by Nate Allen
He went to the 24-hour Drug Store that anchored the shopping center and purchased a $10 touch-tone phone with a cord, went back to the pool hall and waited until it was closing time, then made the walk back to her house. He had remembered her story about the older couple calling the police the night of her tantrum, and he knew the police would keep record of the call. He was aware it was extremely unhealthy behavior for a forty-five year-old man …like Temporary Restraining Order unhealthy, but so was her behavior he told himself. He found the plastic phone box on the outside wall of the neighbor’s house, and using a dime, loosened the screw that held it shut. He had assembled the phone in necessary fashion, no cradle, no electric cord, just the wire that would connect to the phone and the jack. He had brought a pen to put under his tongue to disguise his voice when he spoke as he knew the call would be recorded, and dialed 911.
He told the call-taker that he thought there might be a disturbance at his neighbors’ house, had heard moans and what sounded like muffled cries for help, and he knew the husband to be gone. Gave them the address, and hung up. He knew the old couple’s phone number would show up on the PD’s caller ID, and provide the necessary credibility. He then disconnected the phone, secured the box and left for the woods to wait for the police to arrive.
Jake would not soon forget the expression on their faces when two police cars descended upon the residence, Tony hoping to get away unseen, and Rae Anne standing there with the infamous just-had-sex/bed-head hair in her short white robe, stunned and frightened about what to do next, as he sat hidden from sight like some thirteen year-old vandal who has strewn toilet paper all over someone’s trees, impishly admiring his handiwork. It was now 2:45 a.m. on a Saturday night/Sunday morning and people had begun to stir, it would not go unnoticed. But before it all played out, Jake had headed back to his truck, and home, with an undeniable satisfaction about himself. It wasn’t pretty, he wasn’t proud of it, it wasn’t who he was, or at least not who he use to be, but she had damn sure affected who he was.
He had read her emails, knew of her intentions, had seen the competition, and began to think in terms of how he would need to adapt and create perceived deficiencies in their game and her efforts to play with them. The dose of imaginary Chlamydia had merely proven to be a speed-bump, and not the roadblock he had hoped. A course of antibiotics and a condom had bypassed the issue, and he’d shot his passive aggressive wad with the attempt. Like some perverse emotional warfare, or PSYOP, he was now a romantic terrorist attempting to produce an affliction only he had the antidote for …anxiety, and thereby reinforce remedies only he could provide such as familiarity, comfort …and safety.
He would write her an email later that day, they were initially supposed to get together that evening after all, inquiring about how her weekend with the hubby had gone, now in full knowledge of the bullshit story she had fed him about Glen not leaving town. He never let on that he was any the wiser, his behavior sinister, creepy, and a threat to all she held dear, and in that same psychotic vein he told himself she had it coming. She’d think twice about it next time, or so he hoped…
Rae would call in a day or two, perhaps because she wanted to check the tone of his voice, who knows, but he took a perverse pleasure in listening to her squirm over the phone as she continued her lie about the weekend’s “mundane” activities, and he informed her of his comfortable but uneventful weekend, and that he missed having the opportunity to see her… She would never discuss the actual events of the evening with him, he would never know how it had entirely played out, but he had accomplished what he sought. I don’t doubt for a moment he didn’t cross her mind in the aftermath though. She wasn’t stupid.
It was now mid-February, only ten weeks since that first weekend, but like one of those rides at the State Fair it had an extreme amount of twists and turns, highs and lows, for its short duration. Once she began to step outside of their relationship, he was removed from the starting line-up and became an involuntary mascot of sorts, no longer the star player. He now represented the magic mirror, you know, the “mirror, mirror, on the wall …who’s the fairest of them all?” variety. He had unwittingly become her cheerleader, helping her properly inflate her ego in his own attempts to get back in her good graces, the kids’ playhouse, or on her floor as it often seemed, and in the process helping her ramp up for her next “event” absent him. And “no,” he had not forgotten she was married, but he thought himself more than just the occasional guest, as if he’d earned a special distinction and place in her life, and should thus be afforded the accompanying perks and preferential treatment of a preferred customer …or “frequent fucker” as it were.
If she’d had the wherewithal in the moment she would have noticed the signs, and maybe she did, but the long-term forecast appeared favorable and she proceeded anyway. While it might have begun as a respite from the drought in her life, a welcomed brief or occasional shower of much needed attention, the emotional meteorologist in her should have noticed the elements and the hazards presented by the gathering of circumstantial clouds and coincidental fronts, and the fact that Jake was the only variable common to each. That component, however indistinct and far removed from the actual storm itself, which still had a degree of relative proximity and consistency with it …like thunder, …never far behind the lightning.
All aspects that would eventually get out of hand with the fury, confusion, and potential for harm of a category 5 emotional hurricane, the fact that she didn’t revealed her level of connectedness as well… Liken it to standing with your nose on a billboard, you can’t begin to see it clearly and make sense of it until you get some distance from it, the “me to” you first saw and couldn’t make sense of, becomes “Welcome to Hell.”
.
CHAPTER 9
POCKETFUL OF SALT
Earl had been the precursor to Chunk in Jake’s life. They had grown up together, literally grown up together, some of the first memories each of them had included each other, and those are typically from the age of two or three. He had known Jake before he went through that difficult period as a child, and remained his only friend through it. They were extremely similar, “brothers of different mothers” they would say. Jake would say he wasn’t afraid of any man, only God and the government, but if there was a man that concerned him it was Earl. They had once held each other in headlocks for nearly 30 minutes before Earl’s mom had called him home for supper, neither submitting.
While Jake was failing his first attempt at college, Earl had gone to work at a textile mill in Greensboro, but they were both young, dumb and full of cum, and neither could concentrate on one thing for very long. In that period between the time he had broken up with his girlfriend, and before he moved to Raleigh, Jake and Earl thought to give the military a try, the economy was bad, it was peacetime and the Air Force and Naval recruiters advertised a buddy-system, sign up with your buddy and stay together through basic training and your first duty assignment. They started at the Air Force recruiter’s office, took the ASVAB, Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and each did well, but Jake’s criminal record for some youthful mischief would keep him from getting in, next stop the Navy Recruiting station, same story…
It seemed the military had a surplus of enlistees at the time and could afford to be selective, and while Earl was accepted into both branches they were determined to proceed together, but everyone was now pointing them in the direction of the Marines, and Jake was growing less interested at that thought, planes and boats were cool, and he was thinking in terms of how girls swarmed over the flyboys and sailors. But he had known a friend who had joined the Marines three years earlier. They had thrown him a party when he came home from boot camp, and the nineteen year-old spent the entire night in a tree, Jake would bring him the occasional beer, but the kid spent the entire night in a tree …at his own party, as if on recon or some shit, until when no one was looking he disappeared, perhaps thinking he didn’t fit in anymore. They didn’t see him
again until he had completed his two-year tour of duty …he had come out of it very different than he went in. When they say you can take the man out of the Marines, but you can’t take the Marine out of the man they weren’t kidding, and Jake was looking for a change of scenery, but not a change in his psychological makeup. He wasn’t one to be told what to do anyway, and he drew the line at that point where if he couldn’t go where he wanted, he wouldn’t go at all, and before too long he headed to Raleigh to live and look for work.
Earl on the other hand, was intrigued by it. He had wanted to start with the Marines, “The Few, The Proud, The Marines,” like a romantic siren’s song to him. His father had served in the Corps before becoming a State Trooper, and it almost seemed his calling. Their buddy plan had dissolved and Earl headed off to Parris Island S.C. for training. He would travel around the world, Okinawa, return to Parris Island for Drill Instructor School and serve a tour of duty in that regard before the first Gulf War broke out, afterwards stationed at Lejeune for a time, going wherever they sent him, until returning to the “sandbox” post 9/11. They would lose touch for long periods of time, but every once in a while he would hear from the man. Earl had told Jake on one occasion about a routine he had developed along the way. Every time he went into a bar, wherever it was, first thing he would do was order a shot of tequila, salt, and the lime, take a pinch of salt and throw it over his left shoulder for good luck, and then unnoticed pour some in his hand, and put it in his pocket. It sounded like some superstitious Sailor/Marine thing to Jake at the time you know, but Earl explained that he did so because he often found himself in those establishments that got rowdy, the salt served as a potential diversion it seems, in those fracases that would break out in the abundance of restlessness that accompanied shore leave when abroad, before a deployment, or upon a return, and that DI in him was always in control.
Jake called him on the bullshit, they had grown up in a time when professional wrestling was big, and he remembered Mr. Fuji, the consummate villain who had made a trademark of throwing salt in his opponents’ eyes. More importantly he knew Earl didn’t need the help. He had readily disabled scores of larger men, but he could sympathize that at their age he wasn’t interested in fairness, he was interested in prevailing. He had taught young men and women how to kill, and defend themselves from those who wanted to kill them. For him fairness had been reduced to a very brief statement that he was about to do you harm. He was no longer interested in proving himself to the younger men, only settling the matter. He seemed to have grown weary of fighting unnecessary battles and as a sort of flashback to their adolescence, he gave Jake an involuntary reminder, presented the salt with a magician’s flick of the wrist, slapped him twice before Jake could figure out what was happening, point well taken …and it was a routine Jake incorporated into his preparation before going out, largely as a tribute to his friend who had survived Fallujah, but not the motorcycle crash that killed him after his 20 years of service. He had been a pallbearer at Jake’s father’s funeral. At his family’s request, Jake had served as a pallbearer at his. He must’ve been a helluva guy, because one helluva guy thought him so.
Now there’s been some discussion about a man’s physicality, of intimidation, of the way men interact and perceive one another, and the way women respond to it. Admittedly it seems a bit antiquated and barbaric, we are in the 21st century after all, well beyond the gladiator and warrior-prince periods, but make no mistake, we are at best civilized beasts, but beasts nonetheless. We pay to watch men beat the hell out of each other, our favorite sports are the violent ones, one man imposing his will on the other, taking something of his in the process. And the female of the species for the most part, despite strong protest to the contrary, has not outgrown that instinctive draw towards the male who can provide and protect either, only that as we have “evolved,” that definition has broadened beyond the physical threats to include any man who can offer financial and emotional stability, and thus shelter from harm.
While we seem to deny and renounce its existence, we simultaneously celebrate it as a culture. And Jake hypothesized that it boiled down to four basic categories, and men routinely fall into one or more, the strong, the quick, the smart and the prey, if you have some doubt to its existence, an examination of inner-city gangs or our prison system affords an unadulterated glimpse at its ugliness, an unintentional social experiment, like ants in a classroom glass ant-farm, beneath the surface, it is on display. We may attribute it to their particular circumstances, but the circumstances only exaggerate the underlying inclinations as opposed to creating them.
In the subplot of this “dawg eat dog” world, the man who has never suffered defeat has an aura about him, a reputation, a myth, and a distinction that in and of itself can assuage many confrontations, and becomes a second entity that any opponent seems to battle with as well. A presence that enters the imaginary ring ahead of the man, and often strikes the first unseen blow, but to the man himself it can also be a heavy burden that hangs around his neck like an obligation of expectations to be met, an Achilles heel, that in the event his persona is not enough to demand surrender or respect, can weaken him, as he also battles that unblemished record at the heart of it all as much as any opponent.
The first loss, and every such man will have one unless he refuses to participate or retires prematurely from the game, is debilitating. It fractures the almighty yet fragile ego, the psyche filled with confidence that had grown to be a source of strength now clouds with doubt, the psychological beating of greater consequence than the physical. But contradictory as it may seem, in a minority of men, such losses can ironically prove to be a powerful and liberating thing, because the fear of losing has now been displaced with the knowledge that they can and will get up. And that education, that resulting loss of fear or fearlessness can be a dangerous thing …especially when confined to a man of size and strength.
As is sometimes the case, boys who lose their fathers young grow up with an under-developed sense of what it takes to be a man, often overcompensating, and hardheaded and stubborn, Jake was not an easy study in that regard and it was a lesson he learned at a painful price. He had not learned the natural and ordinary boundaries of when to fight and when to walk away, had never learned to run from trouble and consequently often found himself mired in it. Young and full of piss and vinegar, he was brash and cock-strong and the combination resulted in a lot of unnecessary confrontations, and the few and subsequent losses he had suffered were severe and brutal, but they were also losses that had come out of situations where he was not only in some weakened state, but truly incapable of defending himself. And others who were looking to make a name for themselves, for a notch on their reputation, took advantage of the opportunities. He had the good fortune to learn from his mistakes, a smart man does, and as he matured he would most certainly make more mistakes, but lessen the opportunity to repeat the same ones.
He wasn’t a troublemaker or asshole, but just an extremely complex contradiction, veiled by his apparent simplicity. Make no mistake about it. He was a nice guy, loving father, wonderfully loyal and compassionate human, a lighthearted man, and extremely bright, he had been a number of men’s best friend along the way, and a few women’s. Unassuming and unpretentious, very likely to be laughing with his pals and picking fun at himself, but as he had learned at an early age, the most “dangerous” men in any room never have to tell anyone, they don’t have to behave the part, like the appearance of a stray and mangled dog wandering into a yard, others know that win or lose, he will put up a fight and its best to leave him alone. He made no assumptions as to whether or not he was such a man, to do so is to wear an invitation for trouble on your forehead, but suffice it to say he knew how to recognize them, and if there’s any truth to the saying that “it takes one to know one,” for reasons unspoken, he was always left alone.
Being an exception to rules, he would acknowledge them, and that during the course of his life he had been strong, been quic
k, been prey, and become smart, they are not fixed states, nor mutually exclusive, but often transient phases in which sometimes the “strong” the “quick” and the “smart” become the prey because of the threat they present. They exist in all aspects of society, from the boardroom to the bedroom, the playground to the battleground, while seldom rising to the surface or being fully activated, the instincts are undeniable, and pervasive. And emotions are almost always its trigger, the pin pulled from the grenade.
In that collection of phrases he kept, he had read the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling as a young man, it seemed like a companionate pamphlet to the instructions his dad had left him with, and two of the lines stood out, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you” and “yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …you’ll be a man my son!” It spoke to the experience that had been visited upon him, and he had thus learned it was in his best interest to remain unnoticed as much as possible.
But this business with her, the awareness of these other men and his increasing obsession of them together were quickly becoming his enemies. The knowledge of what she was doing was bad enough, his imagination of it worse, and his OCD became an emotional autism in a sense, like “Raen-man.” The emotion and the increased static it created were shaking that pin loose, and he was beginning to think taking a metaphorical piss in this girl’s yard wasn’t going to be enough to keep the other dogs out, he might have to take a shit …and bring a pocketful of salt just in case.