by Josh Emmons
“Who’s Brian?” asked Elaine.
“My friend from school.”
“We’ve talked about this, Trev. You know the rules about inviting friends over.”
“But his parents already said yes.”
“You asked them without permission from me?”
Trevor said, “I just wanted him to stay for dinner.”
“I know that you just wanted that. But you can’t go ahead and assume that it’s okay without asking. What if we were all going somewhere as a family? Or what if I’d had to work late and get a sitter?”
“Why can’t Dad be here to watch us?”
“We’ve already talked about this.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Remember how I said things are going to be different? How you’ll get to see Daddy in a new house sometimes?”
“But I don’t want to see him in a new house. I want to see him at home.”
“You’re going to have another home, an extra home.”
“I don’t want an extra one.” Trevor’s eyes and cheeks reddened. He grabbed hold of a drawer handle and opened and closed it rapidly. “I want Dad here!” A tear was blinked from each eye and he rocked back and forth on his toes. Elaine reached out to hold him and he pulled away violently, earning a small gash on his elbow from the metal drawer handle and issuing a redoubled cry of anguish. He was lost to consolation now, and Elaine with fixed worry hooding her eyes and darkening her mien, thought I can’t believe that son of a bitch Greg hasn’t called to talk to his children and what am I supposed to do about this friend staying for dinner when I need to make the point that in times of chaos and catastrophe—like now—we have to follow the rules and do things in an orderly fashion, because otherwise, if we let chaos get the upper hand, we’ll collapse and our whole tenuous enterprise of being a family and supporting one another will break apart. Worse than it has already. She dearly wanted to allay her son’s fears and ease his pain and make it all better. Her instinct demanded that she produce Daddy and happily set Brian’s place at the dinner table. Her instinct was to restore peace at any cost.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wetting a rag to attend to Trevor’s wound. “I know you’re upset—we’re all upset—but you’re not allowed to have friends stay for dinner unless you ask at least a day beforehand. So I’ll be glad to give him permission to eat with us tomorrow, but tonight it’s not okay. In fact, I should probably take him home now, it’s getting late.”
And Trevor, out of his mind with rage, crying with rhythmic abandon, turned around and went to his room, where he barricaded the door and didn’t emerge until the next morning.
Across town, alone in his apartment, Barry Klein said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It probably has nothing to do with it and I’m just wasting our time.”
He pushed play on the tape recorder: “Go on, please. We’re off to a good start.”
He pushed stop and continued, “So I met this man at the county courthouse named Shane Larson. He was tall and well-built and even though his face had acne scars it was beautiful—I shouldn’t notice these things now that Alvin and me are, but, well, I do—the point is that he had this firm handshake and he was asking me a lot of questions like was I from around here and did I have family in the area and what sort of insurance did I have. I figured he was either really interested in me or he was a salesman. As it happens he’s a salesman of burial plots.”
He pushed play. “That’s interesting. Please continue.”
He pushed stop. “I didn’t want a burial plot but I did want to keep talking to him—now that me and Alvin are a couple I feel so free to talk to people and it’s nice because before I’d be afraid—so I took his card and asked about the available plots. Was that wrong?”
He pushed play. “This is going well.”
He pushed stop and rewound the tape a little. “The line we were in was a joke; we weren’t moving forward at all. But Shane had such delicate eyes, dewy and green and exactly how a sensitive man looks, and I could have stared at them forever. I came close to asking if he wanted to go to the bathroom with me. Right there in line to see the sheriff’s secretary at the county courthouse. Can you believe it? I wanted him so badly that I was on the verge of nothing mattering. Naturally I didn’t say it because just because I’ve come out of the closet doesn’t mean I’m suddenly Mr. Libertine who can act on all of his impulses. Do you think I’m being too timid or shy, or am I wrong to even have these thoughts about someone I’ve just met especially since I have Alvin?”
He pushed play. “—ease continue. This is going well. You’re hitting on something here.”
He pushed stop. “It’s hard for me to keep up the illusion that you’re helping when you only ever say the same dumb generic encouraging things!”
Play. “I’d like to hear more if you don’t mind continuing.”
Stop. “I rode the lily-livered pink hippo over the top of Old Smoky.”
Play. “That’s very interesting. Can you elaborate a little?”
Stop. “The pink hippo flies by candlelight into the rosy-fingered dawn and deposits me on a mound of poo.”
Play. “I see. What do you think this means in regards to our earlier discussion?”
Stop. “It means I can’t afford therapy!” Barry leaned back on his pillows propped at a forty-five degree angle between the bed and the wall. He gripped his handheld tape recorder in despair. “But you’re all I’ve got. So where was I? Right, so I act interested in the burial plots and ask Shane what he’s doing at the courthouse, and he tells me that he had been arrested the day before for assault and he’s there to set up a court date. He’d spent the night in jail. I was pretty interested in the jail part because it’s one of my rape fantasies. I maybe shouldn’t be admitting this, either, but since we’re here in the spirit of total frankness and honesty I’ll go ahead and say that I’ve thought about being put in jail and kind of forced to have sex with a man. That’s not as bad as it sounds, is it? Oh God, it is, it is. But anyway, so Shane’s dismissive of the whole jail thing and says, ‘Yeah, lockdown for a night. If it’s your first offense as an adult they don’t throw you in with the psychopaths. I saw worse guys in juvey when I was a kid.’ Then he asks me what I’m doing there, so I tell him about how I’m going to report the man I saw at the Longaberger party, the one who’s missing, Leon Meed. Shane isn’t all that informed about local news, so I explain it to him and he gets curious about why someone would go missing and then show up at a Longaberger party and then disappear again. He asks about the reward for finding him, and I mention the ten thousand dollars his mother’s put up. Then he really grills me about what Leon and I said to each other, and what he looked like, and all of my impressions. I would’ve told him anything. But eventually it was his turn to talk to the secretary, and when he was leaving and I was going up to the window I said how it was great meeting him and I hoped we ran into each other again someday, but he just nodded and didn’t answer.”
As far as Shane Larson was concerned, the day had been a waste until he sat down at the bar of Folie à Deux next to a man who reeked of mortality. Who was old and full of days. Shane wept inner tears of joy at being delivered a guy such as this right before Christmas. He’d be able to make a sale and shut that bitch Lenora up about money and I can’t believe you got in a fight, that you instigated it even and now we have to spend all our savings on lawyer fees. All our savings. Funny, he didn’t remember her contributing anything to all of “our” savings, but that was beside the point. The point was that he’d already had to put up with the police and the courts and being contrite enough for that faggot. He’d had to jump through hoops the size of bracelets to keep the cops and all the lawyers happy, and when he came home did he get love and support and, most of all, quiet? Did he get a little sympathy for the mountain range of bullshit he’d had to traverse? Or did he have to listen to her hissy fit and recriminations and name-calling: Are you some kind of savage? Is that it? Did I marr
y a beast of the wild when I thought I was marrying a sweet and dependable guy? She’d married him, Shane Larson, so whatever he was should be good enough for her.
“Really packed tonight, isn’t it?” said Shane to the ancient man. Shane was there to meet a friend of a friend who wasn’t happy with her dead husband’s grave in McKinleyville and might want his body moved to Humboldt Overview. The commission was practically burning a hole in his pocket are you some kind of savage. It was six forty and he had twenty minutes and this geezer here was just waiting to be hooked and reeled in.
“Like a moving truck instead of a restaurant,” the man said with a small laugh.
Shane guffawed although the joke, if it was one, was obscure. A moving truck? Laugh anyway; laughter was always appropriate. “My name’s Shane. Good to meet you.” He hadn’t been closing much lately but tonight he was going to. He was going to close twice. Two on base. He was that kind of confident because you had to be, confidence being the most attractive of scents, and you caught more flies with honey (not that flies were what any right-thinking person wanted).
“Silas,” said the man. Who must have been seventy-five and looked it oh yes he was old. You are old, Father William. They shook hands. “Usually I come here on Thursdays and the place is half empty. Must be the holiday cheer.”
Shane raised his bushy black eyebrows ingratiatingly. “You come here a lot? This is my first time. I’ve heard the chef, what’s his name Michael Frontiay or is that it, he’s supposed to be top of the line. The foie gras they say is dynamite.”
“You won’t be disappointed.”
“I’ll bet.” A little acid jazz music dripped out of the ceiling speakers. The bartender quietly and efficiently went about her business of measuring and pouring and wiping. Shane looked at the seventy-five-year-old next to him whose face was all bisecting wrinkles, and tingled. The average American male lived to be seventy-eight. He took a sip of his martini and thought, You’re going to close this guy tonight. Before you even get to the mourning widow you are going to have a sale. Things are turning around. “What line of work you in, Silas?”
“I’m retired. Used to own a bike shop.”
“Retired.” Shane smiled in contemplation. “That’s coming in loud and clear. The golden years, right? You’ve put in a lot of hard work and now you get to coast. Take it easy.”
“You could put it that way.”
Shane leaned over and rested a hand on Silas’s shoulder, not too heavy but with a certain trustworthiness, squeezed, and let go. “What I envy about you—and as you can see I’ve got a lot of years ahead of me to bust my hump—but what I see as the beauty of your position is that you can concentrate on enjoyment, your hobbies and family and the rest of it. The only business you have to worry about now is life insurance and your burial arrangements. But you’ve probably already taken care of those things, right?”
Silas sipped his red wine and puckered his mouth. It was a bitter vintage. “No, I don’t plan on passing away just yet.”
“Of course not, and that’s where I can see you’re a wise man. You’re not obsessed with dying. But you know what? There are some who say it doesn’t hurt to be prepared, just in case. It even occurs to me that I might be able to help you out, because I work for Morland Memorial Services, and I’d be privileged to talk to you about what we can offer a man like you. It doesn’t take much time, and it’s important to do.”
“If you’ll excuse me for a minute,” Silas said and then moved toward the men’s room.
Shane, staring longingly after him, suddenly saw an entirely new man sitting on Silas’s bar stool. Where the hell did he come from? Shane drew back. What? “Hey! Hey, buddy, not to be rude, but my friend is sitting here.”
The guy looked flummoxed and had tree sap and green stains on his brown pants. What an untouchable and how did he sit down there so quickly? Silas was on his way back and Shane, seeing that the freak wasn’t moving, reached over to lift him from the stool. The guy tried to fend Shane off for a second but was quickly overpowered and forcefully propped against a support column a few feet away. “He was in your seat,” Shane whispered when Silas sat down. The stranger stared at them. He wasn’t going anywhere. Shane wanted to resume his pitch but felt the kind of performance anxiety you got from trying to pee at a public urinal when someone was waiting in line behind you. Shy pee-pee, his brother used to call it. No matter how intense the pressure to go, a muscle freeze prevented anything from coming out, thus making worse the physical discomfort and the panic of being judged somehow by the other guy. Shane couldn’t say anything to Silas so long as this son of a bitch was there, and he was so close to closing the deal that it was indeed like the pain of not being able to urinate—this stranger was a kidney stone—and he winced. “Excuse me, if you don’t mind,” he turned to the stranger and spoke in an unnaturally high and sharp voice, “but you’re too close for comfort. Maybe you could back off because it’s not working you standing so close like this.”
“That was unnecessary roughness,” said the stranger. “What’s going on?”
“You’re really pissing me off.”
Silas opened his mouth and was just agog at this stranger.
“Is this Folie à Deux?”
“Bingo,” said Shane. “Shove off.”
The stranger’s face—pug nose and burnished cheeks with a faint magenta tint—contracted. “This is a restaurant. I have as much right to be here as you.”
Shane stood up and stepped into the stranger’s personal space. “If we were outside do you know where you’d be? On the ground. So don’t make me follow you out. Leave.”
“Listen,” said Silas, “I think something extraordinary is happening. We need to calm down and talk to one another. This is something we want to take slowly.”
Shane swallowed the last of his gin and tonic and chewed on ice. “Oh, yeah,” he said, breathing sharply as though they were at a high altitude, “let’s just do that.” A waiter passed by carrying a tray of steaming dishes. “You, Pierre,” Shane grabbed the waiter’s arm, “I know you’re busy, but my friend Silas and I are ready to sit down. It’s just about seven, so maybe you could talk to the hostess for us and find out when our tables are going to be ready so we don’t have to keep sitting here dealing with pricks like this guy.” The waiter said he’d see what he could do and walked away, his tray-supporting arm tilting slightly. Shane tipped the rest of the ice from his glass into his mouth and swallowed it whole.
“Shane? Is that you?” A young man approached the bar with fey stride and poise, catching little glimpses of himself in the mirror behind the bar. “It’s me, Barry. Remember we met at the county courthouse?”
“Who?” Shane said, confused by the sensory data overload.
“In line at the courthouse, remember? I was reporting a missing person, and you were there for sentencing.”
The stranger was gone—lucky for him—and Shane looked at Silas apologetically like this-kid’s-unstable and said, “I was there making an appointment. Not sentencing.” Silas didn’t appear to believe or disbelieve him, his expression puzzled as he walked around the column next to which the stranger had just been standing, and Shane realized that he wasn’t going to close the deal. A fucking stranger had come between them and now here was a flaming queerbait ruining his chances for a sale. Which meant a real, appreciable loss of income and a bitter wife and further struggling to manage and defaulting on the car payments and the student loans from Brigham Young. Shane saw: a smaller one-bedroom apartment in a worse part of town, one bath instead of two; no eating out; postponing the first child; imitation clothes; another bank loan at Shylock rates. Shane thought: I’m trying as hard as I can and there are these obstacles, Lord. I’m strong for You, but You don’t want me to suffer so much, do you? You know that in these times we have to fight for righteousness and see the good prevail. You’re on my side.
“Isn’t it funny how we’re both here?” Barry asked.
“It’s a laugh
riot,” Shane said.
Silas excused himself and moved to the entrance, where he greeted a South American man with very long sideburns. Shane watched the meeting for a moment and then saw his potential client, the mourning widow he’d been waiting for this entire time, enter, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat and looked angrily at his glass with no more ice in it, and the man who’d come between him and Silas, the guy who’d ruined his commission, was gone and Shane couldn’t punish him.
“I’m a disc jockey at KHSU,” said Barry in his mellifluous voice that was almost a croon, “over at the university. Can I buy you a beer?”
Shane waved at the widow and rose to meet her. “Not thirsty.”
That evening Prentiss Johnson went to the Lost Coast Brewery on Fourth Street, near the old Bistrins building and the Downtowner Inn. He thought, Now what kind of shit is this? A couple of major alcoholics meeting at a bar. Like two wolves on a diet going to a hen house. But it was Alvin’s idea, and as Prentiss’s new sponsor Alvin had explained that there was a reason for it so not to worry. Prentiss sat at the bar drinking a Shirley Temple while the beers on tap were poured one after another for the happy-houring working folks. All these guys wearing business casual who in the middle of ordering would turn backs to their tables and shout “Rog, what did you want again?” and then tap their twenty-dollar bills on the countertop in semidrunk impatience, doing shave-and-a-haircut, and then say “Cheers” when their pint glasses were placed before them and collect their change and flick off a dollar tip. The functioning alcoholics. There was a distinction you learned at AA meetings between functioning and nonfunctioning alcoholics. The former were characterized by their ability to hold and sustain the basics of adult life: a job and a relationship. They tended not to need a drink upon opening their eyes in the morning, and they went entire days completely sober. But they were still alcoholics: they drank to oblivion and drank regularly and drank even when another drink could do nothing for them but concrete, head-punishing damage. And they spent a disproportionate amount of their mental energy and money on alcohol, and they formed friendships based on a mutual love of alcohol, and they did many things they later regretted under alcohol’s influence. But functioning alcoholics lacked the insatiability that defined the standard nonfunctioning alcoholic, the Prentiss kind. For that one little difference they were allowed to live on their own and rarely, if ever, admit that they had a problem.