by William Lobb
The
Third Step
William Lobb
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters and
events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons living or
dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Gatekeeper Press
3971 Hoover Rd. Suite 77
Columbus, OH 43123-2839
Copyright © 2016 by William Lobb
All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it
may be sold or reproduced in any form without permission.
ISBN: 9781619844827
elSBN: 9781619844834
Printed in the United States of America
I’m dedicating this book to:
Hector Luis, “Pancho,” my first and best partner in crime . . .
There is a lot of Luis in Frankie. I hope you found that better place, my brother.
Lori, that girl from 1972 . . .
To everyone who struggles with addiction; the ones who survived, and those who lost the fight.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: One Morning
Chapter Two: Turf’s Lovely Tavern
Chapter Three: Life After Pam—A Beginning
Chapter Four: A Visit To Grandma’s
Chapter Five: The Old Man’s Story
Chapter Six: Eddie
Chapter Seven: Reality
Chapter Eight: Diners And Demons And Alexandrine
Chapter Nine: Gone Smuggling
Chapter Ten: The Flying Gonzo Brothers Go To Work
Chapter Eleven: A Night In Virginia
Chapter Twelve: Stones
Chapter Thirteen: Back To NYC
Chapter Fourteen: Alone In The Woods
Chapter Fifteen: Heading Home-Old Friends—Dead Friends
Chapter Sixteen: Back To The World
Chapter Seventeen: Eddie’s Wife
Chapter Eighteen: Betty And The Working Life
Chapter Nineteen: Alexandrine’s House And The Nursing Home
Chapter Twenty: The Jersey Shore And Fat Joe
Chapter Twenty-one: The Death Of John Quarry
Chapter Twenty-two: Going To The Carnival
Chapter Twenty-three: Fourth Of July
Chapter Twenty-four: Life At The Carnival
Chapter Twenty-five: On The Road South
Chapter Twenty-six: A Motel
Chapter Twenty-seven: Running With The Demon
Chapter Twenty-eight: The Road To New Orleans
Chapter Twenty-nine: The Truth
Chapter Thirty: New Orleans
Chapter Thirty-one: Back To The Swamps
Chapter Thirty-two: The Face
Chapter Thirty-three: The First Steps—Zara
Chapter Thirty-four: Feeling Like Falling
Chapter Thirty-five: Everybody Into The Water
Chapter Thirty-six: Say It Again
Chapter Thirty-seven: Death Of Mr. Jones
Chapter Thirty-eight: The Homecoming
Chapter Thirty-nine: Goodbye, Grandma
Chapter Forty: Scene From An Italian Resturant
Chapter Forty-one: Frankie Meets Juan Carlos
Chapter Forty-two: Funeral For Frankie
Chapter Forty-three: The End-Part One
Chapter Forty-four: The End-Part Two
Chapter Forty-five: Moving On—An Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Big Frank
Bro Wix
Bill
Bobby
Christen
Diane
Donna Marie
Ellen
Jackie
Kelly
Kimberley
Lisa
Lisa
Lori
Lorie
Nancy Dee
Nancy
Natasha
Rob
Shari
Susan
Wendi
Wendy
You were all an immeasurably important part of the process. I decided listing your names alphabetically was best. Some of you simply supported my efforts, some of you practically wrote it with me.
One of you said “What are you waiting for, you need to write a book."
Introduction
Surprisingly, I find myself the storyteller now: a disconnected observer of a life and events clouded and twisted by the years, but forever etched in my memory. Maybe not so much etched as dropped there, much like beer cans tossed out a car window on a dark back road in the middle of the night.
It was challenging and engrossing and amusing to have been exposed to these people and events, but I was never directly impacted by them. That is how I work—I push, I poke, I manipulate, then I step back and watch. I always feign innocence. Trust me, I am anything and everything but innocent.
This was a world that, to many, perplexed and terrified. This same world always attracted me, an inexplicable draw, a place of comfort in the chaos. I kept my distance. In this iteration, this time through, I was just another Irish kid from a working class family in this town who spent my days and nights in this bar, the Lovely, growing from a punk kid to a young man to an old man, all within the confines of this place. This place where nothing ever changes: the beer is cold, the whiskey cheap and bitter, and the stories grow more colorful over time.
Now, as I find myself aged and failing, the years of youth and middle age have run into a faded blur. There is no way to make peace with those squandered years. That’s ok, I don’t make peace. I look around at these dingy walls covered in beer signs and cigarette ads, “art” that looks like it was salvaged from a sidewalk dumpster, and finally, sadly, my gaze stops in the mirror behind the bottles of booze. In that ugly mirror, I see the old man who has lived his life, spent his precious moments, here in this place.
My purpose in this life, this place, I suppose, is to relate this story as it was told to me, or as I directly observed it, growing over time to be much like folklore—a story of some madman who spent many nights sitting right here next to me. Frankie, the guy I am going to tell you about, was a lot like me, cut from the same cloth. The key difference: he left and went out into the world and got drunk. I stayed here and got drunk.
I’ve often wondered whether I was a friend to this guy, Frankie, or just another character in a bizarre and dangerous play, an observer on the sideline watching the clock run out. Frankie used to call me Romeo, a left-handed compliment. He was the stud, the ladies’ man. We all just lived in his shadow and told his stories, like correspondents from some distant war. I won’t reveal myself to you now. I’m known by many names, changing through time. I am sure by the end of the story, you will know who I am.
This all happened in late 1981 and 1982, a simpler time for many, but not for all. Addiction and attraction and its complications seem to be timeless, as does a man’s attempt to find, understand, and categorize this thing called “God.” I’ll try to report these events as I saw them or as they were later revealed to me. It could have been a simple life and a simple story, but things kind of got out of control.
Chapter One:
One Morning
Frankie sits on the edge of the bed. He feels like he’s bleeding. His destroyed rib cage screams at Frankie in its own voice.
There is an ache in him that starts deep inside his emptiness. He possesses a spirit that echoes a hollow, mournful wail, a lost wind blowing through a burned-out landscape. The ache of this emptiness infects every muscle in his body unti
l he becomes the ache, the pain, until nothing else remains.
He blows his nose into his hand and spits on the dirty carpet. His feet touch the floor, and he begins to stand.
It still rages, a fire from long ago, from when he was a younger man—sadly, not that long ago—from a time before he was broken. Now he is just smoldering embers and ash, but his is a fire that could rage with the slightest breeze.
Some days, he wishes he’d find the one who could cut him down for good and end this once and for all. That last, perfectly placed, cutting blow, but for now he’s got to piss.
He walks out onto the hot concrete stoop and smells the city summer air. A mix of summer flowers and diesel exhaust and a filthy gray stench fills the air from the factories that surround him.
He reaches into his rolled-up t-shirt sleeve and takes out his smokes, pulling one from the pack with his teeth in one smooth motion. His elegance is legendary. He takes a long draw, starts to cough, then to gag and wheeze. Resting his arms on the metal railing, he watches the sweat drip from his forehead and onto the concrete, puddling in designs that fascinate him. He leans there—coughing, smoking, and sweating—and silently prays that someone will come along and start him up.
Just one word, give me a reason. Today, like most days, Frankie has declared war on the world. It’s a silent war; no one notices. Anyone passing only sees a broken, hung-over gagging shadow, who saw his best days pass many, many days ago. No challengers approach. Frankie wins the day by default and walks on down the stairs.
It’s sweltering already, a perfect day, hot as Hell. The sun has barely risen and the sweat is running off his forehead and down onto his t-shirt.
He needs the gym. He needs the fight, anyone, just to connect, to work this out. He needs it every day. It never goes away. There is no release, only this constant need for one more. One more. One more any-fucking-thing, but today it’s just one more fight.
The thought of a peaceful life is terrifying, at best. Peace is death. He needs the struggle, the only connection he knows. When he feels the contact, when he feels a rib break, when he sees the blood fly and tastes it, he knows hes alive. It’s an affirmation. Without that, he is simply cold and numb and void.
A lot of people remember his times in the church. There were two distinct tries: God, how we prayed for an end to those days. They did end, ended with a vengeance that could only be spawned within the twisted wreck of old broken parts and songs and lies and vodka and pills that comprised Frankie. He seemed to find that terrifying peace there, in church. It confused him and angered him.
Sadly, and this is largely unknown: Frankie thinks he is in league with the Devil. It is not a joke to him; get him alone one night, especially after a fight, or when he is drunk and ask him. His list of reasons and rationale are impressive. He makes you wonder. He’ll tell you he is a heartless, unlovable, cold bastard and anyone who thinks differently is a fool who should be taken for all he is worth.
He did love that old woman, Cora, and the old woman would disagree; she loved her boy. She was old, very old, died at one hundred. Frankie thought she was crazy, if for no other reason than that she loved him and trusted him. She lived in an old house that should have been condemned. It supposedly predated the Revolutionary War. The old woman had a piano in a room of this house, a room heated by a propane stove that always smelled like it was about to explode. It was cold in that house, and always smelled bad. The kitchen floor was so crooked and sloped so badly that visitors swore the entire room was about to fall off the rest of the house. A full cup of coffee could not be set on her kitchen table. The floor slanted so much that the coffee would spill over the side.
Everything there had a purpose and a place to Frankie. That place was his home.
Even when it was clean, the table with the red Formica top and the rusted chrome legs looked like stuff had been spilled on it. A 1940s era stainless-steel-and-plastic mess, it was a thing of beauty to him. As a young boy, he would sit at this table and drink his coffee, with condensed milk and sugar, as he listened to the crazy old woman beat on that poor piano with those skinny, arthritic hands. Her knuckles were the size of walnuts, her fingers long and skinny, but she would beat that poor piano to death as she wailed those church songs. She would sing in a voice that sounded like a choking cat or a screech owl in the night, and he would sit there for hours and drink his coffee and listen. This was church, all that ever worked for Frankie.
The hot, dry summer passed and ended fairly uneventfully, sadly. Frankie always looked forward to the summer and managed to miss it as it flew by. His time passed drunkenly and slowly in a ceaseless parade of hangovers and benders.
The thought did cross his mind, from time to time, that this was no way to live. Not the way the old lady would have wanted him to live. Those thoughts ended as quickly as they appeared.
Chapter Two:
Turf’s Lovely Tavern
There was a time when he was younger that Frankie wished he would die, that someone or something would end it accidentally. Frankie was a goddamned master at finding himself in perilous situations, none of which were ever planned or his fault. He was the poster boy for chaos theory: shit happens.
A lot of people thought he had a death wish. He assured me one night that it was much darker than that. He could consume an impossible quantity of alcohol. The more he drank, the more he talked, the more I believed him. He almost got his wish one night—while looking down the barrel of a 30.06 hunting rifle.
This would be the story of Pam, Pamela Anne. She was stunning, looked a little like David Bowie. Pam wore her hair, in 1976, in what would become the ‘80s mullet. She was a trendsetter, a stoner beauty, voice of an angel and Frankie’s friend.
It was a cold autumn night. He walked into The Lovely, Turf’s Tavern, not so much an actual bar as a hole where he went to get drunk and high and listen to Lynard Skynard’s “Freebird” over and over and over on the jukebox, like that was the only song on the damn thing. Just that fucking song. Like, not one person in that hole could figure out another song to play, ever.
Turf’s was in some weird, angry time warp: every day, every night was the same as the last. The night always ended when Jack, the bartender, bought the last round. A shot of Jack Daniels that would invariably have Frankie running out the door puking between clenched teeth and then stumbling into the street, or—on more than one occasion—a snow bank, where he slept until the cops came along and dragged him home. To this day, he cannot stand that song, Jack Daniels Tennessee Sippin’ Whiskey, or anything about the South. At least, that’s what he says.
He saw Pam’s friend, Patty, sitting in the corner, drunk and crying. Empty shot glasses, once filled with cheap tequila, rolled around the table beside half-full bottles of Rolling Rock beer. Patty said Pam was with Billy, at his house. He was fucked-up on heroin. Frankie had been dreaming of a reason to kill this asshole since the day they met.
Kevin Tyson was his best friend at the moment. Most of Frankie’s relationships had a short shelf life. He got up and left Patty and walked over to Tyson and said he needed a ride to Goshen. Tyson was kind of an idiot and made some remark about picking up babes. Frankie took Tyson’s beer from the bar and Tyson, naturally, followed him like a small, stupid dog out the door.
Tyson’s car was a rolling garbage can, a 1960-something Dodge Dart. Beer cans and cigarette butts everywhere, rolling papers, baggies of weed. The ride to Goshen was perilous but uneventful. Tyson played some crap on a cassette tape he had made, proudly saying it was his “band,” and Frankie just looked out of the window and listened to the empty beer bottles clink in the back seat, a sound far less annoying than the sound of the band.
Pam was one of the hundred or so true loves of Frankie’s life, and he hated Billy Martin, it seemed, since birth, and a thousand-fold more now that he knew Pam was with him. Frankie lived by a bizarre and twisted personal moral code: everything Frank
ie did was okay, as long as he didn’t get caught and people didn’t fuck with his friends, especially Pam.
Billy’s family had a lot of money, old money. Not surprisingly, their house was a mansion. Frankie had never been inside the house before, had never even been invited. He had happily pissed in their driveway on more than one occasion.
Tyson and Frankie pulled up to the house. The driveway had a gate that was open. Tyson killed the headlights, and they drove to about fifteen feet from the front door.
The house was creepy, with only one light on in an upstairs window. A cold wind blew over the grounds, tossing dead leaves and sticks in the air. The trees were barren, the flowers in the gardens lining the driveway, dead.
Tyson said the place looked haunted. Frankie assured him that he was drunk and it was October, so the place should look haunted.
They needed a plan, fast. Frankie only wanted to get to Pam and Billy. He didn’t think much about a plan. He tried the door and found it was locked. He started screaming an endless string of obscenities at the top of his lungs. The only words Tyson could make out were “fucking,” “asshole,” and “motherfucker,” interlaced with words not nearly as clear.
Tyson looked up as he heard a window open, and he screamed at Frankie that someone had a gun. A couple of shots rang out, shattering the silence. Frankie bolted for Tyson’s Dodge. Looking back as he ran, he spotted three shadows standing in the open windows, all three firing at him.
He hit the dirt behind the Dodge and looked into the terrified eyes of his friend. When Tyson was scared, his eyes literally bulged. It was funny and freaky at the same time. On more than one occasion, Frankie had wondered if he hit Tyson in the back of his head, would they just pop out and roll around on the ground.
Relatively safe behind the Dodge, all the pair could say to each other was “who the fuck?” and “what the fuck?”
It didn’t take Frankie long to realize the shots had landed nowhere near him. Either the people in the house were too fucked up to be able to shoot, or they only wanted to scare them.