“You’re so unhappy. You cry in your sleep at night. You talk in mournful tones. I hear you through the wall,” Lulu told me.
“What do I say?”
“You talk about schlepping peppers with a girl named Debra, I think, or perhaps you are escaping from leopards across the sea. I don’t know.”
I told her that I was unhappy because I was afraid of losing her.
“That makes no sense,” she said. “Here I am.”
And she took me in her arms and led me into bed and exploded.
She told me that the world was mean to me because people can be destructive, especially when envy gets hold of them.
“People envy me?” I said.
“You have a sly inner beauty that shines through. You’re not thick and dumb like them. You’re smooth and lean. You are the attractivest man I know.”
This was news to me.
Lulu became like a member of the family. Even Dad noticed how nice she was. Mom included Lulu in our Scrabble games. In her lucid moments, Mom was a fierce player, one who could dig down into the rattiest collection of letters and root up incredible winning words like “etytylic” or “zumbrist” and then, when challenged, go to the unabridged Webster’s and, bango, there it was, the exact word, meaning “that which pertains to the indehiscent fruit of the buckwheat,” and of course her word hit Triple Word Bonus and the Z landed on Triple Letter, so she rang up a hundred points with one word and left you no openings except a “but” or an “aunt” or “tuna” and she would rub her hands and gloat. “Skunked you there, Buddy. What’s your problem? Hormones getting you down again?”
“Hormones are acting up, Mom,” I chuckled, looking at Lulu. Her cutoffs were cut off as high as cutoffs can be cut without becoming a belt, and her halter top didn’t hold much back. I was dazed by her beauty. So generous. Lavish even.
Dad sensed what was happening with me and Lulu, I guess, and he took a sudden fitful interest in me. “You haven’t been to church for a while, Buddy. Months. Hope you haven’t given up on us guys. You need a little spiritual component in your life, you know. If it’s the church you don’t like, did you know you can take communion at home now, using a Methodist modem? I can get one for you—” I told him, No thanks.
And then, one night, Mom put down the word “therapy” in Scrabble and scored thirty-six points and looked at me and Lulu and said, “That’s it. No more booze.” She joined a group called Alamom, they met twice a week and sobbed into their coffee cups and sighed and smoked cigarettes and heaved their bosoms, and Alamom convinced her that she needed to confront her family with the truth about her feelings.
So she did. She sat us down around the kitchen table one afternoon and she told Dad that he was a jerk but that she loved him anyway. She told me that she had never wanted me and that I had ruined her life. “It’s time I started thinking about myself,” she said. “You’ve been hanging on me like dead moss for years, Buddy. I’m an alcoholic because I felt guilty about not wanting you. Now I don’t feel guilty about it anymore.”
I staggered up to my room as if poleaxed and cried into the pillow for an hour and finally Lulu came in and sat on the bed. “Let’s go west,” I said. “I’ll steal the car and we’ll drive to California and find us a cabin in the woods. A log cabin with a barrel stove and a lot of plants and us in a big bed, naked, making love and then running naked down to the pale-blue sea streaked with pink and diving in and swimming and running back to the cabin and jumping into bed and drinking coffee and eating goat yogurt with honey and oranges, and making love again—what a happy life, Lulu. Let’s do it. Let’s go to California.” I said all this in a torrent of words, breaking all the rules of hypnotic conversation. I yipped like a dog. “Please, Lulu. Please. Say you will.”
She looked at me long and mournfully and held my fluttering hand in hers. She said softly, “You’re trying to find love and happiness, but in the woods you must find it within yourself, and, Buddy, I don’t think you have it in you. Maybe that’s why I don’t love you.”
“You don’t?”
She said she didn’t. So she couldn’t come to California with me. She had a job to do. She couldn’t walk away from it. She hoped I would understand.
“Why?” I asked.
“Don’t ask why. You’ll avoid a lot of confusion that way.”
I told her that if she didn’t come with me, I would go by myself. I immediately regretted saying this. I wished I could stay and continue to blow her dress off and to be whatever I was to her, but she said, “Well, then, you will have to go by yourself. I will pack your clothes and make you a lunch.”
I took my sweet time getting dressed, putting on my coat, walking to the Sioux Falls bus depot, hoping that Lulu would run to me and throw her arms around me and tell me to stay. I stood outside the bus until the driver snapped at me to get on board and even then I looked up the street, praying she would make me stay, and then I climbed on and headed west across the prairie for California, there to seduce beautiful women with my subtle techniques and bury forever the terrible secret of my leprosy.
MR. ST. PAUL
hirty-one waist and sixty-five chest, Three hundred pounds clean jerked and pressed,
But body-building is more than physique,
It’s about conceptualizing success and using all
Your inner self, the way I did last week.
Against eleven other guys, I was named Mr. St. Paul.
Confidence is the mark of a true champion:
Before the match begins, you know you’ve won.
And yet, when I was crowned onstage,
A winner, the best that a guy could wish,
I thought, “Thirty-two years of age:
It’ll never be better than this.
No, nothing will ever be as good as in the past
And all you can do is try not to lose it too fast.”
Mr. St. Paul was the only good thing to happen all year,
It’s been all grief since she walked out,
The only girl I really cared about.
I felt so bad, I wished I could disappear.
Every day, I wish I was walking with my right hand
Around the waist of the beautiful Jacqueline Ann,
Riding on her hips and feeling her long body sway,
Walking in the crowd along the State Fair Midway.
We necked everywhere, in the dark at the Aquarium
And at the movies, and in the summer we’d come
To the Fair and ride the double Ferris wheel
And I would reach up her dress and feel
Her—what a thrill on a summer night,
The feeling that you’ve absolutely got it made.
Your girl there, dressed in white,
And you knowing how this game is played.
A year later, she is often on my mind.
I keep the picture of her that she signed:
“When the darkest night surrounds you,
Cold and lonely as can be,
Don’t give up, just look around you,
You can always count on me.
Lots of love to a great guy. Jackie Ann.”
She made me a happy man,
And I love her no matter what my friends say,
And I would take her back today
If she decided to leave that jerk, Everett.
It would be even better than before, I bet.
Just her beside me would give me happiness,
My girl in her cool white summer dress.
And could I forgive her? I would say, yes.
I haven’t gone with anybody for thirteen months,
Except on a blind date once
With a sad girl from Minneapolis, arranged by my buddy Jim,
Who thought I needed one, and any one would do.
But you couldn’t find two greater guys than him
And his brother-in-law Barry.
We’ve known each other since ’82.
We go fishing almost ever
y Saturday
During walleye season, up in northern Wisconsin.
We never discuss money, work, or religion,
And not even women that much, which suits me fine.
So they don’t know I think about her all the time.
They think I’m over her and back to my old self,
And sometimes I think so too and yet
A girl like her is hard to forget
When she leaves you for someone else.
Last weekend, in the boat, a big old green fly
Came buzzing around my head. It
Was the kind you see sitting on horseshit.
It lit on me right between my eyes.
And I thought, “It’s hard to fool one of them green flies.”
I’ve felt like horseshit since a year ago.
Felt like I was drowning, dragged down below,
And woke up some nights in a cold sweat,
Unable to breathe,
Thinking of her and Everett
In a bed and her underneath.
I know where they live in St. Louis Park,
Which is miles away, luckily.
And yet once or twice I’ve driven past and seen the windows dark
And imagined her with him, his big ugly
Face next to hers, him taking off his pants,
Her trembling and beautiful and nude,
And his two big hairy hands
Grabbing her like she was a piece of fruit.
I guess I have got to kill the son of a bitch
One of these days, haul him out of bed
And throw him off the Lake Street bridge,
Either that or accept him living in my head,
Year after year, grinning at me like an ape,
A man I never met
And can’t escape,
My true love’s lover, Everett.
Maybe shoot him in the pants,
Watch him jump and dance,
See the dark blood run.
That might be fun.
Probably this is why guys used to go west,
To Alaska, or if it was really bad, Australia.
To avoid homicide, they recessed
Into the wilderness, the skunk of failure
On their clothes, and took their broken hearts
To the end of the line, out to the farthest parts,
And settled down where good luck could strike,
Some mother lode of goodness make them well.
And they could drive the golden spike
Into that old story that was too sad to tell.
But I like it in St. Paul. My folks are here.
I don’t want to be the one to disappear.
Let him go, not me. Today I bought a gun,
And though I’m not saying I’d shoot anyone,
I believe that tonight I’ll go to St. Louis Park.
Load the gun and drive slowly past in the dark
And see what I see, and see what I do.
Get this thing out of the way and go on to something new.
THAT OLD PICAYUNE-MOON
o the editor,
The Zenith Picayune-Moon:
I grew up among positive-thinking people with seldom an unkind word for anybody and I have tried to be positive too, a founder and builder and cultivator and patron and a medium of light in the world, a philosophy that led me to run for mayor of our city, in which office I have served four terms, as you may know.
Democracy is a tedious business. It tends to attract people who have time to kill, and so a public official spends vast aeons of time sitting and listening to gasbags, but I always tried to remember that public service is a high calling and that bitterness is beneath a public servant. I looked on the bright side.
And then along came that greasy, flabby, small-minded, mealy-mouthed, pasty-faced, and potato-headed daily fishwrap and dog’s biffy, the Picayune-Moon, edited by that dildo Hector Timmy. (You.) If it had been St. Francis’s hometown newspaper there in Assisi, sir, he would have dropped the Golden Rule like a bent pool cue and taught those birds to attack.
My wife thinks I’m wrong. She says, “You wanted to be the center of attention. That’s why you ran for mayor. Stop picking on the press.”
She has a point. A person does feel sheepish picking on journalists, a class already so richly despised that if a planeload of them crashed in flames, most people would smile from pure reflex. Reporters like to think they are despised because they are brave and dare to tell the truth, but the public smells something else, a little sadism and ghoulishness floating around in the tank. Plus a weak filament in the ole light bulb. Whenever a newspaper reports on something you know about, half the time they get it two-thirds wrong.
I quote my wife now: “You have your health and a good home with lovely children and you have the passionate love of a handsome woman in her early fifties, a woman’s erotic peak period. You are a lucky man, in no position to despise anybody. Anyway, if there was ever somebody not worth getting mad at, it’s the paper.”
Of course she is right, and at first glance the Picayune-Moon doesn’t look like much, only about the thirty-first-worst newspaper in America, not even a contender, full of blither and blather about the same hundred ditzy celebrities and “lifestyle” stuff about lives so banal you’d be thrilled to be dead and stock photos of tots and pets and athletes caught in silly positions and the obligatory headline puns and a regular brothel of columnists, all of it tricked out in bilious blue and gooseshit green and virulent yellow, and ten minutes later you can’t remember a single sentence you read. She’s right. What’s to get mad at?
Hector Timmy, I suppose. A man who isn’t easy to describe in twenty-five words or less, but here’s a try:
Airhead, buttface, cretin, dork, eunuch, fungus, guttersnipe, hack, imbecile, jackal, loser, meatloaf, numb nuts, objet d’merde, pissant, rummy, scumball, turkey, upchuck, vulture, windbag, yahoo, zero, a real piece of work.
That’s you, you weasel.
I laid eyes on you the other night as you sat dining at the Blue Light Cafe with your managing editor Delores Whinny. Her hair was drawn up high on her head, bright orange like the inflammation on a baboon’s hinder, so when she scratched her face, it gave me a jolt. And when she poked a fork in it, I almost fell over.
I asked the waitress, “Who is that chinless man with the droopy mustache that looks like he is eating a brown baby rat, Stella?”
“The one sitting with the horse-faced lady? That’s Hector Timmy, of course,” she replied. “You know him. The one who keeps falling off his chair.”
The good woman was right. You had chained your wrist to a bottle of bourbon and were halfway to the bottom of it, slowly turning yourself into a sandbag. What a gorgeous opportunity, I thought. My enemy, immobilized—a chance to say something vile and withering and poke him in the snoot. I tried to conjure up an insult so sharp it could penetrate your mind and slosh through the vast fat deposits and find a working synapse and sting you, but someone as viscous as yourself is hard to sting. It occurred to me to stroll over and casually tip the cherries flambé into your large lap and pelt you with macaroons. As you may be aware, I did not.
At the moment, it is eleven p.m. I have spent thirty minutes on this letter so far and now my wife, her black hair tumbling over her bare shoulders touched with freckles under the pale-blue gossamer negligee hanging light as a leaf on her pale breasts and her bold etcetera, says, “Quit writing to that bebo and take off your clothes.” She runs her fingers through my thick hair. “There is nothing deader than this morning’s paper and here you are, strong and healthy and not all that bad-looking, so turn out the light and come to bed and do your homework,” whispers the woman who still, after twenty-five years, makes my lips twitch. “In a moment, love,” I tell her. She sighs.
I will not bore you here with a list of my accomplishments as mayor, the businesses and organizations I’ve helped at every turn, the thousands of little favors for ordinary folks, the countless dedicat
ory speeches (brief, lighthearted) and the endless public meetings at which I have sat patiently and allowed my fellow citizens to rail and screech at me for the mortal failings of city employees. I will not cite these. I doubt that a flabby little guy with a rat for a mustache would be impressed. The man who edits the paper that printed the story “City Hall Renovation Disturbs Cancer-Stricken Gold-Star Moms in Shabby Rooms One Block from Where Trucks Rumble, Power Tools Whine, Making Lavish Suite for Mayor, Including Luxury Shower and Track Lighting” two weeks ago is not going to be deflected by facts.
“Make peace with the man,” my beloved Annie told me at the time. “Put on your cheap sport coat and your dumb shoes with the tassels and fill your big brown eyes with warmth and smile your brotherly smile and go to the man’s office and grovel.” I decided not to, and perhaps I was wrong.
Your story last Tuesday, “Mayor Loads Pants Pockets at City Treasury in Broad Daylight, Leaving Veteran Observers Sad, Disgusted,” about the City Council voting a salary increase of eight percent for city employees, including the mayor, did not upset me, and I read with amusement the Wednesday installment, “Fat Cat Mayor Jets Around Country at Our Expense—$130/Day Suites, Cocktails, Shrimp the Size of Your Fist”—and then your Thursday front page (“Mayor Stung by Charges of Corruption, Arrogance, and Deceit”) didn’t bother me either, nor Friday’s (“Limo Liberal Cruises to City Hall While Workers Walk—He Is Hauled in Luxury to the Public Trough While Sick and Blind and Deaf and Lame Sit on Cold Corners Waiting for Public Transit”), and when, for the Saturday edition, you sent reporters to rifle our garbage cans (“First Family Doesn’t Clean Plates—They Waste Steak, Trout, and Dark Things That Resemble Truffles”), I rolled over and had a restful nap. It was nothing but that gallant old eye-gouging spirit of the tabloid that maybe we need a little more of in this age of marshmallow newscasters. After your Sunday story, “Six Sofas in Mayor’s Reception Hall—Could He Not Donate One or Two to Old Soldiers Home Where Crippled Vets Who Toppled Tojo Must Squat on Chill, Dank Concrete?,” I actually was moved to send a fifty-dollar check to the Salvation Army.
The Book of Guys Page 8