by Chris Lynch
At which point you are most likely to say, but that’s so negative, and there are no winners and losers and looking at it like win-lose is all wrong when the man is only trying to help you.
Self-defeating, is what you’re thinking. It is a very very popular phrase in my experience, so I know when it is about to come into play, and I think you’re thinking it right now.
Which is why I’m doing the talking. To make sure it comes out right.
This is a place, right, this place here, which is mad with daffodils every spring, I mean, like, rotten with these gorgeous exploding crazy yellow daffodils every spring, and it doesn’t matter. They even have a daffodil festival here, like we’re famous for it, in one of the warmer months named after a girl, April, May, or June or something. But it doesn’t matter. It rains too much. The shops where you shop have too many checkout girls who have a black eye. And every even-numbered person you pass on the street looks about ready to cry and it’s probably because every odd-numbered one looks like he just did something awful to them.
You want to help everybody, right, but you can’t. There is only one of me. If there was more of me it would be different but there isn’t so it isn’t. Hard to be the people’s champion when there is only one of you and so many of them, but that’s the way it is. If it was otherwise, girls would neverever get black eyes but they do. Way too many of them. I would put a stop to that. If there was more of me there would be less of black eyes, and that’s a fact.
It’s too much coincidence, really, that a place would have so many checkout girls with black eyes. You have to conclude, don’t you, that something is wrong. That the girls here are too slow-witted and clumsy and giving themselves black eyes by bumping up against things or falling down against things. Or that they aren’t even giving themselves black eyes, so you have to conclude somebody else is doing it.
Like I say, if there was more of me there would be less of black eyes. If they was really falling down and bumping all the time then I’d be there to catch them. And if it was the other, then I’d be double-time there and you know it. Nobody’d be blacking no girl’s eyes if it was up to me.
How could anybody, though? Unless it was an accident. How could anybody want to give a checkout girl a black eye except maybe by accident? Crazy business, that is. That’s just unimaginable, crazy business.
Makes you want to cry. On purpose, by accident, whether they are falling-down clumsy or whether they had a little help doesn’t matter, checkout girls with black eyes are the saddest things a place has to offer, and if that don’t make you want to cry then you probably wasn’t alive in the first place.
I eat raw hot dogs. Quite a few of them. I am beginning to believe this is not good for me. But I can’t stop. If they told you when you were little that this was not good for you then you could probably stop, right? But if they didn’t then you got yourself some trouble right there, I think.
The other thing is the smell of toasting marshmallows. That smell makes me honest-to-god cry. The second I get it, it makes me well up and empty out, even though I have a love for the smell of toasting marshmallows like you wouldn’t believe. I go to the state park, special, like on Memorial Day weekend and stuff like that, because I know what’ll happen. I go alone and stay in the woods and I look, from a good proper distance, at the families there and have myself a good cry. I see a mother and a father and some kidders and do you suppose, sometime by the end of a beautiful sunsplashy Memorial Day picnic with toasted marshmallows, do you suppose that mother there who could even be a checkout mother, do you suppose she could wind up with a black eye? Unimaginable. No matter how much drinking they do. Right? Not even, probably, by accident could that checkout mother neverever wind up black-eyed, right?
I’ve been caught at it, lurking on the edge of somebody’s barbecue, in the woods, sniffing and peeping and crying. And I get chased. Chased. Even though I keep a safe, respectable distance. Two hundred yards, like. That’s a safe, respectable distance, that shouldn’t bother anybody. How could I bother anybody? Me, just the one of me of all people. Why is everybody out there ready to think the worst about a guy?
I go to church. Not every week. Not every year. But I go. Do you go? I go. Even when I’m not invited. And the priest asked, because I surprised him, and he was trying to get out of his confessions box,
“Are you here for forgiveness?”
Which, again, what am I supposed to say? Why are they always asking those questions that I can’t give an answer to? Except,
“Forgiveness? You don’t even remember me, do you. I was here to offer forgiveness, not ask for it. But now you blew it. Blew it for both of us.”
Which, he did. I might have been a better guy, if I could have done that, forgiven him. Could have been, maybe.
And I finished him off with,
“I hope you’re satisfied.”
So now I do have a confession. I did not hope he was satisfied. I meant exactly the opposite.
How can they tell you to stay away from the church between Monday and Saturday? How can they lock the doors? Some of us need more help from Monday to Saturday than we happen to need on Sunday. Are you supposed to make an appointment? Does anything mean anything if they can tell you to stay away from the church?
I can make fart noises with my eyes. Very few people think that’s funny.
Mary was one of the few.
That’s why I still try and do it for her. She can’t hear it, though, from two hundred yards away. And if I try it from any closer, a beeper goes off at the police station.
So I have to hope she can hear it, on a day when the wind is right and the people are sad enough to be quiet enough, and I am really on with my eye fart noises so that they’ll travel those long wrong two hundred yards.
It’s a long long wrong two hundred yards.
Distance is no help. Distance is no good. Distance is definitely not the answer. Not that I know the question. Not really, anyway.
You could just cry. You are not a human, you are not a man, if you could not just cry. At checkout girls with bruised black eyes and burnt marshmallows, and cavernous closed hollow echoing churches that won’t stop echoing and won’t open up and help either.
We could fill a church, if there was more of me. And there would be no black-eyed checkout girls that’s a fact.
But there’s just the one of me. And so everybody goes on getting it all wrong.
I have it marked. Spray-paint outlines of my sneakers, in the sidewalk. Two hundred yards up east of her house. And another two hundred yards down west. So I can use the wind as I need it.
Don’t repeat that though, about the spray paint. That’d be another problem area for me, where I’ve been doing what I’m not supposed to.
Thanks. For not saying anything. Everybody else gets it wrong. All wrong, every time. You could just cry.
But I just bet, that when the wind is right, and the people are quiet, and she hears. That she’s going to laugh. And it’ll be right as rain again and we’ll be rotten with daffodils.
Because she’s one of the few, Mary is.
Wish me luck.
PISSIN’ AND MOANIN’
NOTHING EVER HAPPENS TO me, and it’s my parents’ fault. They are lovely people, my folks, but they are duds. And they want me to be a dud, too. So they make every effort to keep me out of harm’s way. And out of fun’s way.
“I have a job for you,” Dad calls down the stairs. He’s amazing. He’s lying in bed, on Saturday morning, unwinding from what was probably a pretty taxing week at the shipyard where he works. He’s got muscles on his muscles on his muscles and they are the for-real kind you get from a lifetime of scary honest labor rather than the working-out-in-front-of-a-mirror kind.
Every Friday night, in what is the most decadent moment of our week, my mom rubs oil of wintergreen into his shoulders while he sits at the kitchen table, eyes closed, eating his sandwich of meatballs with raisins in them. The scent of that kitchen is like nothing else, and
it’s dizzying. I don’t think you could ever forget that scent once it got into you, and it can make you not quite right.
“You know what, Dad?” I said when I walked in on it last evening.
“What?” he said, keeping his eyes closed but stopping just short of taking his next bite.
“You’re a good guy, Dad,” I said. It was the fumes.
Then he took that bite.
“I know I am,” he said, “because I don’t have the time or the energy to be a bad guy. Now go back out and get me a paper.”
That was last night. Now it’s this morning. He should be sleeping late, sleeping soundly. He earned it, the way he earned it the previous twelve hundred Saturdays. But no. He can hear me, from one flight away, as I walk the carpeted hallway and gently turn the knob to the front door.
“I have a job for you,” he says.
“Of course you do,” I say, freezing at the door.
There are, like usual, fifty million people in line at the post office on a Saturday. I can’t stand it.
It’s times like these that get me all worked up, get me saying and doing stuff. It’s just so frustrating, because nobody seems to be doing what they could and should be doing. My father could go mail his own package. Most of the people in front of me could probably have done their postal business during the week. The guy behind the counter could stop making chitchat with everybody and get us all on our way and out to a better place.
There’s got to be a better place.
I can’t stand it. The atmosphere is so thick and stupid and wrong, it’s like somebody spun a valve and shut off the air. I can’t breathe. I have to get out.
There are three open phone booths along the front wall on the outside of the post office. Very often, if I’ve been sent here on a Saturday, I’ll spend a good long while leaning on the wall, smoking, while the crowd inside melts down to something more manageable and I can do my business. They close at noon.
And they don’t allow smoking in the post office. How can they trap you in that box, with fifty million other people for that long, and not let you smoke? Coincidentally, they don’t allow smoking in my house either. It’s all insanely unfair.
“Pissin’ and moanin’,” my Dad says to me whenever I complain, “pissin’ … and … moanin’.”
I’m telling myself this story, complete with Dad’s trademark side-to-side head bob, me imitating him imitating me saying “pissin’ … and … moanin’” through a cloud of delicious Camel smoke, when the phone rings.
What are you supposed to do, when the phone rings? I mean, when a phone rings that doesn’t belong to you?
I don’t know what I was thinking.
“What did you say?” Dad’s voice boomed down the stairs, and thumped me in the back of the head.
What did I think? That he couldn’t hear everything? I knew he could hear everything, despite working all the years at the shipyard, and despite most of the people there being deaf from working there. I knew he could hear me. Why did I say it?
“What does that mean, Of course you do? Is there some problem, just because I have a job for you?”
“No, Dad,” I say. “I didn’t mean anything.”
And I didn’t. When you say something that nobody is supposed to hear, you can not mean it. I did not mean it. I only said it.
So what I mean is, what are you supposed to do when a phone that totally doesn’t belong to you rings?
“Hello?”
“What does pissin’ and moanin’ mean?” asks the voice on the other end.
First a small shiver trills up and down my backbone. I look all around. Then panic.
I slam the phone down, tear back around the corner into the post office.
What would you do? Who the hell was that? Why are they asking me about pissin’ and moanin’?
“Hey,” the chubby posty from behind the counter snaps, “you can’t have that in here.”
I realize from the blue shoestring of smoke running up past my right eye, and the vigilante looks I’m getting from the people in line, that I’ve still got a lit butt hanging on my lip. I let it drop, and stamp it out.
A few poignant coughs are heard. They are so dramatic, these Saturday-post-office-antismoking people.
The voice. May have been woman. Honeyed, low, secret-sharer voice. May have been a guy. Wasn’t no kid, that’s for sure.
What was I running from? This is what I should be running toward. What kind of a worm am I? Why should I be nervous? That phone call was, now that I think of it, the single sultriest thing ever to happen to me. Ever.
There was some music in the background, behind the voice. Wasn’t good music. Country, I think. But still, not so bad I had to run away.
What was I afraid of? I wasn’t afraid. Oh yes I was. To hell with this.
I creep out the glass doors, edge along the wall. I feel stupid, stiff, conspicuous all of a sudden. Week after week after week, I have run my errands or stood here with all of the city walking past or driving past and I’ve felt like I was one of the bricks of the building, of no interest to nobody. Invisible and unnoticed and just there, smoking.
Light up. I should light up. I think I will light up.
I take the crushproof pack of Camels out of my back pocket. I do that cool move, banging the pack on the back of one hand to get the tobacco nice and packed. I work my cool moves, when I’m alone smoking, sneaking smoking, never knowing when I will someday do it for somebody else. Then the other cool move where I snap my wrist to force up a cigarette, like the cig comes up of its own volition, only it’s my volition. Like I’m a snake charmer, only I charm cigarettes, which is a lot better since cigarettes have a purpose while snakes do not. Anyway, I usually do it simply for my own amusement.
But now it’s different. I feel like a naked store-window mannequin as I stand near the phones, leaning on the wall, trying to light a smoke and seem like nothing out of the ordinary is happening.
I fumble in one front pocket, the one where I always keep my money, then in the other one where I keep my Kleenex and Tic Tacs. See, the lighter could be anywhere. Because I have to keep one step ahead of the game with the cigs and lights because my mother does the laundry. And while I get a little chewing-out if I leave a Kleenex in my pocket, and Tic Tacs are no huge problem, cigarettes are evidence that I have been in both harm’s way and fun’s way and that would bring swift and terrible retribution.
The phone rings.
What are you supposed to do again, when a phone rings and it isn’t yours?
I let it ring two more times.
Do I suppose I look all casual and unconcerned? Have I made her sweat long enough? You are supposed to make them sweat, are you not? I’m light on experience in this arena.
“Hello?”
“Did you suddenly forget something pressing you had to do in the post office?” she asks and, oh yes, she is a she. A throaty, all grown-up she. And she smokes, I can tell you that.
“Ah, ya,” I say, throwing in that ah on purpose, just to keep her on her heels. “I had to mail a package, and I thought they were closing.”
“You mean that package there, that you left on top of the phone?”
I don’t really have a plan when I do this, but I hang up the phone again. As if I can dodge her and save myself from embarrassment. As if she can’t still see me.
The phone rings again immediately. I pick it up. She is laughing. It is a lovely thing to hear, a smoker’s laugh.
“You don’t know what work is.”
“Yes I do, Dad.”
“No you don’t, or you wouldn’t be pissin’ and moanin’ about the little things I ask you to do.”
“Please,” Mom asks, getting out of bed and strapping on her robe. “Please, guys, can we not fight?”
“We’re not fighting,” Dad and I say in harmony.
“You are a very funny guy,” she says.
“I suppose I am.”
“We need a funny guy.”
“Ev
erybody needs a funny guy.”
“Then it’s agreed.”
“It is agreed. What is agreed?”
“You’ll be coming up?”
“Up. You want me coming up.”
“Yes.”
“Up … there?” I am squinting, trying to make out something or someone. Somewhere in there, in the many windows thrown out across the three floors of apartments set over the shops of the building directly across the street. She has to be in there someplace, or she wouldn’t be able to see me this well. Unless she’s just guessing. Maybe she’s just guessing.
“Close,” she says. “Now look one floor up. And a little to the left.”
Probably not guessing.
“Damn,” I say. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“I asked you first.”
“What does that matter?”
“It matters. I asked you first, so you’re supposed to answer first.”
“That’s the way it works?”
“That’s the way it works.”
There is a pause. Then some muffled something as she apparently cups her hand over the phone to talk to someone.
“Hey,” I say, “Who’s there? You’re with somebody?”
“It’s a little early in the relationship to be getting possessive, don’t you think?” she says. “And besides, he agrees with you. That is the way it works.”
“Oh.” I find myself lighting another cigarette. “Oh, good—”
“But I don’t like the way it works, so it’s going to work different. It works like this: I can see you and you can’t see me, so you’re required to tell me who you are first.”
“This is mental,” I say, and it is.
Pause. This is where I should be slamming down the phone and filing the whole thing away as a great story to tell my buddies when I’m thirty years old and finished my chores for my dad.
I stay on the line.
“Virgil,” I say. “My name. It’s Virgil.”
“Well hey, you know, you look like a Virgil,” she says and I swear her voice has dropped two more octaves. “Did you notice, Virgil, that they are closing the post office right now?”
