A Rock and a High Place

by Dan Mooney

  “So what? We’re in here now.” Frank shrugged at him.

  “He was going to stop us, though. Why? Because we’re old?”

  “Speak for yourself. I’m not old.”

  “Really though, why was he going to stop us? Is it because he thought we were gay?”

  “Have you gone and lost what little was left of your mind?” Frank asked him.

  “I just want to know what his problem was.”

  Frank sighed again, and then stopped just short of the bar. He turned to Joel and, looking up at his friend, he grabbed a hold of both of Joel’s arms.

  “Joel, old pal, you have to stop making everything that happens into some kind of personal crusade.”

  “I do not,” Joel spluttered, but he could feel that his friend wasn’t wrong.

  “You do, though. Pretty much everything. All the time. Sometimes you’re being wronged—in fairness to you, probably more often than not—but sometimes you’re just encountering an asshole of a doorman who feels like being a prick tonight. And when that happens, it’s not about you, it’s about someone else, and the only way to be happy is to just get fucking over it and get on with your life.”

  In an instant Joel revaluated his many gripes and complaints over the previous month or so since Frank had arrived. So many insults that he now wondered if he might have gotten wrong, that he may have taken completely out of context. Poor Nurse Liam, he thought, that man had been on the receiving end of several boots.

  “Everything okay, gents?” one of the bartenders asked.

  “Just fine, my good sir,” Frank replied, slipping easily into de Selby mode. “My cantankerous old friend here was just having a little rant about your doorman out there.”

  “What, Gonzo?” the bartender asked, gesturing toward the offending bouncer. “Don’t mind him, he’s a prick.”

  Joel and Frank both laughed out loud. Gonzo the Bouncer was a prick. Joel wondered if perhaps people had occasion to say that about him. He hoped not, but it was as likely as not. He had, he concluded as he continued to scan back through the various encounters and rows, been a particularly difficult resident.

  “Do you think that some of the people at Hilltop think I’m a prick?” he asked Frank.

  “Probably,” his friend told him glibly.

  “Really, though?”

  “I don’t know, Joel. You’ve been difficult. Poor Angelica is scared shitless of you. I imagine Karl wouldn’t mind the chance to punch you in the head a few times, too.”

  “Liam?”

  “For some reason that man seems to like you, can’t imagine why.”

  “Neither can I,” Joel admitted.

  “A rare moment of honesty from Hilltop’s resident basket case.”

  “I’m not wrong all the time, though,” Joel insisted.

  “No you’re not, pal,” Frank assured him as he reached for the cocktail menu. “Just wrong about how you deal with it.”

  Joel wanted to reply with something clever to put Frank back in his box, but he had already moved on and was scanning the menu with incredulity.

  “What’s wrong?” Joel asked.

  “Are these prices correct?” Frank asked the bartender.

  “Afraid so,” the bartender replied, apologetically.

  “And the names?”

  The bartender looked somewhat embarrassed, his eyes down.

  “What’s wrong with the names?” Joel asked.

  “Sex on my Face?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “One of these cocktails is called ‘Sex on my Face.’”

  Joel couldn’t stop himself and snorted with laughter. It was as much for Frank’s unexpected prudishness as for anything else. If either of them had been likely to complain about crass wordplay in a drinks menu, Joel had thought it would have been him.

  “Keep going,” he told Frank.

  “Cock Sucking Cowboy?” Frank asked, looking at the bartender as if he personally blamed him for the names and the prices.

  Joel burst out laughing again.

  “Merciful hour,” Frank breathed as he realised how much it cost, “for that amount of money it would want to…”

  Joel thought he would choke laughing. The bartender somewhat guiltily joined in, and Frank couldn’t help himself.

  They ordered a pair of “Royal Fucks” and sat sipping those as the VIP section began to fill up.

  The other attendees came in all shapes and sizes. Young, old, male, female, some that Joel couldn’t quite decide were which. The world, he concluded, was moving on without his generation. It had always been that way, he guessed, but harder to accept when you’re on the receiving end of it.

  He had watched as his father’s generation were left behind by the rise and rise of television, of a planet that shrank seemingly year by year. Now it was his turn, or rather their turn. Their turn to be left behind, by a generation that had embraced technology like none other, that had created virtual worlds for themselves that he was excluded from because it was no place for his generation. Sure, there were a select few who had managed to learn the way, but mostly, his kind had no place here. This generation had forged something special for themselves that his generation had never managed. More tolerance, more acceptance, more diversity. More power to them, he thought.

  If they were lucky they’d reach a point where they weren’t viciously beating the shit out of their children for daring to be the person they had been born to be. Maybe they’d reach a point where their fathers didn’t casually beat them all about the house just because they felt like it.

  He realised he was becoming morose. Two pints and a Royal Fuck apparently had that effect on him.

  They ordered Slippery Nipples while trying not to laugh out loud, and the barman greeted their childish enthusiasm for rude cocktail names with a smile and tremendous patience. Joel wondered what Lucey would make of it all. Him, in a bar sometime after midnight, with a gay man drinking Slippery Nipples and laughing and telling bawdy jokes. He thought that she’d love it. Somehow he just felt that she would laugh long and hard and rub her fingers through his hair and say something like, “Joel Monroe, you never cease to amaze me.”

  Their Slippery Nipples arrived in fancy shot glasses, reserved, Joel surmised, for the VIP section. He popped his back up on the counter top, but Frank glanced around the bar, rubbed the glass quickly with a napkin and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “Hey,” Joel sort of barked at him.

  “Don’t be such a Gonzo,” Frank replied airily, turning in his seat to take in the room again.

  They attracted a crowd with their good humour, as other VIPs came to see who these two well-dressed old gents might be. Joel told them he was a retired mechanic, and they didn’t believe him. He wasn’t lying, but they assumed he was anyway. Frank told them all who he was, and they believed that, so he kept telling them. He spoke at length about the small parts in the small films he had worked on, and the awards he had picked up, and the great actors he had shared a stage with, and the crowd loved it. They mostly ignored Joel, who, several drinks in now, insisted to anyone who’d listen that he was a retired mechanic. It was important to him that they believe him. They still didn’t.

  Sometime around two-thirty in the morning they made their goodbyes and walked out into the warm summer night.

  “Home to face the music again?” Frank asked, slightly slurring his words.

  “I’ll delay a little if you don’t mind,” Joel suggested.

  He hoped they weren’t all furious at him. He wanted one more chance to be himself, to be a VIP and have people look at him like he was somebody. He wanted to feel like somebody and not like a waste of space, taking up room in the nursing home where he lived, extraneous, superfluous, unnecessary.

  “Kebab?” Frank asked.

  Joel remembered tasting the kebab for the entire day over a week ago and shuddered.

  “How about that little park by the river?” Joel suggested.

  They
shared a cab there. Sitting in companionable silence all the way out. Joel felt a little melancholy dragging at him, but only a little. It had been a fine way to pass the evening. A fine way to round out his quest for freedom.

  They sat on the same little bench overlooking the river again. The sound of the water rushing by them was hypnotic, somehow musical, and in the dark the swirling eddies that rippled by them under the street lights looked somehow inviting, appealing. He watched the river flow by him and just enjoyed it.

  “Remember when you told me you were gay?” he asked suddenly of Frank.

  “I remember telling you I fancied Liam,” Frank replied.

  “I got such a shock.”

  “You were quite the extraordinary ass-hat about the whole thing,” Frank agreed.

  “Caught me off guard. I’m better about it now, though, aren’t I?”

  “You want a cookie for not being an ass-hat?”

  “No, not like that. Just…” he hesitated. The drink was making it difficult to form the thoughts coherently. “I thought it was too late for me to get better, you know? Like I might be beyond that somehow.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I know, I know. And I hate when people even suggest it, you know? Like because I’m old I’m incapable of being responsible for my own thoughts, you know? But there it is. I thought I might be too old.”

  “So you want a cookie for growing up a little?”

  “If you have one to give I wouldn’t say no.”

  They both chuckled at that. It wasn’t a lie. Joel was a little bit proud of himself for managing to come around. Even he had thought that Joel Monroe was too old and cranky for life-changing perspectives.

  “No cookies, my friend, but you can have this,” Frank told him, reaching into his jacket pocket and producing the fancy shot glass his Slippery Nipple had been served in.

  “A filthy shot glass,” Joel remarked. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “You’re not nearly as good at sarcasm as you think you are, you know. Take it. For your collection.”

  “Collection?” Joel asked, confused.

  “The little knickknacks on your bedside table.”

  Joel smiled as he took the shot glass. It was frosted and heavy in his hand, and, he decided, a fine addition to his collection.

  “Remember when,” he continued, “I told you that I was going to kill myself?”

  They didn’t chuckle at that.

  “I remember,” Frank said lowly.

  “I’ve had some time to think about it.”

  “Conclusions?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to bother anymore.”

  By the streetlight he could see Frank grinning happily.

  “Well, that’s nice.”

  “It’s because of you, you know?”

  “Me?”

  “Yep. I think I’d sort of forgotten that people are okay. I’ve never had a best friend that wasn’t my wife before. Now I have one. It’s nice.”

  “What about when you were a child?”

  “Nope. My father wouldn’t let me out of the house. Strict man. Religious. Very religious. Didn’t have many friends.”

  “That’s shit.”

  “Not great, all right,” Joel agreed. “Still better than the shit you had to put up with.”

  “Fair enough,” Frank told him. “So you’re not going to kill yourself. That’s nice.”

  “It is actually.”

  “I can’t think of many things nicer than not killing yourself, to be honest.”

  “There’s a few all right.”

  “When did you decide this?”

  “I guess I’ve been coming around to it for a while. I think the first time that Lily looked at me like I wasn’t wasting oxygen that could be put to better use. I think around then I decided that’s not such a bad feeling, and maybe it might be worth sticking around for.”

  “Then Lily did it?”

  “She helped. Mostly you, though. Thank you.”

  Frank smiled and patted his friend on the shoulder.

  “Came up with a top-notch suicide, though.”

  “Oh?” Frank sat up. “Go on…”

  “Did you bring your notebook?”

  “Left it at home. Thought having it with me was encouraging bad behaviour.”

  “You’ve stopped writing the play?”

  “For now, but I’ll get back to it.”

  “Why’d you stop?”

  “At first I thought it would be fun to write, then I thought it could be used to talk you out of it, but eventually it just made me sad. Don’t think I could have made a play about a man who I knew really wanted to kill himself.”

  “But now that you know I’m not?”

  “Oh yeah, absolutely. I’ll dive right back in.”

  “Okay, so it had to be something religious.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it always did, you know. My father was a religious man. Vicious bastard.”

  “But you’re not religious, and you’re not vicious. You’re not him, you’re a perfectly good man.”

  “No. I think that was part of it, though. I didn’t have to be him. The statement, you know,” Joel said.

  Frank nodded at him comfortingly, a little look of encouragement and belief.

  “So, we’d need to break into the castle to start with…”

  The castle had been their first day out together. Joel didn’t know what a trebuchet was then. He really had come a long way.

  Joel imagined that he and Frank could steal in there. The visitor centre on the far side of the castle could provide them access outside of office hours, if they were savvy. Joel would admit that there may have to be some research done to up-skill on his breaking-and-entering abilities, but he didn’t see it as being significantly problematic.

  Worst-case scenario they could simply walk in during the day, though that may attract unwarranted attention that perhaps they didn’t need to be drawing on to themselves, on account of the nun’s outfit.

  Joel had decided that he’d be dressed as a nun for this suicide. In a nun’s habit, preferably one with some kind of ceremonial cape. If there were no habits that came with capes, then they’d just have to add one themselves, because it would be a matter of crucial relevance.

  Inside the grounds of the castle the trebuchet would be waiting for them. The old medieval catapult could heave huge rocks through the air and fire them tremendous distances. Joel would make his way in dressed as a nun, but underneath his habit he’d be weighed down with rocks. It might be a bit heavy to have to drag them, but he reckoned he could manage.

  He imagined himself having his stoic, ever so slightly tearful farewell with Frank. The two men clasping hands, as Joel, fully bedecked as a nun, climbed into the trebuchet. Frank, in his sharpest getup with his fanciest scarf, would wait until Joel had positioned himself correctly, and with a shake of his head, marveling at his friend’s bravery, he’d cut the rope that held the cup in place, launching Joel high into the air and over the castle walls right in between the two bridges.

  Joel could see himself sailing through the air, a flying nun, as people stuck in traffic on the bridges or on the opposite quay whipped out their camera phones to snap blurry images or take short, shocked videos. The flying nun would arc gracefully through the air and splash into the water. Weighed down with all the rocks, Joel would sink to the bottom.

  He could see headlines now, and grainy front page photos as the search for the flying nun intensified. They’d ask, sometime later, what he had been trying to prove, what was his message, what did he want to tell the world, and that itself would be the message. Question things. Puzzle them out. Understand that there’s a motivation for most things, analyse it.

  They would find no reason. And that would be the lesson. Pointlessness.

  Joel decided it was quite simply the very best plan he had come up with.

  “So what do you think?” he asked Frank as soon as he had finished regaling his friend.r />
  Frank said nothing.

  “I’m not going to do it anyway, so you don’t have to worry about that. So tell me what you really think, and don’t be getting all unnecessarily critical.”

  Frank still said nothing.

  “Okay, so maybe the point isn’t very philosophical, and I sort of just made up all that stuff at the end, but you have to admit it would be hilarious, and a real blaze of glory way to go.”

  Frank said nothing.

  In a curious moment, an instant really, Joel thought he tasted tea in his mouth, or rather, the memory of tea, before he realised the familiarity of the situation he was in. Frank was being silent. Not quiet. Silent. There was no noise coming from him. He sat upright still, but his head had nodded forward. Joel would remember afterwards that there was a tiny little smile playing about the corner of Frank’s lips. His usual smile. Like he knew something you didn’t.

  “No, no, no,” Joel begged as he began to shake his friend.

  Lucey had been sitting up in her bed. Talking one minute. Gone the next.

  “Not you too, please, please, oh Christ if there’s a god please no.” Joel began to sob, still shaking the unmoving Frank Adams.

  “You can’t now, not you, you can’t do this to me, Frank. Up please,” Joel cajoled Frank, as he lifted his eyelids.

  Frank said nothing. He did nothing.

  “Fuck you now, Frank, wake up. Please. Please don’t go, Frank. Please don’t leave me,” Joel pleaded as he lowered Frank down on to the hard brickwork pathway that led around the little mini park.

  Joel didn’t know how to do CPR. Not really. He had seen it on TV. He had also seen Nurse Angelica and Mr. Miller. He checked for a pulse.

  “Please please please,” Joel whispered, even as his fingers probed Frank’s neck. Nothing.

  He leaned in and pinched Frank’s nose and tried to breathe some of his own life back into his friend’s body. It wasn’t just breath, mere oxygen. Joel Monroe tried to empty his life force and his spirit into what was once Frank Adams.

  His hands pressed roughly on Frank’s chest. Pushing it in the rhythm he had seen Nurse Angelica work at. He feared pressing too hard. He feared pressing not hard enough.

  “Breathe,” Joel shouted at the limp thing that had once been Frank Adams, better known as Frank de Selby. “Breathe please breathe.”