1994 - Barrel Fever

  ‘Talk about nice, how about that Chip?’ Gill said.

  ‘A chip off the old block,’ the ugly bearded man said, at which point everyone broke into laughter.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ I said. ‘A chip off the old shoulder.’

  Gill and his companions ignored me until the skinny hag turned to me and said, ‘You, sir, are standing in the way of our evening and I for one don’t appreciate it.’ I suddenly under-stood why she was missing her front tooth.

  Gill said, ‘Dolph, maybe you should just try to keep quiet and listen for a change.’ I nodded and leaned back in my chair, thinking, Listen to what? He’s so nice, she’s so nice, aren’t they so nice. Nice is a mystery to me because while on some mundane level I aspire to it, it is the last thing I would want a table full of dullards saying about me.

  ‘Nice job, Byron.’

  ‘Hey, Kimberly, nice blouse. Is it new?’

  ‘I love your haircut, Pepper. It’s really nice!’

  I don’t understand nice. Nice is a lazy one-syllable word and it says nothing at all. I prefer to surround myself with more complex words, such as heroic and commanding.

  ‘That Dolph, is he a national treasure or what?’

  I sat at Gill’s table for another ten minutes or so during which time I heard the word ‘nice’ twenty-three times until I couldn’t stand it anymore. When I finally left, the idiot with the beard called out, ‘Nice talking to you,’ which I guess brings the tally up to twenty-four.

  I wrote Gill after my mother died, hoping he might pick up the phone and give me a call but instead he chose to mail this hokey calligraphed sympathy card, which I fear he may have actually made himself.

  My mother chose to be cremated and the memorial service was sparsely attended — just me, three of my four sisters, my mother’s boss from the collection agency, and a few of her acquaintances from the firing range.

  During that time at our mother’s house my sisters were remote and mechanical, acting as though they were hotel maids, tidying up after a stranger. They spoke as if a terrible chapter of their lives had just ended, and I felt alone in my belief that a much more terrible chapter was about to begin. I overheard them gathered together in the kitchen or talking to their husbands on the telephone, saying, ‘She was a very sad and angry woman and there’s nothing more to say about it.’ Sad? Maybe. Angry? Definitely. But there is always more to say about it. My mother made sure of that.

  Three days after the memorial service we met with her lawyer, an energetic woman with very long fingernails painted to resemble American flags. Someone, her manicurist I suppose, spent a great deal of time on the stripes but the stars were a mess, a clot of glitter.

  She opened her briefcase and informed us that my mother’s house, car, and personal possessions were to be sold at their cur-rent market value. That money would be added to her life insurance, pension plan, and bank holdings and, according to her will, would be donated to her specified charitable organization, The National Rifle Association.

  After the initial shock had worn off, my sisters found themselves plenty more to talk about.

  I thought it was funny but, then again, I guess I could afford to think of it as funny. On the afternoon of my last visit, after the radiation and chemotherapy had left her with what would soon become pneumonia, my mother handed me a check for forty thousand dollars and warned me to cash it fast. Mrs. Gails’s television was blaring a rerun of a vile situation comedy in which a pleasant-looking, vapid teenaged boy acts as the gamekeeper of four terminally precocious children. ‘Leave,’ Mom said, pointing to the door. ‘And on your way out I want you to shut off her television. It’ll take the nurses a good twenty minutes to turn it back on. Give me the gift of peace. It’s worth the forty thousand dollars, believe me.’

  As I left the room she offered to double the money if I smothered Mrs. Galls. ‘Use the pillow,’ she called. ‘The pillow.’

  I didn’t mention the money to my sisters as, like my mother, I may be mean but I’m not stupid. The money has allowed me to take my time and relax a little before stumbling into another meaningless job. I really appreciate it and every afternoon when I roll out of bed I look up at the asbestos ceiling and silently thank my mother.

  For most of my adult life I’ve held some sort of a regular daytime job so I’m really not used to being at home during a weekday. With all this time on my hands and neither Gill nor my mother to talk to, I find myself watching a great deal of daytime television and drinking much earlier than usual. It had always been my habit to watch television after returning from work. I knew about detectives, lawyers, police dramas, laugh-track comedies, infomercials, movies both good and bad, pageants, commercials, late-night public relations festivals disguised as talk shows, and the valium of anything presented as educational. So it was with great joy that I entered the world of daytime television. Why, I ask, are these programs broadcast when most people are off at work? Daytime TV is a gold mine of pathological behavior.

  I move the television from room to room, captivated by just about everything that appears before me. At first I found myself watching with the volume turned to a whisper, lying on the sofa with the TV eight inches from my face. There were times when, in order to reduce the strain on my neck, I actually placed the portable TV on my stomach. I realized later that I’d been think-ing about Mrs. Gails. Watching anything at top volume meant that I was, somehow, like her. I pictured my mother’s ghost on the other side of my living room, stuffing Kleenex into her ears and calling for the nurse.

  ‘Day and night he’s got that TV going. He’s brain dead — what more evidence do you need? Pull either his plug or mine because I just can’t take it anymore.’

  All of my neighbors work during the day so little by little I found myself turning up the volume and living a normal television life. I start with what is left of the relentlessly cheerful mid-morning advice and interview shows, move through the soap operas, and arrive at the confessional talk shows, which are my favorite. It is their quest for issues that makes these shows irresistible. Recently I watched as a sweatshirt-wearing family appeared to discuss the mother’s hiring of a hit man.

  ‘Yes, I set your mattress on fire but only because you bit me on the head.’ ‘I never bit you on your damned head.’

  ‘Don’t you lie to me. You bit me on the head and I’ve got the scars to prove it.’

  ‘I never bit anyone on the head unless maybe they deserved it because they came home all messed up on needle drugs.’

  Regardless of the truth I am captured by the story: How could you bite anyone on the head? How could you open your mouth that wide? More interesting are those shows where only one of the guests feels it necessary to state his or her case. I watched a program dedicated to medical mishaps where a denim-clad woman was interviewed alongside her helpless, elderly father. The father, an alcoholic, had received thirty-seven shock treatments following an episode of what his daughter referred to as ‘Barrel Fever,’ the D.T.’s. The man sat stooped in a wheelchair, random tufts of dirty white hair clinging to his blistered scalp like lint. He spent a great deal of time clearing his throat and examining a stain on his trousers while his sixty-year-old daughter proudly faced the camera to recall the torment he had visited upon her life. Her father drank and drank until the fever set in, at which point he mistook his wife and children for insects.

  ‘He thought we were bees,’ the daughter said. ‘He thought we lived in a hive and came to carry him off to our queen. Remember that?’ she asked. ‘Remember that, Daddy?’

  The old man touched his sock and licked his lips. The shock treatments had left him weak and muddled but still his eyes were bright. Whatever his stories he was determined to carry them to his grave in a dignified manner. He remained silent, nodding with pleasure each time his drinking was mentioned.

  Given the rarity of truly bizarre acts, the daytime talk shows are forced to pretend that one story is as compelling as the next: the women who have made a lifetime commitment to
wearing caftans appearing on Tuesday are equal to the posse of twelve-year-olds who murdered a neighbor’s infant son on the grounds that he was ugly. I’d rather hear about the twelve-year-olds and had, in fact, looked forward all day to watching that show when someone dropped by and ruined it for me.

  Since losing my job I have become acquainted with my building’s super, a pale, burly, redheaded guy by the name of Tommy Keen. He’s big all over — tall and wide — dressed in undersized T-shirts that reveal the pasty, sweating flesh of his arms and stomach. Every now and then I’d hear a rap and answer to find Tommy swabbing the tiles outside my apartment, pretending he had knocked accidentally with the mop handle. The guy obviously needed a drink, which was fine by me I’m not cheap that way. Tommy’s problem was that he wasn’t content to drink alone. I’d hand the guy a beer and the next thing I knew he’d be hanging out for hours, ruining my afternoon lineup by talking through all my programs. Anything on TV reminded him of a long story revolving around what he referred to as ‘the women.

  ‘Oh, Dolph,’ he’d say, watching the paroled rapist face his victim. ‘The women are going to be the death of me, and you heard it here first.’

  With Tommy it was never any particular woman but, rather, the entire worldwide lot of them whom he seemed determined to conquer on an intimate basis, one by one, if it took him the rest of his life. I would listen, taking into consideration the fact that you really have to wonder about any male over the age of fifteen who still prefers to go by the name Tommy. I endured him a few afternoons a week until the day I had planned to watch the youth posse, when he actually pounded on my door, begging to be let in. He looked hungover, washed out, more pale than usual, a sweating mess. Tommy brushed past and took a seat on my kitchen table, his hands trembling so bad he could not light his own cigarette. ‘So, Tommy,’ I said, thinking about the program I was certainly going to miss. ‘So, Tommy, what’s shakin’?’ He put his doughy head in his hands and kneaded it with his fingers for a few minutes before telling me he’d been having trouble with blackouts.

  ‘Blackouts? What do you mean by that? Was there a power failure in the building that I don’t know about?’

  Tommy looked at me and shook his head. He released a sigh of hopeless disgust and rose briefly from the chair before settling back down and proceeding to tell me this story: The last thing he remembered it was Sunday evening at around 7:00P.M. and he was in his living room, having a few drinks and feeding the fish. The next thing he knows it’s Wednesday afternoon and he wakes to find himself tied to the radiator with a pair of panty hose. His apartment is completely empty of furniture. He is naked and there are four piles of human shit on the carpet.

  Now that’s a good story.

  We are quiet for a few moments before I say, ‘Gee, Tommy, it sounds like you’ve got a real mystery on your hands.’

  His shoulders began to tremble and I thought, Please don’t cry, please, please, please don’t cry. He of course began to sob, a painful protracted lowing that, I am fairly certain, stopped in their tracks any species of moose or elk in the surrounding tri-state area. Something told me I should touch him, place my hand on his shoulder but he was my super and he was sweating so I decided to light another cigarette and wait for him to get this out of his system.

  He came out of it, finally, choking the words ‘I…just. needed to…tell…somebody and I…figured you would…understand.’ His eyes shifted to my trash can, brimming over with empty beer cans and dead bottles of scotch. ‘I…figured you…might…know where I was…coming from.’

  And that irritated me beyond belief, that he might claim to know me. The last thing I need is a diagnosis from some wasted crybaby who drags a fucking mop for a living. The only reason I ever gave him the time of day was because I felt sorry for him. It ticked me off so I said, ‘You know, Tommy, I don’t quite know how to tell you this but on Tuesday night you came to my door and literally begged me for one hundred dollars.’

  Tommy lowered his head and shook it slowly from side to side.

  ‘Then you said that if I wouldn’t lend the money you’d be willing to earn it the old-fashioned way.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean, ‘old-fashioned way’? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Then you sank to your knees and made for my belt buckle.’

  ‘No,’ Tommy moaned, placing his hands over his ears. ‘That’s not possible. You know I’m not that way.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you really didn’t seem like yourself that night but, then again, I’d never seen you wearing a skirt before. You just seemed so damned desperate that I pulled out my wallet and gave you the hundred dollars.’

  Tommy rocked back and forth, hugging himself with his freckled arms. ‘No, God. Oh, please, tell me no.’ But while Tommy cried ‘No,’ some small voice deep inside his tiny brain whispered ‘Maybe, maybe, maybe.’

  The following morning I found an envelope containing five twenty-dollar bills slipped beneath my door. Chump. I should have told him five hundred.

  A while later I was returning from the Laundromat when I noticed a different guy cleaning the halls. He introduced himself as Eightball and we got to talking. I asked about Tommy and was told that he had checked himself into a rehab center some-where in New Jersey.

  ‘That Tommy,’ the new janitor said. ‘He’s a real wild card, isn’t he?’

  ‘He sure is, Eightball.’

  I figure that, wherever he is, Tommy will at least have a good story. If he plays his cards right he’ll be wowing them at AA meetings for years to come.

  Gill’s story, on the other hand, isn’t going to impress anyone. I don’t even think that being an alcoholic was his idea. It’s something he got from his supervisor at work. This guy noticed Gill had been having a couple drinks during his lunch break and called him into the office for a little talk. That night in the Indian restaurant Gill told me how the supervisor had closed the office door and handed him a list of alcoholic warning signs, telling him that he would definitely have to answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘Does my drinking interfere with my job?’ The whole thing was a setup if you ask me. The supervisor spilled out his own story and offered to accompany Gill to a meeting, where, Gill said, ‘I really started thinking about my life.’ Then he started magnifying everything, which is a big mistake be-cause if you think too hard about anything it’s bound to take the fun out of it. That’s what happened to Gill. He’s no fun any-more.

  I remember saying, ‘So your boss gave you a quiz — so what? Do you think it’s the only quiz in town? I could sit down right now and hand you a pamphlet and say, ‘You’ll definitely have to answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘Does my not drinking interfere with my friendship with Dolph Heck?’ Take my quiz, why don’t you? Why would you listen to some asshole of a supervisor before you’d listen to me? He’s just trying to recruit people, that’s all. He’s a so-called alcoholic so he wants everyone else to be too. Can’t you see through that?’

  Gill looked at me and said, ‘I’ve come to see through a lot of things, Dolph. I’ve come to see through a lot.’

  After that there was nothing left to say as nothing gets on my nerves more than someone repeating the same phrase twice. I think it’s something people have picked up from television, this emotional stutter. Rather than say something interesting once, they repeat a cliché and hope for the same effect.

  Seeing as Gill doesn’t have a decent story, I guess he’ll be forced to surround himself with people who pride themselves in their ability to understand. It’s fine to understand other people but I think it is tiresome to pride yourself in it. Those are the types who will bend over backward to make Gill feel ‘special,’ which is sad to me because Gill really is special. I tried to tell him but he wouldn’t listen. Actually I probably didn’t say spe cial, a word that, outside a restaurant, has no value whatsoever. I think I used the term rare, another restaurant word.

  While Gill is worthy of attention, his story is not. He hasn’t even had any blac
kouts. I’ve had a few. More than a few, but they always take place in private and they’re nothing to write home about, nothing like Tommy’s. The closest I’ve come to the Tommy zone was three weeks ago when I received a telephone bill listing quite a few late-night calls to England. The curious thing is that I do not personally know anyone in England. I thought they’d made a mistake and considered protesting the charges until a few days later when, leafing through a stack of magazines on the living room floor, I came upon a heavily notated page torn from the TV Guide. I saw where I had circled and placed seven stars beside that week’s three-part PBS ‘Mystery’ presentation. At the bottom of the page were a series of oddly arranged numbers, which looked like locker combinations. These matched the numbers on the phone bill, leading me to assume that I must have actually dialed international information and phoned Scotland Yard at the end of each program to congratulate them on another job well done. Still, though, that’s nothing to get worked up about. Exceptional would be to find yourself on a plane headed to England, wearing a tweed cap and demanding that the stewardess put you in touch with Chief Inspector Tennison.

  Since receiving my last phone bill I have taken to fastening the telephone to its cradle, using some of the threaded packing tape stolen from what used to be my job. In the rare event of an in-coming daytime call I can always grab a knife or scissors, but luckily the task appears to be too strenuous during my ever in-creasing personal mystery hours. Another problem solved with simplicity and grace.

  My next project is to fashion a cushion to the hood of my vacuum cleaner. Again this morning I woke on the kitchen floor with my head resting against the hood of my ancient Hoover.

  I ask, ‘What were you thinking?’

  ‘Mattress, Dolph?’