“We both do. But tomorrow is another day.” He thrust his hand out to meet mine. He was a true friend. There was no denying it. We parted company with each man feeling the caring of genuine friendship.
I was high on life on my way home that night. What an incredible day it had been. I not only felt in complete command of my sobriety, I was almost giddy with joy over Toby’s news that the detectives were closing in on Reubin Tatum. I knew better than to say anything to Mary Bauer until Tatum’s ass was behind bars. I knew how deeply positive the news of his being off the streets would affect her. I couldn’t wait to deliver the news to her as soon as it was given to me one day in the very near future. I was feeling so good that I found myself talking with my higher power. I was thanking it, primarily, over all it had given me. Then I found myself daring it to allow me to have a devil dream tonight or to have an unwelcomed visit by the Two-Knock Ghost.
“I feel too good to have a devil dream tonight God,” I thought. “And I don’t need to have any knocks from his cowardly, unseen little friend,” I continued. “Devil dreams are supposed to occur when I’m troubled, right, God?”
To be honest, I wasn’t sure how any of it really worked. I didn’t know if a good day of feelings earned me or any person a night of peaceful dreams. I didn’t know if you could ask your higher power for a night of joyful dreams and he would grant it. I knew nothing about the realities to the answers to those questions. What I did know was that I was communicating with whatever I thought my higher power was. It felt good. It felt restful. It felt blood pressure lowering wonderful. It was different. As I continued to communicate with my higher power during the last 30 minutes of my ride home, I felt closer to Christine.
* * * * *
Thankfully, my prayers to the entity in the upper regions or the inner strata worked, and I did not have a dream about the devil or the Two-Knock Ghost. Instead, I dreamed of music. I dreamed of sequences of notes that were hauntingly lovely, sequences that had never been heard before by any human being but me on the wondrous night of dream music. Once my brain accepted the notes as outstanding enough to pass my personal standards, it kept playing the main theme repeatedly as if on a musical loop. Little by little my brain kept adding small segments to the initial theme. Slowly, I was creating a song in my sleep.
Incredulously, I had done this before … but not for the past several years. As the notes tumbled into their potential resting positions, I began to think, within the dream, that as soon as I awoke, I would go immediately to the piano in the living room and write this song for Christine as close as possible as to how I had dreamed it. This is how I had done it the last time I had dreamed music. It had culminated with me presenting the completed work to Christine three or four days after the dream event.
She had always loved the songs I had written for her, each and every one. There were no exceptions. And on this night as I dream thought about Christine, my heart expanded to new degrees of love for her. Then, as the bursting of emotions occurred, more notes began to tumble profusely, seeking to find their proper logical sequence in the dream song that I was creating.
Finally, I could feel myself rebuffing the notion that dreams only last some small finite amount of seconds. Surely this dream traversed the six and a half hours of sleep I had that night. Or so it seemed. And if it had not, how miraculous it was that the human brain and psyche could create a complete masterpiece of music in less than one full sweep of the second hand across the face of a clock.
When I woke in the morning, I sprang ecstatically from my bed and raced to the piano. I turned on the tape recorder and began playing the notes as I had dreamed them. I played furiously because there had been times in the past that I had lollygagged and the dream notes slipped away as the more time passed between my dream alpha state and my waking state. That mistake would not happen on this morning. Within forty-five minutes, I had the complete song on tape, with chords, three times. I was overjoyed because now I knew I could call Christine soon. And I could share with her something of substance and beauty that would reflect the other things of substance and beauty that I had been accomplishing in the past two weeks. It had been four years since I had written her a song. Oh no! Suddenly that sentence would not leave my head. Then came the shotgun blast to my very real and fragile stomach. Before this four year stretch of years that I had not written Christine a special song, the most time that had ever passed without me having done so was a year at most. Some years I would write her three or four. That shotgun blast was another realization that had gone from my brain to my stomach pit in a nanosecond, of yet another way that I had neglected my wife.
I could not control myself. I dropped my head onto my arm that I had placed on the piano ledge above the keys and wept for several moments. Then, as if the shotgun blast wasn’t enough, an irreverent freight train slammed into my brain. Rum and Coke will ease your pain. Rum and Coke will ease your pain. Rum and Coke will ease your pain. Like the rhythmic rolling of the freight train’s wheels, the insidious phrase kept rampaging through my brain. My body began to shiver. The tears would not cease falling. All the good feelings of the last two days dissipated to a pool of white hot grief.
The pain stole my very breath from me and knocked me from my waking state. I was now asleep on the piano in a tumultuous state of dreamless agony. It would have been the perfect time for a devil dream. What better time to kick an eternal candidate than when he is down. But instead, next to come were the bombs.
First the shotgun blast, then the plaintiff freight train, then the bombs. Boom. Boom. They jolted me from my sleep and almost off the piano and the bench where I was sitting. The bombs had come from the other side of the front door. I said, “Hold on a moment,” as I stumbled the few steps to the front door at the opposite side of the room from the piano. I had been startled by the bomb like knocks on the front door, but I hustled to open it anyway. I opened it. No one. The length of the balcony was devoid of people. It had happened again. The Two-Knock Ghost had intruded once more. This time when I was at my lowest ebb, having plummeted to horrific emotional depths upon the realization of another way I had neglected Christine. And the chicken shit ghost was right there ready to pounce on me when I was already flat on my back, prostrate upon my altar of shame.
I hated that ghost, the cowardly ghost of sound and fury who lacked any substance beyond its dastardly signaling device. I felt terrible in this nearly unlivable moment. But I was struck by the thud of reality. It was Thursday morning, and I had already spent forty-five minutes working on a song, two or three minutes weeping and twenty-five minutes of pitiable sleep napping. I had to go to work, work to help other people feel better, no matter how I felt. I had traded running for working on the song, but now I needed to shave and get ready to face the day with people in it. I hated the Two-Knock Ghost, but unknowingly it had done me a favor by awakening me. Otherwise, my aching soul and its attempt to hide from pain in sleep, could have caused me to be late for work. That was something I had never done. Thank you my unseen enemy.
When I got to work and saw Amanda, I immediately felt better. How could I not? Not only did I have a beautiful intelligent and pleasant secretary, but I had just driven across the lovely, small city of St. Petersburg, Florida. Sure, I knew what the problems were in St. Pete, but it was undeniable that St. Pete still possessed small city charm and was home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the States.
While driving to work this morning, I realized another way I had neglected Christine. When we first arrived in St. Pete and finally finished moving in, Christine asked me one day if we could go to the beach. I said, “Yes.” I said to her, “There’s a lot of choices honey. Do you have an idea of which beach you would like to see?”
Without hesitation she said, “Pass-a-Grille.”
“Pass-a what?” I remember asking her.
“Pass-a-Grille, like a George Foreman Grill except with an e at the end. I’ve asked
some people in the grocery store what their favorite beach is around here and most of them said Pass-a-Grille. A couple of them said Fort DeSoto. I looked up both of them on the computer and they’re only a few miles apart. We could actually and very easily go to both beaches on the same day and spend a good amount of time at both locales.”
I could see the excited little girl in her face when she explained what she had to me. The equally excited little boy in me answered, “Let’s do it—right now—both places. Which one first?”
“Fort DeSoto.”
You should have seen her face then. God, my wife was beautiful, possessed with an eternal youth that human aging could not sabotage.
We spent four hours at Fort DeSoto that day and six hours on Pass-a-Grille. The day was capped off by dinner at the three-story Hurricane Restaurant and Night Club. We each had their tasty special, a grouper sandwich.
Both beaches were vastly different from one another, gorgeous in two totally different ways. From one stretch of beach at Fort DeSoto you could look to the south and see the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. A few blocks away, but still in the Park, you look west and could see Anna Maria Island.
Pass-a-Grille was a pristine one and a half mile long peninsula filled with beautiful new and old houses with a multitude of shapes and sizes. It was very sleepy the day we visited. It was the middle of the week and there was only a spattering of cars in the scores of parking spots they had on Gulf Way from Twentieth Avenue to the tip of Pass-a-Grille.
We had the time of our lives that day. We had ridiculous fun. At Fort DeSoto Christine and I made love in the Lagoon. It was the first time we had ever made love outside. I don’t know why that was, but it was a fact. It was an incredibly joyful moment for me and I think for Christine also. Why? First of all, because I felt so much love and passion for this good, almost saintly woman, that I was able to stay within her body for well over an hour. I will never forget her little excited girl face of that day and I will never forget the womanly face of love that she gave me during that blissful hour plus inside her. A couple of times she closed her eyes for several moments and wrapped her arms tightly around my neck.
Christine had always made me feel like a man. But this day, this love making, two o’clock in the afternoon, outside, in public, with people only hundreds of feet away, was entirely different. I had never felt as much of a man as I felt on that day. I felt like a good and decent man because I was being enveloped by a woman of the same ilk. During this time we were intimate, I felt I had a handle on what the best kind of sex was, that there could ever be—because I thought I owned it that day. Thirty years with the same woman, loving her more deeply each time she presented me with a child. Loving her more from time to time when she made some random movement that she might often make, but I felt like I was seeing it for the first time. Loving her more when we were making love and she would say with a glint in her eyes, “Can we try this?” Falling in love with her all over again because she endlessly exuded the overwhelming sensuality of pure and unbridled kindness.
Yes, we had the time of our lives that day. But when I looked back on that day in its entirety, I remember seeing something now that hurt me, that I didn’t understand that day. I remember a look of disapproval on Christine’s face when I ordered my rum and Coke at dinner. It was there, most definitely, albeit subtle. There it was, a momentary, quickly flashed hint that she was not happy with my drinking. How many other hints had I missed or ignored throughout the years?
That day, that wonderful day when we made love in Fort DeSoto’s lagoon, watched a sunset on Pass-a-Grille and ate grouper at the Hurricane, was the last time Christine and I went to the beach together. This morning, during a period of my life when awareness was falling on me like raindrops from a summer storm, I had now become aware of more ways I had hurt the woman I loved. For a brief moment I excused myself from any fault by rationalizing that within days of that memorable interlude, each of us had become entangled in the work schedules of our careers. But then I dismissed the rationalization, knowing that I had become a man of excuses and that Christine was unwilling to accept them any longer. That’s why I lived at the Beaches of Paradise and Christine lived on Snell Island, 9.7 miles from me.
All that work day, which was only hours after my good news from Toby and my musical dream, I wrestled to try to gain some emotional balance between those facts and my sad awareness of more hurt that I had caused Christine. Suddenly I began to feel that my life had become somewhat of a game of keeping score. It was current good deeds and accomplishments versus poor and neglectful deeds from the past. At first, when I became aware of a past neglectful behavior, I would label it with a negative score. But after pondering it, after looking repeatedly at the cup that awareness was, I would eventually credit myself with a positive point, believing the awareness itself was a good thing. I could accept responsibility for it and try to correct the damage that I may have caused by the neglect. Then, I could stop beating myself up for it and move beyond it, learn and grow from it.
All these thoughts passed logically and swiftly through my mind between the time I said good morning to Amanda and my first client. Before that client, I buzzed Amanda on the intercom and asked her when Mary Bauer’s next appointment was.
“Next Friday at 1:00 p.m.,” Amanda answered most graciously, after a short pause to look it up.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you need anything else, Dr. McKenzie?” she asked.
“No thank you.”
“How about a nice cup of hot chocolate?”
It was 88 degrees outside. And still, the thought of hot chocolate soothed my imbalanced spirit even before it got here.
“That would be really appreciated, Amanda.”
My next appointment with Dr. Banderas was next Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. My appointment with Mary Bauer would be two days later. I couldn’t wait for time and life to pass so hopefully I would be able to give Mary news that would allay her anxieties of being hurt again by her assailant.
I felt the earth beginning to shift beneath my feet. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, I was a man of extremely comfortable habits. Even though I was separated from my wife, I had my favorite drink beside me whenever I wanted it. I had my career, my work, and my little bedroom to go into in the evenings to do my homework. I had my lazy assed self to be with everywhere I went. Compared to what I was becoming, I had slipped into a way of life that was sedentary both physically and maritally. I had slowly flattened myself into a boring, introverted alcoholic who had no right to be happy with a woman who was becoming more dynamic each day.
I was beginning to be determined to change all relevant aspects of my personality and behaviors. From now on I would try to jog in the morning. I would make time to practice on the piano. I would call my kids every week or two. I would plan for more family gatherings wherever they might be. I would stop at Sports Authority on Tyrone Boulevard and buy a couple of ten pound free weights and start toning my biceps and pecs. I would continue my visits with Dr. Banderas and continue with my trips to the Serenity Club while doing my work on my clients’ behalf on the way there.
But oddly, one of the most important places I would frequent would be the live oak that Toby had shown me. Even though it was only a tree, it inspired me every time I saw it. It was a living entity imbued with strength and majesty and once, already, it had made its way into my dreams and had spared me an onslaught from the devil.
My next step was to determine when to call Christine and determine when we would meet. When we did, I would have a variety of significant news to tell her. It would all be the truth, without exaggeration, punctuated by the song I wrote for her that I hoped she would appreciate deeply.
I was enjoying my new routine. Only three things would make my life better—rekindling my love affair with my wife, getting a handle on my devil dreams, and the terrors of the Two-Knock Ghost. How childish I felt at times
when I admitted I was frightened by a ghost I had never seen. Over the next three days, I called each of my children and apologized profusely for my neglect of them all those many years. I also called Christine and asked her for her schedule. When she said she was free a week from tomorrow, which was a Friday, I asked her to have dinner at the Red Mesa on Fourth Street North only four miles from our Snell Island home. I was like a young boy waiting to go on his first date with his eighth grade sweetheart.
I should have slept well Saturday night. I was doing everything right. I was even praying—in a manner of speaking, attempting to communicate with my higher power. I even fell asleep talking with it, whatever it was. I didn’t label it male or female, hermaphrodite, young or old, bearded or clean-shaven. I knew as much about the appearance of my higher power as I did of the Two-Knock Ghost. But I knew that my higher power was a magnificent being, but the Two-Knock Ghost was malfeasance incarnate.
Sometime during the night, I was sitting with Christine on a white swing that was hung onto a huge branch of my favorite live oak. We were alone in a wide open green pasture with a long narrow brook that stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions, about two hundred feet in front of the oak. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and not another tree in sight. There were no rocks or boulders, no animals or birds and only the murmurings of the brook as it trickled from west to east. Christine and I were happy, holding hands and laughing as we swung beneath the branch. There were no words between us, just the silent bonds of a love that had overcome all problems.
I watched our dream swinging for a long time, not becoming bored for a micro second at the idyllic scene I was observing. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning from out of the cloudless sky hit the oak at its enormous base, split it and started it to burn. Why now I wondered? Why now when I felt that I had earned this dream by a week of good deeds, good decisions, hard work on my character. There was still nothing else in the picture but the tree, now ablaze. But dark clouds came rampaging into the azure sky. They were angry clouds, powerful and vehement as if being ushered in there by a force with evil intentions.
The Two-Knock Ghost Page 18