by Mark Richard
THE CLOSEST BAR TO YOUR PENTHOUSE is across the street on the beach, the Thunderbird Lounge, and it suits you too. It’s an off-season nexus of the strip, a strictly locals place. There’s the marine biologist moonlighting as the bartender, the undercover cop with the hash pipe, the magician who picks pockets off season, the pretty registration clerk who sleeps with entire visiting hockey teams, the rubber auto parts satyr, the commercial fisherman who tells you there’s a Carolina logger in Moby Dick, there’s the enormous leonine bookie, there’s the owner of a nearby bar whose arms are always broken in casts because he can’t pay his gambling debts, the two gay busboys who will later be convicted of murder, the Navy nurse junkie, the tragic widower, the duck-carving hero of Guadalcanal, the mob boss’s son trying to become a fireman, the doe-eyed harelip girl who always wants to sleep with you, and there’s old Fitz, the driving instructor who has his own shamrock shot glass in a special place behind the bar to steady his nerves after a day riding shotgun with old Filipino women students on the expressway.
There’s Witcher, whom you meet the first day you set foot in the place, who entered talking about having approached a single-lane, one-mile bridge over a swampy river hauling a repossessed double-wide house just as a big rig tandem log truck was entering the other end, no possible way for both trucks to pass on the ancient rust-cornered span, but neither seeming to back down, and Witcher saw the log truck and the log truck saw Witcher and they began accelerating toward each other, both blaring their big diesel bassoons, big Witcher working through the gears of his tractor truck, seeing the log truck beginning to furiously flash its headlights but not slow down either, both barreling down to the point of impact in the middle of the bridge, Witcher saying he just kept pouring it on, and you could tell he didn’t know why, he was just led to do it. You’ve crossed that bridge many times and had ridden a tugboat beneath it, in fact it’s where the tugboat once sank and a steamboat was overturned by a white tornado on a full-moon night years before. Witcher said just before the point of almost head-on impact he flung himself across the seat …
It is here in the story Witcher lifts the water glass of vodka to his lips and drinks about half of it and sets it back down, and the bar allows the warm rush of the alcohol to settle his nerves before someone says, For God’s sake, what happened?!
He says the first thing that happened was that the mirrors on either side of his cab were ripped off: the right side by the girders of the bridge and the left side by the leading edge of an oversized load of loblolly pine logs. The edge of the logs must have then caught the leading edge of the repossessed part of the double-wide home because he felt a shearing feeling and the noise of a great impact as the boarded-up wall to the transported living room was ripped off, its pieces exploding into space and fluttering down into the river, and then there was nothing for a long time, or what seemed like a long time, and he realized the truck was still racing forward, and he didn’t know if it was going off the side of the bridge or still barreling down the bridge, so he decided to sit up and get back behind the wheel, so he did, and the truck was flying across the bridge at a great speed about to veer and plunge off the bridge, so Witcher grabbed the wheel while sneaking a look in the rearview mirror, where the log truck’s brake lights were lit through braked-wheel skidding smoke betraying that the driver had lost his nerve or had become confounded, and Witcher also saw cheap living room furniture, a fold-out couch and an ottoman (you remember his saying ottoman) and other crap blown out on the bridge road, and he realized he’s lost the inboard and maybe outboard walls to the repossessed double-wide he was hauling, but he had not lost his nerve, had driven what remained of the repossession and delivered it as it was to the double-wide dealer boasting low, low prices just outside of Suffolk, had gotten in his car and driven straight to the Thunderbird, and there he stood finishing the bottom half of his straight water glass of vodka, no ice, a Pepsi chaser.
You will remember the story because you have a reporter’s notebook in your back pocket and because afterward you go in the bathroom and you write it down sitting on the lid of a toilet, thinking, Here I am, I have found a home among some of God’s other special children.
THE SECRETARY AT THE PAPER knew to call the T-bird bar phone when anyone was looking for you, either there or the putt-putt golf course down on Pacific. You were usually at either place in the late afternoon. It’s where your mother calls you one night from a neighbor’s house in your hometown. Your father has been drinking and listening to his jazz records, and she asked him if he wanted her to put his dinner on a plate, as usual, because he was doing what he usually did when he came home, opening up the freezer, putting ice in a glass, and from the stove she would hear the noise she said she always dreaded, the clink of his flying tiger class ring tinking against the bottle of bourbon as he grabbed it from under the sink. Your sister, a teenager now, has told you she couldn’t bring friends home because she wasn’t sure what they’d find. This night, a rainy night, your father has grabbed them both by their arms and thrown them out the front door into the rain, slammed the door, loudly locked it, and turned off the front porch light.
You drain your glass at the T-bird and get in your big green Caprice with the 350 engine, and you burn up the forty-seven miles to your house. You break into your house and grab your father up out of his stuffed chair, where he looks up pleasantly surprised at first to see you, Coltrane blaring, and you grab him by his arm and throw him out the front door, but he’s in pretty good shape from working on the lake property, and the time you remember as being almost the last time you see your father will be this time when you’re pushing each other around in front of your house in the rain and wrestling down in the mud.
UNDER THE LAW, YOUR father is entitled to anything he has brought into the marriage. When he backs up a truck to your mother’s house to claim what is his, you have sent your mother and sister away, and you have two friends there to back you up, one is David, the son of The Preacher, the other is George, a son of the Commonwealth’s Attorney. Your father takes the old carved beds and marble-topped dressers and big furniture, dining room table, dressers, plus all the hand-painted vases and china and silver and pretty much anything else of value except a couple of things you have hidden off-site, a clock your grandfather said was yours one day, a .30-.30 Winchester your grandfather used to hunt with in the East Texas bayous, and an aluminum ladder you use to put up Christmas wreaths on the front of the house.
He’s angry when he can’t find it all. Then he says something you don’t understand. He tells you he’s hauling your trash. You just shrug and say, Get your stuff and go. When the moving crew he has hired, big thug-looking guys who seem to specialize in this type of thing, get impatient toward the end waiting for your father to find the things you’ve hidden, your father finally comes around to the porch where you’re waiting for him to leave. He puts out his hand to shake, and you look at it as if it were a poisonous snake and go in the house.
IT WASN’T EASY BEING YOUR FATHER. A perfectionist with an imperfect child, a son who avoided you, a son who would have preferred to live across the street at the Baptist parsonage. A son who was a stick-figure kid mostly on crutches scared of ice and wet tile.
The good thing about your father being a perfectionist was that he was paralyzed by his perfectionism. Here is a Father Illustration: your father would do all the research on how to do some home repair or home improvement, he would research all the best places to buy the materials he would need, he would buy all the special tools he would need to accomplish the task, and then, afraid of not being able to make the repair, the addition, the improvement perfectly, he would not do any of it at all, so that when he leaves your mother’s house, he leaves the garage full of the materials and tools needed to do all the things that have always needed to be done around the house but have never been done by him.
In the months to come, you scrape and caulk, prime and paint while your mother refurnishes the house with things she buys at
yard sales and things given to her by friends. She gets a job working midnight shifts as a switchboard operator at the hospital. Your sister needs to look at colleges, so you and friends of the family take her, even though there is no money for tuition. Your mother is not worried, she says God will provide.
THE FURNITURE IN YOUR BEACHFRONT PENTHOUSE is an old broken table, a desk in the living room, a bookcase your grandfather made, and an old four-poster you scavenged from the ex-girlfriend’s barn when you lived on the Chesapeake Bay. When your mother and sister come to visit, you have to wheel over a couple of cots you borrow from housekeeping at the Thunderbird.
At the T-bird Lounge, they play the States Game between Memorial Day and Labor Day. There’s a large Rand McNally map pinned behind the bulletin board on the back of the swinging door behind the bar. If you get a girl from a state, you get to put one of those little stars like you are awarded in Sunday school for attendance; everybody chooses his own color. At the end of the summer, whoever had the most states wins a prize. Because of Virginia’s physical proximity, by midsummer everybody has already gotten Pennsylvania and Ohio. You sit next to a girl and say, So, where are you from? and she says, Ohio, and you turn to your buddy next to you and say, Damn it, I already got Ohio, and you pick up your drink and move along. On your way home one night you see a friend desperate for Nevada in the front seat of his car, and the buttock flesh and arms pressed against the windshield look like a fat man changing clothes in a phone booth.
In spring, there are amphibious assaults on weddings at the country clubs on the back waterways of your beach town, and Witcher has a nice boat, and you all wait until the reception is in full swing before you dock quietly at the end of a private yacht slip. Before the mother of the bride can buttonhole you as to who you are, you’ve had a drink and dance and have made off with a bridesmaid in Witcher’s boat to tie her to your bedposts with the pretty ribbons she’s pulled from her hair.
In summer, a girl from New York comes down on weekends, and you’re not really sure what she does, she works for a fashion designer, she says, and she packs light, mainly a handful of bathing suits. For you, that summer becomes a big blue star over the state of New York.
Fall is the Whiskey Rodeo. The Navy and the local police want to demonstrate the effects of drinking and driving, so they set up a large municipal parking lot with a twisting course marked by orange cones. They invite the local media to come down and participate. About a half dozen reporters will drink whiskey, wine, or beer over a certain time and then drive their own cars through the obstacle course, all the while the news groups will tape it for a segment. You see the woman who always gets green just riding the helicopters out to the aircraft carriers when the media would go meet a returning battle group. There’s the photographer who has volunteered from the daily paper who always had a joint to share before you got on the helicopter. You decide to take your drinks in shots of bourbon. The art department has painted a landing strip on the hood of your car as if it were an aircraft carrier and stenciled the number 69 on the door like the aircraft carrier Eisenhower. You said sure they could do it, not thinking they would.
People at the Whiskey Rodeo are crunching orange cones even after one drink. But not you. You have downed five shots and run the course perfectly. That’s the end of the demonstration, they say. You say one more, so you pour yourself a big shot and down it and announce that you’re going to do the course backward. The police make a move to stop you from getting in your car, but you get in, laughing. Of course, you flatten all the orange cones, and a couple of people have to jump out of the way. Okay, fun’s over, somebody says, and instead, you do a really big doughnut in the parking lot, honking the horn and waving for the one news camera still rolling, and then you leave the parking lot heading south on General Booth Boulevard.
Down the road you realize you’re the only one laughing. You look in your rearview, there are no blue lights yet, but probably there will be soon. It’s getting dark, so you decide to floor it out to a subdivision that is still being built by a crooked developer who once boasted that he had never read a book in his life. You get out there, and there’s a house lit up, and it’s a Model Open House somebody has forgotten about and the garage door is open, so you pull in and hit the garage door down. You go in the living room and the kitchen with the fake fruit in the bowl and the stack of flyers and wait, and nothing happens. You go into a bathroom off the laundry room to piss, and there’s a water snake in the toilet, or else somebody didn’t flush a long, perfectly coiled turd with a head and eyes. It spooks you, and to this day you don’t know what it was. When the timers shut down the lights in the Model Home, you creep back to your penthouse, go to the T-bird, and watch the eleven o’clock news with Brian, the marine biologist bartender, and are grateful to see the Whiskey Rodeo didn’t make the news.
THE PROBLEM WITH ASKING GOD for signs is that He sends them. You drive along a country road late at night and see a little cross atop a little church lit with a spotlight and you say, Okay, if You are real, make that light go out, and the light goes out. Shooting stars are too easy, especially on the water. Even that one time you are pissing off a dock in Marathon and you say, I really need a sign, and something falls out of the sky so bright you can read a newspaper, and you know you didn’t imagine it because your wheelhouse radio bursts alive with chatter: What the hell was THAT?
After the Whiskey Rodeo, you are strongly encouraged by the police to make amends. You know what that means. You don’t want to be stopped down in the dark part of the county in April by a beach cop with an August attitude and when you roll down the window he says, I’m thinking of a number between one and ten, and he’s studying his thumbnail, working the little banged-up places on the end of his unsheathed billy club, while his partner watches for any headlights that might come along before they pull you out of the car and adjust your attitude.
So for your sins you are assigned to Crash and Burn. You’ll ride with rescue squads who pick up the pieces of the young sailors when the fleet comes in and they take their six months of paychecks and buy overpowered cars and motorcycles. They call the head-trauma wing of the Norfolk hospital the House That Honda Built. You’ll ride and report what you see.
At the first accident scene, you can smell the beer in all the blood. It’s hard to tell how many guys are in the accordion of car that missed the dogleg turn off Oceana Boulevard and plowed right into the bull’s-eye of the hazard sign. They’re all dead. You can’t look but you do and see a bloody arm coming out of a T-shirt that seems to be coming out of the glove compartment. There are some skin magazines on the folded-up backseat floor, and they look as though they might be gay magazines, but you can’t tell and you don’t care, it doesn’t matter, they’re all dead.
The next is in broad daylight. You go to one of those faceless Navy housing ghettos, and there’s the young girl hysterical at the front door: The snake is eating my baby! The snake is eating my baby! It’s the home of one of those asshole guys with the ninja crap on the walls and a boa constrictor or some large snake in a tank, and he leaves on deployment and gives his wife careful instructions on how to feed the goddamned snake, she’s supposed to take live mice and dip them in vitamin powder and feed them to the goddamned snake, and she can’t do it, who can blame her, and the snake gets hungry and pops itself out of its tank and makes its way over to the crib. The snake gets in there and unhinges its jaw and starts to try to swallow the baby headfirst when the mother comes in from the neighbor’s laundry and the baby is screaming with a snake on its head like a skullcap with a length of yellow and brown tail. Nobody knows what to do. One of the EMTs is a woman who tries to calm the woman and almost faints herself, the other EMT holds the snake’s neck as if he can squeeze the top of the baby’s head out of the snake’s mouth. Suddenly you’re a Boy Scout, and you take down one of the asshole’s ceremonial swords, and you tell the EMT to get out of the way and he does, and you chop off the goddamned snake’s head, and the baby is go
ing to be fine except for some small punctures in its scalp after they cut the snake’s head off of it, but the worst part is when the snake’s body goes off twisting and banging headless into the furniture and knocks over the baby changing table and twists all around it, dying.
What do you want? your boss asks you one night in a strip club. You don’t know what you want; you seem to have everything you need—job, girlfriend, car, bar, beach. Historically, as with the realtor, when your employer asks you this question, it’s always like a sign from God that you’re about to move on.
When your employer springs this question on you, historically you’ve not been smart enough to ask for a raise, you take the question literally, and you think you might want to live in New York and be a writer, even though you’ve not really thought this out and you’re a little surprised to think it to yourself at that moment.
At that moment outside the strip club you sit in your boss’s car, and you haven’t said what it is you want yet. While you’re thinking, a black man comes out of the strip club dressed all in black leather, you’d noticed him in the strip club, mainly because he wouldn’t take off his black motorcycle helmet and they’d asked him to leave. He makes a big show of pulling on his black gloves and getting on his big black motorcycle and kicking it started and loudly revving up the engine, but something engages and the motorcycle gets away from the motorcyclist. Suddenly the black guy is driving his big black motorcycle up onto the hood of some redneck’s pristine Trans Am muscle car parked beside him, the motorcyclist putting his front wheel through the redneck’s windshield, where it looks permanently stuck. It is one of the most incredible things you have ever seen as the black guy tries to get his motorcycle off the hood of this redneck’s car and you and your boss, who has become one of your best friends, are laughing as hard as you will ever laugh in your entire life, and the only thing you want and the one thing you have wanted since is to always be able to laugh that hard again.