by Ken Grimes
What did I do the next night? Go out to drink, of course. The banter and the laughter of drinking companions in pubs made the hours roll by in countless amusing ways. My favorite was the man who would sidle up to me occasionally and ask what I was drinking and make me a challenge. “Aye, son, if you buy me onna them pints, I’ll eat this glass right in front of yeah.”
As a well-traveled, sophisticated partyer I doubted him the first time but ordered a pint of his favorite ale. He stood chatting with me and glancing over occasionally to a couple of the barflies, who were smiling, already on to the game.
After draining the glass, he slowly and calmly begin to eat it one bite at a time, carefully chewing and swallowing the pieces. My jaw dropped in astonishment, and he laughed.
“The hardest part is when the pieces get stuck in yah teeth in da back,” he said proudly. “But this is nothing. You canna believe me when I chew a bottle of Newcastle Brown.” Newcastle Brown ale was the good locally brewed beer, and the bottles were made of thick, brown opaque glass.
Alcoholism is measured not only in quantity of alcohol consumed or number of pint glasses eaten but also decisions made. For example, trying to date the most attractive woman at the factory where I was working. A frozen food factory is not high on the list of places to fall in love when you’re seventeen, but how could I resist Julie? Though there were some very attractive women at the factory, Julie was the prettiest of them all, and she liked to come out back and flirt with the stock boys while catching a quick smoke. I soon found out that she was married to—but separated from—a much older man who had recently been let out of prison for stabbing someone in a fight.
Somehow that only made her more interesting.
The factory was a moldering behemoth in an industrial park on the outskirts of town, a relic of the complete collapse of the manufacturing era. The nearest city of any size was Newcastle, which was still suffering from the strikes and mass layoffs of the 1960s and 1970s.
I’ve noticed that the only people—writers, academics, Republicans—who extol Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line are people who’ve never worked on one. I suppose automated production of everything from cars to cakes changed the world for the better, but stand on your feet for eight hours with a thirty-minute break and two fifteen-minute cigarette breaks, doing the same monotonous task over and over, every day, every week, and you’ll wonder about progress.
The women on the various product lines made the best of it, calling out to one another in their singsong Geordie accents while listening to a radio perched high overhead, tuned in to the local hit parade. I have every English pop hit from the fall of 1982 memorized, particularly the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” which seemed to play every fifteen minutes.
As a stock boy in the frozen cake section, I got to wear a spiffy blue jumpsuit and white boots, like a reject from David Bowie’s “Major Tom” video. I was charged with operating a forklift, moving huge metal canisters of milk into the cold room, and stocking fifty-pound bags of white flour. The factory made frozen apple pies for one high-end supermarket chain and a gâteau for a moderate-priced market chain. Their use of the French word for cake always amused me, because there was nothing French about those cakes.
When you’re seventeen, it’s a rush learning how to move five-hundred-pound pallets on a giant forklift. And nothing could be cooler than operating the machine and scouring the workplace to find the most attractive woman in the company. Why? Because only the unreachable, the unattainable, would move my levers. I knew it was dangerous at the time, in that half-understood way of teenagers, but I didn’t care, because once Julie started flirting with me, I would have picked up a five-hundred-pound pallet with my hands. As the only American there, I had instant celebrity. I think everyone at the forsaken place lived within a ten-mile radius of the factory, and very few had even been to London, which was three hundred miles away.
Julie was a froster, the glamour job at the factory. She wore her cute white hat cocked at a jaunty angle while working a big white bag of frosting, twisting it rapidly in her hands to create the various designs on top of the gâteaux.
The interior of the factory was not well lit, and there was a constant hum and crash of motors wheeling the foods around the line. Charlie, the lord of the realm, stayed behind large plate-glass windows near the main entrance and liked to stare at the workers. Pretty girls he fancied or male workers he took a liking to were invited to drink Smirnoff vodka in the back room. I was one of those favored. I never liked vodka as a teenager. It was my mother’s drink, my uncle’s drink, served in a big glass pitcher with ice and refrigerated until the pitcher was whisked out and drinks were poured into crystal glasses. Vodka smelled bad and tasted worse. But ah, the effect. Vodka worked faster than beer, made me warm inside, and promised instant friendship with those I drank with.
Charlie was the master of the drunken joke and regaled us with anecdotes about the peculiar inhabitants of the town and of his former haunts in the East End of London. As is true of many Cockneys, Charlie was a natural storyteller and loved to hold court with his captive employees, who would listen to anything for a chance to take a break from work, sit down, and have a free drink.
Charlie liked to pull me off the factory floor and send me to buy his vodka at the off-license down the road from the factory. He would hand me a twenty-pound note and tell me, “Ken, a quart of Smirnoff, and mind how you go.”
Glad to be pulled out of the stockroom to do something useful, I would jump on the rickety old bike someone had left at the factory and pedal furiously down to the shop, buy the vodka, and race back. One day I trotted back to Charlie’s office, fresh from a sortie to the liquor store. A small crew had already gathered, waiting for the delivery. As I handed Charlie the bag, it slipped in passing. The bottle crashed to the floor, and the vodka splattered everywhere, filling the room with a medicinal smell. Charlie looked at me in horror and yelled, “My God, boy, go back for another one! Here’s another twenty quid, and don’t fucking break it this time.”
In a matter of weeks, it was obvious to Charlie that I had something going with Julie. We would sneak outside and make out during our breaks, and people began to talk. Charlie told me not to touch Julie and warned me not to switch from the daytime shift to the four-to-midnight shift to follow Julie, who changed her shift. But I didn’t listen. Her husband was nicknamed “Stevie” because he, too, wore large, darkly shaded glasses like the famous pop musician. Everyone feared him, even the best of the pub fighters. Even though he and Julie were separated, he wouldn’t take kindly to his wife dating anyone, particularly not some American teenager.
Julie and I would eat our lunch together at eight P.M. in the break room next to the men’s locker room. The ceilings and walls were stained brown from the cigarette smoke. About 80 percent of the women smoked, and even more of the men. Our eight-week romance—which was never consummated and consisted of furtive visits on park benches in front of run-down council flats, where we would make out and talk—was fated to end in ruin, because in a small town, everyone knew everything about one another. People were certainly watching me.
Our friendship became public with a visit to the local disco in a down-market mall nearby. You had to be a paying member to enter this penultimate 1980s nightclub, where strobe lights flashed and winked in time to the throbbing music. Julie and I went with a friend of hers who was a member. We drank and drank and started to move closer and closer together. When Julie’s favorite song—a remake of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” by the Boys Town Gang—started playing, she grabbed me and swung me out onto the dance floor, where we started to kiss. Although we were partially hidden by the other working boys and girls gamely shuffling in time to the music, I could see Julie’s friend looking at us. When I walked back to our table, she shook her head and said, “Ken, you canna do this; Julie’s still married, and Stevie will kill you if he finds out.” I laughed and brushed it away, high off of the beer, the music,
and Julie.
One night a week later at the factory, one of the women on the cake line burst into the break room. I could hear through the plate-glass windows overlooking the factory and realized there was a commotion coming from the assembly line. The woman said, “Ken, he’s here, Stevie’s here. He’s screaming for the American and says he’s going to kill yah. You must run now, he’s coming up the stairs.”
I hesitated. To run would be instant shame in any culture, much less he-man Geordie country. Julie turned to me and whispered, “Run, get out of here, I’ll take care of Stevie.”
I could hear him stomping up the stairs, yelling that he was “going to kill that bloody Yank.” I ran to the back door and down the steps two at a time. I flung open the corrugated metal door at the back of the factory and emerged into the amber night sky of the parking lot.
I sprinted across the parking lot, the lights of the factory growing dim, my blue jumpsuit blending in with the dark, my white boots whistling through the knee-length heather. I ran back home to Tiny, praying that he would know how to save my life.
Tiny listened calmly as I told him what had happened. We sat in the dark of his living room, both of us chain-smoking. He would get up occasionally to move the curtain and see if Stevie had followed me home; everyone knew where I lived. Tiny told me not to worry, he’d take care of things. I could see in his eyes that he understood; he didn’t lecture me about how stupid I was. He seemed to remember what it was like to be seventeen.
Recovery programs suggest you make amends to those you’ve harmed and ask for forgiveness. Only once have I made amends in a men’s bathroom in front of urinals in a murky haze of cigarette smoke. That’s what Tiny arranged the next week. He made me swear I’d stop seeing Julie, and he promised to broker peace between me and Stevie.
There I was, a few nights later at the pub, quaffing one pint after another, trying to keep away the terror that filled me as I imagined Stevie finding me and killing me. Then Tiny crept up to me and told me to meet him in the men’s room.
It was dark, and the urinals stank and leaked their constant water, and I was unable to see Steve’s eyes behind his dark glasses. I lied about chasing after his wife, and I tried to be convincing when I said I’d never see her again. He just stared at me, maybe with pity, maybe disgust, it was hard to say. We shook hands, and then I went back to drinking.
I lied. Nothing was going to stop me from seeing Julie. We made a last attempt to see each other for a weekend getaway to Scotland. I packed a suitcase and told Tiny I was going away to see a friend in London. I booked a hotel room in Edinburgh and took one of the run-down public buses up to Newcastle to meet Julie at the train station.
The station was enormous, and I waited at the ticket booth for over an hour, becoming more and more agitated. They began to call off the train number for the departure to Edinburgh. Like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, I searched for Julie’s face among the passengers but couldn’t see her blond hair or upright, confident stride anywhere.
The minutes ticked by. In desperation, I called her mother’s house, since I couldn’t call her at Stevie’s flat. No answer. I kept dropping the coins in the pay phone, over and over, ringing again and again, until her mother came on the line.
“May I speak to Julie, please?” I asked, trying to modulate my voice and not sound like an American.
Her mother responded immediately, “You have to stop calling here, yoong man. Julie canna get away wit you, she told me to tell you that.”
I dropped the phone, picked up my beaten leather overnight bag, and took the bus back. I walked to a fancy pub at the end of the street that I rarely patronized. I had told everyone at my regular pub about my plan to be in London, and I didn’t want to explain why I was back, bag in hand.
I opened a pack of cigarettes and started drinking and didn’t stop for the next three hours. Although I was embarrassed and ashamed, it felt good to be in the pub. Quiet. Alone. And drinking. I sat on the overupholstered couch, watching the smoke drift upward. The pub was empty, the afternoon light leaden and heavy.
Days later, Charlie switched me from the night shift back to the day shift. I endured the humiliatingly compassionate looks from my coworkers as the news spread instantly from shift to shift. Later that week, I waited for Julie for hours at the bus stop between shifts, hoping she’d show up. When I finally saw her walking to the factory entrance, she refused to turn around and look at me, even though she knew I was standing there.
It was a cold morning and a long walk home.
13
MG
It’s Impossible
I got a call from Western Union: “Regarding the money you wired to a Ken Grimes in Iowa City, Iowa?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the person who took the message made a mistake; he thought you were wiring five hundred instead of fifty.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No, ma’am.” He apologized profusely for Western Union. “But your son,” he said, “collected five hundred. So could you please make up the difference?”
Ken had called and asked me to send him fifty dollars for books he needed for one of his classes. Why did it have to be wired, though? I suppose he rooted through his bag of reasons and pulled out something equivalent to an emergency room’s “code blue” for books.
That was a week before I talked to Western Union. I put down the phone, appalled, not just that Western Union could have committed such a gross error but that Ken could have collected the money and said nothing. It’s impossible. No, it isn’t. No, it wasn’t. So I called him. Finding Ken at the University of Iowa was like chasing down one zebra in a herd rushing across the Serengeti Plain.
Finally, we connected. “I’m sorry, Mom.” His plaintive voice. “I thought you were really sending me five hundred.”
“What? How could you think that?”
Can you hear a shrug? “I guess I just did.”
(Lie.)
I’m sure he apologized at least as much as Western Union, abjectly.
• • •
Fast-forward a few years, after he has his degree, after he’s stopped drinking and drugging. I bring up this five-hundred-dollar debacle. And now I hear the real reason:
“I was stoned out of my mind; I didn’t know what was going on; I convinced myself that you sent five hundred; you were just being generous or something.”
It’s every mother’s lament: I didn’t know he was doing all those drugs. At least not so much as to cause this kind of distortion in his thinking. He couldn’t work out the math? No. Being stoned, he could, through some exercise in quantum mechanics, make fifty turn into five hundred.
Any addict’s “reason” for doing something is possible, because reason doesn’t apply. Trying to reason with an alcoholic is like trying to argue with gravity. You’re like Sisyphus, pushing that huge rock up that high incline only to have it fall back. You push again, and it falls back again.
We all respond irrationally much of the time. We like to think we’re rational human beings when we are, in fact, driven by emotions, not reason. We’re driving, rushing at a wall, though some of the time we can jam on the brakes.
All of this is exacerbated by drugs and drink. Addicts live in a wonderfully elastic world that expands and contracts at their bidding, where the laws of gravity don’t apply. They can fly away.
I always loved that song of Perry Como’s “It’s Impossible.” It’s probably well loved by addicts, too. If you asked one for the world, somehow he’d get it.
Or say he would.
• • •
That was one phone call.
Then there was the phone call from the dean of students at the University of Iowa, where Ken had been in sketchy attendance for three years, informing me that they couldn’t find him.
I stared at the telephone. I even shook the receiver a few times, thinking perhaps the voice would fall out and explain the prank.
“What do you mean, ‘can’t find’?
” Idiots. How had they lost him in the first place?
“He hasn’t been to his classes in a couple of weeks.”
This was one of the scariest moments of my life. I had a picture of the whole university mounting a manhunt, sniffing dogs and all. That having failed, they were now driven to call the parent.
The dean went on, “And he hasn’t paid his tuition.”
Money I had sent him long before.
I don’t recall what else was said. Probably not much. Not from my end, certainly; I was too shocked to say anything. Perhaps I should have realized that a student not showing up for classes and spending tuition money on other, more vital things, such as beer, wasn’t that unusual.
Totally unnerved, I called my brother, who lived in Olney. He called the police in Iowa City. He then offered (as only Bill would) to go out there himself and see what he could do. But we waited to see what happened.
It happened fairly quickly. All the police did was go to Ken’s address (something the university authorities couldn’t figure out to do?), where he was, in the same place he’d been living all along with several friends. It was Ken, said the pleasant policeman, who came to the door. He was all right. We told him to call.
Did the policeman tell me he was drunk? Stoned? I don’t think so. He was, of course, but I don’t think that was mentioned.
Ken had his excuses, naturally. If he could have printed them up and put Lincoln’s face on each one, we’d be rich. He was a buffet of excuses. They were heartfelt.
Tell a baby not to cry. It’s just impossible.
• • •
Why was Ken at the University of Iowa in the first place? Considering the schools within a stone’s throw (Johns Hopkins not the least of them), Iowa was a strange choice, indeed. It was over a thousand miles from Maryland, very hard to get to except by car, if you didn’t run out of gas. Which I did a couple of times, being near-penniless and running on fumes.
We had been living in Maryland for most of our lives. Why not the University of Maryland? He didn’t want to go there; he wanted to get away. And twenty-five years ago, the University of Maryland wasn’t the school that it is now.
