Twenty on a fourteen-dollar tab. A forty-three percent tip was far too much for mediocre service.
◉ ◉ ◉
Rule one of breaking up: Do it in a public place.
Rule two: Do it after you’ve paid the bill.
Chapter 35
Back in Seattle, I couldn’t settle. Jittery and depressed, everything irritated me: people, places, things. Name a noun and it bothered me.
Sarah flooded my thoughts day and night. Even if being with her wasn’t right, it had ended the wrong way. I dialed her a handful of times, hoping to talk, to apologize, maybe even—I don’t know—beg to come back. She wouldn’t pick up.
May slipped into June. I found myself waiting anxiously for Higgles’ next call. I read a lot—newspapers, essays, foreign and fashion magazines—but after a while I found myself wandering out, heading down to the Pike Place Market or to a Capitol Hill coffee shop. I struck up conversations for no reason, introduced myself to people as “Charles but call me Chuck,” and found myself talking about real estate, college basketball, and the weather with anyone who’d talk to me. The challenge: be normal. I packed my time with activities, but nothing helped break that persistent foul feeling. Everything I did disgusted and angered me.
It was while I was sitting on a folding chair in the back of the elementary school cafeteria during an emergency PTA session to debate whether Kwanzaa was a real holiday and should be recognized by something special at school—say, cupcakes, or a screening of The Lion King—that I realized what was wrong with me.
I was frightened.
Terrified.
But not by the things most people fear. What panicked me were the things that filled the cracks of everyday, the small things that chewed up the minutes—the laundry, the television, the line at the post office, the worthless chitchat while shopping. The things that make normal people normal.
Everyday events pushed me deeper into a funk: replying to the checkout girl’s “Hiya,” petting an overly friendly dog, waiting in line at the bank. The tally of my existence turned into tiny hash marks. Internally, I raged at the chubby middle-aged woman who bragged about drinking a six-pump no-foam caramel macchiato on her blind date. Outwardly, though, I became taut, controlled. I appeared rigidly calm.
Listening to the people at the PTA meeting hotly debate the definition of a true holiday, I realized that this was it. Life, really, is nothing but taking a stance and fighting over things that, ultimately, mean nothing. I realized I couldn’t hide or avoid that fact.
So I determined to move toward it, to embrace the mundane. Embrace what I feared.
I picked a religion and started going to church, a nice, boring Protestant one, even joined their choir and got my own shiny powder-blue satin robe.
Soon I was making a name for myself at potlucks with my Iowa cheddary potato delight.
The cancer hospice center appreciated my stopping in twice a week to read stories to the dying.
I spent time at a group home for retarded men playing board games and watching American Idol.
Bridge with a couple from church became a weekly activity.
My days brimmed with healthy, good-person activities.
I’d never been so miserable. Each time the guy at newspaper stand updated me on his car restoration or the woman working at the deli told me a new recipe, my soul sputtered and seized like an airplane engine choked with birds. To these strangers, “Charles but call me Chuck” was a friend, someone they knew and could trust. He provided them with something—purpose, love, meaning, I don’t know.
In public, I fought to keep smiling. Alone, I fought not to cry.
Chapter 36
Soon after my epiphany at the PTA meeting, I saw Ray-Ray. The perfect hair, the smooth, upright walk, the confidence of manner—I caught only a glimpse, but I’m positive it was him. I’d just finished participating in a charity Scrabble tournament to raise money for Afghani orphans. Four depressing hours playing a game I didn’t like and definitely wasn’t good at. Walking through Pioneer Square afterward, I passed by the Lighthouse Shelter for Men, the place Ray-Ray and I met. That’s when I saw him. He was heading in. Thursday evening, a few minutes to seven. The sight of him sent a scorching chill through me.
I followed, determined to—what? Say “hi”? Give him a hug? I wasn’t sure.
The security guard stopped me just inside the shelter doors. “Whatcha wanting?”
“The guy that just came in,” I said, motioning toward the stairs leading to the second floor, the area where men slept. “That was Ray-Ray, right?”
His face creased in puzzlement. “Who?”
“Listen, the guy who just came in, he—” I broke off, thinking. “He dropped some money.”
The guard held out his stubby hand. “I’ll see he gets what he deserves.”
“Yeah, well, I’d feel better if—”
“If you’re thinking you’re heading up there,” he said, “then don’t be thinking it. Residents only.”
I started to tell him I used to live here then thought better of it. What did it matter? I took a new tact. “I’m a friend of Director Robert Tanke. I was talking to him this morning—”
The guard knocked his fist loudly on the counter as if to ward off bad luck. “What, now you’re some sort of ghost whisperer?” His voice was low, worried. “Tanke got killed something like three, four months now.”
My stomach wrung tight. That’s about the time I sent the Haiti package to his address. “Killed?”
The guard’s thick head bobbed once. “Robbers cracked into his house when he was asleep. Didn’t rob much, ’cept for his life.”
That night, I lay awake, worry scrapping at my heart. Had that really been Ray-Ray I’d seen? Why was he back at the shelter? Who’d killed Tanke? Who’d collected the packages? And what did this all mean to me?
The more I tried to figure it out, the angrier I became.
First thing the next morning, I went out to Tanke’s place, determined to find some answers. What I found was a shuttered house, an overgrown lawn with a FOR SALE sign posted in it, and a pile of weathered fliers and junk mail littering the front stoop. The doors were padlocked tight. The place was empty, abandoned by death. No clues that I could see.
I looked for Ray-Ray, but that proved a waste of time, too. For two days straight I hung around outside the shelter, waiting for him to exit or enter. He didn’t. Or at least not that I saw. But the whole time I lingered outside the place, I felt certain someone was watching me. Who, I couldn’t say. But I could feel a cold stare slicing deep into my spine. The coldness stuck with me for days.
There was no specific reason for my leaving Seattle. The town was like a party after the guest of honor had left. The drinks still flowed, but the welcome was waning. What did it matter if it had been Ray-Ray I’d seen, if he was back in the shelter? Sure, he’d set me up, got me going on the Kam Manning, but our lives had separated, headed in different directions.
I packed up my books, the few articles of clothing I had, and bought a plane ticket to Cincinnati. Home of the Bengals, my favorite football team.
Chapter 37
I looked at places in Cincinnati’s Over the Rhine and Clifton areas, but ended up renting a house some thirty miles south in Kentucky, away from everything. I moved in with my one piece of luggage and stack of books. I was hoping for—what? Quiet? To be anonymous, hidden? Safe? I couldn’t say.
Built in the 1940s boom years, when the steel factory brought jobs, the small house stood on a scrub of land. There were other houses around, but no neighbors. The jobs had bled off some years back. The people left. The houses stayed.
The kitchen in my place had a refrigerator that never got cold and a stove I didn’t trust to light. Water stains colored the ceiling of every room. The entire house smelled like it’d been bombed for fleas. A poured-concrete deck out b
ack was spidered with cracks. It was a house one rented when planning a suicide.
Early one morning, someone came by and raced a mower over the lawn, shearing the grass down to the dirt. I lay in bed listening to the engine whine and the blades of the machine kick stones and dirt against the house’s siding.
I’d forgotten about the Midwest summer heat and the lightning storms that jagged the night sky. I’d forgotten how isolating rural areas can be.
I’d not forgotten about the cicadas. Magicicada. The North American genus. They blew in, buzzing and whirling thickly through the sweltering air. About an inch long, they had shiny, black shells and hard red eyes. Most people know the regular locust, the kind that come out in the summer. These were different; cicada nymphs spend most of their lives underground feeding on root juice, emerging once every seventeen years.
Their deafening kkkerrrklick-ing became the soundtrack for sweltering days.
At night, I’d sit on the patio in a rickety lawn chair, the cicadas careening their way past my head. The tepid breeze, like an aftereffect of their whipping wings, stirred little. I still wrestled with the thought of returning to Sarah. I kept telling myself I’d done the right thing by dumping her.
I’m not a bad person, I told myself, it’s just that my life is bad.
Often, I fell asleep there, waking to dawn corrupting the sky and the entire deck covered with cicada carcasses, the insects having done what they’d been born to do.
Sweeping them up, I was amazed at how light their bodies were once life had left them.
Chapter 38
The summer between my fourth and fifth grade, my father set up a small aboveground pool in our backyard. Only three-feet deep and ten-feet wide, it still took the entire day to fill with the garden hose.
Nearly every afternoon, Clement would come over and we’d hit the pool with my dog, Mackerel. Panting excitedly, she’d circle around the tiny ring of water like a roulette ball, speeding in one direction then suddenly stopping to poke her snout over the edge and bark wildly.
We splashed her lots.
September rolled in. The weather cooled, and the swimming ended. Fifth grade began.
Draining the pool was a weekend to-do that my father never seemed to get around to doing. The draining would take hours and ruin the lawn, he said. So he bought a vinyl pool cover instead. Slipping the cover over the rim of the pool, he secured it tightly with bungee cords.
“To keep the leaves and muck out,” he said to my mother.
“Emptying the pool would keep the leaves and muck out,” she said.
“I’ll empty it next weekend,” he said and never did.
September crept into October. Halloween approached.
Coming home from school one afternoon in early October, I found Mackerel in the backyard. She’d somehow gotten on top of the pool cover without it collapsing and lay there with the head resting on her paws. “Mackerel,” I said, “get off.”
She barked once and tried to stand, but wobbled about on the slick surface of the cover like a foal first standing.
“Come here!” I worried the material wouldn’t hold her, that the pool cover would break and drop her into the water like a teabag. I circled the pool, calling, yelling, demanding, but Mackerel couldn’t move beyond the center, doing an odd dance of rising then sitting while barking joyfully. She found it all a game, fun.
Leaning over the pool, I reached for her. No luck. I leaned farther, my waist hard to the edge and my hand on the cover for support.
It was then that bungee cords snapped and the cover gave way, folding into the icy water.
Mackerel and I both yelped. We both went in, hitting the murky wet.
When my mother came home, she found me sitting on the kitchen floor, wet and crying. Mackerel, soaked but happy, wandered the house, leaving muddy paw prints on the carpet.
Instead of soothing words or a comforting hug, my mother tore into me for my stupidity. “Let the dog drown next time!” She grabbed my damp T-shirt at the waist, skinned it off me like a rabbit. “Now clean up this mess,” she said, pointing to her soiled carpet.
My father caught hell for being too lazy to take the pool down. “The boy nearly died,” my mother said, cursing. It was a rare moment that she showed her true anger. “Empty the fucking pool, now!”
My father knew better than to argue. He went to the garage, took out the garden hoe, and attacked the pool, hacking the frame and lining to bits. A torrent of water gushed over him and the lawn.
As for me, I was packed off to bed without dinner.
My father woke me later. He was drunk. “Don’t let your mother know,” he said, turning on the light. He handed me a ham and butter sandwich, then stepped back from my bed like he was afraid of me. “That trick nearly got you killed, huh?” He laughed, the sound hollow and joyless, then stared at me gravely. “There’s a lesson in all this.”
The pool cover, the dog, my head slipping under the water. “What is it?”
“I’ll let you think on it,” my father said, turning out the light and leaving me alone with my sandwich.
Aside from Don’t be stupid or Pool covers don’t hold my weight, I wasn’t sure what lesson my father thought I’d learn. Lying in the dark eating my sandwich, the only other glimmer of new wisdom I gained was realizing I didn’t like ham with butter.
It’s only now that I realize the lesson of that day, one that would have saved me from the trouble I’m now in. Walk away. When things look bad, walk away.
Chapter 39
I’d been living in Kentucky a couple months when, exiting the Piggly Wiggly one Thursday morning, a chubby boy in a Cub Scout uniform positioned himself in front of me and held out a small, padded envelope. “Take this.”
Instinctually, I took it, then, panicked, tried to hand it back.
The boy retreated with a frightened look on his face. “He gave me twenty bucks to do it. Said to tell you”—he tried to remember the message—“it’s clover.” Turning, he ran.
A chill spiked me. Higgles had found me. Again.
I looked up and down the street thinking I might see him. Nothing.
I ripped the envelope open. A SIM card.
I popped it in my phone. A text. Book 4. Tuesday.
Book four was The Memphis Sky Above, a memoir by a twenty-nine-year-old woman who went by the initials ES. No name. She didn’t like her name, didn’t like her family. She didn’t like much of anything according to her book, even though she seemed to do just about everything. Drugs, sex, stealing. It was the standard “hard life, hard lessons” memoir. I didn’t believe a word she wrote.
ES was the worst kind of full-of-shit. Technically, she told the truth, but her truth was stripped of any truthfulness. Instead of saying a cup was white, she’d say it wasn’t exactly red. She made unimportant events sound life-changing and poured gallons of emotion into a simple conversation. She didn’t have friends but soul mates. From her book, she came off sounding like someone who’d accuse you of betrayal for not returning a call quickly enough. Sure, she’d done her addictions, battled her demons, endured her lumps, but then who hadn’t? It didn’t justify a whole book.
Why people under the age of sixty wrote memoirs, I couldn’t figure.
I once had a chance to find out. After Sarah and New York, when I was back living in Seattle, ES did a reading and book signing in Portland, Oregon. I drove the three hours, curious to see if the real-life ES mirrored the one she’d crafted in her book. The woman at the podium didn’t have the luxurious mane and ample cleavage of her author photo. Meek and dressed down in a Hüsker Dü T-shirt, she was unrecognizable.
An old woman and I were the only one’s to show up. ES read a profanity-filled section about falling in love at AA, her voice rising querulously at the end of each sentence.
Afterward, the woman in the audience asked ES what it w
as like to have fondled a former vice president’s genitalia. “I think you have the wrong author,” ES said, in her tilting voice.
“No, I don’t,” the old woman replied.
ES asked if there were any other questions.
There weren’t.
A twinge of sympathy hit me. I bought two books, had her sign both. I asked her if she had plans, if she’d like to go to dinner.
ES looked at the tall pile of her unsold books. “I’ve a bus to catch in an hour,” she said, pulling out her phone.
“There are other buses,” I said.
She looked up at me, her eyes tired yet questioning. “Have you read my book?”
“I’ve read it.”
“Then you know I’m an alcoholic, so don’t expect me to drink,” she said, biting a hangnail. “And don’t expect any fucking either.”
I took her to Macaroni Grill. She drank. A lot. I offered to take her to the bus station. She took me to a motel room.
We fucked.
Afterward, she cried. I felt bad, not for what we had done, but for her, for myself. I could see why she did what she did. She was lonely, confused, and reached out any way she could just to make human contact, even if that meant destroying a bit of herself in the process. I knew the feeling firsthand.
She wiped the tears from her face with the bedsheets. “It’s not you,” she said. “It’s just this whole thing—my life, my memoir. It’s difficult opening yourself up to the world, displaying your life. I’m not proud of my life. That’s why I don’t use my full name, why I go by ES, to stay anonymous.”
“Anonymous?” I sat on the bed next to her. “Your photo is on the back cover. You just did a public reading.”
She ignored me. “People read my book and think they know me. I don’t even know me.”
What do you expect? I touched her leg gently, feeling her heat. “Listen, you put yourself out there. Of course people are going to think they know you.”
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