When her case came before our judge, he asked the teenager why she had done what she did. She apologized, telling him that she “thought it would help.” When he asked what it would help, the teenager had no answer, and only reiterated her original statement.
The judge levied a five-hundred-dollar fine and sentenced the girl to repaint the entire bridge, even the portions she had not defaced. Those who suggested to the judge that this was an extreme punishment were met with angry stares.
For some weeks after the ruling, the girl could be seen suspended on a platform above the road after school, painstakingly erasing her original handiwork. She has become something of a local hero and is said to be considering a run for a seat on the town council. Meanwhile, the repainted bridge has become a prime target of vandals, and is now covered with vulgarisms and rude slogans.
Kevin
While eating lunch at a restaurant in the city, I paused to visit the men’s room. I like to wear loose-fitting, comfortable pants, and I had discovered that, when I pushed them down to use the toilet, my wallet often slipped out onto the floor. Consequently I developed the habit of removing the wallet from my pocket before I sat down and resting it on the edge of the sink, to protect it from contact with filth. On this particular occasion, since the sink was out of reach of the toilet, I set the wallet on a child’s high chair the management had stored in a nearby corner. When I was through I pulled up my pants, washed my hands and departed, leaving the wallet behind.
Ten minutes later I finished eating and offered to buy my companion, an old friend, his meal. It was then that I discovered my wallet was missing. Immediately I remembered where I had left it and went to the men’s room to retrieve it. But by now the wallet was gone.
My friend, a keen observer of men, provided an enticing clue. Only one person had entered the men’s room after me, and he had been carrying a hammer. Armed with this evidence, we approached the restaurant’s owner and told him that my wallet had been taken by a man carrying a hammer. To our surprise, the owner told us that this man was named Kevin, he was a handyman and had been doing repairs in the kitchen.
When my friend and I insisted that it was Kevin, then, who had my wallet, the owner shook his head. He refused to give us Kevin’s last name or address, and maintained that Kevin would never do such a thing. He was honest, the owner told us, and would have turned in the wallet had he found it, but Kevin had done nothing of the sort.
Dejected, I left my friend’s phone number, imploring the owner to ask Kevin if he had found any “lost” items in the men’s room. The owner promised to do so, but I had little hope, and my sympathetic friend agreed to put me up for the rest of my stay in the city, and lent me enough money to enjoy myself.
Thus resigned, I was shocked when Kevin called me at my friend’s apartment that night to report that he had the wallet. He explained that he owned a leather-bound notebook that he carried with him on the job, which he used to jot down his ideas and inspirations. This notebook was identical in appearance to my wallet. Apparently he did the same thing I did in men’s rooms to keep the notebook clean. What Kevin found extraordinary was that he had forgotten, on this particular day, to bring his notebook to work, an omission he could not recall ever having made before, and this happened to be the same day he found a wallet that looked just like it, sitting in exactly the place he would have put it, had it been his notebook. He wondered aloud if the wallet/notebook shape had some deeper significance, some mystic connection to the place he had found it in, and if some greater power had forced me to leave the wallet, as a stand-in for his notebook. That said, he agreed to leave the wallet at the restaurant the next morning, and when I went to pick it up I found it at the counter, its contents fully accounted for. I never met Kevin.
In the car home from the city I wondered, in the wake of his cryptic comment, what ideas and inspirations the handyman might be writing down in his notebook, and what might have caused him to forget it while I was in town.
Terrorist
In my second year of high school, I attempted, along with two other boys, to drive mad a fourth boy, L., who was the shyest and most awkward member of our small group of social outcasts. The three of us called ourselves the ITO, or Independent Terrorists’ Organization, and tortured L. in a variety of ways, including the mailing of anonymous threats, the vandalizing of his car, the dedication to him of hit songs on the local FM radio station, and all manner
of obscene and disruptive telephone calls. We invited him to meet us in the middle of a park, arrived early, deposited at the meeting place a cardboard box containing a cow’s heart with his name seared into it with a soldering iron, then hid in some nearby trees and took surveillance photos of the event, which photos we subsequently mailed him; we set afire in his yard a small but extremely detailed effigy of him that we had constructed from chicken wire and papiermâché and soaked in kerosene; we issued an invitation to a nonexistent formal party at the home of a girl he secretly loved, which he dutifully attended, carrying a bouquet; we placed an order at the drive-up window of the fast food restaurant where he worked and came to the pick-up window in a borrowed car, wearing plastic Richard Nixon masks. Though our true identities could never have been far from his discovery, he never accused us, as we three were his best, if not only, friends; and in fact he confided his anxieties to us, and we dutifully promised to help him identify his torturers and punish them in some way once they were unmasked.
This went on for about four months, and ended at my request. In the space of those months, my braces had been taken off, and I was prescribed contact lenses and began dating a girl; and it was in imagining how to explain my behavior to her that I realized how awful that behavior was, and I begged my friends to come clean.
In retrospect, I see that this desire was purely self-serving, and that identifying ourselves was the cruelest trick of all, for there could be no deeper blow for L. than to be confronted with our betrayal, and with the knowledge that, if he reacted appropriately—that is, with anger—he would have no friends left. When we finally revealed ourselves, it was by telegram, and we made sure we were all at his house when it arrived.
His response convinced me that I was a coward, a conviction I still hold to this day. He unfolded the yellow paper, read it aloud, and then laughed as long and as hard as we did.
Directions
The daughter of old friends had decided to attend college in our town, and was to visit the campus with her boyfriend, a pre-med student at a university in another part of the state. As a favor to her parents, we agreed to provide the two with dinner when they arrived, and answer any questions the young woman might have about life in the area. We had not seen her since she was a little girl.
We prepared a lavish meal, eager to help our friends’ daughter, and to ease any fears she might have about her new independence.
To our surprise, the couple arrived nearly an hour early, and in a strange condition. They were dressed with extreme informality, their T-shirts soiled and blue jeans stained and torn. Both were personally unkempt, their hair knotted and oily, and they reeked of cigarette smoke. The pre-med student had a pinched, impoverished look about him, as if he had been awake studying for days on end with only coffee to nourish him. Most alarming was the fact that our friends’ daughter appeared to be at least seven months pregnant.
Despite our shock, we struggled to make a go of the evening. The couple were obviously hungry, so in lieu of the unfinished meal we made them cold sandwiches, which they ate in huge, anxious bites. We told our friends’ daughter about life at the college, which information she received silently, occasionally nodding to indicate she understood. Meanwhile her boyfriend’s eyes wandered around the room, as if our modest possessions were priceless items in a museum. At one point they asked if we had anything to drink, and they polished off two brimming glasses of milk each, allowing it to spill over their faces and onto their clothes.
Not much later they rose to leave, so we wished them
luck and told them they should feel free to come by anytime. In response, they asked us for directions to a free medical clinic downtown, which we gave them. They thanked us quietly and drove away in a dilapidated Buick that emitted blue smoke.
For some minutes we considered what we would say to our friends, particularly on the subject of the pregnancy, about which they had not warned us. It was during this discussion that a knock came at the door. We opened it to find the real daughter and boyfriend, dressed, respectively, in a yellow designer sundress and a shirt and tie. They apologized for being late and presented us with a bottle of sparkling cider and a plastic container of cupcakes. The daughter kissed our cheeks and the boyfriend shook our hands.
We told them our oven had broken down and took them out to a restaurant. Both talked incessantly and with smug confidence about the careers they had plotted for themselves and the country estate where they planned to live when they graduated. My wife and I found them extremely annoying.
For months afterward we expected, even hoped, to be visited again by the first couple, but they never came back.
Distance
A witness to a prominent local murder fell under close scrutiny during the trial, when it was revealed that, directly after the killing, he had wandered around aimlessly for an hour and a half before reporting the crime to a policeman who happened to be walking by. Asked for an explanation for his behavior, the witness explained that he had been sitting high in the bleachers of the empty football stadium where the murder had taken place, and had seen the shooting, which occurred beneath the goalposts at the opposite end of the field, from a great distance. Though his view of the murder was clear and the sound of the shot quite loud, the witness found it difficult to believe in something that had happened so far away. Upon further questioning, the witness confessed that, had he not encountered the policeman by chance, he might never have reported the crime at all.
When the trial was over, members of the jury expressed their disgust with the witness, whom they characterized as irresponsible at best, and at worst guilty of some sort of crime himself. The foreman, who had been sitting closest to the witness during the trial, even confessed to a desire to physically harm him, and said that he would have done so had the two not been separated by the walls of the jury box and witness stand.
4. Work and Money
In the pocket of a pair of long-forgotten pants I was preparing for donation to Goodwill, I found a ten-dollar bill. This pleased me until I realized that the bill was worth far less than when I put it into my pocket, many years ago. As a gift to my future self, and in a bet against inflation, I added a second ten-dollar bill to the pocket, and replaced the pants in the back of my closet.
Sixty Dollars
All the money I ever found, I found during the same year, in the same town, at exactly the time I most needed it, when I had little income and few prospects for more. I was working part-time at a supermarket and living in a large house with four other recent college graduates, where we subsisted primarily on pasta and beans and cheap beer, and I had begun to pine for a better life, free from incessant worry about my expenses, which at the time included a large credit card debt and a substantial student loan.
The first time I found money, I was walking over a bridge and stopped to gaze down on the river below. After doing so, I happened to look at my feet and noticed that I was standing on a twenty-dollar bill.
The second time, I went into a bank to withdraw twenty dollars from my savings account and saw a twenty-dollar bill lying on the floor. Since the bank had just opened and no other customers were around, I kept it.
The third time, I checked a book out of the library and found twenty dollars pressed between the pages.
Though the sixty dollars might have had the power to change my life—I could have quit my dead-end clerk’s job and found something worthwhile—I squandered each of the twenty-dollar bills on expensive restaurant meals. In fact, all three of the meals came out to more than twenty dollars, so I ended up spending money of my own that I would otherwise have saved. I seemed to believe that since the money had been found, not earned, it would somehow be taken from me if I didn’t spend it fast. But the result was that I developed a taste for good food and drink, and my near-poverty became all the more difficult to bear.
I now recognize this year as a turning point, but whether it was for the better or the worse remains unclear.
The Pork Chop
My father managed apartment buildings for a living, and every June, when the university students left town, he went through each vacated apartment to clean and repair it for the coming school year. Often he found items left behind: radios, shower supplies, an electric typewriter with the price tag still on it. These things would be given to my sister and me, or, in the years after we moved out of the house, sold at an annual yard sale.
Among the tasks on my father’s list was to defrost and wipe clean the refrigerators and freezers. In those days, most freezers tended to accumulate furry mounds of rock-hard ice, which had to melt before my father could complete the job. Consequently, he would spend one day removing all the moldy food, and then the next cleaning the kitchens and their defrosted refrigerators.
Entering an apartment one cleaning day, my father was overwhelmed by a terrible odor. He reasoned that it could not be coming from the refrigerator, as he had purged it of food the day before, so he searched elsewhere—under the oven, inside the cabinets, down the heating ducts—for the dead mouse or squirrel he figured was the source of the smell. Eventually, doubting his memory, he checked the refrigerator once more, and that is when he found the pork chop.
It had been sitting in a plastic bag, sealed into a ridge of freezer ice. Now, to my father’s astonishment, it was crawling with maggots. He couldn’t understand how the maggots had gotten into the bag so quickly, but there was little time for contemplation: the odor was intensifying. He removed the plastic bag and dropped it into another bag, which he wrapped, double-knotted, in still a third bag. He threw this bag into the dumpster.
Inside the apartment, the smell would not diminish. He lit candles, placed air fresheners everywhere. When he got home, the smell was on his clothes. My mother washed them, but they contaminated the rest of the load. My father showered and brought the smell into the bathroom, where it lingered for weeks. He drove the ruined laundry to the dump and the smell adhered to the trunk of the car, and then leaked into the passenger compartment. Months later, despite my mother’s ministrations, the smell could still be discerned in their house. Meanwhile, the apartment was professionally cleaned, twice, with bleach, yet my father still could not rent it for the new school year. The following fall, he was only able to rent it to a woman with a severe cold, who complained incessantly once she recovered, and moved out before the semester was over.
My father, always stoic, rarely mentioned the incident. But my mother talked incoherently about the pork chop on her deathbed. She called me by my father’s name and begged me to take it away, to get it out of her hospital room. Not wishing to disobey, yet reluctant to explain the truth, I pretended to toss something into the trash, then moved the metal can into the hallway. After that, however, and up to the moment my mother died, I thought I was able to smell the pork chop myself.
Tool
Though many have expressed doubts about the wisdom of our society’s dependence on computer technology, our acquaintance, a computer programmer, was always quick to defend the machines that had made his career possible. Technology, he would say, was never of unambiguous value; every negative effect a new technology precipitated was balanced by some positive change. Computers might not be the answer to every problem, he admitted, but they were certainly the solution to some.
Nevertheless, he suffered a crisis of faith at the height of his career. Computers, he realized, had taken their toll upon him: he suffered from acute back problems, severe eyestrain and poor nutrition, and he had alienated himself from his wife and children with his frequent all
-night sessions of programming and Internet use. He decided to take a month’s leave from his job to engage in some unmediated personal experience. With his family, he hiked and camped; he studied the lives of birds and plants and learned their names. He took up jogging, and bought himself a workbench and a set of tools.
It was the tools, one tool in particular, that would prove our acquaintance’s undoing. In the last week or so of his vacation, he began knocking together some crude wooden items: a toy chest for his son, a stool for his daughter, a coat rack. Especially satisfying to him was the hammer. Though he enjoyed measuring and marking boards, or sawing them to the right length, no activity proved more stimulating than fastening the boards together with his hammer. After a day of hammering, he would lie awake in bed, his mind racing with the shape of the hammer, the sound it made, the sensation of pounding nails into wood with it. In a few days he was coming to bed later and later, and his basement workshop soon filled up with ugly wooden items, many of them of no practical value, nor of any resemblance to recognizable objects. Indeed, he was gripped by a kind of madness, an addiction. When it was time to return to work, he called in sick, and against the objections of his family locked himself in the basement with his beloved tool.
Inevitably, the time came when our acquaintance had to choose between the hammer and the computer. The choice ought to have been obvious: with the computer, he could make a living which would support some abbreviated version of his carpentry habit. But if he chose the hammer he would lose everything.
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 6
