Someone To Crawl Back To

by Phillip Gardner

  Joe Fales traced circles on a napkin with a pencil and a quarter, then put the napkin in front of Evander on the bar. “Roll the quarter down your nose, and if it lands touching any one of the circles, I'll buy you a drink.” Evander pressed the coin between his eyes and rolled it the length of his beak. Each time, a new lead pencil line ran down his nose. Everybody was laughing, laughing at Evander who was laughing at them. Then we heard John.

  He was standing in the center of the last table with his pool cue-turned-microphone singing “My Way.” Everybody laughed. “Get off my table, you dumbshit.” Byrd was laughing too. John kept singing, going down on one knee like a crooner. He didn’t stop singing. The laughing stopped. Eyes turned to Byrd.

  “Time to go,” I said to John, who had begun the first verse again. “Come on man, get down from there. I'll buy you a drink, then we'll go.”

  “Can't make me.”

  He jumped to the next table, where Harman Parnell, the mobile home guy, and a one-eyed guy I didn't know were playing. The balls went everywhere. He slipped and fell hard on the green felt-covered slate. It was Harman's money on the game.

  “Hey, asshole.”

  John took out his wallet, emptied it on the table. “Next game's on me.”

  Byrd, Joe, and Evander were coming down the steps. The place was otherwise frozen.

  John pushed himself up again, stepped toward the rail. “I will now perform a half-gainer into the side pocket.”

  “Get down,” I said.

  “Otherwise known as a belly flop.”

  At the next table, Mitchell Watford stood in front of him, cue stick raised.

  “Take out your score cards, gentlemen.” He dove onto the next table, going down hard, landing on his side. His mouth was bleeding. Mitchell grabbed him by the shirt, but I pushed him away. Byrd and I helped John down.

  He found his footing, stretched his arms, threw back his head. He really was bleeding. “I did it Myyyyyyyyyyy way.” Then he gave a deep, theatrical bow. Nobody was laughing.

  He went into a three-point stance like a running back and darted the length of the room, dodging players, up the steps, disappearing behind the bar. I picked up his wallet and began stuffing his money inside it when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up expecting trouble, but it was Evander Baker, looking away, at the other end of the pool hall, at John, who was standing alone on the bar with Byrd's revolver at his head.

  “This is the audience participation part of the show,” he said. He wiped the blood from his mouth. “I'm gonna do this bar trick I saw once.” He took a deep breath. “Everybaaa-dy having a good time? Then, let me hear you say hell yeah.” He cupped his hand at his ear. The room was absolutely still. You could hear the slow turning of the ceiling fans. “Dead crowd,” he said. “Blame it on the opening act.”

  I started toward the bar. “Put the goddamn gun down, John.”

  “You are in charge of crowd control, Josh,” he said, motioning for me to stop. “Now, I'm gonna show you the best fuckin' bar trick you ever saw. Are you read-eeee? But I need your help.”

  He moved slowly down the bar toward us. “You see, I'll blow my brains out, here, live-and-in-person, like you ain’t never seen, if you guys will just promise to take care of my wife and kids, okay? Like in the Old South, in the old days, a casualty of war. What you say? I know I can count on you. Let's see a little commitment here.” It was hard to look at him. Some men leaned on their sticks and looked down at the floor. “Let's have a show of hands. Come on, how much is that asking?” With his free hand, he shook an imaginary pompom. “You-can-do-it, you-can-do-it, you can.” He took another deep breath. “Come on guys, it's my wife and kids,” he pleaded. “Just make sure nobody fucks with them, that's all I'm asking. I'd do it for any one of your fuckers, wouldn't I?” I was the only one looking at him. “You fuckers.”

  “Come on, John.”

  “Let me buy you a drink, man.”

  “Call it a day, Pal.”

  “Hand me the gun, brother,” I said. We all waited, looking but trying not to look, afraid.

  John lowered the pistol, then sat with his legs dangling from the bar. “How much is that asking? I'd do as much for any man in this room.” He looked from one down-turned face to another. He still held the gun. “You're all a bunch of pussies. You're all pussies.”

  For the first time, I think, he realized he was bleeding. He wiped his mouth, then eased himself down and walked to the jukebox, the pistol hanging loosely at his side. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. He dropped two quarters into the machine, set the revolver on the glass, and pressed the numbers. He hovered over it, its lights illuminating his rising and contracting chest, hollowing his eyes.

  A saxophone blasted, the brick walls boosting the volume. Jr. Walker and the All-Stars: “Shotgun.” The record skipped with a dtic, dtic between the lyrics. John gave the corner of the machine a cushioned blow with the palm of his hand. Then again. His head plumed up in anger. Gripping the edges of the machine, he rocked it gently. Then his body exploded in electrocution-like surges.

  The needle screamed off the vinyl. He stopped, and we could hear the slow, predictable mechanical whine of the player's arm rejecting, then coming to a stop.

  I laid my hand on his shoulder.

  It was so cold I had the heater blowing full blast, but John had his window down.

  “Pull in here,” he said.

  “Too late to buy beer now.”

  “Pull in. I want cigarettes.”

  The fluorescent lights inside the WILL-MART convenience store were as bright as lights in an operating room, so bright I could see his reflection in the cooler door. The reflection did something to his smile. He circled back toward the counter.

  The woman cashier sat on a tall wooden stool beside a tiny TV. When she stood, she curled one arm under her bowling ball-sized belly and slid sideways to her feet. John said something and she looked down, smiling at her stomach, then suddenly looked up at him as if he were a ghost. I reached for the door handle. She looked terrified. The pregnant woman quickly handed over the cigarettes, avoiding his eyes. I pushed the door open. John just stood there looking down at her, then turned and started back to the car.

  I don't know why, but I turned on the blinker in the parking lot before pulling out onto the street. John was tearing the cellophane off the Lucky Strikes. As far as I knew he had never smoked.

  “What did you say to her?” I asked.

  “Asked if she loved her baby.” He pulled the lighter from the dash and lit up.

  “What did she say?”

  He puffed. “That she did.” He pressed a button, and his window went up in silence. “So I asked her why she ate him.” He bumped a second cigarette from the pack and lit it from the first, then offered it to me.

  “No thanks.”

  He tucked the filter of each cigarette under his top lip so that they looked like red-tipped fangs. The smoke streamed up his cheeks, over his eyes, through his hair.

  Then he stared straight ahead, his eyes fixed on some image in the glass or beyond it, or on nothing at all farther away.

  Ahead, the road seemed to meet me, as if it were being created the moment the headlights touched it, and I took the curves slowly, concentrating on the very center of the lane, focusing, feeling the comfort of that concentration until we neared town.

  John began singing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” a little slower than the original, but at near perfect pitch.

  After a time, I joined in.

  You find balance in small things. For example, think about how hot you like your coffee and about how cool it gets before you don't want it anymore. About how cold you want your beer and how slowly you can drink it before it becomes an obligation. I know, these are small things. But try it. You have to start with the balance of small things. It takes some time, but try it. Then over time and if you’re lucky, maybe you find the perfect balance in your day between the coffee and the beer. Then move to the bigger things. Maybe it can
make a remarkable difference.

  Inhabited Space

  Giles Carter

  After two sober weeks of sitting all day in the sun writing, Giles did produce a scenario finally, a good one he thought. And so in the end it turned out all right, or at least that's what he told himself.

  But that first day Giles lay in bed well into the afternoon, thinking of the drive from the airport to the hotel. Nobody in the limo said the screenplay wouldn't work and would have to be scrapped. Nobody said it. But everybody knew.

  Giles reached for another cigarette on the table beside the bed, lit it, and began to replay yet again the drive to the Hilton from LA International, feeling only the oscillation of panic and awe. The scene inside the stretch Lincoln had played so smoothly, unfolding seamlessly, every inflection perfect, every pause charged with silent meaning. If he could just remember how it had really happened, he might be able to use it sometime. He had lost so much because he'd forgotten how things had really been.

  Now all he could recall truly was the blood rushing through his ears and an internal voice saying, Something is wrong here; something is very, very wrong. He couldn't remember a single line of dialogue from the thirty-minute drive. He had lost it.

  When he finally got dressed Giles was still on East Coast time, and he went for a walk in the gray mist because his internal clock said it was time for a drink. He had the small blue notebook, which he carried in his pocket to remind himself that it didn't necessarily have to be a lie, his saying he was a writer.

  The next day, after Giles had searched until he'd found the bar again, the barman, a Swede, refused to return the little notebook. “I'm gonna fuck up your world, Bubba,” Giles had said with such conviction that the Swede, who had thirty pounds on him, reached for the phone and called the police.

  But that first day, the Blonde had taken the notebook from Giles's pocket and laid it before him, then opened the button on his shirt and pressed her fingers on his nipple. Later, he vaguely remembered some shouting from the Swede about the bill.

  The bar, The Booth it was named, was narrow and dark, a neighborhood geriatric bar in North Hollywood. People knew one another. They were all very, very old. Somebody spoke when someone new walked in. Giles Carter sat among them and listened for conversation that he might use in a script. Rhett Butler's stand-in arrived, the ears and mustache perfectly preserved, the ancient, tanned face a wrinkled mask. The old man had traded on that role, Giles thought, that moment, all these years, playing the refracted part of a man pretending to be Clark Gable acting the part of Rhett Butler, a fiction.

  After his first novel, Giles had promoted himself like a brush salesman. He'd thought the promotional persona would force him to get the second book written. If he went public enough about the second book, he'd have to write it. If he were bold enough it would be a good book. He'd have to hold true to it. That's what he had thought at the time.

  “What about Hollywood?” the interviewer from Publishers Weekly had asked.

  “Hollywood is a whore in a wedding dress,” he'd said.

  That was before he had taken the contract to write the screenplay that wouldn't work.

  Sitting alone at a small table inside The Booth, he drank and soaked in the dark coolness, then drank more. And sometime later when there was still light outside, two women came in and took a small table behind him. Giles watched them in the mirror above the bar and listened. One was tall and blonde, mini-skirted and well built—English. The other, brownish-red hair and weathered, said she was from Colorado. He thought she looked made of desert material. He sat so that he could listen like a secret agent. Both women had played hooky from work, the tall, good-looking one because her Colorado friend had just been broken off from a relationship. They drank. The English blonde pressed buttons on the juke box. Heads turned.

  Later, much later, an old woman, one of the regulars, came into the bar with her wares and set up shop on the tiny area that had been meant for a bandstand and sold—what? And Giles thought, yes, Fellini.

  “Your accent, is it real?” the blonde said.

  Giles was standing at a telephone, music behind him, without the number he thought he'd intended to call.

  “I have my hand on you,” she said after other drinks.

  ***

  He awaited the hole he was going to make in the windshield on the drive over, and they parked in an alley that made him think danger. Then he was looking around for a bed.

  He thought it would go quickly. Even the earth's axis seemed to him greased, all things gliding now, the city a pastel patched quilt easing around him. But instead they were standing in the apartment kitchen, small and narrow and empty, and someone, a man, arrived and then wasn't there.

  A NEW VOICE: “You didn't go to work. You should have told me, you know. When you didn't show for dinner, I called the office. I gave you away.” The tanned, athletic girl who was talking to the tall blonde woman he was with hadn't taken her eyes off him since appearing from vapor just now. Her eyes never left Giles.

  The girl was young, maybe sixteen, if you didn't count the eyes. Giles didn't know what to say. Why was she telling him this? Dinner? Whose office? She waited for his reply. Now a reversal: she looked at her mother but spoke to him. “I have my license, but hers is a five-speed. What's your name?” she said, still looking at her mother. Then he realized she was still talking to him.

  “Giles Carter,” he said.

  “Giiiles,” she repeated. “What does it mean?”

  Then the girl was gone, and Giles and the girl's mother were drinking vodka. “She approves of you,” the woman said. “She likes you. Couldn't you tell by the way she was looking at you?”

  “But I'm not from Mississippi. You told her I was from Mississippi. South Carolina. I'm from South Carolina.”

  “She likes you. She likes the way you are.”

  He sits on the sofa with a photo album on his lap. There is no other furniture in the room. The snapshots seem familiar. Has he seen the people in the photos before? He half expects to see himself on the next page. But what the girl says about each picture is unfamiliar, the connections between one picture and another just beyond his reach. The woman in the kitchen making more vodkas is smiling from inside the picture her daughter points at. Giles forgets where he is.

  When she reaches the last page, the girl tilts up the photo album and the pages flip backwards like celluloid squares, rewinding time, reconstructing the narrative: Boy gets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy meets Girl.

  Giles sees two sofas, like an L here. One mattress on the floor framed by the bedroom door there. That is all. Where does the music come from?

  The girl looks up at him and smiles brightly.

  He decides. No sleeping with the tall one he drove over with, no going to bed with all those photos, all that history to carry in his head. Even drunk, he feels the levitating sensation of having decided and knowing that no amount of drink can change his mind about this one.

  After a few seconds, he realizes the girl's mother is talking to him. “I’ve promised a driving lesson, you understand. You won’t go away, will you?” she says. “Promise? Won’t be long.”

  Her daughter waits impatiently at the door, observing. “The girl sees wax figures through thick glass,” Giles whispers.

  “Promise that you won't sleep with her,” the English mother says, looking past him, speaking now of the brownish-red haired Colorado friend who has been broken off of a relationship and who has been somewhere in the apartment all along.

  “No, I won't.”

  The girl stands holding the door, looking at him. She doesn't extend her hand to protect her mother as the woman weaves past her. The girl is still looking at him after the mother has negotiated the landing, still looking at him. The mother is on the stairs now, and Giles thinks she'll never make it down in one piece.

  “We'll be back, but you won't be here. So I'll say good-bye,” the girl said.

  “I'll be here.”

 
“Sure you will.” She turned, then looked back. “But I like the sound of your voice when you say that.” He heard her running down the steps before the door closed behind her. He heard a voice.

  Then he was inside his own head.

  INTERIOR - APARTMENT - NIGHT

  That brown-red color, like Colorado, was fine. Just right really. But from the view Giles had now, CLOSE UP, the roots should have been black, or better yet blonde. She should have had it dyed. All wrong not to have had it dyed. He was sure she should have. No question. The Colorado Woman. Her breasts sway in the water.

  WOMAN

  Let's take a bath.

  Turning her face up to us now, toward the camera, toward him; the camera is at EYE LEVEL. He steps back, out of the frame.

  THE GIRL

  (voice

  over)

  The woman who calls herself my mother

  wants her purse. You got it?

  CUT TO:

  WOMAN

  Must've left it at the bar.

  CUT TO:

  THE GIRL

  (hip against the sink but leaning in

  as she speaks)

  Well THESE keys are mine and I

  won't be handing them over.

  CUT TO: CLOSE UP

  For a second the keys between her thumb and first knuckle flap like a small fish grasped by its head.

  CUT TO:

  THE GIRL as she opens the WOMAN'S BAG, lights a cigarette from it, blows out the smoke, watches as the smoke finally disappears. Then looks again at the WOMAN in the bath. A long moment here.