You Got Nothing Coming

by Jimmy A. Lerner

  The public schools are the kind where parents stay enthusiastically involved in all aspects of education, generously contributing their time and dollars with a zeal normally associated with the alumni of private colleges. The public high schools consistently pump out adolescent grist for the polishing mills of U.C. Berkeley and Stanford.

  There are still large patches of woods, tree-laden walking paths, scenic bike trails, and even a shrine for the local literati, the Tao House, where Eugene O'Neill is said to have written The Iceman Cometh.

  Downtown Hartz Avenue is dotted with antique stores and art galleries, boutiques striving to be chic and quaint and charming all at once and often succeeding, elegant restaurants and European-style alfresco cafés where the young, the old, or just the weary can sip exotic coffees or a glass of chardonnay. Young mothers in bright summer dresses push baby carriages and window-shop, stopping to chat and laugh with friends and neighbors they encounter on the street.

  With its almost all-white demographics and high concentration of professionals, Danville is an easy target for satire by our friends in San Francisco, a bridge and a universe away. To them it is a privileged enclave of Republicans and smug materialism. To them I would say, "So sue me!" I felt I had paid my urban dues.

  For me, a survivor of a thousand nightmarish D train subway rides in New York's stifling summer heat, Danville was a place of such surpassing beauty and mountain-shadowed serenity that if it didn't exist I might have invented a place in my heart for it.

  Danville, with its sheltering canopy of majestic old oaks, with an old-fashioned downtown soda fountain and an independent bookstore (where the friendly owners not only knew my name but would send me postcards to let me know when books they thought might be of interest to me had arrived), was to me a refugee from Flatbush Avenue, the American Dream.

  With its own Monster, Dwayne Hassleman, lurking behind his curtains in a small house on Maple Street, just a few blocks from the Danville Players theater group. Just waiting. Waiting almost a year to come back into my life.

  Was he really waiting for me? Waiting for me to get divorced and move in across the street from him with my girls helping me to schlepp boxes of books and blankets and towels and photo albums and old vinyl LPs? Was he watching us even then as the former wife gave me decorating suggestions and the piano movers wrestled with my piano so later I could pound out the music of pain and loss and despair?

  Was it the sharp scent of my pain that roused the Monster, that was once again to make me the target of his obsessive interest? Or just my bad luck?

  Or maybe it was just someone playing dice with my universe.

  * * *

  I was unpacking boxes that the former wife had considerately labeled "dishes," "books," "bathroom," "bedroom." I had taken a one-year lease on a small house on Maple Street in Danville. For $1,500 a month I was rewarded with a washer and dryer, two bedrooms (one for the girls on weekends and Wednesday nights), a small living room with hardwood floors, two bathrooms, and a beautiful backyard with preinstalled flowers, Japanese maples, and lots of bushes and plants. (Is there a difference?)

  For an extra $150 a month the homeowners' association provided an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts, and a health club. The pool even had a diving board and a lifeguard on duty. It was my deluded hope that the girls would love having the use of a diving board (no diving boards at the former wife's pool) so much it would mitigate some of the fresh pain of the divorce.

  Best of all was my view of Mount Diablo, which dominates the San Ramon and Diablo Valleys.

  I was removing some books when the doorbell rang.

  Assuming the former wife (for brevity's sake I'll call her the F.W.) or the girls had forgotten to give me some last-minute box, I opened the door.

  Dwayne Hassleman stood there.

  "Welcome to the neighborhood, Jimmy. I thought I recognized you. My house is the one with the green roof just across the street and three down. Need some help with those boxes?"

  We shook hands. There was no sign of the Monster I had last seen at Denny's. Or that had made the late phone calls and threats. Dwayne appeared to be calm and healthy, muscles straining against a white T-shirt over his camouflage pants. Same jungle combat boots. Intense green eyes.

  "Jimmy, I don't know if you ever received my voice mails— but I want to apologize in person for how I acted, not only at Denny's that night but the phone calls after. I was just so messed up back then that—"

  I waved away the rest of his words. "It's all right, Dwayne. That was a long time ago. I'm glad to see you're doing well."

  "You look good yourself. You still go to that A.A. meeting on Monday night?"

  "Well, right now let's just say that I'm in between recoveries. Again."

  "I know how that is. I've been meaning to get back into some kind of support group but—"

  "Dwayne, you don't owe me any explanations."

  "Hey, you're going to love this house. It's got a great backyard that overlooks the association swimming pool. I almost leased it myself when it became available last month after Mrs. Bush died."

  "Why didn't you?"

  "It didn't have the right kind of steps to play stoopball."

  "But there's a great stretch of sidewalk to play skelly. You have any good bottle caps?"

  "Hold on. I've got some Heineken in my fridge— be right back."

  Fifteen minutes and two beers later we were back again in the Brooklyn of our youth, laughing and pretending there had never been the slightest rift in our friendship. There had never been a Monster.

  On that day— a very bad day— I was grateful to have my friend Dwayne back.

  * * *

  Dwayne was Mr. Helpful that first day in my new home on Maple Street. Although it was a workday, a Monday, he appeared to have nothing more important to do than insist upon carrying boxes to the F.W.'s designated areas. At a certain point in the afternoon I realized that someone had removed every single lightbulb in the house.

  "No problem," Hassleman said. "There's a new Ace hardware store off of Hartz— I'll be back in a New York minute." And he was out the front door before I could give him the bill I was pulling out of my wallet. A compulsive list maker, I already had on my "Moving— To Do List" a trip to the hardware store, the post office, the supermarket, then some take-out Chinese food.

  Through the large picture window in the living room I watched Dwayne race down the cobblestone path that led from the front door to the sidewalk. The stone walkway bisected a colorful front garden blooming and bursting with unknown (to me) varieties of plants and flowers. Parallel to the cobblestone walkway was my driveway leading into a two-car garage. Although our homeowners' association rules prohibited parking cars overnight in the driveways, most residents did it anyway— a suburban expression of civil disobedience.

  The Monster's driveway across the street boasted a late-model silver Mercedes parked alongside a spanking new Range Rover. Dwayne paused a moment, examining his set of keys as if trying to decide on the appropriate mode of conveyance for the half-mile journey to Ace. He reached into a large pouch in his cammy pants and extracted one of those huge Banana Republic safari hats designed to deflect… what? Poisonous snakes dropping down from overhanging vines? Poison blow darts to the neck?

  The Monster finally selected the Range Rover, a manly choice for a hardware store trip. The Mercedes would be kept in reserve for the early evening journey to Starbucks.

  Or it would have been, except two minutes after Dwayne embarked on his suburban safari, a tow truck rolled up behind the Mercedes. Two burly guys wearing identical sweat-stained black tank tops over ragged Levi's emerged from the truck, one of them consulting a clipboard.

  They looked like, walked like, and quacked like visitors from Planet Repo. I watched through my living room window (have to get some window treatments) as they seemed to verify information from the clipboard with the Monster's license plates and address. Apparently convinced the Mercedes wa
s a rightful resident of Planet Repo, they quickly hooked it up and were towing it down Maple Street when the Range Rover pulled into the driveway.

  Dwayne leaped out just in time to scream at the Mercedes' rapidly disappearing bumper.

  "COCKSUCKERS! GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING SHIT!"

  Had my grandpa George been there, he might have remarked that "profanity is the crutch of a crippled vocabulary."

  All raging army fatigues now, the Monster started jumping up and down on the sidewalk, directing a barrage of profanities so foul that my remaining notion of propriety prohibits me from listing them all here. Veins like ugly purple ropes suddenly popped out on the Monster's linebacker sturdy neck, pulsing and palpitating with the implied promise of payback for Planet Repo.

  When the jumping and cursing failed to fetch back his beloved Mercedes, the Monster started beating first his fists and then, rage fading to sadness, his head against the Range Rover's windshield, tears streaming down his cheeks. It was a transformation so extreme and curiously poignant that it was like watching someone working his way through the "stages of mourning" at a lightning pace, moving from rage and denial to grief and acceptance in seconds.

  The Monster must have really loved that Mercedes.

  Dwayne finally extracted an Ace hardware sack from the Range Rover, crossed the street without looking first (only in California are people so trusting), and calmly strolled down my walkway.

  I opened the front door. "Problem?" I asked.

  Hassleman managed a weak grin, the affable mask firmly back in place. "No problem," he said, handing me a bag of lightbulbs. "I'll straighten it out tomorrow— hell, I paid eighty grand in cash for that car." On the journey to get my M.B.A. I suffered through a few financial management and accounting classes and I didn't recall ever hearing that cash had the downside risk of bouncing. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention.

  I took out my wallet to pay for the lightbulbs, but Dwayne waved it off.

  "Consider it a housewarming gift." He grinned, eyes still moist with Mercedes grief.

  "Thank you. Listen, I have a lot of stuff to put away—"

  "No problem, guy, I got a few things to take care of myself, a little business, but why don't you drop by later, say seven or so, and I'll barbecue us a couple of steaks in the backyard. I noticed your fridge is empty."

  What was he doing looking in my refrigerator— we didn't put any food away. I had been planning to pick up some spicy-hot Mongolian beef and wonton soup (paying extra for the crispy noodles), but my back and neck were singing in pain after wrestling with boxes all day. The prospect of driving into downtown Danville (six whole blocks) exhausted me. The alternate plan of a delivered pizza (extra topping for the newly divorced) depressed me.

  "That would be great, Dwayne. Listen, I appreciate your help today and thanks again for the lightbulbs."

  "Hey, what are neighbors for?" he said brightly, all the rage of a few moments before nowhere in evidence.

  Front door closing, Hassleman's jungle boots bouncing over the cobblestones, then making a diagonal cut at the curb to cross the street and reach his driveway. He stops by the Range Rover, considers.

  Then backs the Rover into his garage.

  Thwunk! Metal garage door meets the concrete below.

  Somewhere in a never-imagined future a steel door is sliding open from a concrete wall. Two steel sleeping trays in an empty cell, a rusted metal toilet, graffitied cinder block.

  Just waiting for me.

  * * *

  During the course of my first day in the house on Maple Street I unconsciously reenacted the housekeeping rituals of the Newly Divorced Guy. The furniture guys pulled up in a truck and delivered my brand-new black leather La-Z-Boy recliner. They placed it in the living room in front of my thirty-five-inch TV without my even having to tell them that was precisely where I wanted it.

  I hadn't luxuriated in the comfort of a huge recliner since my bachelor days, fifteen years before. The wife considered recliners to be male barbarisms whose true subversive purpose was to destroy the tasteful communal decor of the family room. She preferred sectional sofa arrangements, not just for the aesthetics but to facilitate family bonding.

  Recliners were the last refuge of the solitary scoundrel.

  The cable guy arrived to ensure that I had twenty-four-hour access to old Rocky and Rambo movies, to Arnold and Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, reruns of Bonanza (give me dark, brooding Adam over punk-ass Little Joe any day), The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, and my all-time favorite, Leave It to Beaver, featuring network TV's first true sociopathic character (also a favorite), Eddie Haskell.

  Could my childhood affinity for Eddie— that rascal!— account for my unthinking acceptance of the Monster's barbecue invitation?

  I tipped the cable guy generously to hook up my VCR to my TV. Despite my M.B.A. in telecommunications management and my strategic "white papers" extolling technological "convergence," I could never manage to get the VCR to do anything more than play back rented movies. The F.W. had always handled the high-tech details of modern living. VCR hookup was her job. I was clueless.

  The movers arrived with more stuff from my "old house" that the F.W. thought I could use. Two big beer-gutted guys from the furniture company arrived and installed a new king bed in the master bedroom, two twin beds for the girls in "their" bedroom. (I hoped they didn't mind sharing a bedroom.)

  I tried to replicate the amenities of their bedrooms at home— a Nintendo, a color TV, a telephone, a computer, a CD player. A mature and amicable divorce should never interfere with the spoiling of the children. The F.W. and I agreed on that. Though not Jewish, the F.W. had the heart and soul of a Jewish mother.

  The phone guy came out and activated dial tone, added a second line to ensure uninterrupted Internet access (no way I was going to pay for the phone company's overpriced DSL connection), and passed on rumors he'd heard from the union that the phone company was an acquisition target for an even bigger Baby Bell. Another generous tip and twenty minutes later the computer, monitor, scanner, printer, and modem were happily interfacing in my bedroom.

  The sun was setting in a velvet haze over Mount Diablo when I was finally able to take a break. I slothed out for a minute in my new La-Z-Boy, adjusting the level until my head was about an inch off the floor (optimal relaxation position) and my feet somewhere in the heavens. A serene bachelor moment except the blood was rushing to my head and I couldn't breathe.

  Also too quiet. Way too quiet. With the exception of the occasional business trip or "marketing retreat" to learn how to Be Here Now, I hadn't been separated from my wife or the girls in many years.

  As part of the joint custody and visitation schedule, the girls would spend every weekend and one weeknight every other week with me. That was the formal agreement; in practice the F.W. and I would be as flexible as circumstances required. If her job took her away on a business trip during the week or she just needed a few days to herself, I would gladly have the girls, and she would do the same for me. We both read the books and articles about how to minimize the trauma to the children. We were determined to have a collaborative, consultative divorce. No bickering in front of the girls and absolutely no behind-the-back bad-rapping each other to the kids.

  Five more days till Friday, though. I tried to adjust the recliner lever to return me to a more or less horizontal position. Hopeless— my center of gravity had sucked me into a potentially critical condition. I rolled up and to my left and quickly received a reminder about the unresilient qualities of a hardwood floor. Have to buy some throw rugs or something. Meanwhile my back was killing me.