Simple Simon

by William Poe

  WILLIAM POE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 William Poe

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1477624996

  ISBN-13: 978-1477624999

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910753

  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

  North Charleston, South Carolina

  Simple Simon

  William Poe

  Simple Simon met a pieman,

  Going to the fair.

  Said Simple Simon to the pieman,

  “Let me taste your ware.”

  Said the pieman unto Simon,

  “Show me first your penny.”

  Said Simple Simon to the pieman,

  “Indeed I have not any.”

  Simple Simon went a-fishing,

  For to catch a whale;

  But all the water he had got

  Was in his mother's pail.

  Simple Simon went to look,

  If plums grew on a thistle;

  He pricked his fingers very much,

  Which made poor Simon whistle.

  He went for water in a sieve,

  But soon it all fell through;

  And now poor Simple Simon

  Bids you all adieu.

  —Traditional

  CHAPTER 1

  Cocaine overtook the lives of many people during the 1980s. That seemed especially true in the Hollywood gay scene, where I was something of a fixture in the bars, especially the seedy ones. I drank too much in addition to doing drugs and picked up one male hustler after another in a string of meaningless encounters.

  I ended up strung out, broke, and nearly insane. The one good thing that came out of it all was my current lover, Thad. His full name was Thaddeus, but he hated people calling him that. His parents pronounced the “th” in his name, but he preferred “tad.” Thad and I were lovers on and off for years before I went into rehab. At times, our heated relationship led to fights that ended in our nearly killing each other. I once headed off to a bar where I knew I could find him, meat cleaver in hand. I jumped from the car and ran inside with murderous thoughts. The bartender, who knew both of us, calmed me down enough to give Thad a chance to escape. I was mad because the drunken night before, Thad had disappeared with our Boston terrier to get even with me for accusing him of flirting with another guy. When Thad sobered up at a friend’s place, he went to the bar and was going to call me, but I found out he was there first, and stormed from the house in a rage.

  Thad and I had already split when I decided one night to simply drive away from Hollywood with Sean, my boyfriend of the day. My idea was to go to New York to start a career as an artist—as if a person just drives into Manhattan and announces himself. But that was the vanity and craziness of cocaine. Sean and I did drugs in every city along the way and never made it any farther than my hometown of Sibley, a hamlet just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas. I hit my low point when Sean disappeared, and eventually checked into rehab.

  Thad was the first to get sober, at a state-sponsored facility in San Diego. When he graduated from the program, he realized that I was the love of his life and that he had almost lost me for good. Thad offered to load my furniture and other belongings into a truck and bring them to Sibley, using the opportunity to rekindle our relationship—and to get me to check into Riverdell Recovery Center, literally holding my hand as I signed papers declaring myself a penniless ward of the state.

  My mother, Vivian, never used words to convey it, but she knew that Thad and I were in a relationship. Thad was living with her at our home in Sibley, waiting for me to complete the program.

  Getting sober my first week at Riverdell, I felt like someone who had run a marathon. I was exhausted, mentally and physically. Even so, it was hard to rest. Every time I tried to stretch out and relax, I felt a terrible urge to score some coke and rarely managed more than a catnap. If drug cravings and men snoring didn’t keep me awake, then a disturbing dream would do the trick. One night, I tossed and turned until I crashed onto the Vietnam veteran sleeping in the bunk below mine.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the man growled as he slipped on a pair of jeans and headed for the kitchen. He often went downstairs for a late-night snack.

  “Pipe down,” someone called out.

  Climbing into my bunk and pulling the covers over my head, I was again in the midst of a dream as five-year-old Bubby, running in circles in a sandbox, dragging a sharpened stick behind me to furrow a spiral in the sand.

  Grandmother Mandy watches from the porch. “Come inside,” she pleads. “Let’s play Old Maid.”

  Little Bubby races toward the chain-link fence surrounding the yard and holds fast. Mandy hooks an arthritic finger through a belt loop.

  “Leave me alone!” Bubby calls out.

  My counselor at Riverdell, a man named Harris, encouraged me to talk to him about the dream. He thought it must be significant since it recurred, in one form or another, nearly every night. Harris was a handsome, muscular fellow with a rough-hewn but trustworthy face. At a morning session, I asked him why my dream would be about trying to escape the grasp of someone who loved me. Harris, who had already discovered my creative side, thought that writing might help me understand.

  “Use writing to explore the route you took to Riverdell,” Harris suggested. “What were the decisions you made along the way? What drove them?” Before I could comment, he got a box of pencils and a legal pad from his desk drawer. “Start at the beginning,” Harris instructed. “Tell me about Mandy.”

  I wasn’t at all sure that writing about my experiences would help me recover from drug abuse, but I trusted Harris. On the first day at Riverdell, he had convinced me that life was worth living, and that I should stay and try his methods. The first few hours after committing myself, all it had taken was for someone to accuse me of being a faggot and I was ready to jump off a bridge. Harris called Thad and Vivian to help me realize that people who mattered loved me. Their presence was enough to keep me going on day one, but now I had to face the future.

  After the evening meal, I found a quiet spot in the dorm. At first, I just stared at the lined, yellow paper. Start at the beginning, Harris had said. I thought about my grandmother and considered what it was like growing up in Sibley.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Mandy was elderly by the time I was born, probably in her seventies, but no one knew for sure. During moments when Mandy’s mind was clear, I enjoyed sitting in her lap as she thumbed through old photo albums and told me stories. Mandy was born fifteen years after the Civil War—the War of Northern Aggression, as I grew up knowing it. She told me family tales from that era as if she had lived through them herself. I learned that my ancestors came to Arkansas by wagon train and that one of my grandfathers, James Thomas “JT” Powell, was “strung up” by a band of marauders who accused him of being a Northern sympathizer because he nursed a wounded Union soldier in his home until the troops arrived to claim him. When she told the story, Mandy’s face would contort into a grimace and she’d say, “The very idea that a good Southerner shouldn’t help someone in need, even if he was a thieving Yankee!”

  My grandfather, Simon Bartholomew Powell, began courting Mandy during business trips to Little Rock. He owned the general store in Sibley, a small community about thirteen miles away and an arduous trip along a rutted stagecoach road. Mandy was the only daughter of a furniture manufacturer. She must have truly loved Bart, because moving with him to Sibley after they married was a step down on the social ladder. Little Rock may not have been a metropol
is in the early twentieth century, but Sibley barely qualified as a village. Our family house, a timber structure built by slaves who came with the Powells from Alabama, was the largest building for miles around. We affectionately referred to it as “the mansion,” though its size was the only grand thing about it. Mandy and Bart lived there for several years, and I imagine it was due to Mandy’s pleas that they eventually relocated to Little Rock. Bart opened a mercantile store close to the capitol building along the main road that farmers used to bring produce to market.

  Sibley retained a strong pull on my father, who took us to live in the mansion before I started school. I shared Mandy’s room there, which was crammed with furniture and memorabilia that had accumulated during her long life. I slept on one of two Jenny Lind beds and kept my toys in the bottom drawer of a mahogany armoire where Mandy stored the clothes she had worn as a young woman. The long dresses with high collars and black button-up shoes eventually found use as witches’ costumes at Halloween carnivals. A fox stole laid out on a special shelf made of cedar took pride of place. The wrap was so tattered that it looked like roadkill. Even so, Mandy would brush its fur and make it presentable when she felt obligated to appear at a relative’s funeral, or on the infrequent occasions when someone took her into Little Rock to attend Sunday services at Immanuel Baptist Church, where Bart had been a deacon.

  As a young boy, I would raid Mandy’s armoire and prance around the room in her old dresses, admiring myself in the gilded full-length mirror. One afternoon, she found me sitting at the vanity in my pajamas with the fox stole draped over my shoulders. I had put on lipstick and powdered my face.

  “You look adorable,” Mandy cooed. “You would have made a sweet little girl.” Her voice trailed off, and she sat down on the edge of her Jenny Lind bed. She stared vacantly at the floor and mused, “We wanted a girl after the twins died.”

  Mandy often spoke of her twins, stillborn males buried in an unmarked grave at the family cemetery across the street from the mansion.

  Though such memories brought unbearable sadness to Mandy, as a boy I preferred her pensive moments to the times she became obsessed with the idea that Bart had put bonds in a safety-deposit box during the Great Depression and that she had to find them. Mandy would get on the phone, a party line during those days, and call every bank in Little Rock. The clerks knew the Powell name and assured her that no accounts remained open. Because of the party line, every resident of Sibley knew of Mandy’s obsession.

  Bart was in a direct line of inheritance that stretched at least to the early 1700s. He was a wealthy man when he married the debutante Miss Amanda “Mandy” Sharp. The Great Depression was the final blow that ended the family’s fortunes. By the time I came along, no one had any money. My father, Leonard “Lenny” Powell, barely survived as a plumber, and my mother, Vivian, earned a living as a bookkeeper at the local grocery store.

  The circumstances of Bart’s demise were legendary. Anytime I whined about Vivian letting out the hem of my pants instead of buying me new clothes, I heard the myth repeated. When farmers were struggling, Bart loaned them money. In the depths of the Depression, the farmers went bankrupt.

  “Why didn’t Bart take their farms?” I’d ask on cue, eliciting the well-rehearsed statement Better that one family suffers than for many to do without.

  We were good people because Bart was willing to sacrifice.

  “Let’s have iced tea,” I said, hoping to draw Mandy out of her stupor. While she remained on the bed, watching me, I rubbed off the lipstick and powder with a wad of tissues and put on jeans and a T-shirt. I jumped on the bed and draped the fox stole around Mandy’s shoulders. She stood and took my hands. We waltzed to the rhythms of imagined music.

  “Time for that tea,” Mandy said, out of breath.

  Mandy gripped the banister as I followed her downstairs. Once we were in the kitchen, she grasped the counter to steady herself. I dragged a chair to the refrigerator so I could reach the freezer compartment and get the ice tray. I managed to lift its metal arm and release the cubes into our glasses. Mandy poured the tea. We sat at the table in front of the dinette window and watched our two horses standing in the corral where they had found shade under an oak tree. Their tails swished furiously as they fended off a swarm of flies.

  Finishing my glass of tea, I dashed upstairs to get a deck of cards. Mandy and I played a few hands of Old Maid, but it didn’t take long for her concentration to fade. I suggested a game of Hearts, but Mandy stared out the window as if she hadn’t heard me.

  The rest of the afternoon, Mandy studied the faces of heat-baked sunflowers that drooped in the garden near the back porch. I returned to the armoire and played dress up, occasionally going downstairs to check on her. Even as a preschooler, I was as much Mandy’s guardian as she was mine.

  On those long summer days, I usually rose with the sun and went outside to go exploring. Beyond the horse corral, a creek-fed pond merged with a cypress swamp that stretched for miles beyond our property. Those early mornings were treasured moments, when I didn’t have to worry about Mandy, when Vivian and Lenny weren’t arguing, and when my sister Connie, ten years my senior, wasn’t around to harass me.

  I always returned to the house before Vivian began preparing everyone’s breakfast, though I usually satisfied myself with a bowl of Sugar Pops that I ate while sitting on a stool at the counter that separated the kitchen from the dinette. Lenny ate simple breakfasts, racing downstairs at the last minute for a fried egg on toast and a cup of coffee. Without acknowledging anyone, he’d hurry out the door and drive away in his Econoline van filled with plumbing supplies.

  A glass of orange juice sufficed for Connie, who claimed she was fat when Vivian insisted she eat a full breakfast. “You’re too thin,” Vivian repeated, almost daily.

  Connie would saunter across the front yard, heading to the main road, unconcerned about getting to the road in time to catch a ride with her girlfriend to their summer job.

  Before leaving for the grocery store, Vivian always hollered upstairs to rouse Mandy. After hearing her open the bedroom door, Vivian would turn to me and say, “Be good, Bubby. Watch out for Mandy.”

  When everyone was gone, Mandy liked to eat a slice of buttered toast and sit at the dinette window, where she’d remain all day if I didn’t help her back upstairs or engage her in a game of cards.

  Left alone, I entertained myself by dressing up or imagining adventures with my friends Dingo and Wacket—two teddy bears that I got for Christmas one year.

  I sensed when Vivian’s car turned up the driveway late in the afternoon and would run out to greet her. She often scolded me for running toward a moving vehicle, but smiled when I offered to help carry the groceries inside. After putting things away, Vivian would check on Mandy.

  It seemed that Lenny arrived home earlier with each passing day, parking in the dirt driveway visible out the kitchen window. He would be struggling to catch his breath by the time he made it to the den and sank into his favorite chair, a La-Z-Boy recliner. Vivian worried when he insisted that his chest pain was “nothing but pleurisy.” Bart had died of heart trouble, and so did his father before him. Once settled in his chair, Lenny would turn on the television and light a cigarette, the first in a chain of Lucky Strikes he’d smoke until bedtime.

  Despite working a long day at the store, which ended with a tiring stint at the checkout counter, Vivian didn’t rest after caring for Mandy—she started supper right away. Sometimes she tried to slip Lenny a TV dinner, but if he suspected, Lenny would dig through the garbage to find the box and prove the deception. Sometimes Vivian had me take the packaging out to the incinerator barrel near the barn and say I was burning old newspapers. Lenny would grumble when he didn’t find his evidence, and begrudgingly eat the food.

  Whether it was a TV dinner or Vivian’s own cooking, Lenny always complained. The Salisbury steak was tough as hide, the mashed potatoes were lumpy, and the butter beans ice-cold. Vivian dutifully took her pos
ition on the couch each night, sitting beside the La-Z-Boy and reading Harlequin romances once the kitchen work was complete. Lenny waged an ongoing battle to get a TV signal, having attached so many branches of tinfoil to the rabbit-ear antennas that it was like having an aluminum Christmas tree set up year-round. Lenny’s blood pressure exploded if he missed an episode of Gunsmoke or Wagon Train.

  After her nap, Mandy and I often sat on the porch swing. She’d read Grimm’s Fairy Tales to me. Some evenings, she retold stories about the Powell family that I had heard since I was old enough to walk. I most enjoyed the one about the marauders who came to the mansion after the Civil War and hanged our ancestor, JT, from a tree. “That one, right there,” Mandy would say, pointing toward a mighty oak where the limb used for the hanging now supported a tire swing. I planned to climb the tree when I got older to look for evidence of the hanging, but it didn’t matter if any existed or not; I was convinced that it had really happened.

  Other evenings, when Mandy wasn’t clearheaded enough to read to me or tell stories, I sprawled in front of the television with my floppy TV dog. Vivian kept a supply of construction paper that I drew on with Crayola crayons. When I finished my artwork, she would place her romance novel facedown in her lap and ask me to show her what I had drawn. I’d explain that the images told of my adventures with Dingo and Wacket. Vivian never pointed out that I used so many colors, and drew so many characters on the page, that I ended up with an indecipherable mess.

  Lenny would snore if Vivian spoke too loudly. He wasn’t actually asleep; he just wanted us to be quiet.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “What have you got so far?” Harris asked at the beginning of the first morning session after I had started writing.

  “Nothing that matters,” I said. “It’s hard to remember anything important.” I handed him several sheets of paper torn from the legal pad.