Unfortunately, Peterson then said, Well, as it happens, we’re going to call on the Albert family this evening, perhaps you’d like to come along. In truth, I didn’t expect, and never quite expect, to be taken seriously as a pastoral counselor. But in the end we allowed Peterson to herd us into in his Escalade. He liked a friendly face, he said, and I certainly had a friendly face. I was remarking, on the way to the Alberts, that I had often read certain works of theology when I was back at the state school, and even in the dusky light, out in one of the subdivisions of Tyler, which consisted of mansion upon unimpressively constructed mansion, I could see naked terror on K.’s face (in the backseat of the Escalade), but God help me, I could not stop talking as Peterson concentrated on the driving, and Melanie, his assistant (seated next to K.), checked stuff off in a handy ring binder. I kept talking and said that if God had designed the orchestra, then the cello was His greatest accomplishment, and a good singalong was the fastest persuader, and no man converted on an empty stomach, along with a few other choice morsels, all the while thinking it possible that Peterson and Melanie adhered to some kind of murderous Texas cult that only masqueraded as _________, or perhaps they were going to apply snakes and their snakebites to us, and how the hell had we gotten talked out of our rental Buick LaCrosse, why were we riding in Peterson’s Escalade? But before I was able to complete this thought we pulled up at one of the neighborhood insta-mansions. And stepped out of the Escalade.
Soon the Alberts and K. and I were standing together by the colonnaded antebellum front of the insta-mansion, exchanging introductions. This is my wife, Swallow, I was saying, when Peterson got the call, the fateful call, on his belt-mounted cellular phone. How could I not have known it was a setup? Lord in heaven, no! he was saying. Are you certain? Where do you need me to be? Which hospital? I am so sorry, awfully sorry, to hear what you are telling me, Bobby Joe, I’ll be right down there, blink of an eye! Ringing off, Peterson gave Melanie a look of such complexity—at once compassionate, studied, malevolent, strategic, and irritable—that it was clear, at least to me, with Swallow now shivering against me, that we were about to be hung out to dry. In a moment, the speech came: Mr. Morse, I am so sorry to have to do this to you! One of the prized members of our spiritual family has just taken ill. That was his wife calling just now, and I’m going to have to hustle down to the local hospital. As you can see, the Alberts are the finest family out here in this particular subdivision, fine salt-of-the-earth people, and they are expecting you, and you all should really feel free to visit together a little, and I’m going to go on down to the hospital, and Melanie and I will be back in forty-five or so for some fellowship with you all, and I’m just really darned upset about what’s happened.
By the time I realized that Peterson and Melanie were already back in the Escalade, I couldn’t think what to do, frankly, except to make sure I had a phone on my person in case we needed to call for emergency services. In an instant, they were gone, and K. and I were standing in a driveway in a gated community in Tyler, Texas, in front of the insta-mansion getting ready to minister to the Alberts, who comprised the following:
The father, by the name of Tim, definitely potted upon arrival, carrying some travel mug that was filled, he said, with coffee, though his coffee seemed to have a pronounced sedative effect. He slurred, and used the hem of his bathrobe to wipe his lips repeatedly. It was hard to understand much of what was said. Hydrocodone tablets mixed in with the libation?
The mother, Allison, was a chatterbox paying little attention to the fact that her man looked like he might pass out at any moment. She was upbeat and natural in presentation, in a way that was almost certainly compensatory.
The son, Stan, who had not been shaving long. Apparently, there was nothing in this world that interested him, especially not the visitors to the house. He said he spent most of the services at ___________ texting the friends he’d met while playing massively multiplayer games. He admitted later that he had, as an apprentice hunter, just bagged his first kill.
The daughter, Allyssa, Stan’s younger sister, who was the darlingest, sweetest, most self-effacing kid, cheerful of affect and with bad skin. Somehow the Alberts had managed to protect her from the Albert legacy. Perhaps even Tim Albert had colluded in protecting her. According to legend, her first word, as an infant, was marzipan.
The interior of the Albert residence was furnished mostly with downmarket appurtenances of the kind you might get on layaway, and while this furniture did not have plastic covering, it was almost certainly the case that the Alberts had considered plastic covering. It was upon just such an unassuming sofa that we were invited to sit. Swallow slid in close. The Alberts gathered in around us, and I noticed with a certain interest how the boy, Stan, sat in his armchair with his legs crossed beneath him. All four looked at us warily, as if waiting for adversarial courtroom testimony. There was no one else who could start the conversation but myself. I alone was so deputized. Where are you today? I said to Tim. Tell us, where are the Alberts today?
Allyssa, the daughter, slipped out to the kitchen and returned carrying samples of the kind of cookie known as the Lorna Doone, a sleeve of which was presented entire on a florally adorned plastic plate. There the cookies sat, uneaten, each member of the Albert family gazing upon them even as Allyssa at last took up the plate and passed it.
I know what grief and loss are, I tried again, and I have traveled over these many weeks bearing my burdens, not knowing for sure if I could go on. This is the way of the faith, I said, and it’s our lot. We do not carry our burdens in silence, but we accept where we are, as we also accept that those around us can listen, can help us with our burdens. I know that I have often felt better when I have written about my particular sorrows, and I’m sure that Swallow would agree with this, as she has been with me every day that I have been out and about attempting to carry the message. K. said, Carry the message.
I did not feel total conviction, alas, and that is probably why I soon found myself preoccupied with the Lorna Doones. I gorged myself on a good half dozen in rapid succession when they reached me. Indeed, Allyssa and I seemed to be the only ones consuming them. The cookies went back and forth between Allyssa and me for a couple of minutes, and then I watched Swallow slip one into the pocket of her windbreaker.
Tim, by way of reply, began: I think your church is full of goddamned fornicators, and I’d love to be one of those fornicators, but I can’t be shit, not a fornicator or any other goddamned thing, because I’m stuck here in this goddamned house with this goddamned mortgage, I can’t even fucking move because of all the money I owe on this goddamned albatross of a house, and I’d like to be in your church full of fornicators maybe chasing around some teenage tail or whatnot—
To which his wife said, Please, Tim—
I know goddamned well what I’m talking about. He’s some goddamned Yankee who turns up in the house supposed to be converting me to whatever pack of lies and he’s probably a fornicator and a homosexual and a Democrat—
Daddy, please, said Allyssa, and then to me, Mister, he can’t help himself, he won’t even remember he said any of this stuff by morning, and especially he won’t remember anyhow that you were here. It’s nothing personal, honest.
Swallow said: I won’t sit here and have you talk to my husband like that.
Religious nuts think they have all the answers, Tim said, slurring. You all die alone, just like everybody else. Let’s see if you all can figure out how to help me keep the family in this house when the bank people come along any day now, how about that? I’m not going to believe in any religious anything at all, and the thing I’m going to believe in is right here in my coffee cup. Cheers, fornicators.
Maybe it would be good if we tried to pray right now, I said.
A fine idea, Mrs. Albert said. I think so.
And each member of the Albert family grasped a hand adjacent, and I grasped Swallow’s hand, and then we were in a circle, except the last person to allow his
hands to be grasped was Tim, who had to put down his travel mug, begrudgingly, and I said, Heavenly Father, make as to shine down upon this family the Alberts in their time of need, and bless those who would help the Alberts, and see through their reluctance and their doubts into their hearts, and keep them in their home, and may large platters of food and plentiful viands appear on their table whenever they need, and may their health be good. Shine down Your face upon them, for You alone are all-powerful, amen.
It is true, for those who have been wondering, that Swallow and I have a secret code, a semaphoric language of gestures, an emergency vocabulary that we practice when we want to convey to each other the need to vacate an address without actually speaking. We know that circumstances do arise. We plan ahead. At first, Swallow favored a grabbing of the earlobe. I believe it was the right earlobe. This gesture had the virtue of being highly visible because Swallow was in the habit of wearing nail polish, and thus I would notice the lacquered nails upon her earlobe. However, on what was, unbeknownst to me, the practice run, at a Rocco’s Tacos in Orlando, Florida, Swallow performed the grabbing of the earlobe and made for the restroom, disappearing for what seemed like twenty minutes. I hadn’t noticed the gesture. I was left talking to her freshman-year roommate for the duration, with no idea that Swallow was in fact now standing down the block by the Publix supermarket beside some Girl Scouts soliciting money for a blood bank. On another occasion, in Wilmington, North Carolina, I absently grabbed at my earlobe for some time before realizing that Swallow had disappeared out into a parking lot, where, it turned out, there had recently been arrests for pandering. And so in the end, we settled on tapping the ring finger of the left hand with the first two fingers of the right.
We had agreed on this procedure not long before the trip to Tyler, but we had not yet drilled. It was therefore risky to try it, but when I looked over at Swallow, she was tapping on her wedding-ring finger. How long had she been doing it? Five minutes? I did not know. I knew only that once she understood she had my attention, she got up and excused herself, and after Mrs. Albert pointed to the bathroom, Swallow shut herself in and turned on the exhaust fan. Improvising with great haste, I asked the Alberts if I could have a little tour, and then, while I was out in the backyard, as young Stan was showing me his 12-gauge, I wondered aloud where Swallow was and headed nervously back toward the restroom.
I knocked and, upon hearing no response, opened the door to the dawning realization that Swallow had made the gutsy move of going out through the Alberts’ bathroom window, still ajar. The window in question was one of those small, side-cranking windows, so instead of moving up and down, it swung out to the left. It bears mentioning that on this day Swallow was wearing a calf-length dress with a flattering neckline. In this outfit, she had apparently gotten herself over the sill and out the first-floor window onto the Alberts’ front lawn. At least she had left this insubstantial aperture open. Then it was up to me, with my bad knees and my lower-back pain, to climb onto the bathroom countertop and loft myself up through the window frame. Swallow had gently and quietly placed the screen in the shower stall to make my journey easier. I was nevertheless breathing heavily and feeling myocardially close to God as I lifted one leg out the Alberts’ window and then tumbled out, colliding with their recycling bin and dislodging some empties. I dashed across the front lawn of the insta-mansion adjacent to the lonesome barking of a neighborhood hound, a coonhound, from the sound of it. I had not run so fast or so freely in many years. I texted Swallow as soon as I could, meeting up with her in an unimproved stand of trees where the next tackiness of insta-mansions would soon be built, once the derivatives market improved.
All we had to do was get a taxi back to the Buick LaCrosse, parked onsite at _________, and spirit it away without being seen. Swallow, in her churchy dress, waited for me in a Tortilla Flats just down the county road, and I snuck onto the property at __________, slipped the key into the ignition of the LaCrosse like a repo professional, and coasted down the hill in neutral, all before Peterson or his coven knew that I was gone. Unfortunately, we had not yet chosen a hotel. In Tortilla Flats, we quarreled about our choices, and Swallow nixed the Holiday Inn Express. Which brings me back around to my initial query: What were the Spanish-language speakers doing up at dawn? ★★ (Posted 2/8/2014)
Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine, 2201 Beach Road,
St. Augustine, Florida, February 14–15, 2014
Early check-in is always a crapshoot, but in a good hotel they try to work with you. At this address, we were party to a rigid and inflexible conversation with the manager about why he wouldn’t accommodate us at the hour of 1:15 p.m. It should be noted that K.—known on this occasion as Chickadee—has a medical condition that makes it extremely inadvisable to entrap her in heated conversations. No conversation with K. of this type can conceivably be winnable without resort to Taser. Nevertheless, the manager, who, it should be said, had decided that check-in at his establishment was at 3:00 p.m. on the dot—notwithstanding the agitated group of twenty-odd stylish young Europeans who were probably in St. Augustine for SportsWearExpo 2014—repelled K.’s wish to investigate fully his managerial reasoning on the subject of early check-in. The discussion with this manager proceeded in an uncivil way, including Russian Federation–style doublespeak (“When I say the room is ready at three, I mean it is ready when I say it is ready, which is at three”), until K. snapped.
In her opening salvo, she accused the manager of looking at her like he wanted to murder her. Each side escalated. A simple managerial explanation would have sufficed. If the Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine wishes to have a decent relationship with its customers—despite its dangerously slippery bathrooms that must send a dozen seniors to the ER each year, and its paper-thin walls that make it easy to discern which of the high school athletes berthed next door is giving which of his teammates a blow job—this decent customer relationship is well within reach. Simply don’t stamp up and down with smoke coming out of your ears saying, This is my hotel! This is my hotel! (To which, by the way, Chickadee replied: Your family must be very proud!) Just free up one of those rooms that you know are available after hours of sustained chambermaid activity, those rooms that are especially ready for the demanding customer. House the customer. That way the customer won’t have to say, Listen, friend, I am a nationally recognized hotel reviewer, and my laptop is open right now, and I am going to begin writing my review right now, while you are still bloviating.
It is especially galling, Mr. Manager, when you say no room is ready, vehemently refuse service, and then free up a room six minutes later, implying that complaint is indeed effective and that you are a dissembler. Many readers insist that online reviewing is shallow, that the reviewers are vindictive, that their prose is bad, that they want for human feeling, that their physical isolation from the person they are attacking suggests that the worst possible instincts are liable to come to the surface in this online-reviewing process. I want to prove otherwise. It is true that Chickadee, on Valentine’s Day (we had come down south for a day on the links, on a Pricelined package deal and through some barter that I had effected with a golf-pro acquaintance who needed to expand his client base), treated the manager to a few choice words and then had to go lie down (when our room was ready), indicating that her ovaries were about to explode. Our Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine experience was already soured, but we did feel somewhat ashamed of using our privilege to gain access to a room while elsewhere the SportsWearExpo 2014 attendees were killing time, waiting thirty minutes in the manager’s queue. We felt ashamed enough, in fact, that I, as a preferred reviewer on the Rate Your Lodging website, wanted to send Devon Morrison, general manager, a little gift as an apology. I went online and located a trifle that might serve as an appropriate gift, an amiable five-pound jar of attractive Japanese bonbons highly recommended on one of the most esteemed shopping sites on the World Wide Web:
Haribo Sugar-Free Teddy Bears 3KG
First of all, f
or taste I would rate these a 5. So good. Soft, true-to-taste fruit flavors like the sugar variety…I was a happy camper. But not long after eating about twenty of these, all hell broke loose. I had a gastrointestinal experience like nothing I’ve ever imagined. Cramps, sweating, bloating beyond my worst nightmare. I’ve had food poisoning from some bad shellfish and that was almost like a skip in the park compared to what was going on inside me. Then came the, uh, flatulence. Heavens to Murgatroyd, the sounds, like trumpets calling the demons back to Hell…the stench, like 1,000 rotten corpses vomited. I couldn’t stand to stay in one room for fear of succumbing to my own odors. But wait; there’s more. What came out of me felt like someone tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a coffee straw. I swear my sphincters were screaming. It felt like my delicate starfish was a gaping maw projectile vomiting a torrential flood of toxic waste. 100% liquid. Flammable liquid. NAPALM. It was actually a bit humorous (for a nanosecond), as it was just beyond anything I could imagine possible. AND IT WENT ON FOR HOURS. I felt violated when it was over, which I think might have been sometime in the early morning of the next day. There was stuff coming out of me that I ate at my wedding in 2005. I had FIVE POUNDS of these innocent-looking delicious-tasting HELLBEARS so I told a friend about what happened to me, thinking it HAD to be some type of sensitivity I had to the sugar substitute, and in spite of my warnings and graphic descriptions, she decided to take her chances and take them off my hands. Silly woman. All of the same for her, and a phone call from her while on the toilet (because you kinda end up living in the bathroom for a spell) telling me she really wished she would have listened. I think she was crying. If you order these, best of luck to you. And please, don’t post a video review during the aftershocks. Also, not sure why so many people assume I’m a man. I am a woman. We poop too. Of course, our poop sparkles and smells like a walk in a meadow of wildflowers.