Someone To Crawl Back To
by
Phillip Gardner
BOSON BOOKS
Raleigh
© 2009 Phillip Gardner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form including mechanical, electric, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
“Dance Party” first appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Volume XI, Number 4, Summer 1991, pp. 60-65
“Murmurs” first appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, Volume 9, 1994, pp. 35-48
“Sunspots,”a South Carolina Fiction Project winner, first appeared in The State Newspaper, October 27, 1991, pp. 19-20
“Wrecker,” a South Carolina Fiction Project winner, first appeared in The Post and Courier Newspaper, July 16, 2000, pp. 1-2H
“Vibes” is a Piccolo Spoleto Fiction 2000 award recipient
Published by
Boson Books, a division of C&M Online Media Inc.
3905 Meadow Field Lane
Raleigh, NC 27606-4470
[email protected]
ISBN (paper): 1-886420-98-X
ISBN (ebook): 0-917990-18-8
http://www.bosonbooks.com
Cover photo by Rick Cary
Cover Design by Once Removed
To Nancy McAllister
Table of Contents
Prologue
Talk
Chain of Fools
Inhabited Space
What You Really Mean Is
This Is Not A Love Story
Sunspots
Flat-Out
Wrecker
Vibes
Gatsby's Last Dive
Wheels
Grits
What the Arraignment Meant
Murmurs
Bird Blinding
Someone To Crawl Back To
You Can’t Tell Me You Love Me Enough
Rehab
Epilogue
Dance Party
Prologue
Talk
Rene Severance
There are some conversations you can't have. To have them is to ruin everything. Either/Or conversations are one example. There is no such thing as an Either/Or conversation. There are only OR conversations.
There are others you can't have. If you have them everything is over. And if everything is over you die inside. Not all at once, but you die; it's a sure thing.
There are conversations you have to have, no matter what. Because you must have them, they usually end in a matterless world of talk. There are things you have to say because if you don't say them you have no chance of stopping the thing that has to be stopped—before it does damage that can't be undone. These are all conversations you must have.
You can't have conversations about lost passion. Passion is a thing that can only be discussed when it is present. If you have it, or if two people share it, they can spend hours in delicious conversation. This is the nature of passion. To talk about the absence of passion is to ruin any chance of regaining it, to doom it to purgatory. Of course the only reason to have that conversation is in order somehow to save it. There is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost. Maybe not to talk about it is to keep it alive, or to keep alive the chance that it may return. Some people who are clinically dead come back.
Words can do almost anything, repair almost any pain. But they can do nothing for lost passion. So it is pointless to have a conversation about it. The person who no longer possesses that feeling can't be held responsible, not really. Nobody chooses to give up those feelings. Nobody is to blame, not really. Sometimes people get tired or distracted, sometimes they get lonely, sometimes they are mysteriously attracted to other lovers. It's not a thing they choose. If they could go on feeling that feeling with someone, they would. It's not a thing to blame someone for, the loss of passion I mean. So there is really no reason to think that talking will do any good.
If she says, I have lost the feeling for you, what can he say? He can't restore good feelings by making her feel bad, guilty for something that isn't her fault. That would eliminate all possibility for restoring the thing he most wants to save. You don't want to do that. That would be cruel, because even as he said, Please love me he would be making it all impossible. Sometimes it makes you want to cry, but that does no good; that is a conversation with yourself and does nothing to restore the passion that, in its absence, makes you want to cry.
So if you love somebody, it is essential to say the things you have to say and to avoid the things you must never say.
Chain of Fools
Joshua Severance and John D. Truett
I drink decaffeinated coffee in the morning and lite beer at night. I drink a lot of both. The coffee gives the illusion of morning, of things getting off to a start. The beer gives the day closure. It takes a while, but it gets closed, eventually. What happens in between is what I'm trying to get in order, so I divide the day as evenly as I can between the decaf and the lite. It's one way of establishing balance. Balance is the important thing.
When other disillusioned people see that you're working at working things out, it makes them nervous. If you're depressed all the time, have predictable psychotic fits, or drink too much and play air guitar on the bar, people get used to that. But once they sense that you're trying seriously to figure things out, you become the horse that shits in their parade. Just ask F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Or my ex-shrink.
“Earlier, you referred to your marriage as an 'expired lot.' You said, 'Ours is the story of two people who met and fell in love. Then one of us fell out of love.” This was my shrink speaking. “I think there is serious meaning in ‘expired lot,’ Josh.”
“Look,” I said, “I sell pharmaceuticals for a living. It's language of the trade. If I were a carburetor man or a proctologist, I suppose I'd find another metaphor.”
But my shrink, Something Belcher, wouldn't buy it. Poor guy had the look of a human punching bag.
The therapy was killing me. So, step one, I dumped my therapist. And I felt better—like finally parking your car after a long trip of competing for the wheel. At seventy-five dollars a pop, I figured I could clean the counter of decaf and the cooler of Milwaukee's Best Lite for the price of one session. Besides, Belcher had developed a pattern of starting each session with personal experience that began, “When I first entered therapy—.” I suppose he wanted me to seize upon a single word, make him angry, work him through his anger, and then leave him with the illusion of having found some balance. I had better things to do.
Like drinking with my attorney.
***
My friend John Truett and I were driving into town to get away from our wives. I’d lost the only one I’d ever wanted, and he couldn’t leave the one he had. We never talked directly about our fractured interior lives, but I could see the scars and so could he. Neither of us was in a very talkative mood. We passed a building with a big dish out front, a church. The year before it had been a VFW bar.
“That mud wrestling joint is a church now,” I said, craning my neck as we passed. We'd gone to a women's mud wrestling event there some time back. One of the women wrestlers had singled out John to rub baby oil all over her. It's part of the act. I knew he'd remember. I hoped it would lift his spirits.
“That was the day Clinton was impeached,” he said. John is my lawyer. He remembers those sorts of things. He's good at making connections between unlikely possibilities. One day maybe he'll be rich. Divorce is big business.
That afternoon John had learned that his wife was pregnant for the sixth time. In law school he'd fallen in love with her milk makers—she had enormous breasts—and
she hadn't had a dry day in ten years. Their capacity seemed inexhaustible.
As his family had grown, John the man had seemed to shrink proportionately, his appearance more starched, his mind more pressed. It took some doing, and several whiskeys, to get his sense of humor pried away from his too tightly knotted necktie. Once he got going, though, he was funnier than anyone I knew.
“What did Adam say to Eve in the Garden of Eden?” I asked. He grinned. “Stand back, Eve, I don't know how big this thing is gonna get.”
We laughed. “That's Robin Williams,” I said. We laughed some more. John kept laughing until his eyes were all watery. Still he kept laughing. I wanted to change the subject. I thought hard, hoping to tell him another one, but my mind went blank. He tried to hold his breath to stop the little lurches in his shoulders. He didn't look at me. We drove some more.
“I've got a truth for you, Josh,” John said. We had been sitting for a while at the bar in The Paradise Lounge talking movies. John was still in lawyer mode. Contemporary films, he’d argued, don't tell the truth about the ways ordinary men are sometimes defeated in marital relations. John's theory is that women can find complete satisfaction through childbearing, but men, once they've done their part, have no equivalent. And since the man’s function is instinctively not monogamous, the theory goes, men live as slaves to a domestic order defined by women, a fact never confronted by men or women in our culture. For men to admit to domestic slavery would, by definition, make them less than men, John says. So long as women can portray themselves as victims and convince men that they are the victimizers, women hold the upper hand. They own the guilt factor; it’s their big stick, so to speak. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear John’s truth.
“They get you coming, and going,” he said. “I see it in court every day. I use it like a machete in divorce cases.”
I said that men could create art. John passed about four ounces of beer through his nose.
George Miles, the bartender, brought us another beer. He saw the look on John’s face. “This rounds on me, Bo,” he said softly, looking from John to me. George moved down the bar, then glanced back.
“You said you had a truth,” I said. “I hope it’s a new one.” John lifted his sunglasses from his pocket, turned and looked at me through the black lenses.
“You never know how big a woman's ass is until you start to kiss it. Truth. Take it from me. I should know, I've been there. When it comes to gluteus maximus geography, I've been to Montana and back.” He lifted his drink in a toast. “Drink up,” he said. “Let's get out of here.”
“You drive,” John said in the parking lot outside The Paradise Lounge. “If you get caught, I'll represent you for free. If I get caught, I'll have to pay.”
“Okay,” I said. “Give me the keys.”
“No way,” he said. “You're a threat to every woman and child on the highway.”
“No,” I said. “Only to every woman.”
“On the highway? You kinky bastard.”
I sang a song off The Beatles' White Album, and we laughed. Then a kind of heavy silence filled the car, and I got that bad, empty feeling about things.
At the intersection of Laurel and Providence Road, the light turned, and we stopped behind a van. John read aloud the lettering on the back, “Terminix.” He opened the door and walked up to the driver, whose face I could see in his side mirror. I couldn't hear what John was saying. The guy smiled. Then his face went absolutely blank, as if someone had pulled the plug. His window started up, but John held his hand on it. John said something else. I would have sworn he was asking directions or something. Then the guy must have cranked hard on the handle, because the window shot up. John took out his wallet and showed him some money. Then he held his hands together, thumbs up, as if he were playing imaginary saxophone or something, only he was inhaling, drawing hard on the imaginary pipe or whatever. John doesn't play the saxophone.
Anyway, the guy ran the light just before it turned green. John shrugged and started back toward me in the headlights. By the time he got behind the wheel, horns were blowing. The engine was running. He gently shifted the transmission into drive.
“I should have gone into medicine,” he said. Then he didn't say anything for a while. “I should have gone into medicine like my brother.”
“They make a bundle.”
“True,” he said. “My brother has two houses and three wives. Two of them are ex-wives. Drives a Jag. Happiest man I know.”
“Big mistake on your part,” I said. “What does he do?”
“Hearts maybe. No, no it's lungs. He quit smoking after he did his first set of lungs. When you see what's inside, well, you know.” He was drifting. “I could quit smoking.”
I knew what he meant. He'd seen people rip each other's hearts out, had been a paid accomplice.
“What's new in divorce court?” I said. Sometimes he dealt with it by focusing on the absurdity of his work. He was drunk enough now. If he got started, I knew he'd run with it. He could remember whole dialogues, exchanges between soon-to-be ex-spouses. Some of them were as funny as anything you can imagine. But he didn't seem to hear me.
“I could stop smoking,” he said.
One wing on the blue-and-red neon sign outside Byrd's poolroom was broken. When the other wing blinked up and down, it created the impression of a diving left turn. We parked the car in a space where somebody, some kid I guess, had left his letter jacket—a blue one with white sleeves. It was flat with tire tracks. We were singing harmony by this time to the radio. We are both pretty good singers. Really.
Byrd, the owner, is fond of John, too. John represented Byrd during his divorce. For months, every time John walked in, Byrd would cup his balls and say to some customer sitting across the bar or to his second wife, “See that guy? He's the reason I still got these.” For months Byrd gave him free drinks. He greeted us with a warm, vigorous handshake.
John and I leaned against the bar and waited for our beers. Nothing inside Byrd's poolroom had changed in twenty years, maybe longer. It's the sort of place that has been around since the beginning of time. Byrd could have bought new tables or made a killing on video games and poker machines, but the tables never changed, except that he had them railed and covered when they became untrue. His regulars know those tables. John and I were regulars.
Even the records on the jukebox hadn't changed. Most were rhythm and blues numbers: “I've Been Loving You Too Long,” by Otis Redding; “Mustang Sally,” by Wilson Pickett; Percy Sledge's, “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Songs like that. “Chain of Fools” was playing now.
The lights were dim, except for the fluorescent tents above each of the ten tables that stretched the length of the narrow brick room. There were steps down to the tables, and if you wanted, you could sit at the bar and follow any game below. The green felt soothed my eyes. And the pleasant combination of waxed hardwood floors, beer, hot-dog chili, and baby powder gave my brain a rest.
But the place had the opposite effect on John. He was alive. Lifting his arms, wrists cuffed above his bowed head, he strutted toward the bar singing with the Queen of Soul. Byrd smiled at him from behind the bar, pulled out two more Budweisers, and wrung the caps off. Evander Baker and Joe Fales, who were at the third table, lifted their sticks and started chanting, “John-ny,” John-ny.” The others took it up. Whenever any of those guys got locked up, day or night, or split with their wives or got split from them, they called John. I stepped over to the bar to pay for the beers, and John went into a version of “the swim,” his head bobbing to Aretha Franklin, gliding down the steps, past the tables, giving high-fives to everyone.
“Happy Hour all night,” Byrd whispered, leaning in confidentially.
John was singing louder now as the song reached the vamp, and all the players had stopped shooting and were smiling. Most were singing with him, singing the chorus of “Chain of Fools.” Byrd wagged his head from side to side, wiping the bar with a white rag with a red border. “He's cra
zy,” Byrd said. “He's crazy.”
***
Time passed into no time. Somebody had been buying fireballs, a red cinnamon drink, and splitting them two or three ways. But now it was tequila shots we were drinking. Byrd and John were doing bar tricks for the less serious players and those who'd lost their money. Byrd walked the length of the bar with a spoon on his nose, and John dropped lighted matches into two shot glasses in front of him on the bar.
Joe Fales was telling a story I'd heard before about how he'd set some guy's face on fire in chemistry class, then rushed him to the bathroom and dunked his head in the toilet. It was his example of having saved somebody's life.
John pressed a shot glass on each side of his neck. The matches died, forming a vacuum, and the glasses stuck. He stood slowly, then, darting his head like a rooster to the music, danced across the floor, to a song called “Skinny Legs and All.”
Byrd took out a toothpick, bent it in two, then bent each like knees.
“Come here, John,” Byrd called above the music. “I'll show you how to get a woman to spread her legs.” John swayed over. Byrd licked the original break in the toothpick and the wooden knees sprang up.
“I got one for you,” said Joe Fales.
John slowly pulled the shot glasses from each side of his neck and turned his back to the bar. Two raised red islands remained. “You gonna have some explaining to do when the ole Lady sees those,” said Evander. “If that ain't a hell of a hickey, I'll kiss your ass.” Joe was laying out rows of peanuts on the bar.
John pushed away from the bar, then drifted down the steps and swayed unsteadily past tables where the money was getting serious, on back to the last table, the only empty one. He picked up a stick and began banking the cue, hitting it so hard it ricocheted off the rails.
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