At least I saw one of my fellow “regulars,” the old farmer, and I was moved by sentiment. I had never before had the courage to simply sidle up directly next to him on a stool and engage in casual chitchat, but suddenly I found myself not only willing but eager to do just that, my lonely feelings due to my wife’s absence intensified and supplemented by the natural impulse toward “male bonding.”
To my astonishment, the old farmer was garbed in a gray pinstripe suit, a far cry from his usual dungarees or overalls. I fear that my opening remark was some jovial observation on the subject.
“My friend died,” came his sobering reply.
He was referring to Ned Brick, the old detective with whom he had so often gambled.
We spoke for a while of sad things, such as a trip to Alaska he had always hoped to make with his first wife but never had.
The old farmer had been a pallbearer at the old detective’s funeral. I speculated aloud at one point as to whether Sandy Baker Jr. had been similarly employed. This the old farmer answered with a grunt.
I made some remark about Sandy, something about how he didn’t seem so bad to me, a half-hearted defense, I must admit, because at the moment my most cherished hope was that the old farmer would like me. We are always going around criticizing St. Peter for denying Jesus thrice before the crowing of the cock, but come on! It is so easy to want to “go with the crowd” who happens to be around. We all just want to fit in.
“You must know about my disappointing, fat son,” the old farmer said.
I was startled in numerous ways. For one, it seemed that a very personal conversation was about to ensue. Also, it was intriguing to think what association Sandy Baker Jr. might have with the old farmer’s disappointing, fat son. Also, it seemed to be a terrible way to describe one’s son. Also, there is the matter of my own weight.
I noted that the old farmer was drinking gin, a harder libation than usual. On the spot I made the mental decision to recall his every word as closely as possible, and to use the lengthy restroom breaks for which he was so justifiably famous to make some notes in my own form of shorthand, which I planned to transcribe in my leisure at home. As you will see from the following, my plan was a success in that regard.
“You’re telling me you never heard of my fat, disappointing son? His name is Shell.”
I paused to think. It is true that I had heard the name Shell mentioned somewhat frequently, though I could not recall in what capacity. I had a nagging sense that the Shell of which I had heard was a woman, or had been talked about in strictly womanly terms. I was amazed to think that this Shell of my imaginings could be a male of any kind. I thought it best not to mention this, and merely shook my head as if in blankness.
Shell, I was informed, blogged constantly about a young actress named ______. I leave the name blank not from pretension or postmodernism, but simply because the old farmer could not remember the name of the actress that his son liked to blog about. Otherwise alert people of a certain age begin forgetting the names of current superstars, and why shouldn’t they? This man probably knew everything about the phases of the moon.
From various clues, I would suspect that the old farmer might have been trying to refer to Scarlett Johansson, due to a number of mentions of “red hair,” though I cannot say so with certainty. Ms. Johansson has been viewed in films with various shades of hair, red certainly among them. Perhaps a certain jpeg from Shell’s blog, at which the old farmer had gazed with disgust, had fastened itself to his mind with, dare I say it, the strange admixture of lust and distaste that is so common for all of us who participate in humankind.
Shell was fifty years of age, and the old farmer found it unseemly that the girl of his obsession still had baby fat on her, in the old farmer’s estimation. This also makes me suspect that her identity was that of Scarlett Johansson, who is a person so soft and creamy, resembling nothing so much as a nourishing bowl of oatmeal.
Hypocrisy! cries the alert reader familiar with the area and its inhabitants. Isn’t this the same old farmer who has a child bride named Cherry of all things, covered in pale, pink freckles from head to shapely toes?
To which I can only respond, “Touché.”
But may I suggest that we pause before rushing to judgment and take a hard look at our own lives and impulses? It is probably far from uncommon that we recognize as great sins the small faults in others that we fail to recognize in ourselves.
Not that there was any sin involved, on the face of it, with the marriage of the old farmer to his legally aged wife Cherry. As I brood on this complicated matter, it occurs to me that what really bothered the old farmer was his son’s timidity. Shell was not going after his dream! Rather than tracking down Scarlett Johansson (for the sake of argument) and asking her on a date, he was content to scan the Internet for candid photographs of her, in effect building a virtual shrine to her in full view of a disbelieving public, at which he could kneel and worship like a wretched mooncalf.
One warm evening the old farmer came home, or so he related, after dropping off his young wife Cherry at the airport, to notice that the living-room furniture had been pushed against the walls. Next he saw Sandy Baker Jr. with his shirt unbuttoned all the way. Sandy Baker Jr.’s ribs were prominent and pronounced and his chest was quite hairless, almost as if denuded by artificial means. As another part of this scenario, the old farmer’s middle-aged son Shell was on his hands and knees. Sandy Baker Jr. was riding Shell around the room like a horse.
Have I mentioned that Shell was living with Cherry and the old farmer at the time, due to his pending divorce? Naturally, the old farmer wished to ascertain what was “going on.”
“I was showing Shell here some tricks,” Sandy Baker Jr. offered, buttoning his shirt, having dismounted, and attempting to make himself look presentable under the circumstances.
The old farmer thought of a postcard that Cherry had mailed him from one of her shopping trips to Dallas, showing a spider monkey in a cowboy outfit riding a large dog. At the time, everyone had said it was “cute” and “funny.” But now he remembered with stark immediacy the grim, desperate faces of the monkey and the dog.
As he told his story, the old farmer had been staring into the filthy mirror behind the bar, staring the way he might have stared at a fallow field, full of longing and knowledge, seeing things a layman could never see. Suddenly he turned those burning eyes on me.
“Stay away from Mr. Sandy Baker Jr. He’ll beguile you with his powers, and soon you’ll be his henchman on his bloody, hidden deeds.”
This was interesting news, because I had recently given Sandy Baker Jr. the sum of $300 that didn’t exactly belong to me so that he could have some special publicity shots of my cat made up.
Inspired by the old farmer’s newfound passion for gin and the reluctant thought of returning to my own dark house, I consumed a quantity of Gibsons and made many embarrassing proclamations, only a few of which I can recall with any certainty, most if not all of them to uninterested strangers.
A basketball game came on the TV, and as the national anthem was being played I arose with a ceremonious air and hoisted my conical glass and the three wondrous white onions impaled on a toothpick within to the beautiful young woman singing and the enormous flag held parallel to the ground like a safety net by a contingent of artfully arranged Marines. I became belligerent afterward because no one else had stood. “I guess I am the only one standing up for a lady,” I am afraid I declared. “A lady called America!”
At another blurry juncture, I tried to persuade the frightening bartender to turn over the personal telephone number of Sandy Baker Jr. In retrospect, it should have given me a clue to his nature that Sandy was so secretive in his refusal to reveal those very digits, which should have been tucked in my wallet seeing that we had become business partners of a sort and even partners in crime, for what had I done but robbed my wife’s company under her very nose, like a mastermind for whom the FBI agent in charge of the case develops
a grudging respect?
Yet thank goodness the fearsome barkeep did not comply! I was left bereft of the contact information I so assiduously sought.
What a condition I was in: drunken, combined with doubts and anger. Given the volatility of my intended communicant, I cannot imagine that the confrontation would have gone well.
What if I had used Sandy’s number as a means of finding his address? What if I had gone over to his apartment or hovel and banged on the door in a rage?
In one such imagining I am pinned to a wall by the projectile of a crossbow and my body, once pried free with some difficulty, is dumped in the old farmer’s catfish pond, along with so many others. I suppose most catfish are farm-raised now, and it is a good thing. They are awful creatures, monstrous to gaze upon, and will eat anything, including my remains. To name a thing like that after its supposed resemblance to a cat is the gravest insult. I hope you do not have a pet catfish because chances are he will never be a movie star! Ha ha!
I should pause to admit two things:
1) Sometimes I call my cat “Catfish” as a nickname because of her cute little puffy fish face.
2) There is a movie called Catfish and for all I know it has a catfish in it. We should all be more scrupulous and not fling around generalizations with abandon. Why am I imagining a catfish circling and circling in a cheap inflatable wading pool? Is that something I read about in a review of the film? A catfish is possessed of extremely sharp and painful cartilaginous (I guess) “whiskers.” Anything inflatable, which might be endangered by harsh poking, would be an unwise container for a catfish. Perhaps that is a central metaphor of the movie, the folly of keeping a catfish in a rubber wading pool. I have not seen it, so I hope I am not giving anything away. Somebody apparently put his catfish in a movie long before my cat became a movie star, so hats off to that enterprising gentleman (or woman). The more I think of it, the less can be said with any certainty on any subject whatsoever. My tongue is a small sea creature indeed, thrashing about so crazily in the hull of an enormous fishing boat christened Ignorance. Wittgenstein was right when he philosophically told us all to shut our big kissers for good. I believe that wily old German went so far as to say that we shouldn’t even make pronouncements like, “The sun will come up tomorrow.” But just try telling that to Little Orphan Annie. Who said that Wittgenstein is necessarily right about everything all the time? Why shouldn’t we say, “The sun will come up tomorrow”? What if it doesn’t? In that case, we will have lots of worse things to worry about than what we said about the sun yesterday. In actual fact, what we say about the sun has very little effect on the sun at all.
When I thought about what to say to Sandy Baker Jr., not every outcome I considered ended with me dead, a clunky bolt shot through my throat.
I also imagined that I might murder Sandy Baker Jr. in self-defense.
What if he came at me with his crossbow raised? What choice would I have but to pick up the novelty “lava lamp” I imagine he would have sitting on an end table for irony? I might smash the lava lamp in his face, releasing its scalding contents, which would blind him. Or perhaps a shard of it would sever one of his arteries. Were it still plugged in, it might well electrocute him.
Thank goodness, then, for the professionalism of the reticent yet ugly bartender. A bartender is used to receiving many slurred requests, few of which he fulfills, unless they involve a fresh drink. That is as it should be. One thing we can be content to know in this world is that we can count on most people to do their jobs in good faith.
One thing from which the unattractive if dedicated service professional could not save me was a wretched hangover. When one’s spouse goes out of town, the initial thought is, “Welcome back, bygone days of bachelorhood. I may as well loosen up and have some wholesome fun!” The reality always ends in pain.
Upon my wife’s return, I managed to choke out a catalog of my misdeeds.
For business purposes, she has been endowed by her employer with an American Express card devoid of any limit. With it, she pays for meals and necessary sundries on business trips. She then files an expense report to the accounting office. Once it has been approved, a check is issued. My wife deposits the check and uses the funds to pay off her corporate American Express card in a timely manner.
Potentially limitless funds! You can see the unfortunate temptation for a spouse who wishes to turn his cat into a movie star.
I regret to say I “borrowed” my wife’s corporate credit card without her knowledge. It was with an excess of adrenaline that I met Sandy Baker Jr. at the prearranged spot: a particularly shabby and generic automatic teller machine near a diseased tree.
My hands were quaking as I slipped the stiff rectangle of fiduciary plastic into the appropriate slot. The source of said quaking was twofold: first, what right had I? Could my actions get my wife fired, or even jailed? Second, my attempt at entering the personal identification number represented the sheerest of guesswork. Perhaps an entirely random number had been assigned by my wife’s company. I chose to assume, however, that this card shared the “PIN” of all our other cards and accounts. (An interesting side note: I almost just told you what it is before deleting it! That is how at ease I feel with you, dear reader, with whom I share so many dreams and goals. But that is no reason to throw caution to the wind entirely, as I am sure you will agree. Suffice it to say, the number bears a poignant romantic association for my wife and myself.)
Luckily (or unluckily) my marital instinct paid off to the tune of three hundred big ones. Sandy Baker Jr. could not possibly have been more delighted.
In contrast, my wife’s response to this tale was not a good-humored one.
“You’ve never kept secrets from me,” she said. After a pause, she added, “Have you?”
I suddenly realized what my breach of trust had done! It had thrown everything good and true into question.
She was also upset because a credit-card payment was imminent, and where was this extra money supposed to come from? She did not say it, for she is the least cruel of persons, but the implication—whether intended or not—was that no extra money might be had from any source, thanks to my unemployment and despair.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You let this vagabond into our home? And he took pictures of our cats? What else did he take? Do I need to inventory the china? I can’t believe you let this character near our cats!”
I tried to soothe her by explaining that Sandy Baker Jr. had never set foot over our sacred threshold, that our feline transactions had been entirely digital in nature and had involved just one of our cats—the one that seemed destined for movie stardom. I had sent him a wide selection of good photos of our potential movie-star cat over Facebook. He needed the money in order to have them printed out on the proper high-quality photographic stock expected in Hollywood, with the required amount of “resolution” and “pixels,” and a professionally “pumped-up” kitty résumé printed on the back in an acceptable font. Multiple copies and shipping costs were other considerations. We had both agreed after some deliberation that Priority Mail with an official notification of receipt was the way to go.
My wife was having none of it. “I don’t like it when somebody takes advantage of my sweetie,” she said. Her brown eyes flashed with exciting danger! She expressed her idea that we should “march right down to that bar” and demand the money back.
I begged her to reconsider. I was willing to admit that maybe Sandy Baker Jr. had made a fool of me. But I could not stomach the idea that my foolishness—if such it was—might be made manifest in front of the crowd at the Green Bear, of which I had come to think as a kind of peaceful sanctuary. From what? That is a difficult question. Not from home, surely, where my cats and wife reside. From life? Better not to spend one’s life in constant analysis, as proven by the bestseller in which Malcolm Gladwell tells us, “Just do things without thinking about it like the great geniuses of history, who never thought about anything, and soon enou
gh you will be a genius like me (and by implication, your cat will be a movie star if you have one).” Action! Action is the key.
“We could invite him over here,” I said.
“That’s it!” my wife agreed. “Under some pretext.”
My expression revealed that I did not know quite what she was getting at.
“And he was never seen again,” she said.
We laughed, enjoying my wife’s dark sense of humor.
“We could invite him over to dinner,” I said. “Keep it private and friendly.”
“And if he doesn’t fess up, then whack!” my wife said. “Hold on.”
She left the dining room, where we had been seated, and I heard her going down the hallway to our bedroom, one of the cats humorously following and making a cute little sound characteristic of it: myuh-myuh-mew-M’YOW!
I felt my capillaries become chilled with fright. I knew what she was going after. And sure enough, she returned, slapping it methodically against her palm: an old-fashioned policeman’s “sap,” its leather glowing a deep, warm black with age.
“Nobody messes with my sweetie,” she said.
I beg your pardon. Do you know what a sap is? It is a small, light instrument for concussive purposes, a deceptively sweet-looking little club with lead concealed in the “business end.” You would not wish your tender brains to come up against one! This particular weapon my wife kept under the bed in case of intruders. It was an antique, belonging to her great-grandfather, a beat cop in Mobile, Alabama, who died of a heart attack at an extremely young age one day as he pounded his beat. There are a number of fascinating stories about him, particularly his death and its aftermath.
Oh, this is just what we need, groans the burdened reader. Genealogy. I reckon it is the only subject we haven’t covered yet in this tedious encyclopedia of human knowledge in its cosmic entirety.
To which I would counter with what has been proven again and again in many major studies: writing is at heart a therapeutic practice, meant to make the writer feel better. How often as a teenager did you scrawl a poem in your loose-leaf notebook, just to get something off your chest? Can it truly be that you have lost your sense of youthful innocence? If your main hope is to turn your cat into a movie star, you should hold such feelings tightly to your breast.
Movie Stars Page 9