I wonder if I should try for disability, what with the rash and the probably broken ribs and undiagnosed mental illness.
We finish our lunch and I feel moderately queasy and write it off to not having had that big a meal in a long time.
Gus pays.
We head back to work.
Dr. Jolly is there.
Of course he is.
The office is abuzz with the latest news.
The even bigger windfall that Dr. Jolly has anticipated has finally happened. The Point, the biggest company in the world, has bought Dr. Jolly’s Godwater, effective immediately. We all get to work twice as many hours at half the pay and no benefits, even though the Point owns most of the hospitals in the area and is one of the leading pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Well, everyone except Gus.
He gets a very generous severance package and will never have to work again.
Then Dr. Jolly tells us he’s moving to Santa Cruz, California, and isn’t planning on coming back.
We get in Gus’s truck and he says, “Man, this sucks.”
“For me,” I say.
“Well . . . yeah.”
29
This Installment Plan Isn’t Working
Gus drops me off in the driveway. I ask if he wants to come in and hang out for a bit but he says he doesn’t want to because Dayton makes him nervous.
I gingerly get out of his truck and watch him back out onto the street because I’m in absolutely no hurry to go inside the house. His reverse lights illuminate my car. I’ve gotten so used to it being parked in the same place that I’ve stopped noticing it.
I only really notice it now because Bart’s big black truck is parked on top of it. I don’t even really see how this is possible except Bart’s truck is huge and my car is very small.
The driver’s side door to his truck pops open and he hops out just as Gus speeds away.
I hear the creaking door of Mapes’s house open and he struggles down his porch steps with his girth and two of his little yapping dogs.
“Go back inside, old man,” Bart says to him.
He doesn’t realize Mapes is only about half-there mentally, if that. Mapes just stares vacantly, Bart’s ire setting the little dogs to yipping.
I continue toward the house.
“I’ve come for the second installment,” Bart says.
“I don’t have it,” I say without thinking. That isn’t exactly true. I do have it. From Alice’s stash. But I’m going to need it for other things like food and possibly a place to live.
“Then I’m going to have to give you a beating,” he says.
My ribs still hurt from the beating the well gave me.
“A beating is not going to give me a greater ability to make money,” I say. Then I point to my car. “Much like removing my only mode of transportation didn’t give me the ability to make money. I’d probably have it to give you if I hadn’t spent so much on the bus and rideshares.”
“Not my problem,” Bart says. “I’m just doing a job.”
“Tell Jen to go fuck herself.”
“It’s not for Jen. It’s for Charles.”
Even the kid’s beloved uncle doesn’t know his fucking name.
“If you cared so much then you might get his name right. It’s Charle. Not Charles.”
“That’s what I fuckin said. Don’t make fun of me.”
I sigh and stand there. I have to bend over slightly in order to breathe.
“Okay,” I say. “Get it over with. Sure hope this rash isn’t contagious.”
But I’m not sure Bart knows what ‘contagious’ means.
He moves in and quickly beats me to the ground before kicking me over to the far side of the driveway.
I guess it hurts, and it’s certainly embarrassing, but now I just feel mostly numb.
He kicks until he’s panting and exhausted.
I lie there with my arms pulled around my head, half hoping I just pass out and wake up in a hospital somewhere.
Once finished, he spits on the back of my head and says, “Get that money, motherfucker.”
I hear his truck start up and roll over.
One of Mapes’s dogs hikes his leg and unleashes a torrent of piss onto the side of my face. Then it squats down and shits right next to me.
“Mapes, you old retard, get them things in the house.”
It’s the Monarch, reaching down and helping me to my feet.
I’m pretty sure I need medical attention.
He walks me toward the house. My vision is blurred and I’m grateful the Monarch is there to guide me.
He pulls a piece of paper from the door and says, “You seen this?”
I shake my head.
“It says these premises have been condemned and occupancy of this property is prohibited. You think them boys have been up to their pranks again?”
“No,” I rasp. “I’m pretty sure this is real.”
“Where ya gonna go?”
I point to the door. “In there.”
“You can stay at my place,” he says.
“I don’t want to walk that far.”
“Suit yourself then.” He hands me his half-drank can of beer. I don’t know where he produced it from until I remember the cup holder around his waist. “Might need this.”
I take it and practically fall through the front door. I think I close it behind me but maybe I don’t. I collapse onto the floor and fall asleep or possibly enter a mild coma.
30
Spent
“Come on. Get up.”
The voice is very authoritative. The shoe that I open my eyes far enough to see, the shoe nudging me into consciousness, is highly polished and very black. I reach out to rub its shiny surface.
“Don’t touch the shoes, you filthy creep.”
But the shoe was touching me, I think.
“Give me a second,” I say.
“We don’t have a second. We’ve got more important things to do. We got a call. We’ve got to escort you off the premises. Unless you want us to take you in for trespassing.”
“I signed a lease.” It sounds useless.
“You’ll have to take that up with the landlord. The city says no one’s supposed to be in here.”
I pull myself up onto my hands and knees and manage to straighten up and force myself woozily to my feet.
There are two cops standing just inside the doorway to the house.
“You been drinkin?” the second cop says, kicking over the half-empty can of beer.
“No,” I say. “That was the Monarch’s.”
“He’s probably a schizo,” the first cop says. “Let’s just get him out of here.”
They each grab one of my arms and I pull my feet off the ground. Not because I don’t want to leave the house but because it’s what people on cop shows always do and I don’t know when I’ll have another chance. At this point, my goals in life have diminished to about that extent.
I briefly panic about leaving the money behind but reassure myself I can get back in because I have the key. I’ll just wait until they’re gone.
“Don’t let us catch you back here again,” the first cop says.
The second cop nods toward the car and says, “That the piece of shit Bart mentioned?”
“Yeah,” the first cop says.
“We’ll get a tow truck out here for it.”
“This your car?” the first cop asks.
“Nope,” I lie.
“Better hope not,” he says. “I could write five different tickets for five different things right now.”
The second cop checks his watch. “We gotta go.”
“We’re gonna go get some free pussy and find a black guy to beat up on. It’s a big morning.”
I stand there until they drive away, not really knowing what to do. I reach into my pocket to grab my keys and notice my pants feel weird. I pull the waistband out and peer down, half expecting to see that the rash has mutated even further. Inste
ad, I find Alice’s money. I must have stuffed it all down my pants sometime during my coma.
I just leave it there.
I pull out my phone and shamble along the sidewalk.
There are a couple of other lone men shambling along the sidewalk on the other side of the street. I’ve seen people like this regularly since moving back to Dayton and assumed they were all some form of drug addict. Now I see them differently. Maybe they’re people like me.
What kind of person is that?
A loser.
A failure.
People who’ve spent their arsenal and, having never hit the target, just given up.
I type ‘Team Klaus’ into the search bar.
Hadn’t that Mason guy mentioned something about them being in the area?
What was I going to do if they were?
My life has felt like a nightmare ever since leaving Callie.
I turn and look back at the house, the Monarch’s car still lodged in the front of it. I look at my own car, destroyed, a pile of metal shit on the curb.
If I could turn my back on all of my dreams, why couldn’t I turn my back on the nightmares too?
31
On The Road With Team Klaus
“What if it’s sold out?” Gus asks.
“This isn’t Europe, dude. There’s no way it’s going to sell out.”
Gus maneuvers his large truck into a narrow parking space in the Oregon District.
We get out of the truck and light cigarettes because smoking is great and we don’t know how long the line at the club is going to be. It’s probably not really a club. More like a bar. ‘Venue’ is probably the most generous term.
The night is warm and breezy, the sun just now disappearing from the sky. It’s around nine and, even though that’s when the doors open, I know we’re probably here way too early. Team Klaus rarely performs before midnight unless it’s at some kind of private event. Although they have gotten a little older. Maybe they’ve changed.
“So,” Gus says, “it’s really been two years since you’ve seen her, huh?”
“Yep.”
“No contact even?”
I think about the mysterious calls I get. Is this considered contact? Are they even from Callie?
“Nope,” I say.
We stop at the back of the line. It’s only about fifteen people deep. Once we stop moving and are forced to stand still, I have to bend over a little to feel remotely comfortable. It feels like my insides are bruised. The only good thing about the beatings received from the well and Bart is that the intense, almost never-ending pain has taken my mind off the rash.
A homeless man with a massive growth on his lower lip shuffles up to us.
“Gotta smoke?”
“Sure, man.” Gus pulls the pack from his pocket and hands the guy two.
“Got a phone I can use?”
“Sorry, man.” We both have phones but both feel this is asking too much.
“Fuck you then!” the guy says. “I ain’t got nobody to call no way.” Then he shuffles a little down the sidewalk to begin the exact same encounter with someone else.
“Even the homeless people in Dayton are assholes,” Gus says.
As we draw closer to the door, I notice Team Klaus’s opening act is a band called The Skelebongs.
“Man,” I say, “I’ve been waiting a long time to see The Skelebongs.”
Gus smiles a little and says, “Hey, they’re from Twin Springs. They were at my party the other night.”
“I guess I won’t make fun of them then,” I sigh.
“You can,” Gus says. “If it makes you feel better, I guess.”
But it won’t. Not now. It’s this final thing that makes me realize I’ve lost Gus as a best friend. There would have been a time when trading jabs about a band called The Skelebongs would have been the secondary focus of our evening, running closely behind the main reason we were there. And if the main event turned out to be a dud, we wouldn’t have been able to talk about anything but The Skelebongs. I’m not really sure if Gus has changed or if I’m just an immature dick.
Gus pays for both of us and we enter the venue. There are some tables lining a mostly open floor, a small stage pushed into a corner in front of a large plate glass window.
We go to the bar and order beers and take them out to the patio so we can resume smoking. Thank god for party patios. Before walking out, I glance around to see if I can spot Callie. I don’t. And I’m not sure if I’m ready to see her yet or not. I know I won’t see her on the smoking patio. There are a lot of bands that hang out drinking and smoking before they go on. Team Klaus is not such a band. I guess they really can’t be if they want to preserve their mystery. Especially not if they want people to keep thinking they’re guys.
I find an empty table with a couple of chairs on the patio.
“I think I need to sit down,” I say.
Even when I’m standing, it feels like my body is trying to assume some kind of sitting position.
We sit down and Gus pulls out his phone and says, “I’m gonna see if I can get some more people here.”
“I’m going to think about all the horrible turns my life has taken,” I reply.
It wasn’t that the end of things with Callie was the beginning of all the horribleness. It was just that my time with her was like a blissful hiatus from the horribleness. It was my fault it ended. As of right now, it is the single biggest regret of my life.
They were on a tour of the West Coast. It started in Idaho and made its way over to Washington, Oregon, and down through several cities in California. They played to increasingly large crowds and it was to culminate with three nights in L.A., where the goal was to draw some attention from a certain respectable indie label with huge distribution that had been putting out exactly the stuff they had been making. Everything was going well. Everything was working out exactly like the band wanted it to.
Apparently I was deathly afraid of even other people’s success.
Intimacy on the road was difficult for Callie and me. It was rare we had a moment to ourselves. And when we did she was either too anxious about the show she was going to perform or too tired from the show they’d just performed to really be present. The noise and the travel were too much for me to focus on writing. It was a struggle to even concentrate on reading a book. The anxiety would take hold and my mind would go to dark places. The literal definition of ‘anxiety’ is probably ‘the state of being anxious.’ I would define it as simply exploring the worst-case scenario of any given situation. I was an expert at that. That was one thing I had never failed at.
Rachel was Blue Klaus’s little sister. She was ‘taking a break’ from college, helping Team Klaus to sell merchandise and get up and on the road in the morning. I’d never met her before that tour. We ended up spending a lot of time together. We talked. Not about anything serious. I never got the impression either one of us had any feelings for each other at all, except as chummy acquaintances. In other words, there was nothing in me that warned me to stay away from her. Not that she was predatory. Just a lonely, sheltered girl with hormones bouncing to the moon and back.
It was the second to last night in L.A. I had drunk way more than I had any previous night, ramping up before the last show in two days and the inevitable come down van ride across the lonely middle of the country before ending up back in Ohio to settle into relative normalcy, something I longed for but something that seemed impossibly far off.
I was headed down a long hallway to the restrooms. Rachel was on her way back.
“Hey,” she said, approaching me. “I know you.”
Then she pointed at me, moved in closer.
I gave her a dubious, squint-eyed look, as though I was trying to figure out who she was.
And we moved closer and closer, our eyes locking, neither one of us stopping.
I knew what was going to happen and knew it was wrong. Knew I didn’t even want it to happen. And there was that stupid, self-sa
botaging part of my brain that said, “Why not?”
Everything had been working out for Team Klaus, which meant they would end up getting signed to the label they wanted and would have to come back here to record and would have to embark on bigger, longer tours, and I’d be left behind. I was holding Callie back.
I didn’t stop mine and Rachel’s imminent collision. We kissed sloppily and got moderately handsy with one another. The whole thing lasted a minute at most.
The immediate regret was sobering.
I pushed her away and said, “I can’t. You understand? I really have to pee.”
She made a dejected face and slumped back against the wall.
I peed and told myself if she was still in the hall when I opened the door that I would stay in the restroom and hide from her.
When I opened the door to the restroom she was gone.
But the regret was still there.
I couldn’t not tell Callie this had happened. I could justify not telling her until we returned home because it would sound considerate, like I didn’t want to throw a pall over their last couple of shows. But, eventually, I would have to tell her. I would have to break her heart, even if it didn’t result in us breaking up. I would have to watch whatever faith and trust she had in me vanish like I’d watched most people’s expectations in me vanish.
I took the easy way out. Well, the easiest way out for the time being. I didn’t think what I was doing at the time would throw a shadow over the rest of my life.
Failure As a Way of Life Page 11