.”
“Taylor? Taylor what?”
“Um… Townsend. Taylor Townsend.”
“Taylor Townsend? Shit. She sounds like a real bitch.”
“She was… she wasn’t that bad.”
“Fuck that shit, man. This chick broke your heart. And for what? Because you accidentally read an email of hers when she left that shit open on her laptop, right on the living room table? Come on, most of us would have read that shit.”
“Well…”
“Bitch was probably cheating on you, too.”
“Hey!”
“I’m just saying.”
A couple bats streak across the moonlit sky. They chirp and squeal. There’s a few stretched clouds in the flat sky, but no stars. There’s never any stars. Just black squiggles swimming in the black sky. Just a bunch of black snakes ready to rain down on us all.
“Well, you know… she didn’t cheat on me. For the record.”
“Yeah, sure. Here,” he says, now taking the egg carton from me. He sets the whiskey down, leans over the hood of the Jaguar, and starts chucking the rest of the eggs like they’re hand grenades, yelling BLAM! and KABOOM! when he hits my target. “Bullseye, every time.”
“Nice,” I say. I try to take the scotch from him when he slouches back against the Jaguar but he yanks the bottle to his chest. He doesn’t look at me.
“What do you want to do now?” he asks, breathing heavy.
“Um… I don’t know. You want to head back to Joe’s? They’re open ‘til four.” I take out my iPhone and see we have ninety minutes of bar time still available.
“Nah,” he says, picking up some pebbles out of the gutter and chucking them at the house we’re facing.
Y Is for Fidelity Page 9