That's what I wanted to say. But I didn't. Instead I said, "I happen to love your daughter, too."
Frank said, "Well...," and hung up.
As it happens, that was the day I switched from buying fifths of vodka to quarts, which is really just a matter of efficiency but let's not pretend it wasn't symbolic. My AA sponsor, Dirk (his actual given name, believe it or not), characterized this as the day that I justified my alcoholism. Dirk was a high-flying wine journalist before crash-landing into the program, and claimed to know something about justification—drinking was his job, & a man's got to do his job, etc. Lucky for him he switched from the wine business to the saint business: Nowadays he runs a Chelsea soup kitchen and wanders the city draping blankets on homeless folks.
Naturally my whole Marshall Plan disintegrated when Stella left. Two days later I was behind the bar at the Exchange, pouring my famous "two for one" shots: one for you, two for me. I tried calling Stella again a few days later, hoping the cooling-off period might be finished. This time I got her mother and you can just imagine how that went. I had to put down the phone midway through the conversation due to me bursting into flames. I wrote Stella a few long letters—not quite this long—which went unanswered. Then one night at about three A.M. — that dread hour again; Christ, the blood & despair that comes spilling forth when that cuckoo sings thrice—I dialed California and in an exceedingly ugly & weepy stupor told her father that I had rights, I could see my daughter, Stella had kidnapped Speck, stolen her, that I was going to huff and puff and blow the fucking house down. "Ben," he said calmly, "you are your own worst enemy. You should go to bed."
"I know all about you, Frank," I said. Menacing-like, grrr.
He didn't seem to catch my drift. Or else he was a cooler tomcat than I'd expected. (I suppose I figured he'd instantly break down, cupping the phone and whispering in falsetto, "What? What? Oh God what do you know?") "Rest assured," is what he shot back, "that the pleasure is reciprocal."
In my pickled mental state all I managed to say was "Vice versa," which didn't make a lick of sense, not even as a pun. Frank sighed and hung up so I yelled at the dial tone until that escalating chime sounded and that nasally female phone-voice advised me that if I'd like to make a call please hang up etc. That call was enough to get a rise out of Stella, since about a week later I got a letter from her. Handwritten, dated, distressingly formal. The Cliffs Notes go like this: It was over. There was no use trying to fix it and the only thing I was feeling right now was guilt, which suggested that I wasn't completely inhuman but guilt was still, in the end, a selfish sentiment and thus more of the damn same. I could see Speck only after I'd completed care at an alcohol treatment facility and made other assorted penances, and Frank—"my father," she called him, not "Daddy"—had a team of lawyers prepared to enforce all that. Graciously, I suppose, she did admit that I wasn't solely to blame for everything, but said that, "quite simply," she needed to get on with her life and I needed to get on with mine. Signed it: Sadly, Stella.
***
So that's what we did. Sort of. Stella got on with her life, anyway. She finished her Ph.D. at Pepperdine and scored a teaching post at UCLA which she kept for several years before she met & married Jon, a public-schools administrator with two sons from a prior marriage, and then she opened a boutique nursery in Pasadena which is apparently quite successful. (Snazzy website, anyway. A hundred different varieties of camellia in stock.) I know all this because for a few years in the '90s I was on their Christmas-letter list—an error, I felt sure. Due to those letters, I know that Jon—the last name is Kale, like the spinach; hence, I've always envisioned him as a cross between John Cale of Velvet Underground fame and the Jolly Green Giant—is fond of flyfishing and mountaineering though a knee injury in '96 or '97 put the kibosh on the latter. He's also an amateur wine collector, so their family vacations tended to follow the route blazed by my AA sponsor Dirk when he was sipping himself silly around the globe: Chile, France, Portugal, New Zealand. One Christmas letter mentioned—ostentatiously, I thought—that "the enclosed wine cork" was a happy memento of that year's travels, but my letter didn't come with a cork. I even fetched the envelope out of the trash to make sure. Where was my goddamn cork? So perhaps my presence on the list wasn't an error after all. I imagined the two of them debating whether or not to tuck the cork in with my letter. "No," I could hear Stella saying, "he'll probably eat it."
And me? By now you know the bones of that story. The hardest part was what to do with Speck's disposable diapers, the ones Stella had left. There must have been fifty of them, stacked neatly in a wicker bin under the changing table. Charity Hospital couldn't be bothered with such a puny donation. I was sure that orphanages still existed but because they were no longer called orphanages I didn't know how to look them up in the phonebook. The local battered women's shelter seemed suspicious of my offer, as if my fifty Pampers were a Trojan horse that would grant me entry to the shelter so that I could knock around some broads. It was a year before I mustered the cold strength to put them out with the trash.
Just as Stella demanded, I did enter an alcohol treatment facility: a shabby but sweetly bucolic place upstate where vast herds of deer grazed on the lawns and where I once saw a bear though no one believed me. By that time, however, Speck was already out of college. In the long interim I made a somewhat harrowing mess of myself and decided, without really deciding, to act like the monster I presumed down-deep I was. Or that Stella thought I was, same difference. Shortly before I left New Orleans, I was fooling around with an equally alky divorcée named Sandra ("Sahn-dra"). She claimed to have been a model once but that seemed dubious from a visual point of view. She also claimed, repeatedly, to have blown Mick Jagger during the Rolling Stones'"Tour of the Americas" in '75, but, you know, same doubts. We'd float from bar to bar fighting and losing our shoes, like in one of those love stories from Bukowski. One night, while she was doing to me what she claimed to have done for Mick, I withdrew at the last second to do precisely what I'd seen those chuckling neanderthals do in that video of Felix the Fat's. I had to hold Sandra by the hair for a moment. "You ... fucking ... pig!" she screamed, wiping her cheek with a shirt of mine she'd plucked from the floor. I suppose I thought it was going to make me feel better, to seal my fate like that. Instead I felt worse. To boot, it wasn't much of a performance—Felix would've given me a thumbs-down. Even as a monster I was hopeless. I apologized to Sandra and knocked back a few vodkas while, to make herself feel better, she told me the Mick Jagger story again. Sounds like a charming fellow, that Mick. Does a little leprechaun laugh when you tickle his balls.
***
Lookee here, dear American Airlines. Morning is breaking. As an old saxophonist pal in New Orleans used to say, when dawn would find him with a beverage in hand: The sun done caught my ass again. His name was Charley and he died of a heroin overdose ten years ago. I threw a surprise birthday party for Stella once that featured Charley, hidden in the bathroom, launching into a rendition of "Happy Birthday" on his sax. A lovely moment that made me feel like a king though Stella didn't feel like quite the queen I'd hoped she would. She ended up crying by the end because she claimed the guests were mostly my friends, not hers. I could have pointed out that she didn't have many friends but I wasn't that kind of dummy. Stella was a harsh judge of character and few people passed muster. The handful of friends she had were always under caustic scrutiny, mostly for moral trespasses. Whereas I've always been an indiscriminate collector of people who tend to float in and out of my life without much passport control. Years of bartending inure you to human foibles or so I've always suspected. A regular at the Exchange, a sixtyish fellow who'd once been a successful financier before some mysterious disgrace toppled him, used to say, "I'll talk to anybody, on three conditions. You gotta make me laugh, or make me think, or make my dick hard." After hearing this spoken the fifth or sixth time I asked him what happened when he encountered that rare human specimen who could achieve all three. "I propos
e," he said. Well, we never could keep track of his wives. The last one was Filipino; the unkind rumor around the bar was that she was mailorder.
Most everyone around me is still asleep, but miserably so—curled up on skinny white cots or cardboard mattresses or on the hard blue carpet, contorted in chairs, propped up against the walls & windows with their dry mouths open, like corpses after a shooting rampage. Corny pink light is streaming through the windows, transforming the dust motes into floating glitter. Like little sea creatures suspended in the water or whatever the stale analogy might be. The window-washers have already arrived—what a rough early schedule they've got, though some of them must be grateful to avoid rush-hour traffic. The sanguine ones, anyway. This one near me seems blithe enough. He's a short Mexican dude with a flat Mayan face, shining up the windows via a mop-head attached to a six-foot pole. I've always heard that interior housepainters suffer sky-high rates of alcoholism, the theory being that staring at varying shades of off-white for daily eight-hour stretches drives them to drink. I wonder how it is with window-washers, always looking in or out—at glassed-off worlds immune from their touch. Eight-hour blinks of ivory-taupe-oyster-eggshell-alabaster-argent-pearl, the hermetic seal of glass, the guilt of abandoning one's child to write laughably mortal lines of poetry: I suppose we all have our excuses, our justifications as Dirk would say—our reasons for wanting to escape life for a while, sometimes longer. Some just better than others. Ah, the window-washer's cellphone just rang. Someone must have called to tell him a joke because he's laughing like mad, damn close to tears. I can't quite make it out; I used to have a fair grasp of Spanish but along the way I lost that too. He's doubled over with rabid joy, & hooting so loudly that a few of the sleepy refugees nearby are grimly yawning to life, casting annoyed glances down Mexico way. Rise and shine. Ees morning in America.
Early in this letter I mentioned that I'd placed my one call yesterday, & that it didn't go so well. Let's just say it didn't go as well as the window-washer's call. I'd just been bussed in from Peoria. No one would tell me a cottonpickin thing, as Miss Willa would say. From the payphone across from Gate K7 I dialed Speck's cellphone. "It's Bennie," I said. ("Bennie!" she sang back.) "I'm stuck in Chicago," I explained. "Total nightmare scenario—my flight didn't even make it here. We landed in Peoria and they made us walk to O'Hare. Well not really, but close. Anyway, everything is canceled. It's a complete effing mess." (Did you catch that? Me tidying up my language for my daughter.) "They won't say when I'll be en route but it's not looking promising for tonight—"
"Shit, Bennie," she said. Her voice was different: pricked, strained, impatient. I hoped it was just prenuptial jitters, or some knotty tangle of a wedding detail she was dealing with, or that maybe my ears were overattuned, my antennae too sensitive.
Nope. "We had a deal," she said.
"Which I'm doing everything short of hijacking a plane to keep my end of," I said. "And if you need me to do that, I will." How? I thought of Woody Allen, in Take the Money and Run, trying to escape from jail by carving a gun from a bar of soap. A decent tactic save for the rain that reduced the gun to bubbles.
"I'm sorry, Mom is being a total nightmare about everything"—"total nightmare scenario," meet "total nightmare."
"One of Syl's law-school friends is stuck at O'Hare, too," she went on. "The two of you should get together to commiserate or something. Jesus, Bennie, I don't know ... this is all getting a little weird and uncomfortable. Maybe we should just skip the whole walking-down-the-aisle thing and play everything by ear tomorrow, okay? Just say hello and start from there? Maybe not rev the engine so high at the get-go?" Another automotive metaphor, I noted: Perhaps a daub of the sludge that used to crust my greasemonkey father's hands had found its way onto the DNA. "Just get here as soon as you can, okay? Oh wow, I think Syl's brother just walked in. (Is that Wyatt? Ohmigod, just a sec.) Bennie I gotta go. Get those planes moving, 'kay? Chop chop."
Transcribed like that, it doesn't sound too bad, does it? Honest but genial, even a little hippy-dippy: That's my girl. No, you had to hear the clenched tone of her voice, the way her words groaned to a stop—I was just one more wedding headache (a wed-ache?), another abrasion in her life. But then what did I expect? A long time ago I'd recused myself from that life, confident that she was better off without me—or was I just, as I suspected of Walenty, indifferent to her existence? Over the years, in rare semisober moments, I wrote her letters that tried to explain my absence but inevitably I got soused and scrunched them into the trashcan. But, Christ, listen to me—how I hate it, that droning & hollow refrain: I wuhzzz drunnnnnnk. It's too easy to stuff the story of my life into a bottle like some rinkydink toy ship. One of those things you see at the souvenir shop and say, gee, how'd they fit that in there? It's a gimmick, an old trick, don't buy it. I think it was Seneca who said that alcohol doesn't create vice—it merely brings it into view. One of those dainty pearls of wisdom I found in the rehab-clinic library. I've got enough for an elegant necklace.
After she hung up I banged the receiver against the pay-phone three or four times—slowly, and with mounting force, my eyes shut so tightly that I wouldn't have sensed the flash of a nuclear blast rocking Chicagoland. We had a deal. No doubt I would've bashed the phone further, would've smashed it down to its wiry guts, had a retiree at the payphone beside me, wearing a t-shirt reading SNOWBIRD AND PROUD, not exclaimed, "Whoa, buddy, whoa there, what the hell?" At that point I wanted so desperately to kick something that I hopped around on one leg with the other leg cocked and loaded for bear. But the only things to kick were the wall and the Proud Snowbird and since both seemed innocent, down went my leg. That's when I felt the collective gawks of my fellow passengers at K7, bemused and slightly alarmed, zeroing in on me. "You got a problem there, buddy?" said the Snowbird Who Was Proud. An excellent question that I could have answered at length but chose not to.
Instead I fell into the closest O'Chair I could find, frightening off a woman and her toddler son in the seats across from me. Fine, go—that's right, I'm infectious. Or I'm the bogeyman. Not a terrorist though. Oh, for chrissakes all of you stop looking at me. Lou Dobbs of CNN is up on the TV screen accusing Mexican immigrants of spreading leprosy—you people want crazy, watch him. Hands trembling, I fetched a white legal pad from my satchel and began writing: Dear American Airlines, and so on & so forth etc.
***
Jesus fucking Christ, you want to see trembling hands? Look at this, it's like my mother's shaky stroke-scrawl, I can't even make the damn words—dear American Airlines, you pigs, you pigs, you grabby fucking pigs! Just a few minutes ago—for fuck's sake, the sun is barely up—officers of the Chicago Police Department commenced to roaming the airport shouting for everyone to wake up and give back their cots because, as they thunderously explained, "the airline needs its gates." Screw your gates! To think of that poor old Munchkinette with the vegetative husband being rousted from her sleep by the fuzz! How dare you?
That's the exact question I asked one of the cops but it didn't go over well at all. He was a young crewcut guy, with a severely acned face suggesting that his muscle-lumpy physique was derived from chemical supplements, with shallow blue eyes spread too far from one another on his face, skin like a raw bratwurst. "Hey, have some manners here," I said to him. "These people are just sleeping. They've had a rough night. You don't need to shout at them." Spoken without a touch of menace or hysteria, I can assure you. I know I haven't slept in the last thirty-some hours or so but I'm not entirely cracked.
"Back up, sir," the cop growled at me. I was a full yard from him. Any farther back, I would've needed to email him.
"How dare you treat these people this way?" I said. "This isn't their fault. It's the airline's fault. If the airline wants its gates, it can put us on planes." The cop muttered something into the miniature radio-mike on his shoulder and then said to me, booming, "Sir, I am ordering you to back up, and get out of my face." "I'm not in your face," I said. "And you don't need to
shout at me either." Okay, to be accurate I probably should've pinned an exclamation point onto the end of that last sentence; by this time I was admittedly flustered. "Back off, NOW! " he roared, and in my peripheral vision I saw two or three other cops moving sharply our way.
I looked down at his gun. It was a chunky, square-handled pistol of what type or caliber I can't say. The holster was made of smooth black leather, resembling more an oversized cellphone case than the elongated, pantsleg-shaped cowboy holsters that I strapped onto my belt as a child, the kind embossed with horsey scenes that I would've sported while riding my own Cooch through New Orleans. It didn't appear to have the expected strap over the gun's handle; I looked for a telltale snap or somesuch, but the gun seemed wantonly unsecured, like a hand inside a loose mitten. So it wouldn't be hard, I thought. Just grab it. Distract the beefheaded cop by actually getting in his face and just—grab it. He'd go flailing backwards once the pistol was mine, whooping into his shoulder microphone, while the other cops would stream forward with their guns drawn, snapping commands; in a moment they'd have me surrounded in a semicircle. Put it down NOW put it DOWN. And then all I would have to do—how simple it would be, how ludicrously simple—is raise the gun in the air—not straight up, not aimed directly at the ceiling; at more like a forty-five-degree angle, high enough for the bullet to whiz over everyone's head but low enough to make everyone duck—and fire. Bang. Once, twice at the most. That's all it would take to bring a hail of bullets upon me. It was so easy to imagine: micro-mists of bloodspray popping across my shirtfront as my body filled with holes, that pretty pink morning light streaming like bright lasers through my perforated torso, me slowly swaying, swaying like a drunk maudlin dancer on an otherwise abandoned dance-floor, that same skewed light catching the bursts of smoke from all that gunfire, each little cloud curling out of the barrel and drifting into the next cloud as they spiraled upwards toward the ceiling. Nothing could be simpler. And all it would take is one quick movement, hardly a gymnastic one. I bit my lip and stared.
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