. . .
Dear Allison, about that last phone call in Galveston, I never should have said all those things about wanting to spend the rest of my life with you. An ex-girlfriend said the same things to me, and for some reason, when someone opens up like that, you lose respect for them. See the New Mexico desert, the mountains and the red sunset? It’s great here, but I’ve seen it all before.
. .
Dear Allie, early this morning, with only a dark orange glow in the sky, I drove through the Sonoran Desert. Have you ever seen a giant saguaro cactus? They look like sentries guarding over an empty landscape. Some are strong and standing tall. Others are lying in the sand, shot full of holes. Should be in Vegas soon.
. .
Hey, check out the showgirl fourth from the left, she kind of looks like you. btw, I’m staying at the Edmont Motel, room seven in case you feel like calling. Did anyone mention that I moved? I left Galveston before Mardi Gras, just couldn’t get excited about it this year. Have you read Raymond Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” That’s what it was like, everything went. You should have been there.
. .
Allie, you’ll like this: I met an older woman at a motel bar and told her you have most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. She made a game out of it and said, ‘How beautiful is it?’ so I played along and said, ‘It’s so beautiful that if you put one finger on her lips, you’d have to chop off another finger to balance the pleasure with the pain.’ ‘That’s not funny,’ she said. ‘It’s Zen,’ I told her . . . . I’m leaving Las Vegas.
. .
Dear Allison, I’m sending a letter this time because I wanted you to have this bar napkin. It’s from O’Malley’s. I was there Thanksgiving night, and when you didn’t show up, I started writing on it:
TOP FIVE THINGS TO DO BEFORE I DIE
Drink till I pass out
Climb Mt. Kilimanjaro
Run with the bulls in Pamplona
Visit Sonny Liston’s grave
Hold Allison one more time
What a gift, huh? Scratch out the first and fourth.
If you’re wondering why I’ve been in such a lousy mood for the past couple months, watching you pull away was part of it, but also, I lost everything in the futures market. Took some stupid chances and gradually went broke. The thing is, I had worked like a madman for that money and could have prevented the loss, could have made better decisions instead of riding it down, but when the market began to crash, it felt like the wheels of Fortuna had turned against me. One day I had enough and said, ‘Screw this world. If losing everything is my destiny, bring it on.’ . . . Sounds silly, huh? Stupid? Fatalistic? All that and more, but that’s what happened.
Two days before I left Galveston, you and Josh were rollerblading on the seawall. You were holding his hand. You were laughing. I almost turned my car around but there was no point in it. Are you still with him? Not that it matters, just asking.
I’ve been staying at the Desert Song Motel in California. The rooms are clean and circle a blue swimming pool with a diving board. Instead of watching television, sometimes I open the drapes and watch the people at the pool, adults grilling burgers, kids playing Marco Polo. It helps pass the time until I narrow down my options and make some definite plans about what to do.
There’s a twenty-four hour diner across the highway and we have a special arrangement. When I call in an order, the waitress brings the food over without me having to leave my room. It’s odd though, sometimes I go through these periods where I can’t taste much. Do you ever get like that, where nothing has flavor and you can’t swallow? What about how complicated it all is, the way you have to think forever about what to eat, because really, you don’t want anything? If you ever get like that, where you dread putting food in your mouth, drink protein shakes with a banana, egg and peanut butter. It’s quick and easy, keeps you alive, and you can leave the blender in the refrigerator instead of cleaning it each time. I hope you never get like that.
My favorite waitress is Diane Phillips. She’s nice and friendly and always delivers my order wearing a clean blue apron. Today she and her husband came over to surprise me with a home cooked meal. They spread the curtains open to let in some light, and Mr. Phillips rolled a cigarette. He talked about the Korean War. He had it rough over there, was a prisoner in North Korea for nine months. As bad as it was in Korea, he told me that he didn’t know hell until he got home. What happened was, he gave up on everybody and quit living. He said he didn’t want to be included in a world with so much cruelty. ‘Take my name off the list,’ is the message he wanted to send.
The reason I’m telling you all this, is because I feel the same way. I want my name taken off the list. I swear to God I do.
At one point in the story, Mr. Phillips paused and got choked-up. ‘You see this strong woman,’ he said. ‘She’s the angel who nursed me back to life.’ Diane smiled and squeezed his hand. She asked if anything was bothering me. I told her that everything’s fine. They wanted me to keep talking, but I didn’t know what to say. Diane gave me a glass of water and said, 'Mitch, it starts with forgiving yourself and then forgiving others.' Mr. Phillips agreed with her. He told me you can't use isolation as a means of self-preservation. It won’t work.
The Phillips are good people. Anyway, like I mentioned before, I’m at the Desert Song Motel in California. If you want to call, you can. If you want me to come back to Galveston, I will.
. . . . .
Hawaii
Jack is not feeling well: His wife spends her time testing recipes for the Junior League cookbook. His son is obsessed with girls, skateboards and tennis. His daughter hides in her bedroom, listening to albums and talking on her phone. She and her boyfriend broke up.
Mitch tries to get his father’s attention. “Tennis is my new sport!” he says. “My first tournament is Saturday morning at nine o’clock.”
Jack isn’t interested. He’s entrenched in his leather lounger, chain-smoking cigarettes, staring at the Daytona 500 on television.
“Can you give me a ride next Saturday?”
The volume is turned up. Car number thirty-eight is fading, pulling off the track, out of the race.
Mrs. McAllister is studying a recipe at the stove. Mitch opens the refrigerator. “We’re out of Hawaiian Punch.”
She rinses a candy thermometer in the sink and dries it with a kitchen towel. She attaches the thermometer to a pot of bubbling corn syrup and squints to read the temperature.
“Dad has the volume cranked up so loud we can’t even talk to him . . . Dang-it, Mom, do you hear what I’m saying? Why won’t you do something?”
“Turn the volume down,” she says. “He won’t care.”
Tracy enters the kitchen, removes a frozen Snickers bar from the freezer and quietly announces to herself, “My boyfriend’s gone, and now my father’s gone.”
Mrs. McAllister adds a tablespoon of vanilla to the corn syrup. Mitch goes back into the den. “If you’re wondering why I quit baseball, it’s because it wasn’t fun anymore. And anyway, tennis is better than baseball because you don’t have teammates—you never let them down, and they never let you down. Are you listening, Dad? I said your teammates never let you down.”
A cloud of cigarette smoke hangs suspended in the air. In the backyard, the grass has grown tall and needs cutting. The barbecue grill has rusted out, charcoals fallen to the ground.
. . .
Honolulu’s not bad—hell, it’s paradise if you’re in the right frame of mind. The streets are clean and the grass is bright green. In the harbor, pink catamarans are docked in a row, and at Nalu Gardens, they have a pond with koi fish. The trees are different. I’m getting used to them.
Found a place to rent my third day here, two-fifty a month, bills paid. The apartments are called Claridge Cabanas. I don’t actually have an apartment though. It’s a space in a storage room/garage with tools, lawnmowers, gardening equipment, a sink and toilet. It smells like sour grass and
urine, but living here feels right. There’s room on the floor for my bedroll, a few books and a radio—everything I need.
Paula, the landlady, is about sixty. Her skin is dark and wrinkled from lying in the sun, and she’s bossy as hell, but we get along. She caught me climbing through the garage window and didn’t say anything. I climb through the window sometimes instead of using the gate. Bought an old Chevy Impala for eighteen hundred, not a bad deal for Hawaii. On the mainland it would sell for half that. It runs good though and works fine for delivering pizzas. I deliver pizzas at night. Can’t find my way around town yet, but it’s no big deal. Most of the deliveries go to Hotel Row. I drive my smoking Impala up to the front entrance, park and jump out like I’m delivering precious cargo. Then, with pizza in hand, I stroll past the attractive girls at the reception desk wearing my frumpy red and white striped pizza shirt. If you think about it, the shirt and all, the image is sort of like a TV commercial—or a sick joke.
There’s a stack of poetry books on the floor, but I’m through with poetry. And the great poem for Allison, for all Mankind—what a joke—I’m through with that too. Shakespeare’s sonnet eighteen isn’t about winning someone over, so yeah, I still read it. Why not? It’s not a win-over poem, it’s more of a “goodbye, this is my final gift to you,” poem. Other than Shakespeare, I read Schopenhauer, Big Jim Thompson, and the chronic drunk, Charles Bukowski. Amy, (was it Amy?) Anyway, some chick quoted Bukowski one cold night, when we were getting high under a blanket on the beach in San Diego.
Tonight after work, I drank a few vodkas and walked to Nalu Gardens. The koi pond is circled with foliage. The trees have lights mounted on long smooth branches. It’s secluded and private except for sounds from nearby traffic. I sat on a narrow footbridge, my feet a few inches above the water.
When I was young, I needed to get away from Palm City. The plan was to walk Florida’s Atlantic coast and sleep outside, and if I suffered from the elements, that was fine with me—I wanted to suffer—I wanted to break myself down, figure out what was wrong and start over.
Standing in my grandmother’s yellow kitchen, telling her goodbye before getting on the bus to Florida, she asked me to call her when I got there. I resisted, saying that I wasn’t sure where I’d end up or where I’d be staying, which was all true, but mostly I didn’t want sentiments from home preventing my descent or changing my mind.
“Promise me,” she said. “Call me collect from wherever you are.”
I argued with her, making up one excuse after another, and there she was, my grandmother, demanding that I stay connected to her. How did she know? Nobody else in the family knew. She reached for my hand. “Mitch McAllister, don’t you ever forget that I love you!” My Grandmother knew she was about to lose one of her own and she held on. Eventually, I held on too.
At night the lights on the footbridge are dim and don’t penetrate the water. It doesn’t matter how hard you look, you can’t see fish.
. . .
This morning, I drank a warm beer for breakfast and went for a run. Didn’t expect to make it three blocks. Instead, I kept going mile after mile through downtown Honolulu thinking I could run forever. I did the same thing in Florida. I left Palm City at four in the morning with my duffel bag, cassette player and favorite tape, Tea For the Tillerman. The bus was dark; the air blowing through circle vents smelled like old carpet. My father had just died, and after that happened, nothing else mattered except figuring out why he did it. On the seat in front of me the fabric was torn. I stuffed my sweatshirt in the corner, sank against the window and picked at the torn seat.
We stopped in small towns along the way to let people off and on, and when the sun rose enough to light the bus, an old guy was sitting across the aisle. I offered him a piece of spearmint gum and asked where he was going. He shook his head and removed his dentures, holding them out for me to see.
“So where are you headed?” I asked again.
He put his dentures back in his mouth. “Tallahassee,” he said, “to stay with my daughter.”
“Where are you from?”
“Beaumont,” he said.
“I know about Beaumont.”
He smiled and nodded in agreement. I put on my headphones, leaned against the window and listened to Cat Stevens.
In Ft. Lauderdale the city felt right to me, and for some reason, I felt right too. Instead of drowning in Florida, my plans changed and I decided to swim. First I went to Denny’s, where I met some kids my age. One of the girls told me I could have crashed at their place, but they already had too many people.
I hauled my duffel bag down Oakland Park Blvd to the Atlantic Ocean. From there I took a city bus to Bahia Mar Yacht Club to find a job. Being a deckhand on a fishing boat could have been my dream job: catching fish every day, getting laid by surfer girls every night. The yacht club had a hotel, tennis courts, a large swimming pool, sailboats and charter fishing boats. I dropped my bag at the foot of a palm tree, sat down on it and felt okay.
One of the charter boats had just tied up after a fishing trip. The deckhand was laughing with customers, shaking hands and taking pictures. He opened an ice chest, grabbed a large king mackerel by the tail, and held it up for everyone to see. Watching all this, my mood slowly changed. I became despondent. I could bend my finger back until it broke, but I knew, even with the perfect job, there was no way I would ever be as happy and cheerful as that deckhand.
Getting heavy is what I now call the times when depression crippled my ability to live a full life. Hide, be patient and wait for a rally, is what I’ve learned to do, but a rally was nowhere in sight on that day in Florida. Resting against the palm tree in perfect weather near boats and a beach, I realized something was wrong—not with my environment, but with me.
It took thirty minutes of sitting there, nearly incapacitated, before I was able to rethink my situation, lower my expectations and press forward. When a security guard drove by in a golf cart, I stopped him and asked for directions to the Bahia Mar employment office. Inside the office, a friendly lady offered a chair while she made copies on a Xerox machine.
“What type of employment are you looking for?” she asked, feeding documents into the copier.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Some type of solitary work might be best though, like cleaning pools or mowing grass—that sort-a thing.”
She sat behind her desk and took out an application. “Did you say solitary?”
“Yeah, you know. Something where I don’t have to fake a smile all day.”
“That’s a new one,” she said, “but sure, we’re always hiring. Let me get your phone number.”
“My phone’s not hooked up yet. I recently moved here and haven’t had a chance—”
“You will need a phone and dependable transportation. What is your current address?”
“Well, that’s the other thing. I just got into town this morning and haven’t found a place yet.”
She hesitated a moment, taking a closer look at me and my duffel bag. “Surely you know that you’ll need to have a permanent residence before anyone will hire you? Not just us.”
My first night in Ft. Lauderdale was spent walking around the city, sleeping behind a 7-11 convenience store for a few hours, then walking on the beach until the sun came up. I sat beside a payphone and ate a microwave burrito. Thumbing through a newspaper, I called a few rentals. The cheapest one, the one I rented, was an upstairs room in a townhouse owned by a purple-haired palm reader. She was grouchy, overweight, and wore a frayed sundress. While explaining the rules, her parrot in the kitchen yelled at me. Her husband, sitting in a recliner, never said a word.
That afternoon I slept a few hours, showered, then headed out on foot when it got dark. On Oakland Park Boulevard I found a neighborhood bar and sat on a stool next to a freelance writer. He lived on a sailboat and talked about Biscayne Bay. I told him about the Strait of Magellan, how tricky it is to navigate. We talked about single handed sailing, the Roaring Forties and
how the Indian Ocean meets up with the Atlantic off the Cape of Good Hope. “Jeez-us,” he said. “You’ve done a lot of sailing for someone so young.”
“Not really,” I told him. “I’ve only read about it.”
He eventually moved on. I kept drinking beer and playing songs on the jukebox. They had “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. I listened to over and over. When the bar closed, I walked down the center of neighborhood streets gripping my pocketknife. The knife was a Gerber, thin with a three inch blade. I’d had it for a while and was pretty good at flicking the blade open with one hand, something I would end up doing inside the palm reader’s car. But at this point, I was worried about being jumped. I was also lost.
At night, all the townhomes looked the same. I quietly walked up to someone’s front door to try my key. It didn’t work. Where the fuck do I live?
Further up the street, I stopped at one with a right-side garage, like I remembered. After jiggling my key in the lock, the door opened. Upstairs in my room it was obvious the palm reader had riffled through my duffel bag.
I woke up in the morning with an awful hangover. In the kitchen downstairs, the parrot was yelling something I couldn’t understand. After a shower, I walked to Oakland Park Boulevard and got on a city bus. It didn’t matter which one.
Every day for a week, I rode city buses around Ft. Lauderdale. Sometimes I got off on A1A to walk past the open air restaurants and pastel colored motels. As nice as it was there, it wasn’t working, so at the end of the week, I told the purple haired lady I was moving.
“You owe me ten dollars,” she said.
I sat on her couch. “What? You told me rent was eighty a week and I already paid you.”
“The electric,” she said. “You owe ten dollars for electric.”
She hadn’t mentioned anything about electric bills, and ten dollars was a lot of money. I finally offered to pay the money in exchange for a ride to the bus station. She agreed, but after finding her purse, she told me, “I’ll give you a ride to Oakland Park Blvd, five blocks from here. You can take a city bus from there.”
Leaving Allison Page 15