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Employer, No Guns!

“Get fucking real!, ” she said to me as I walked out of the apartment and down the street to the Green Room where Peter and a table were waiting. It wasn’t like I had not done this every Thursday night since I we got married back in the spring of ’96.
She used to like Peter, but refused to like him anymore. She didn’t like the way he refused to prune the facial hair… and he drank too much. Drank himself into oblivion three nights a week and just into a stupor the others. She never laughs at his jokes. Peter is a funny guy, especially when he’s tied a few on.
I met Amelia in college and we hit it off immediately. She was the kind of girl I had waited for all through HS, but that alas never came on the scene. She was there under the tree at the Hare Krishna free dinner. My mother told me it would all be better in college. Girls would respect brains. Like I was ugly, maybe I was, or am, I don’t know.
Peter and I go back to Bethesda and Lowes Grove Elementary. he provided the first beer I ever drank, and it was with him that I shared my first alcoholic buzz. As a prerequisite for joining the little social group the two of us had created, he would ask if the male applicant masturbated. If the answer was yes, we would laugh and say that was sick. If the answer was no, we would say, “why wouldn’t you? Liar!”, and as equally dismiss them. Tough crowd.
Peter believed in the importance of baseball. The way in which a rock show really could change your life (hopefully for the better). Amelia and Peter initially thought the world of each other. Peter told me that she was the woman I would marry. In fact, he was the first of the friends to sign the virtual petition permitting us to make such an action. I don’t know what has happened.
Peter comes over to watch the games on most Saturdays and some Sundays. He brings cheese dip and the occasional woman that he finds himself sleeping with. Most of the time it’s just cheese dip, perhaps a six pack of light beer.
The other engagement is the weekly Thursday night at the Green Room where Peter buys the beer and takes me to the cleaners for the sum total of about $20 a week. Once a month he lets me win, but he has the billiard muses riding his back. It’s like a social obligation.
Amelia took a job as a paralegal with a law firm two years ago and has since gotten all uppity on me. That is when the problems with Peter began. She was alright with me for awhile until the last six months. Her crowd has changed and she want me to change mine too. She bought me a suit for Christmas, replacing my graduation one – bought my parents – that is about 30 pounds too small now. We go to firm “socials” on Friday nights, twice a month. I did not join a fraternity in college for a reason. She talks of going back to Law School, and I pretend to be interested. She tells me I should do something with my writing. become a journalist or something. Write for the local entertainment weekly where I do have inroads. She is dissatisfied that I am the senior staff member at Visart Video on Hillsborough Road. I like it though. Not the seniority, but the contact with people, the service provision, and most of my co-workers, except Micah – who incessantly talks of his fecal fetish and wears a dagger on his belt while on his shifts. I remember the internship summer at the agency when I felt the suffocation. The suffocation of what my life SHOULD be like upon graduation. Videos are good enough for me now. Five PM until midnight is alright.
Peter has been landscaping since dropping out after our junior year. He “couldn’t handle the oppressive administration and structure”. He’s read more books since then that I have. He wants to be poet laureate of the United States one day. A desire which i have tried to talk him out of repeatedly.
Amelia doesn’ t think that Peter is the type of person “we” should be tarrying with now in our “new life”. Peter is just dragging me down and keeping me from accomplishing my goals. She doesn’t understand that without him I might me in the bottom of a river with a cinder block chained to my left foot by now – self-imposed.
I do love her despite how all this may sound. I love the way she gets sweet at bedtime. The way she works a party. The way she loves Detroit the same way I do, despite the fact all of the friends think we are crazy.
She told me today she was pregnant and I took three steps back. Not that we weren’t planning, but we weren’t planning for now. Everything is alright as she has health insurance for us all through the firm. She asked for me to start searching for a writing job tomorrow, and I guess I will.

R. Carver

There was that time that I wrote the review of your book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love for the Times, and I did not know anything I wrote. You were wild and magnificent and more worldly, and more worldly read than me. I thought you dwelled on the bad things, and the bad people feeling the bad things too much. I made it a habit to adopt the new style and I thought you had nothing to do with it.
I met you that weekend in Portland, a long weekend, Labor Day, and you seemed the nicest. I could not seem to get the smear of your writing out of my brain. A bad smear I thought at the time. Like you had tainted my thoughts. The way in which love could be. Like you had precluded the possibility of anything possible. I was young, foolish and full of hope.
In Portland, over that beer, I found you nothing like what you wrote. Filled with passion and a history of love, I failed to understand the way in which you could write what I felt at the time was so much heartlessness. Nothing is ever as it seems. Mt. Hood stood as a monument outside of the bar, and over the roofline, of the cold, frigid horizon of aging.
I made a mistake. See, it was never your intention to be that way. There was a commitment to truth of one sort or another. The way in which a fictioner will write it and a journalist could never get. This is all second-nature to the English majors in the crowd. I picked up your book again tonight some 18 years later, and it all falls into place. It’s not that easy, simple or forthcoming. Trying to make sense of tea leaves at the bottom of your cup, or to believe that she is out there waiting for you seems fruitless now. I do not know how I got the Times gig at all. Daddy was in the service with an assistant edtor during a week when the editor had escaped to Mali when it was beautiful and a respite. I needed cash.
Tonight Robert arrived and later found himself vomiting on the bathroom floor for an hour and a half until he passed out. I made a bed for him and lured him to it where he lies asleep now. I was just in bed myself, lonely, reading your review of Richard Ford’s The Ultimate Good Luck when I realized that a peace was required. All that I said of you was wrong. Incredibly so. In fact, all that I have said of myself to this point has been so as well. I am still figuring out piece by piece, and I still cannot figure out why your last word is there in those pages, as if that was all that ever really mattered. I can read it a hundred times over now, just one paragraph, with only a smidge that begets a smear, starts to sink into this heart, and I breathe.

Jorge Luis Borges

“Your mother was unkind to me,” I thought as we boarded the rollercosaster. It was Independence Day after all. I thought about the ways in which she had always cast dispersions on me and my family – a side of the tracks which she peceived in me, and which she did not desire for her daughter, although we lived blocks apart and on the same side of the tracks. There was an imaginary track in your mothers mind in which cotton and coal and automobile parts moved up and down the seaboard, and on the other side of it – the side that knew nothing of these tracks – lived those people.
It was strange that she was my mother’s best friend in high school and that they had not spoken in 30 years. My mother attended your father’s funeral when he was mangled in the mechanical looms at Burlington Industries, and your mother did not acknowledge her. Driving home, mom saw an albino deer cross the road and she was sure that it was the spirit of your father escaping to freedom.
I don’t know what happens in these dreams. My upper teeth, gums and teeth, half rotting, become detachable. Easy answer is that I need a trip to the dentist. Hard answer is that I feel that I am losing a part of me.
I guess I have felt that for awhile. Like a phantom limb thing for the last 10 years or so. Like I need to become whole with the person that I used to be, and that I was comfortable with. I was going to change the world, I remember. I was going to be someone, and mom always thought the same.
I can’t figure out what in the world making these little web sites has changed, or the occasional brochure for real estate, black angus steaks, a week in Las Vegas. I’ve settled, but I know in the back of my mind that more was what I wanted.
This is those most personal type of journals. Not as entertaining as the rest. Not as scary either. No one dies. Nothing is ambivalent. There is a noticeable lack of the Borgesian twist. My moonface wanes as the sunlight approaches. I want sleep as do you now. A week of bad vibes and discussion. We will make it better in the thing to come.
But my teeth seem to be falling out my head as I fall to sleep and this seems to exhibit a certain paranoia akin, but completely different from, the sinking pool of weeks before. If it’s not one thing it’s another, I suppose.
But what you do not realize is that my mother loved your mother when they were kids. She worshipped her to an extent. They were inseparable for a matter of 8 years coming through school. I guess there’s the rub. There’s nothing that she could have done but marry that guy and live in that place and be that person that was something that your mother lost the capability to love so long ago. Hell, she didn’t even love you in the way in which you wanted to be loved.
I wish that I could make sense of all of it and I suppose that is what I am trying to do, but perhaps a few more hours of sleep are needed – a few more years between me and that. Perhaps, you and I can make it all better if we try.

Falls Lake at sundown.

Once upon a time, mama saw the giant with big green eyes and asked at the behest of her husband to at least spare the children. It was only later that the true drama happened and I walked into a snails’ nest of heckuvalotuv trouble.
Michael and I dug the grave on the occasion of his thirteenth birthday, under the treefort 836 yds. in the woods behind my parent’s house and roughly 416 yds. behind his. Roughly 8 ft. by 4 ft., we spent all late afternoon opening the ground and building the mound beside. I paused on the hour to vomit and Michael would berate me in the best way he knew how, with his limited language, speech impediment and drawl. I did the best I could to understand exactly what he was saying. At times, I even mistook his unkind words for the kindlier variety.
It was that afternoon while BMXing down by Falls Lake that we came across her. Fresh out of the water and on the rocks lying there, we hid in the fallen trees for over an hour before ever making an approach.
Mom called us at lunch and her voice rang through the valley and down to the lake, but since we were known to tarry outside of earshot regularly she did not worry at our absence that afternoon at the lunch table, Saranwrapped, the sandwiches were put in the frigidaire for our imminent arrival.
Cookie, Michael’s mom and my mom’s best friend, had relinquished custody of us boys,for the afternoon to my mother. We swam early and played our jump or swim, marco polo, sharks and minnows- the best we could with just the two of us after my brother left.
Later on the bikes we struck out down the path by the Allen house where Ricky was layed up with cancer at 35. (That man once helped us roof our garage, as he was a roofer – his whole family was – before he opened the vintage Ford truck parts store. He could drive the nail in one swipe, accosting it while it was still in the air and driving it right through the tarpaper and plywood.) Down to the lake we rode, bunnyhopping the new craters created by the three weeks of rain. Michael had taken his step-dad Scotty’s 12 gauge and a half box of buck shot, three beer cans from the curb garbage, and two full ones stuffed into the cargo pockets of his surplus army fatigues.
Down to the lake we rode with cargo in tow, me in front, Michael in back. Arriving, we decided the 5 minute trip enough to merit consuming the beers, which we did in short order, throwing the empty cans, as well as the empties we brought with us into the lake. Michael loaded the shotgun with shells and we took turns shooting at the cans as they slowly drifted out toward the channel. Finally, by pure stroke of luck, I made the first hit and for the first time in my life I heard and understood (differently than I would later come to understand the term) “fallen soldier” – except Michael added “Yankee” in between the two words.
After the shells were expended, or the cans had drifted too far out for feasible aim and accuracy, Michael strapped the gun back around his shoulders and we headed down the makeshift path toward the north point where we liked to skip the rocks made smooth by the channel moving through. That is where we saw her first. First in the water and then coming onto the shore and lying down. we hid behind the dead trees that were exposed from the summer drought. She didn’t know we were there. She thought she was alone. Naked, laying on the channel stone.
Michael had the idea to make a scare and I agreed. We could surely outrun on bikes. We could make it back to Dude Ranch Road before she could even fully arise and make a chase. He started and I hid my eyes and readied for the great escape – Huffy handlebars in hand. I watched as he approached, barefoot like a samurai, not making a sound. Once upon her I could not stand it anymore and I took off in a random direction. Knowing the woods like I did, I would make it back home and to fried bologna sandwiches in no time. Three hundred yards away I heard the impact , and then the bang, and I was stopped immediately. I turned to look back and Michael stood with the shotgun in one arm and his other in the air. I thought we were out of shells.
Shrieking he called me a ‘pussy” and told me if I had any balls I would come back and help him take the body back with us. Of course, this is the moment in which I should have run – far from that place and back to sandwiches and pool and mom and garage and basketball goal and Huck Finn – but of course that is not the way it went down. I went back and we place the body across the two bikes and between the two of us and we pushed it out of the woods and to the treefort. I went home and got two shovels and a pickaxe from the leanto behind the garage. We dug until 6:30 and Michael went his way and I went mine.
I went to the pool and straight in with my cutoff courduroy Levis. I wanted to wash it all away. I knew her. I had secretly spied her on my own before. I had delicate fancies during prepubescence about her. I wanted to wash it all from my hands, and the blood drippings from my shorts. I wanted to deny all evil. Destroy all monsters. Make my mother proud. It would all come to be sooner or later anyway – and the opposite.
That was the summer before Michael was incarcerated at the Dillon school. The summer before Cookie died after hitting the split rail fence at 55 MPH, the wood coming through the engine block, firewall and her heart. The summer before I fell in love the first time. The summer before I first hailed a cab. The summer before my first guitar and the last summer of piano lessons. The summer in which Michael and I stopped being friends, his family moving away after the death of his mother. The summer I learned my first lesson.
If I could make it all different now, if it really did happen, I surely would. Michael is okay now the last I heard through the grapevine. I am not sure that I am. Though the dream won’t stop, I am working on it. If the cure comes soon, maybe we can all live happily ever after.