The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  Things began to look up a little in West Palm Beach. Good old Mike was there, for one thing—my roommate and best friend in New York, that candidate for sainthood. He too was trying to write, and when I’d first mentioned the possibility of rejoining him in Florida, he replied with a nervous letter, the gist of which was: by all means come ahead; I’ll even find you an apartment in advance (as he did); but I have a good life here, Blake, and I won’t stand for your fucking it up. Fair enough! Probably it was best I hadn’t told him too much about my last days in Norman. In a nutshell: having been fired at the Italian place and being left, once again, with way too much time on my hands, I’d begun making the long drive to Oklahoma City more and more often, the better to hang out with old high school friends—the unsuccessful ones, the ones who hadn’t escaped—and naturally we drank quite a lot, whereupon I’d endeavor to drive all the way back to Norman in the wee, wee hours. This, of course, was downright suicidal, and bore the expected fruit. One night I slammed over a curb on the entrance ramp to I-35 and had to wait until sunrise near the Fifty-first Street exit with a mangled tire, woken every now and then by the shuddering blast of a passing eighteen-wheeler; I was too drunk to work the jack (tricky little gadgets in those old VWs), and finally was rescued by my mother’s boyfriend, Dave, who stopped on his way to work the next morning. Then one night—maybe a week later?—I came back to my blah apartment with the dirty carpet and cinder-block bookshelves and decided I was hungry, so I put a pot of water on the stove to boil spaghetti and passed out. I woke up, hours later, to a mortal stench: the bottom of the pot had melted on the burner, and little metallic embers were flying all over the place; the smoldering carpet was ruined, and surely would have burst into flames if I’d slept a bit longer. I had a slight cough for weeks after. Finally, a few days before my departure for Florida, I fell asleep at the wheel of my Jetta and plowed into the back of another, bigger car. This on I-35 again, late at night. The collision woke me, and sobered me, and when the police arrived I was quite alertly contrite and they let me off with a ticket.

  If I’d stayed in Oklahoma a few more weeks, I daresay I might have managed to kill myself. At any rate I wouldn’t be writing this; I’m pretty sure of that.

  Through all of this, my brother was a comfort to me. He was perhaps the one person on earth who genuinely admired me—was even somewhat in awe: he thought I was “brilliant” because I’d graduated from a decent college with honors, or perhaps because I’d done so in spite of being laden with many of the same flaws that had made his own life such a dreary business. In letters he went out of his way to suggest I’d be a success in the long run, while the best he could hope for was a kind of “functioning mediocrity”—this, I might add, amid the usual epistolary quirkiness: his analysis of, say, a Rolling Stone article about some washed-up rocker (enclosed with a lot of scribbled marginalia); bits of scripture that had particularly puzzled or pleased him; some actress (invariably pubescent) whom he loved and wanted me to love too.

  I repaid my brother’s kindness as best I could, responding to his letters at droll, deadpan length: “I, too, laughed at Robin Gibb’s remark that ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ refers to a cavernous vagina (though I wonder whether such ribaldry is the best way to jump-start a career)” . . . “as for what Christ said about the camel and the needle’s eye, well, I doubt people are damned just because they die wealthy, and besides that’s nothing you or I need to worry about” . . . “per your advice, I watched that new show the other night with particular attention to [some pubescent actress], though really I found her a little too androgynous for my taste, at least at this stage in her . . .” It wasn’t simply a question of humoring Scott, since he was in on the joke—that is, he knew his interests were eccentric and sensed I was being ironical; at the same time, these were his actual interests, and he enjoyed discussing them at sober length, irony or no.

  Mainly I was amusing myself. I was out of touch with most of my old friends and simply had few people to write, apart from family and the wayward Kate, who rarely wrote back. When I wasn’t chatting with Mike and his fiancée, Donna, I was waiting tables (prior to being fired) or writing (badly) or reading or walking along Lake Worth and/or drinking. The last usually involved lying in the dark and listening to music I associated with better days, though I continued to believe that some sort of heady redemption lay ahead. In the last half hour or so before passing out, my reveries would take a maudlin turn: for instance, I liked to imagine thanking my parents in some grandiose public way for having never given up on me during my errant salad days. Also I spent my drinking time making mix tapes, mostly for my brother, who wrote astute critiques on the quality of my playlists as well as their rationale, the way they seemed to reflect my present state of mind. Sometimes I’d make the matter explicit by singing a few songs into the boombox microphone, the more lugubrious the better (e.g., Barry Manilow’s “Trying to Get the Feeling Again”)—a joke that wasn’t entirely a joke, as I knew Scott would appreciate.

  MY BROTHER ENDED up in Okinawa, where he took a course in broadcast journalism and made some extra money teaching English to Japanese businessmen. (He was flush enough to send me two hundred dollars—badly needed—for my twenty-eighth birthday in 1991.) He got his own show on an armed forces radio station and also had some kind of gig as an emcee at military award banquets. Around that time, too, he received NCO Leadership and Good Conduct medals, as well as a framed souvenir record album on the occasion of his discharge in 1992, signed with obvious affection by his radio colleagues.

  Scott sent me a tape of his radio show, presumably a broadcast he was proud of. I listened to it once, while cooking dinner, then put it away until recently. Scott’s radio manner struck me as wooden, though it’s possible he was expected, as a marine, to dispense with the usual deejay patter. It also occurs to me that Scott was mindful of his privilege—his own show!—to an almost morbid degree, such that he was cautious not to make any risky remark, to give any hint of an unbalanced nature. There’s a comic incongruity between the Scott-ishness of the musical program (AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” followed by a Dusty Springfield tune) and Scott’s monotone delivery throughout: “I have a request from Staff Sergeant Mike Berry for two tickets to the New Year’s Eve dance tomorrow night at the armory. That’s two tickets to the New Year’s Eve dance. If anybody can help Sergeant Berry, please call me here at the station. That’s two tickets . . .” Only once does Scott allow a touch of his personality to intrude—toward the end of the show, when he plays Roy Clark’s 1969 recording of “Yesterday When I Was Young”: “It’s a little corny,” Scott remarks with a self-conscious chuckle, “but I like it a lot. It’s got a kind of poignance for this time of year.”

  . . . The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned

  I always built to last on weak and shifting sand.

  I lived by night and shunned the naked light of the day

  and only now I see how the years ran away . . .

  Yesterday the moon was blue

  and every crazy day brought something new to do.

  I used my magic age as if it were a wand

  and never saw the waste and emptiness beyond . . .

  The friends I made all seemed somehow to drift away

  and only I am left on stage to end the play.

  There are so many songs in me that won’t be sung,

  I feel the bitter taste of tears upon my tongue.

  The time has come for me to pay for yesterday when I was young.

  SHORTLY BEFORE HIS thirty-second birthday, Scott was honorably discharged with the rank of lance corporal. We wondered about his decision not to reenlist at a time when he seemed to be doing so well, but Scott explained he had little hope of promotion because of recent cuts in the defense budget. Besides, he had a number of irons in the fire: he was making “decent scratch” as a language teacher (he showed me his business card, which certainly looked professional: Japanese on one side, English on the other), and m
eanwhile he and a friend had started a production company, which didn’t pan out for one reason or another.

  Years later, in a bizarre coincidence, my aunt Kay struck up a conversation on a plane with an ex-marine who, it turned out, had been stationed in Okinawa with my brother; in fact they’d been pretty good friends.

  “Scott was a nice guy,” the man said, “but he had a lot of problems.” Something in my aunt’s manner had suggested, perhaps, that such an observation wasn’t wholly unexpected, but still the man felt obliged to explain: “He drank a lot. A lot. We tried to get him some help, but Scott—” He shook his head.

  Another revealing item was an alumni bulletin I received from our old high school while Scott was still a marine. I noticed he was listed among the Notes for the Class of ’83—five years later than he’d actually graduated. When I mentioned this to my father, he penetrated the matter with his usual lucidity.

  “I imagine Scott misreported his age.”

  “But why?”

  “Well,” my father sighed, a little exasperated at having to say as much, “I guess he’s embarrassed about being a thirty-year-old corporal.”

  And this was two years before Scott decided not to reenlist—still a corporal. My father thinks he was basically drummed out of the service, though nothing of the sort appears in his record (perhaps that was part of the deal) and my mother waxes indignant at any such insinuation: “Oh bullshit,” she says. “You guys just don’t want to give Scott credit for anything. He was a wonderful marine . . .”

  The truth of Scott’s military career is somewhere in between, I think: yes, he was a good marine, and yes, it ended badly. He didn’t want to be a thirtyish corporal; he didn’t want to be thirtyish period. Scott’s acceptance of his own mediocrity was deceptive. During his vagrant days he lived in a realm of pure possibility: he could be anything he wanted, if only he tried. Then he tried and became a thirtyish marine corporal in Okinawa, albeit one who did cool things like deejay his own show and emcee award banquets. When Scott discovered this wasn’t enough, and wasn’t likely to get better, that may have been the biggest disaster of all.

  HE INSISTED ON returning to Oklahoma for the very reason that, arguably, he should have stayed away: he knew a lot of people there. My mother tried to remonstrate with him (“Don’t be ridiculous! Stay in Japan!”), but Scott held his ground and even moved in with her for a few months until he got settled. As for my father, he welcomed Scott home by giving him the old BMW, that car he and Sandra had shipped back from Europe the same summer Scott had dabbled in smack and landed in rehab.

  Beneath our hopefulness was a coral reef of accumulated cynicism, though of course we didn’t concede as much even to ourselves; we simply knew what we knew. I mention this to suggest the shock we felt when Scott really did show signs of making good. Within a month he’d landed a paid internship in the news department of a local TV station. The pay wasn’t much ($7.50 an hour), but he was eligible for a salaried position if he worked out, and meanwhile he was allowed to do those five-second spots between commercials: “Pit bulls on the loose! Two roving pit bulls have been killing cats in Nichols Hills. News at ten.” This in the polished nasal monotone he’d perfected as a marine deejay. Before long, almost everyone we knew in Oklahoma City had seen Scott on TV and assumed he was on his way to becoming a celebrity of sorts. What a turnaround!

  I was living in New Orleans, trying to get my teaching certificate. Over the years my stock had continued to drop vis-à-vis my stepfamily, despite efforts to support myself and become, belatedly, the kind of unassuming guy who knows he doesn’t amount to much and makes no bones about it. At this rate, though, Scott would eclipse me both as a family member and worldly success. It was a little surreal.

  Then one night I got a strange message on my machine. At the time I always screened my calls, since there were few people I wanted to talk to, and I was usually a little drunk at night. This particular caller, a young woman with a nebulous foreign accent, seemed to know I was listening as she spoke.

  “This is Miriam,” she said. (Actually, as I later learned, she spelled it Maryam.) She sounded as though she’d been crying and was now tensely composed. She paused, perhaps in the hope I’d pick up. “I am in New Orleans.” Pause. “Please tell Scott to call me.” Pause. “Or I will kill myself.”

  I bolted to my feet and fumbled with the phone, but she’d hung up after that fourth and final pronouncement.

  “What’s going on?” my mother said, when I called and asked to speak to Scott.

  “Nothing. I just want to talk to my brother, for God’s sake. Put him on, please.”

  “What’s going on?”

  But finally she passed the phone to Scott.

  “Zwieb?” His voice was furtive; I heard a door click shut. “What’s up?”

  I could tell he already knew the gist of it. “Who is that woman?” I asked. “She crazy? Why’s she calling me?”

  My brother implied with a chuckle that, yes, she was a little crazy and this wasn’t the first time she’d threatened to kill herself. Therefore we could all relax. He told me she was on vacation in New Orleans with her fuckwad husband, and Scott thought she might enjoy meeting me. This by way of explaining how she got my number in the first place and why she thought to call me in the midst of her latest despair—that is, Scott had refused to give her our mother’s number, though he was worried about her and eager to return her call so he could explain to her, once again, why life was worth living. Before hanging up he made me promise not to tell our parents, and I made him promise not to give my number to any more of his crazy girlfriends.

  THAT SUMMER I went home and saw my brother for the first time since his discharge. Except for his drinking he seemed fine—a statement that also applied to myself, for better and for worse: I was working hard at my education classes, desperate for steady employment, and meanwhile I went through a fifth of liquor every two or three days. As for Scott, the only cloud on his horizon that I could see was our mother’s determination to keep him from the same blithe hobby. God knows she was a formidable obstacle by then: she’d become portly around the age of fifty and was now a vigorous 190 pounds of farmhand fat and muscle. A few years ago she’d moved from her condo to a place in the country where she could keep animals and do her gardening and whatnot; my brother named this haven “Womanhood” (because he called our mother Woman in the same whimsical spirit that he called me Zwieb) and was forever threatened with eviction if he couldn’t stay reasonably sober.

  I was taken aback by the sight of my brother’s car—that is, Burck’s old BMW: dusty and disheveled, its lovely burgundy finish was now marred by a savage key-scrape around its entire circumference (the work of Maryam’s fuckwad husband). During its ten years in my father’s care, the car had looked as sleek as the day it rolled off the boat, but once Scott assumed ownership it became like a schizophrenic taken off meds. One by one its nifty little features went on the fritz: the thermostat, the cruise control, the miscellaneous gizmos. Scott loved the car and assured me he’d have it repainted as soon as he could “muster the dosh”; meanwhile he kept the stereo in working order and the car raced around town like a bellowing hobo.

  One day I visited Scott at that TV station where he still worked as an intern. He’d asked me to bring him something, but the real point was to watch him being taped for one of those five-second news spots. He didn’t sit on the set where the regular anchor sat; rather he was propped on a stool with the busy newsroom visible behind him. For my benefit he bantered with a couple of harried PA’s who fixed his clip-on microphone and adjusted the teleprompter: “C’mon, let’s do this thing . . . Tom, can I get some coffee here? . . . Do I look pretty? Man! You ever seen anybody this pretty? . . .”

  And so on, as if he were terribly bored with the whole business but willing to be good-humored about it. A lovable old pro. In fact it was rather impressive the way his manner changed as soon as taping began: his face went blank and he nailed it on the first take
; then, the moment it was over, he plucked off his mic and sauntered away like Sinatra. The others responded to Scott with a kind of meek, long-suffering patience—he was older than they, and vaguely dangerous, and besides they seemed to know (even if Scott didn’t) that they wouldn’t have to suffer him much longer.

  Sure enough he was fired the following week. Having seen what I saw, I wasn’t surprised; as for Scott, he affected to be at peace with it. “Such a bullshit job,” he said, going on about what an “embarrassment” it was to be associated with such a “poorly managed” enterprise. I replied that the competence of management wasn’t his immediate concern as an intern, a point he seemed to concede with a little chuckle. He asked me not to tell our mother about it, and for weeks he continued to leave her house “to go to work,” until finally he moved into a rental home owned by our father.

  BURCK WAS PAINFULLY aware that Sandra and her children didn’t like me and only tolerated Scott, but he wouldn’t let go of the hope that sooner or later we’d come to appreciate each other’s finer qualities. To that end he organized a family trip to Santa Fe for Christmas in 1992—the first time in years we were all together for more than a day or so, and this time Scott was included.

  Two nights before I boarded the plane to New Mexico, I got in a bar fight. After a long season of cloistered tippling I was restless, and ended up sucker-punching a guy who’d called me a faggot during a pool game. Turned out he had a lot of friends. Happily the damage was mostly internal, a few creaky ribs, though I had enough of a shiner at the airport to confirm Sandra’s view of me as a dissolute character. My father held me off after a welcoming hug and whistled. I said he should see the other guy, that I’d been defending a friend and so forth (though of course the opposite was true, and in fact the episode had strained the one good friendship I had in New Orleans). While I stood there, quipping and lying, I happened to glance at Sandra’s face: for a moment it seemed pinched with such loathing—before flashing back to a tired smile—that I wondered if I’d hallucinated it. Her children were already heading off to Baggage Claim.