Well, I guess I was wrong.
I just don’t belong.
But then, I’ve been there before.
Everything’s all right.
I’ll just say goodnight,
And I’ll show myself to the door.
‘Cause I’ve got friends in low places,
Where the whiskey drowns,
And the beer chases my blues away.
And I’ll be okay.
—Garth Brooks
7.
Old Knobbers
The appointment with Dr. Chod was half a week away and I was losing it pretty quickly. I needed some sort of distraction to calm my deteriorating mind. I already told you how bleak my list of friends was, but I texted one of those holdovers from my childhood years to put out some feelers. His name is James Dulroney, but everyone has been calling him Fieldy for as long as I can remember. I don’t claim to have a best friend, but if I had one, then Fieldy would be the stock answer. We bonded over a mutual love of comic books that eventually led to a mutual love of cheap beer which led to me not speaking to him since I sobered up. I haven’t read a comic book in over a decade and the Avengers movies have kind of gone to shit. I texted him in bro code: “What up?”
To his credit, his response was much quicker than my wife’s. “You blooming wanker . . . Where have you been?” He included an emoji of a smiling turd.
“Sorry, bro. Life has been crazy.”
He quickly texted back: “Is everything okay, mate?”
I should probably explain that Fieldy has always been a bit eccentric. One of his quirks is that even though he was born and raised in East Texas and hasn’t traveled any further than Mexico during Spring Break, he speaks with a very forced and unconvincing British accent that is supposed to be cockney, but more closely resembles southern Ebonics. What further complicates his horrendous effort is that his use of British slang is based upon a select few BBC shows he has watched over the years, mainly EastEnders.
I texted him: “I’m fine. Any chance we could hang later? Maybe catch a movie or something?”
This time his response wasn’t as quick. I wondered if he was trying to formulate a convincing excuse to let me down easily. At least five minutes passed and he finally texted: “Meeting up with the old knobbers at 6:00. Gaming night. You down for a pint?”
“Where?”
“Savage’s house.”
“K.”
“Brilliant. Cheers.”
Of the members of my social circle, Savage was the one I least got along with. I think he tolerated me solely because of the others and I didn’t relish the idea of going to his house. He had become a bigshot local realtor and his modus operandi was to rub his success in all our faces, but he resented that I had married into more wealth than he could ever hope to attain. On the flip side, he usually had some incredibly good weed and that thought was comforting, since I would be the only one there abstaining from alcohol. Ever since the news of my death sentence, I had romanticized the idea of drinking myself into oblivion, but I knew that if Dare ever found me like that again it would be the last straw.
Bingo, buster.
That infernal voice rearing its ugly head again.
I turned on every device in my house and listened to Spoon’s Gimme Fiction, watched Reservoir Dogs on Netflix, occasionally glanced over to a Twitch stream as Angry Ernie played Fallout 4, and I casually played Plants vs. Zombies on my phone. My mind was divided by a cacophony of visual and auditory stimuli, but occasionally a single voice cut through the noise and seemingly muted it.
Bingo, buster.
That was my mental dance and what exacerbated it was a growing hunger that terrified me. I was famished, yet the only the foods that sounded satisfying were either pure sugar or the red meat that I had forsaken for decades, and which almost literally bit me on the ass earlier. I decided to reject my urges, fasting and trying to distract my rebellious mind.
It was almost 6:00 when I left and drove out to an exclusive area of town known as Waterforde. I passed a tacky ornate gate and moved past tennis courts and a manmade pond that was equipped with a massive fountain that seemed to be stopped up as the water barely tinkled out of the top. I pulled into Savage’s driveway and noted that even though his house was opulent, it was barely half the size of mine . . . at least the house that had been mine until I’d been reduced to pool boy.
I rang the doorbell. A minute later Savage opened the door and offered me a halfhearted smile and softly said, “Hey, Rip. Come on in. Keep it down a bit if you don’t mind, Denise is putting down the twins.”
Savage was conventionally handsome, but his chiseled jawline and politician-styled haircut lent him an air of insincerity. When we were twelve I watched him shit himself during P.E. when he let a fart get away from him, so his poser act wasn’t resonating with me. Maybe that was the very thing he held against me; I could see through all of his bullshit . . . I knew who he really was.
Whatever.
We tiptoed through the living room and I glanced at an obnoxious mounted deer head with twisted antlers and an expression of deep resignation that he was fated to spend his existence staring out at assholes. We stepped into a country style kitchen, then through a door that led down some tight stairs and into a huge sunken den equipped with a half bar, a projection screen with half a dozen theatre chairs, and a round table that was large enough to seat King Arthur and most of his knights.
Fieldy hopped out of his chair, ran over to me, and pulled me into an uncomfortably tight embrace. He released me with a pat on the back and said, “Smashing to see you, Rip.” He squeezed my arm and added, “Jesus Christ, mate, are you on ‘roids?”
At first, I thought he was busting balls, but from his expression I could tell he was being serious. I had to admit, I did feel a lot like Barry Bonds during his homerun chase. Fieldy used to be ripped and was even an All State track athlete, but over the years he had grown soft and looked more coach than athlete. He had recently given in to the hipster craze, shaved the sides of his head and grown a massive beard with the tops of his moustache slightly twirled upwards. He was also wearing a neck scarf and one of the flannel shirts he’d pulled out of the back of his closet that had previously been retired after Cobain died.
“Hey, Ripley.” Nicky Demorra waved at me from his seat at the table. Nicky was the missing link between Don Knots and Steve Buscemi though he was slightly less attractive than either of them. I had known Nicky longer than anyone else there, meeting him in second grade at Nettie Marshall and bonding over our mutual unpopularity as the token white boys in a predominately African American school. We learned to absorb beatings together. He taught me how to draw superhero muscles and I taught him how to draw a naked woman—really it was just a few well-placed circles and of course that magical triangle.
Our relationship took a turn for the worst a few years prior when I got particularly wasted on Jose Cuervo during one of our joint family camping trips at Krause Springs and called his wife, Erica, the C-word loud enough for everyone to hear. I apologized the next morning and Erica and Nicky both said I was forgiven, but I knew that I really wasn’t, and I never would be. Once you go C-word there’s no coming back from it.
For the record, his wife is that and much worse, exemplifying the rare ability to be completely self-centered and critical of everyone else at the same time. What precipitated my dreaded declaration was Erica’s loud proclamation that: “If I had it do to over I would have never had children.” Her eight-year-old son was sitting in her lap. Somehow, she managed to say the most vicious thing I had ever heard and still got to be the victim.
The other member of our crew, Bennie Franks, glanced up at me from behind a Dungeon Master’s screen and slowly nodded, like speaking aloud would have taken way too much energy. He was a professor of literature at the local junior college and I imagine he was petered out after lecturing all day to a generation that couldn’t give a flying shit about reading or anything else that happened before Kan
ye married Kim. He wore his long, prematurely graying, hair in a ponytail and his sharp cheek bones and prominent nose further gave him the appearance of a poor man’s John Lennon. The similarities ended there as I had frequently heard him butcher Beatles songs during Karaoke night at the local bar.
“You didn’t bring any beer . . . ” Savage began and then he quickly added, “I’ve got some Sam Adams if you want to share.”
I shook my head. “I’m on the wagon tonight.”
Savage nodded. “Fair enough. I have to admit, you look like you’ve lost like thirty pounds since the last time I saw you. Are you doing the Atkins Diet or something? P90X?”
“Neither,” I said. “Just clean living.” I sat down at the table and stared longingly at what everyone was drinking. Savage was drinking a Samuel Adams Summer Ale and had a pretentiously expensive bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle Kentucky Bourbon placed in front of him. Fieldy had a yellow can of his trademark Boddingtons Ale, chosen in all likelihood because it is brewed in Manchester and fits in with his alter ego. Nicky held the beer that I would have most liked to have indulged in, a glass bottle of Red Stripe that had shards of glistening ice still clinging to the surface. I watched him take a long drink and shivered. Even though Bennie was by far the most educated out of all of us, his tastes had never progressed beyond that first brand of shitty beers we had shared back in high school: Natty Lite. He was drinking a tallboy and there were already three other empty cans scattered around him. By the end of the night he would have drank enough of them to build a fortress, but if he was drunk, you’d never be able to tell.
Bennie was rolling dice behind the dungeon master’s screen, so I asked him, “Are you working on a campaign? We going to fight more of those dark elves?”
Bennie frowned. “Sorry, Ripley, we completed the assault against the Drow two weeks ago. I was just working on a way to add your character into our current campaign. It’s based on Spelljammer and set in Wildspace. I was thinking you could be a Dracon . . . ”
“Dracon?”
He waved at me dismissively. “They are kind of like centaurs. I could possibly let you be a tinker gnome . . . ”
“Let’s play a board game tonight,” Nicky offered. “By the time we got Ripley caught up we’d all be wasted and Savage would just start trying to fuck the beholders again.”
“Fuck you,” Savage said. “You fuck one beholder and then it defines you. I’m down with some Settlers of Catan.”
Fieldy groaned and said, “Sod off. You and your loaded dice.”
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” Savage said.
“I hate the game,” Fieldy said.
“How about we play Arkham Horror?” Nicky asked.
“You’ve really developed an unhealthy fixation on Lovecraft,” Bennie said. “You are going to have to accept at some point that he truly was a shitty writer.”
“Never,” Nicky said. “Without him where would modern horror be? He created the whole cosmic horror genre. He created . . . ”
“Tentacle porn?” Fieldy asked.
“Blame the Japanese for that one,” Nicky said.
“Lovecraft would have been quick to blame them for it,” Bennie said. “He was one racist asshole.”
“He suffered from xenophobia,” Nicky said defensively. “Poor bastard was practically a shut in. He spent hundreds of pages describing and naming what he claimed was indescribable and unnamable. Let’s just play a game and see which one of us can keep their sanity.”
Bingo, buster.
Savage shook his head. “Arkham is like a four-hour game and that’s assuming everyone understands the rules. Ripley, are you familiar with it?”
I shook my head. “Not really. Lovecraft wrote about that octopus tentacle-faced guy, right?”
Nicky laughed. “His name is Cthulhu. Damn, Ripley, you are probably the most knowledgeable pop culture guy I’ve ever met and you don’t know Lovecraft?”
I shrugged. “I guess it’s a void in my geek knowledge base.”
“That settles it then,” Savage said. “I got to boot you guys out of here by eleven at the latest, Arkham is out.”
“Jesus,” Bennie said. “You gotta change your Depend under garments before midnight?”
Savage laughed. “More like the twins’ diapers. I love the little guys, but they wake us up at six no matter how late we keep them up. Ripley knows what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah,” I agreed but really didn’t. Dare had always gotten up with our daughter because I could sleep through a tornado.
“Savage never was one to stay up late,” Nicky said. “I remember when I spent weekends at your house and how you’d always get up like clockwork to watch Saved by the Bell.”
“That’s lame,” Bennie said. “That show was pure shit. Preteen masturbation fantasy put into sitcom-sized chunks.”
“That’s not so far from the truth,” Savage said. “I personally ascribe to the theory that the whole show is just Zach’s escapist fantasy. Basically, he’s dreaming the entire thing.”
“Like that season of Dallas that my dad still bitches about?” Bennie asked.
“No way,” I said. “Zach gets into shenanigans sometimes and—doesn’t his archrival date his dream girl?”
“Yeah,” Savage said, “he’s constantly getting into trouble, but he always comes out better for it. And Kelly might occasionally flirt with Slater, but she always ends up with Zach in the end.”
“That Kelly is one fine bird,” Fieldy said. “I’d bonk her. Has she ever flashed those baps?”
“If by baps you mean tits,” Savage began, “then yeah she has. In the “Skinemax” classic Sweet Dreams she even has a bit of a lesbian scene with Jaime Pressly.”
“Your spank bank knowledge never fails to impress me,” Bennie said.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Savage said. “But back to my point. Zach wasn’t always so cool. Originally, Saved by the Bell was called Good Morning Miss Bliss and Zach was more like Screech—the girls didn’t like him, his classmates made fun of him, and none of his “shenanigans” came together. It was only after the show became Saved by the Bell that he was transformed into—”
I raised my hand: “But how does that corroborate your dream theory?”
“For one thing,” Savage began, “it explains his sudden transformation. Secondly there’s the theme song. It’s a dead giveaway.” Savage belted out the song with what was a disappointingly good voice: “When I wake up in the morning and the alarm gives out a warning and I don’t think I’ll ever make it on time. By the time I grab my books and I give myself a look, I’m at the corner just in time to see the bus fly by. It’s alright, because I’m saved by the bell. If the teacher pops a test, I know I’m in a mess and my dog ate all my homework last night. Riding low in my chair, she won’t know that I’m there and if I can hand it in tomorrow it will be alright.”
“So how does that prove your point?” I asked. “He’s awake in the song.”
“My point exactly,” Savage said. “The scenario he is describing is reflective of the loser Zach, but in this series he’s a winner. The song is subtly pointing out that the real Zach is still a loser, but that this new series is his dream fantasy.”
“I’m not fully ready to buy it,” Bennie said. “But you’ve made a compelling argument.”
Nicky smiled. “If we’re going to talk about theme songs casting a series in a new light then let’s look no further than The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Will was actually dead during the entire six-season run.”
“Lay it on me,” Savage said. I glanced at him and realized he’d pulled out a shiny blue glass pipe and a Ziploc baggy filled with what was undoubtedly prime kush.
“It’s simple,” Nicky said. “He is talking about how his ‘life got flipped, turned upside down’. What he means is that those couple of guys making trouble in his neighborhood actually did a drive-by on his ass.”
“That’s racist,” Bennie said.
“Bu
llshit,” Nicky said. “Will Smith was a rapper . . . kind of. A drive-by was a vital component of any rap. Anyway, consider his journey to Bel-Air: he’s drinking orange juice out of a champagne glass, the license plate says “Fresh”, and when he arrives he ends up sitting on a throne in his kingdom. Will is actually in Heaven the entire time.”
“Not bad,” Bennie said, “but I think I can one up both of you.”
“What you got for us?” Savage asked.
Bennie smiled and said, “The reason the inhabitants of Gilligan’s Island can’t escape is because they are in Hell.”
“I’ve watched every episode at least twice,” I said. “I’ve got to hear you justify that.”
Savage finished packing the pipe, lit a match, and inhaled. I was eager to ask him to pass it over when the smell hit me. I was instantly nauseated, and the thought of inhaling filled me with a deep dread. I had never been so turned off by anything in my life. I had to fight the urge to run out of the room.
“Are you okay?” Bennie asked. I nodded and then he laid his theory on me. “So consider this . . . each character is represented by one of the seven deadly sins. Mr. Howell is obviously greed and his lazy wife is sloth. Ginger is lust, and innocent farm girl, Mary Ann, has a clear case of envy. The pompous Professor is obviously prideful, because he can’t admit that he is too dumb to get them off the island.”
“You resemble that remark,” Savage said.
Bennie waved away his jab and continued, “Now you have to assign two of the sins to Skipper: gluttony, because of his eating issues, and wrath because he’s always yelling at poor Gilligan.”
“Not bad,” I admitted.
Bennie nodded and said, “I’ve tried to lay this one down on my class, but they don’t know what the hell Gilligan’s Island is. Now here’s the real kicker . . . Gilligan isn’t as innocent as you might think. In fact, he’s Satan.”
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