Surrounded by Cal’s dark wardrobe, Crawford took a deep breath then lay flat on Cal’s bed, his head next to his briefcase. He didn’t know why he smoked the pot; he just did.
Isn’t that the excuse of a child? “I don’t know why. I just did… because I could.”
It was an excuse he still used with Dorothy from time to time.
Maybe we all just need to grow up.
Crawford looked at the ceiling and thought of all the ceilings he had seen over the years under the influence.
All those ceilings. Even the Sistine Chapel. I should have been sober for the Sistine Chapel.
He thought of that time waking up in Berry’s apartment to unusual patterns on the ceiling that looked like a scaffold made of light. It was beautiful. Turned out to be reflections from a shopping cart filled with empty beer bottles a few feet from the bed. He would later learn he had stolen it from a large liquor store the night before.
“But how did I get it home?” he asked them.
“You pushed it home, twenty-some blocks,” Berry told him.
“We just pointed you in a straight line,” Scott had said.
“And you made me do it?” Crawford asked.
“Made you? Hell, no. You insisted,” Scott said.
Berry and Scott had made jokes about that shopping cart for years, telling Crawford it was a prophecy that his books would be sold in supermarkets.
How do I know I stole that damn shopping cart? Crawford thought. Those assholes might have lied to me.
He opened his briefcase and pulled out the bottle. He broke the seal, took a deep breath, and then tipped it toward the afternoon sun. It went down his throat smooth and felt warm and cozy in his gut. He looked at the videotape lying in the case. It was cold and distant. It was scheming against him.
Crawford walked down the hall and peeked into his and Dorothy’s bedroom as if to find his lovely wife waiting for him in bed.
“Honey?” he said, just in case.
There had always been a maternal element in Crawford’s relationship with his wife, especially when he was intoxicated. But now he didn’t feel the attendant dread of her authority, even with marijuana in his bloodstream. The naughty schoolboy who had been caught smoking cigarettes in the bathroom felt secure knowing there was someone to answer to.
But where…?
Then he saw the note next to the bed.
Dear Jim
If you are reading this note, I’m assuming that you have made it home OK. I hope you’ll do me the favor of calling my mother and telling her what your situation is. At least tell her you’re all right. I will be there soon (at Mother’s) if I’m not when you call. I need to be away from you for a while. I think Cal does as well. Please don’t fight me on this. I know you have a problem, and maybe it’s “our” problem, but I can only accommodate so much.
Dorothy
There was no “Love,” before her name.
Crawford walked down to his study and sat at his desk. He felt like a stranger in his own home. It was stillness, pure silence — the kind a writer dreams of but often wouldn’t know what to do with if he had it. Looking at the Wall of Shame — especially that ridiculous picture of him accepting the James Crawford Day plaque — he thought of how a house does not make a home — nor a drafty old study, even for a writer — not without the ones you love. He had often used the excuse that the burden of raising a family, of being married and being the primary income earner, was the real reason he needed to drink, “to relax” from all those pressures. Of course, relaxing wasn’t really the objective. The objective was to get shitfaced. And the only reason people get shitfaced is that they’re trying to get away from something. Crawford thought about how he had been trying to get away from this place forever. This wonderful, warm home. Apparently, leaning on the bar at a shithole dive felt better, more secure. It was easier, no paternal pressures involved.
Cowardice.
“It’s not complicated,” he had written in Self-Assurance, “until it’s duplicated.”
What? Cowardice?
He didn’t want to call Dorothy’s mother. He didn’t even have to see his mother-in-law in the flesh to feel so small. He pulled the phone in front of him and put his hand on the receiver. It rang and Crawford froze. It rang again.
“Hello?” he said eagerly.
“Like you’ve said before, Doctor…”
Oh no. Crawford’s heart started pounding.
“You can have anything any other man has.” The voice sounded like it was put through a filter.
“Who the hell is this?” Crawford said faintly.
“You know who this is. And you know who this is.”
Then her voice, sincere and unaffected, like he’d always known it: “Jim. Do what he says.”
He felt a jolt of helplessness that made his shoulders, his arms, and his hands feel like they had turned to stone. The calmness of his wife’s voice made it worse.
“Baby, are you okay? Honey? Are you…”
“I’ve tapped into your phone lines. All of them. And I’m watching you. You call the police, even from a public phone, they both die. I’ll be calling you soon. So don’t leave. Watch the show again. It’s so much fun.”
“Both? Both what? Listen, you son of a bitch!”
“Dad? Are you there?” Crawford heard Cal say before the phone went dead.
Part III:
What Any Other Person Has
CHAPTER 16
THE FIRST TIME CRAWFORD CONSIDERED THE POSSIBILITY THAT HE COULD HAVE BRAIN DAMAGE from drinking was when he came home after talking to Berry and Scott and found that copy of Comprehensive Psychology Review in the bathroom under a pile of Rolling Stone and Penthouse magazines. There it was, an article that so closely resembled his argument that Crawford knew if he submitted his thesis it would be the academic equivalent of showing up to a murder scene with a bloody knife in his hand. There were even sections of the text underlined.
Jesus, I can’t remember doing that at all, he thought.
Crawford sat back against the toilet and took a drink from his Coors Light tallboy. He had no idea what he would do now. There was no way he could turn in the thesis he had.
God, and I finally thought I did something of value. Something I was proud of.
You haven’t done anything at all, he thought, throwing the journal across the room. Crawford did the only thing he could think of besides getting more drunk — he called Dorothy, who promptly came over and listened quietly as Crawford’s anguish came pouring out between sips of beer. “Why do you drink so much?” she asked quietly after hearing a salvo of what-do-I-do’s.
“I guess I could finish one of the other ones,” Crawford said, ignoring the question and referring to one of his previous proposals.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What?” Crawford said, taking another drink.
“Why do you drink so much?” she said louder.
“I don’t know.” He paused a moment. “Lack of self-confidence. Lack of self-worth, self-respect, self-esteem, maybe.”
“Okay, so what do you need to do now?” Dorothy was always so practical when it came to weighing up a problem, even back then.
“I don’t know.” Crawford finished his beer then crumpled the can and threw it in a wastebasket. “I can get an extension on my thesis. Maybe a couple of months, I don’t know.”
“No, what do you need to do first?” she said gesturing to the wastebasket.
“Oh, get another beer?” Crawford was so tanked he looked like a little boy, vulnerable and afraid.
“No!” she said walking over to him and putting her arm around his shoulders. “Right now. What do you need to do right now?”
“I don’t know,” he said, putting his hands over his face. “I don’t know.”
“Why not stop drinking? How’s that for a start? It seems to me that all these problems come from drinking, right?” Dorothy had an alcoholic brother and knew all about the question-r
esponse approach to getting a drunk to admit his problem.
“Well, not all my problems. Amnesia seems to be a problem.”
“And where do you think that comes from?”
She reminded Crawford of his mother when he was eleven during a spitball incident at school. But before he allowed himself to be insulted by her cross-examination, he realized that she was just about all he had at that moment.
“Okay, I’ll stop drinking for a while. But what do I do about my thesis?”
“Write another,” she said like a strict mother.
“Oh, I should just sit down and crank out a master’s thesis in the next couple of weeks, huh?”
“Yes.”
Crawford admired her resolve, but then again, she didn’t have to write it. And on what topic, did she propose? It had taken him a year to come up with the one he had.
“Why did you say you drink?” she asked with the coldness of a statistician. “You gave me a reason you drink so much a minute ago.”
“Say what?” Crawford honestly couldn’t remember what he had just said.
“You said you lacked self-confidence, self-esteem.”
“Yeah,” he shrugged.
“Why don’t you write something about that?”
“I haven’t done any research,” he snapped.
She assured him he’d done plenty of research. Crawford rolled his eyes.
Handing in a paper to Dr. Watkins on self-confidence or self-esteem could be a blunder bigger than handing in a plagiarized paper. Crawford eventually went back to his panacean masturbation theory, using a made-up patient who beat his depression autoerotically. Mary Epstein was unavailable (or unwilling, Crawford thought) to do the copyediting, so Dorothy helped as much as she could, mostly just locating spelling and punctuation errors.
Watkins was clearly not happy with the result, later writing in his evaluation, “You have always shown a strong potential for independent and original concepts. In academic terms, your problem is that you rarely follow it up with a resolute focus. That’s just my opinion. But my opinion is important right now.”
Watkins’ words were wounding, but Crawford got his degree nonetheless. He had mixed feelings that summer about the whole experience — it felt good to get it over with, but the finale was not as gratifying as he had hoped. He spent much of the summer wondering what he would do next. He also drank. But the conversation he had with Dorothy about his drinking and his thesis always stuck in his mind — even on the day they got married.
Self-confidence, self-worth, self-respect. Self-esteem.
Why don’t you write something about that?
Crawford pulled the videotape from his briefcase and set it on his desk. He just sat across from it, staring without expression. The tape seemed so innocuous, like a plastic box of nothing. He felt like he couldn’t bear to watch it again, but he knew he had to. It was all he had.
He hit rewind and let the tape lumber back to the beginning. He’d almost convinced himself the whole thing was a hoax, but if so, now his entire family was involved. He looked at his hands, stretching them like a pianist player preparing for a performance. In all the years he had been taking substances for pleasure, the most reliable litmus test of his mental state was his hands. For some reason, it made him think of reality, the here and now, and his inability to grasp it, if in fact there was such a thing. The world modern man had built around himself — with his TVs and video machines and videogames and digital music and alcohol and drugs and psychology and self-help — it all worked to take him away from what was right in front of him, the real world. And what confirmed this most was the look and feel of his own hands.
He hit play.
The sound screeched out like a car transmission going out.
“Yesssssiiiiirrrrreeeee. Good morning, Dr. Crawford! We’re moving right along. How is your self-esteem?”
He’s holding up the book to the side of his face. He’s imitating someone. Have I done that?
“Time for stage two!”
He’s opening the book. There’s a bookmark.
“The second stage is to eliminate the harmful things that are destroying our lives. That’s good advice, Dr. Crawford!”
Crawford felt a lump in his throat the size of a golf ball. He hit the forward button and the image sped ahead like time-lapse photography. The woman tied to the chair. Crawford looked at the bottle waiting patiently on the floor next to his briefcase. Happy Pappy bouncing next to her. Talking. The book under his arm. He put the bottle on the desk. Ripping the tape from her mouth. He unscrewed the lid and placed it carefully on the desk. Jenny screaming. Her eyes. Those eyes. He lifted the bottle to his mouth, his eyes concentrated on the screen. The monster laughing. Pointing his yellow glove at the book. He took a drink and put the bottle down, holding the alcohol in his mouth before finding the courage to gulp it down. That fucking book! Crawford swallowed and hit play.
“Okay. Okay. Focus. Focus.”
Jenny could barely breathe.
“People usually recognize right away when they’ve created a relationship with bad things or bad people.”
She’s gasping for air. Is she acting?
“But many times we continue these relationships…”
She’s crying. I never saw her cry like that. Not like that.
He hit forward, then play.
Stroking her hair.
“Yes. And why is that?”
He’s going to read from the book.
“Because we’re afraid to eliminate them from our lives.”
To the camera.
“Not unless you’ve got self-esteem!”
Crawford hit stop and the screen went blue. He looked at his hands again. What could his hands tell him? What could this damn video tell him? He picked up the bottle and brought it to his lips. The forceful odor harassed his quivering nose. He put the bottle down.
Crawford had mindfulness, as the Buddhists say. He was in the moment. He was real. He was a part of everything that’s real — everything he’d shut out with alcohol.
Crawford hit the play button then hit rewind, watching the pictures flash by in reverse. It was almost funny, watching this psycho dance backward.
Distraction is never real.
He punched play.
“We all know that fucking someone besides mommy is really naughty. It’s really bad!”
Crawford hit the slow-motion button. The image advanced one frame at a time like a grotesque slow-motion replay of a football game.
The face fills the frame, slowly moving from side to side.
Crawford hit play again.
“That’s why a little cocksucking whore like this one needs…”
Crawford hit pause.
Wait. A small white spot just above the mask.
He hit reverse, then again in slow-motion:
blip, blip, blip
Pause.
The image was a frozen face, blurred by an upswing, like the mask was melting in a shower of acid. There was an area behind the mask that had a strange pattern, the only thing that made the set different from the real show. Crawford leaned forward.
What is it behind the white spot?
It was a wall — a brick wall. And something was written on it that was faded and old.
Crawford again felt the golf ball in his throat and swallowed hard. He looked down at his hands, but he wasn’t sure if they were shaking or not. He thought maybe his whole body was shaking.
He moved closer to the screen and his mind tore ahead like a horse running itself dead. A wall with a faded word written on it, definitely a faded word maybe an image but part of a word and it was paint, like it was painted on the side of a building in the old days, like large murals for Coca-Cola or Shell Oil.
He put his face almost to the screen, squinting at the grainy image.
It looks like an S.
Crawford opened his desk drawer and pulled out a legal pad that had scribbling all over it. He tore off the marked up page, th
rew it in the trash then looked at the image on the screen again.
It’s an S.
He picked up a pencil and drew a line at the top of the page, curving it slowly down, while looking at the screen. It was an S with a smiley face, a smiley face on the bottom — just two small dots above the bottom of the S, like a smile.
What is that? I’ve seen that.
He wasn’t sure if it looked familiar or if he just thought it looked familiar. He looked at his hands, but his hands couldn’t tell him anything. He tore off the top page and held his sketch to the screen.
What the fuck is it? I’ve seen it.
Crawford hit the stop button on the VCR and turned off the TV, then he glanced at the bottle, looking at it carefully. He picked up the phone on his desk. You have to call someone, he thought. Call 9-1-1. But what will you say? A clown from a TV show has abducted your family?
They’ll suspect you, Lee had said.
And the crazy fucker said that he’d tapped into our phone lines. He said not to even use a pay phone. I guess my mobile phone is no good either?
“Come on, that’s bullshit.”
What if it’s not?
Crawford slammed the phone down on the receiver.
“Son of a bitch!”
He put his fingers to his temple as if he were searching for a button on his head to tell him what to do.
Rely on the successful solutions you have used in the past.
“I’ll talk to Peters. I’ll talk to Peters.” That’s what Crawford had done more than once, especially when he was on a terrible drinking binge and couldn’t get off, especially when he had some terrible circumstance to deal with. It was always embarrassing, but Peters was the only person that could help.
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