by C J Hribal
Which was part of our father’s genius. His jokes, booming laugh, and hail-fellow-well-met schtick played well. The boys out East wanted panache, polish. The people our father called on wanted regularity, someone who looked like he was not from out of town. Our father was a known quantity, right down to his mimeographs of “What to Do in the Event of a Nuclear Explosion: 1. Spread Legs. 2. Place hands on ankles. 3. Bend over. And 4. Kiss your ass good-bye.” He could tell the sales rep in training, “The boys in the lab like it if just before a trial you quote Einstein.”
“Einstein?”
“Yeah, that one about God not playing dice with the universe. They may be scientists, but they go to church. You want to know a better one to lay on them? ‘If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?’ That’s Einstein, too. He was into six of one, half a dozen of another if you ask me. That’s what relativity’s all about—same difference.”
“Say again?”
Our father would have a finger to his lips. “Shh. Loose lips sink ships.” And drive on, his protégé taking notes, sometimes with question marks after the more inscrutable comments. Loose lips sink ships? Look up ref.
And our father would explain to the new guy the salesman’s habit of talking to himself: “Sometimes you’re just thinking, and it comes out your mouth. It’s okay. You’re not going crazy. You can only spend so long thinking about your wife and kids, and what you’re going to say at the next mill and who you’re going to see and where you’re going to eat and after a while your mind goes blank.” Our father would trail off then, the thought burning away like morning mist in sunlight, his brain a movie screen against which all the projected scenery clips past. He has entered that finite, scrolling universe of the Hamm’s beer sign, and he sees the same thing over and over and over. Road, highway, river, sky. Rocks, clouds, fields, trees. Undulating blue, undulating green, undulating black-gray highway. Telephone poles whipping past. Cattails looking like cigars on sticks. Corn and trees a blur, the clouds changing but infrequently. It’s like they’re not moving and then they have. You blink, come back to yourself. What happened? You check mileage markers, the tenths ticking off, then come to the next whole number and it’s been forty-some miles since you last knew where you were. Do the math—it’s another seventy-eight miles to the Spotted Heron Motel on Highway 13, where you’ll stay the night. Besides the Super 8, the Spotted Heron, the gas station/bait shop, the Dipsy Doodle Diner and Gift Shop, a campground and a couple lodges, the town’s nothing. Good people, though. Margie behind the grill will recognize you, flirt with you over the pie, a flirting that won’t go anywhere even though there are times you’d like it to. But Margie’s stuck with her alcoholic husband just the same as Susan Marie is stuck with hers. Funny how you can see yourself as somebody’s alkie husband once you see somebody else’s alkie husband, and you find yourself wondering, What the hell is she doing with that loser? And then you think you’re that loser, too, only you belong to somebody else, and generally you’re able to maintain, and Margie is one of the reasons such a thing is possible. She’ll call you Sugar, pour you coffee, and say things like “It’s deader’n a doornail in here, sugar. What say we go out back for a quickie?” and you both know she’s kidding. She’ll go home to Mack, who fixes cars at the garage when he’s not drinking under them, daring fate by smoking cherry cigars while he works, and you’ll look over your reports in your room, and dull the illicit ache with a couple-three stiff Rob Roys until the room’s orange carpet and green bedspread lose their focus and you find yourself wondering what Margie’s last name is anyway, and where she might live, and could you find her if you just drove around for a while. You’re jogging the keys in your hand when you realize you’re being silly. What are the chances that you’re going to find Margie at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night just driving around? Then you realize she might still be at the Dipsy Doodle and you could just drive by there, or check out Len’s Hideaway. You could use the beer. You could use the fuck. And it’s only when your brain utters that word that you realize your need, feel the fuel of the Rob Roys pushing you out the door, wondering what you’ll say to her, wondering if your need is so obvious in your face every time you drive up here. Does she see that? Is that why she flirts? She sees your need plain upon your face and wants to do you a kindness? Hopes you’ll recognize the need naked on her own face when she talks about a griddle quickie, disguising the obviousness of her intent with its obviousness? A chummy little fuck in a north woods town, two people ministering to each other’s needs? She has needs, too, right? Mack with his gin fizzes and cherry cigars is no prize, right? Though what do you have to offer her that’s better except maybe you shave, and your tongue isn’t littered with bits of tobacco? That’s a treat, right, your tongue in her mouth won’t leave cigar detritus? And oh, sweet Christ, now you’re imagining it plainly, picturing the two of you reclining here, in the Spotted Heron Motel, your home away from home, two whiskeys on the bedside table, the two of you cuddled up post-fuck (you don’t even want to think about the lovemaking because you do, you do want to think about it), stroking each other’s flanks, her skin pebbly as a basketball beneath your fingers, her nipples still erect from the air-conditioning.
And you can tell your protégé about how you deal with that, about how you walk away from that temptation, how you’ve been doing it for over twenty years now, denying yourself the simplest of illicit pleasures, the meaningless fuck, because you believed in the sanctity of your marriage, and knew the enormity of the stupidity you were tempted to commit before you attempted to commit it. Or maybe you don’t say anything about that, ever, to anybody, because the traveling salesman jokes just assume you have, and denying it would simply confirm it for some people, but you carry it in your heart, how you almost fell, and there is shame enough in that. And a part of you is kicking yourself, too, because maybe she really wanted you to make a move, maybe that flirtatious invitation really was that, an invitation, no strings attached, and even in infidelity you are a failure. But no, no regrets. You walked away from that, and the only real regrets you’d have would be because you had pulled something stupid, like you are now, cruising back roads off Highways 13 and 77 outside Glidden in late twilight trying to find someone you’re really hoping (not) to find. But still, you wanted to—want to, want to—and the wanting itself is a sin. Christ, don’t you get any credit for saying no? For turning away? For driving around roads where you know you won’t find her rather than going to Len’s, where you most certainly will? And the next time you’re in the Dipsy Doodle—tomorrow night, even—when the bells jingle over the door she’ll greet you with “There’s my lover” and a knowing, sad, necessary smile, and you’ll both know what it was you passed on. And you’ll instruct him, your young sidekick, who’s never at a loss for bedside companions, on the finer points of fidelity and loneliness, and how, if you believe in the former, then the latter is necessary and unavoidable.
He could instruct them on it all, how to sell and how to live in the world—in short, how to act as though you believed the world was a better place than it was—but the suits had no interest in that. They never took him up on his offer, never gave him the one honor he thought they owed him, the single mark of respect he wanted accorded him in his old age—to be seen as a font of wisdom on the finer arts of selling. Not what they give you out of a book, but what you need to know if you’re going to make it out there—out in the world.
They weren’t interested, had no intention of honoring him like that. And so it continued. His best accounts taken from him. His commission rate dropped. His quotas upped. His territory chopped or rearranged, parts of it given to others. When he got tired of it he went to a competitor, Dewless Chemical. Dewless was a family operation. Hands-on and homey. The employees like family. A problem: lots of the employees were family. So promises were made about advancement that were clearly not going to be kept when there was a son-in-law that our father was “taking under his wing.” And
as the company fell apart, they expected the company’s nonfamily members to forgo, during this time of financial contingency—“just like family”—things like bonuses and paychecks. In fact, the nonfamily members of Dewless were seen as more familylike in this regard than the family itself. This was made plain to our father when the son-in-law, driving past Park Falls with him, had the temerity to open up a pay envelope, something our father had not seen for weeks, and do some math on the back of the envelope, referring as he did so to the uncashed check he held in his other hand.
“What’s that?” said our father.
“My check and bonus,” said the son-in-law. “Can you believe Pop’s bonus checks for this quarter were only averaging thirteen percent?”
“Thirteen percent?” said our father.
“Yeah, and he expects me to swallow that. Can you fucking believe it?”
“No,” said our father, “I can’t.”
By the time Dewless went Chapter 11, two of our father’s paychecks had bounced. One was missing. “It’s in the mail,” a nervous Mr. Dewless promised over the phone. “And I will not come in your mouth!” our father shouted back. “Wally, the children!” said our mother. As though we didn’t know who it was being screwed. He hadn’t received a commission in six months. When they went belly-up, they still owed him six paychecks plus the commissions.
It was quite a hit. To get us through, Robert Aaron and I cashed in the money we’d been saving for college. The family’s coffers remained unfilled. Our father blamed himself, as though he should have seen it coming. Perhaps he should have; perhaps he was blinded by almost, sorta being a consultant to that shit son-in-law, but when you got down to it, because Dewless was a family operation, our father’s screwing was strictly small-time. To get really screwed, you needed a major corporation. Our father went back to Dinkwater Chemical for a spell—he was desperate—but he had feelers out, and one of his old friends, Benny Wilkerson from the Cicero Velvetones, was now a regional sales manager for Drydell Chemical, an outfit out of Dinkwater only slightly smaller than Dinkwater themselves. “But we’re growing, and we need somebody in specialty chemicals in the Midwest, Wally. You could be that man.” Our father was sold, sure he’d finally found a place that would treat him right. We were over the hump.
Too bad Drydell got grabbed soon after that—in the late seventies—by Perle Chemical, which in turn was snatched up by Lakeland Oil. Lakeland Oil didn’t want to do paper, they wanted to do paint, so they sold off the paper unit to Dinkwater Chemical, and our father could either go back to the Dinks or switch to paint. He wouldn’t have had any choice in the matter at all except Benny Wilkerson had been bumped up a couple levels in the moves, and while they were combining and downsizing—mostly salesmen our father’s age—Benny was able to tell our father, “No promises, but if you’re willing to learn paint we can keep you,” which was as much of a display of loyalty as our father expected. In making that offer, however, Benny had stepped on the toes of the new paint manager and, sight unseen, had made an enemy for life. The paint manager wanted both Benny’s and our father’s heads on platters. And given that corporate communications during the merger had been placed in a blind trust operated by the Keystone Kops, he was able to get exactly that. Our father would talk to his regional sales supervisor, they would agree to something, “but just let me run it by the higher-ups,” and by the time it went up and came back down the corporate pipeline, the person who’d agreed to whatever had been fired, left the company, or was to be found in a different department entirely, and the directive or agreement had been lost, forgotten, or changed beyond recognition. The new orders were accompanied by a memo welcoming a new regional supervisor to his tasks. No mention of what had happened to the previous manager. Our father joked that someone was killing the regional supervisors and distributing their body parts in industrial-size barrels of creosote and paint thinner. “It’s how they got rid of Hoffa,” he said. “Everyone thinks it was lead overshoes and a trip to the river, but I bet he’s in a warehouse somewhere, his bones slowly dissolving until he’s poured down the drain during a Superfund cleanup.”
And so it went. Our father took to subscribing to the theory of prior arrangements. That it was a conspiracy. That everything—the whole goddamn world—was a conspiracy.
Conspiracies go better with drinking. The worst of it was when our father took absolute leave of his senses one evening and started screaming at the television set that Walter Cronkite was a Communist. I thought of Ahab. Twirling down, twirling down, twirling madly, madly down, a ballet of failure still tied to his obsession, a victim of the thing he most desired. Then I thought of failures less romantic. Not Ahab trailing like an afterthought behind the whale as it sank into the abyss, but Wally as Willy Loman. I knew how that ended up. I put the thought out of my mind. Besides, if Wally-Bear was Willy, that would make me Biff, and I didn’t want to think about that much, either.
Our father was not one of those brutal drunks that ruins or blights lives. There was no hitting in our family, and although there was a lot of screaming, the verbal abuse was minimal. The anger was directed mostly inward. Broken green and bloody glass replaced our father’s normal eyes as he slumped in his easy chair, lashing out at Walter Cronkite (a Communist!) and Hubert Humphrey (another goddamn pinko!) and teachers and unions and those who demonstrated against the Vietnam War or didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan. Our father’s days as a suburban Republican were over. There were enemies everywhere, they were in cahoots, and they were evil. He was now a nut, a crank, fodder for the extreme right’s assault on the national consciousness in the years following Reagan’s ascent to the throne. But these assaults on Walter Cronkite, we knew, were the outbursts of a deeply frustrated man, and in some ways I think our father was careful to pick remote targets that couldn’t be held accountable.
He even forgave the companies he worked for. They were only doing what companies did when they were managed by the petty and the incompetent. It was not the company’s fault; it was the fault of bad management within the company, and if our father could just get the higher-ups to recognize that, the scoundrels would be thrown out, an enlightened management would be installed, and all would be well in the land of the Dinks.
Our mother, for all her health problems, was a battler. She believed nothing would get better unless our father went to war against his own company, getting everything in writing, fighting for what was his, slugging it out with the higher-ups. Our father believed the higher-ups knew what they were doing. He would not fight. Instead he retreated into the belief that the very thing afflicting him would save him. Our father was good at this—clinging fast to opposing beliefs. Not giving credence to explanations that made sense.
He did not, for example, believe in the democracy of failure. That everyone had an equal chance at it, just like happiness. He thought only losers were punished with failure, and if he was failing, then it was his fault. He would rail against his company but then accept the wisdom of its arbitrary judgments. Elsewhere the world was full of conspiracies, but in his own life it all came down to him. He’d dropped it, the whole ball of wax. He deserved it, what happened to him. Failure was a meritocracy, and he was one of its minions.
He was helped in this belief by staying in touch with Louie Hwasko, his best friend, best man, and piano player for the Cicero Velvetones. Louie’s life had not gone the way he had hoped either. His marriage to Helen Federstam had not lasted—Helen having decamped for California years ago—and his marriage to Shirley hadn’t lasted either. They’d had a half dozen or dozen tumultuous years of too much drinking and too much cheating.
“ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ should have been tattooed on her boobs,” he told our father. “I couldn’t keep up with her extracurriculars. When she was done with me for the evening, she sometimes went out and found somebody else.”
We were at the Dog Out. Louie had come up for a visit. Shirley had left him. Our father indicated me sitting on the other side of him.
I was old enough for a beer but made a point of drinking sodas when I was out with my father—my petty self-righteousness in action.
“Oh, sorry. Virgin ears, I forgot.”
I let that remark pass.
“Anyway, she’s going, she’s gone. Took her suitcase and threw some things into it. Not everything, but I’m guessing when I get back the place will be pretty much cleared out. Too much drinkin’, too much fuckin’, that’s what did us in.”
“You should have just set her things out on the stoop when you first found out what she was like.”
“What was she first like, Wally? When you first met up with her, what was she like? Was she like that all the time? She was plenty sweet to me, I can tell you that. So when did she get this hankering for other men’s dicks? Maybe I couldn’t satisfy her, you know what I’m saying? That’s what she always told me. ‘Louie,’ she’d say, ‘I got a big heart and a bigger pussy, and you’re just not doin’ it for me like I thought you might.’ ”
“Don’t talk like that.” The way my father said it, I got the feeling it was something men didn’t own up to even if it was true. It would be like betraying the brotherhood. Certain truths shouldn’t be uttered. They might scare the horses.
