Don't Make Me Stop Now

by Michael Parker

  DON’T MAKE ME STOP NOW

  stories by MICHAEL PARKER

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  For Jim Clark and Terry Kennedy

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WISH TO THANK the editors of the magazines and anthologies in which these stories first appeared or were reprinted; my students, past and present, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Stuart Dischell, George Singleton, and—in no way least—my editor Kathy Pories, whose help both on and off the page has been endless, careful, gentle, exact, and immeasurable.

  Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?

  —Denis Johnson, “Work”

  CONTENTS

  What Happens Next

  “Hidden Meanings, Treatment of Time, Supreme Irony, and Life Experiences in the Song ‘Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman’”

  Everything Was Paid For

  Off Island

  Go Ugly Early

  I Will Clean Your Attic

  Muddy Water, Turn to Wine

  The Right to Remain

  Smoke from Chester Leading Me Down to See Dogman

  Couple Strike It Rich on Second Honeymoon

  The Golden Era of Heartbreak

  Results for Novice Males

  A Conversation with Michael Parker

  Also by Michael Parker

  What Happens Next

  I

  WHEN HE WAS SEVENTEEN, Charlie Yancey was at a family reunion, skulking around the edges of rooms, his thick hair in his eyes, waves of rather-be-anywhere-but-here insolence rolling off of him like steam, when his father told him to pull the car around, drive his grandmother back to the nursing home.

  “Why do I have to?” said Charlie.

  “Because if you don’t you’re not leaving the house for a month.”

  “Well, fuck me,” Charlie whisper-mumbled.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I said, Well, I need the keys,” said Charlie.

  His father handed over the keys slowly while staring at him slowly and saying slowly as if he was trying not to let himself speed up, “I want you to drop your grandmother off and come straight back here. Do you hear me, Charles?”

  “Yes,” said Charlie.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Force Grandma to withdraw some cash from her bank, stop by the Dot and Dash for a case of beer, swing by and pick up Moocher, and cruise around downtown all night?”

  His father looked past him, at something on the wall of the basement, which is where all the teenagers in the family had gathered to play pool. Charlie wondered what his father was looking at but was for some reason afraid to turn his head. He needed his father to hug him or slap him, either one, anything but look beyond him.

  “Thirty minutes, Charles,” said his father. “That is the maximum amount of time it would take you to get from here to the nursing home and back, even if there was an earthquake. If you are not back in thirty minutes . . .”

  His father seemed to grow so visibly and hugely bored with his threat, and his long-running battle with his middle child, who gave him nothing but lip and trouble, that he trailed off and continued staring at the wall, or whatever he was staring at, not Charlie Yancey, not his son, not who he ought to have been looking at.

  Charlie shrugged and went to get the car. He had his tapes stashed in the glove compartment. It was his mother’s Dodge Dart, a terribly unsexy car to drive if you were a teenager with even a sliver of self-respect. But Charlie had made some improvements. The radio only got AM so he had talked his mother into letting him put in an FM / cassette player with money he made working at Walgreens after school and on weekends. The Dart was parked down the street. Charlie put in Humble Pie’s “Smokin’” and cranked it up until the windshield vibrated and the steel doors actually hummed. It cleared his head from all the family melodrama, all the forced pleasantries and smiles. Not that he’d forced it too hard.

  “God, Charlie, don’t be such an asshole today, okay?” his sister Ellen had said to him that morning when they were waiting around for their mother to finish putting on her makeup. “Just pick one person to be nice to, okay?”

  He’d ignored her. Now he sat in the car, nodding to the greasy organ chords of a song called “Hot ‘N’ Nasty,” waiting for his dad to bring his grandmother down to the street. When the song was over he decided he wanted to hear it again on the ride home, so he rewound it and was about to eject the tape when his father appeared by the carport, feeble Grandma Yancey in tow, motioning for Charlie to come up the drive and get her.

  “God, do I have to do fucking everything for him?” Charlie said aloud. He got out, fetched his grandmother, ignored his father, who said, “Thirty minutes, Charles.” He helped his grandmother in the car, clicked her seat belt around her tiny waist, walked around the driver’s side holding his nose at the faint smell of urine he’d detected while leaning in close to her, got in, cranked the car. Twenty seconds of silence followed as he drove to the corner stop sign, put his signal on to turn right, which he was about to do when the opening chords of “Hot ‘N’ Nasty” came thundering through the speakers. It was much louder than before. He must have accidentally brushed against the volume when he was getting in or out of the car. It was so loud that Charlie thought they’d been hit by another car. Or a train. Maybe the earthquake his father had joked about. It took him a few more stunned seconds to get his act together enough to reach over and turn the volume down. By that time his grandmother was dead.

  II

  Twenty years later, when he told this story to a woman named Teresa, as they were lying in bed in a motel room alongside an interstate in central Virginia, Yancey held his breath in the silence that followed the word dead, which was often oddly reminiscent of that stunned silence that had come over the Dart after he finally managed to turn down Humble Pie. He liked Teresa. Maybe he loved her. Love did not come easy to him — he’d been with a couple dozen women since high school but none for longer than three years and some for as short as a couple months — and he knew from having arrived at this moment before that it was critical, decisive. He needed for her reaction to surprise him. He wanted the questions his story elicited in her to be searingly perceptive and gentle at once. He sort of needed her not to laugh, though, hell, he understood it was funny in a darkly gothic way. She could laugh, it would not blow the door shut on them if she laughed, but if she did happen to laugh it would be best if she did not follow up her laughter with some sort of sitcom dialogue along the lines of, “Omigod, are you serious?”

  It would really be better if she did not ask, even reflexively, if he were joking.

  Some next questions that it would be best if she avoided:

  Did she have a heart attack? In fact, she did, a massive coronary, but it really did not matter much exactly what she died of, given her age and, more important, the fact that the story wasn’t really about her death. Still, most people have fairly literal minds. A literal-minded woman was not, to Yancey’s mind, very sexy. In fact, if he had to choose between a woman with a little meat on her bones who delighted in abstractions or even drenching irony, and a leggy, taut-stomached beauty who was forever asking him to explain every goddamn quip out of his mouth, hands down the former.

  Yet we’re conditioned to want the facts. Just a few weeks earlier, when they’d met in a bar in Richmond, Yancey had asked Teresa where she was from, what she did for a living. (He pointedly did not ask her if she had a boyfriend, as it struck him as immaterial at that point in the game.) These questions were scaffolding. You ask them out of duty and file the answers quickly away. Yancey could not therefore deduct
too many points for Did she have a heart attack? though if she followed up with more literal questions, say those resembling a medical history taken by a nurse preceding a physical — Any history of heart disease? — well, it wasn’t as if Yancey were desperate.

  What did your dad do to you? Another literal question begged, to be fair, by the way he’d shaped the story, its emphasis on his strained relationship with his father. He didn’t mind it so much because it revealed a tendency toward melodrama, which he himself shared, though he was a little ashamed of it and had learned over the years that he was never fully satisfied by the tawdry ending of stories, that the shambles he leaned in close to listen to brought on in him a despair greater than that of the characters themselves. This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when Yancey was very nearly soothed by the horrific details of the lives of others. He could not really pinpoint when that period had ended, and sometimes, admittedly, he longed for it to return.

  The question also assigned blame. What did he do to you? Obviously the asker of this question felt he deserved punishment. In this way it never failed to rankle. Like I fucking killed her, Yancey wanted to say. Though he did in a way. At least some days he thought so. People die all the time because no one pays attention to them, listens to their rather pointless stories. To seventeen-year-old Yancey, his grandmother was ancient, yellow-smelling, her skin like soiled dollar bills he got in change at the backstreet mom-and-pop groceries which sold beer to minors. He did not want to touch her. Even his father seemed vaguely embarrassed by her, not to mention pissed off that he, among his four siblings, shouldered the duty of caring for her. It had taken Yancey many years to realize that his grandmother had a personality — an entire life — preceding the aged state in which he had only known her. Now his father was approaching the same state. The difference was that Yancey had known him before he became creaky and forgetful. Perhaps it was a blessing that he had no children who would grow up to view their grandfather in the dismissive way that Yancey had always thought about his grandmother (when he thought about her at all), but that might well change, depending on the woman lying naked next to him, her response to his story.

  He hoped she did not ask Do you blame yourself for what happened? Yancey had no real answer to this question, though he really disliked when people said, in answer to his questions, I have no idea how to answer that, for it was Yancey’s experience that however fiercely they clung to ambiguity, however slickly they italicized the phrase Well, yes and no, they proceeded to deliver glib responses suggesting that they knew very well how to answer that question. One thing Yancey did not want to appear to be was well scripted. In fact, he wasn’t all that spontaneous — he thought about conversations he might have with people on the slim chance that he might have them — but by all means he wanted to appear whimsical. Did he blame himself? Look, it was an accident. He forgot to eject the tape, he accidentally brushed the volume control getting out of the car. And at the same time it was all his fault for preferring the oblivion of music over his own family, which admittedly meant more and more to him as he’d grown older himself. Yet he was a teenager. It was in his job description to be self-absorbed, to prefer loud music and locked rooms to some uncle of his discussing his golf game around the dinner table. Shy sensitive teenagers prefer the sanctity of music because it expresses what is for them wholly inexpressible. Sitting in that car, waiting for his father to bring along his grandmother, Humble Pie fucking cranked, Steve Marriott begging some sweet girl to shake that thang, asking Yancey over and over, “Do you get the message?” — twenty years had passed and Yancey still remembered the way that song lifted him above the subdivision where his aunt and uncle lived, treeless and too tight with bland ranch houses. He put his ear to Teresa’s shoulder and remembered how those raunchy Wurlitzer chords had sucked him right up on stage in a packed arena, put a mike in his hand, whisked him off stage after the encore into a waiting chartered plane. How could he be blamed for craving such sweet deliverance?

  Though he could not say it did not hurt him to think about that day, or hurt to retell the story. It didn’t hurt him where his listeners assumed: his heart. The heart, to Yancey, was a swimming-pool pump. It served roughly the same function as a hot-water heater. Since that day his grandmother’s had given out, Yancey had come to detest the mawkish association of the heart with emotion. What others called heart, Yancey located outside the body. It was in the air, molecular, shifting like dust motes. Perhaps it was in this motel room, that rarefied and elusive substance falsely consigned to the chest. Yancey guessed he’d very soon see.

  Can you listen to Humble Pie now? This was usually phrased as a statement — I bet you’ve never been able to listen to that song since — but it was a question all right. He could not really discount it, as it was, at root, serious, more serious perhaps than those who posed it realized. The indestructible tendrils of the past, come snaking back to encircle if not strangle us — that was what this question was about. How do you get over anything? Are distraction and forgetting the only path to peace? One girlfriend of Yancey’s freaked when he revealed, absentmindedly, that the leather jacket he favored in winter had been a gift of his ex. The fact that he wore the jacket was proof that he was not “over” this ex, according to his girlfriend. But it’s just a jacket, said Yancey. It’s warm, plus it’s just now getting broken in good. How could he ever bear to hear Humble Pie again, much less the history-laden “Hot ‘N’ Nasty?” The argument that it was only a song — that it had a terrific rhythm section, that Steve Marriott’s vocals were whisky-soaked brilliance, that if you flat-out failed to shake your ass to it you had no ass to shake — was not worth offering to that stupendous portion of the population, male and female, who believed the heart was something more than a pumping station. You just could not tell these people that, in fact, you liked to listen to “Hot ‘N’ Nasty” a couple times a month and expect them to see you as anything less than a monster.

  Oh Teresa, please surprise me. I want you to be different, therefore you will be different. For one thing, she waited a long time after he told the story before speaking. This was a good sign. The story demanded lag time. The longer she waited, though, the more hopeful Yancey became, the more pressure he applied to her question. Which is why it hurt so deeply — hurt in a place very near where he took his breath — when she asked the one question no one had bothered to ask him before, the one he did not ever want to answer.

  “What,” said Teresa, her voice a little croaky from disuse (which only made Yancey want her more), “happened next?”

  III

  The turn signal clicked. Yancey’s grandmother slumped over, her mouth open a little. He knew instantly that she was dead, but how? He’d never seen death before, except of course on movie screens. She could have been sleeping but for the unnatural loll of her neck. He felt, instead of panic (which he figured was on its way), a sense of warmth, of peacefulness, for both of them. He looked to the left and to the right. The road was clear. He looked in the rearview mirror; there was no one behind him. To the left and to the right: clear. He put his foot on the gas.

  Yancey had had twenty years to think about what happened next, and he’d turned it over in his mind so many times that he had assigned an image to the turning: sugar spinning on a stick, gathering into a cloud of cotton candy. Like cotton candy, the versions of those moments following the unexpected and lethal blast of “Hot ‘N’ Nasty” had been deceptively inviting, disappearing rather tastelessly with each compulsive nibble. Sugar and air, empty calories. Yancey did not care for cotton candy, nor for images of his mind obsessing over what finally was a series of lefts and rights, tap of the brake and slap of the gas pedal. Once he had read an article about a famous French theater critic that spoke of “the ulcer of consciouness: the mind devouring itself.” The phrase needled him when the stick was thrust into the cotton candy chamber, as did the fact that the French theater critic ended his days in an insane asylum, no doubt eating his own excrement,
as famously insane Frenchmen are prone to do.

  To narrate, for sweet Teresa, what happened next without baggage, to tell it exactly as it happened, free from the self-conscious renderings bathed in the unnatural pinks and blues of artificially colored cotton candy, free from footnotes about insane Frenchmen, free from revision, hyperbole, lies: if he could just pull it off, he’d never have to tell this story again.

  He drove a mile or so before his grandmother, jolted as he slowed for a curve, fell forward in such a way that made her look, well, dead. Her chin grazed her breastbone, her arm flopped over toward his side. Yancey pulled off onto Carolina Avenue, which he knew to disintegrate into a two-track leading to a dumping ground by a ravine. In the woods he stopped at the turnaround, leaned his grandmother over so that her head rested against the window glass. Strangely he did not mind touching her. The heat from the hot-water heater that is the heart had not yet leaked out of her. Her joints were still pliable. She was dead and it was his fault, but he felt calm and oddly focused. A purpose was unfolding, though he did not yet know what it was. However, it was noble and rather simple.

  Dusk had been slowly gathering, and with it a chill that Yancey felt because he’d cracked his window to combat an odor growing hard to ignore. He remembered just minutes ago holding his nose at the faint smell of urine. What a wuss I used to be, said Yancey to his grandmother. He took side roads, welcoming the anonymity of darkness, for riding around was the principal form of teenaged entertainment in his town, and people knew his car.

  Yancey pulled behind the Dot and Dash, alongside the Dumpster, where no one could park next to him. His grandmother’s purse lay on the seat between them. He only took a five.

  Old Cedrick was behind the counter. He’d sell booze to a third-grader. Yancey grabbed three tall Bulls from the cooler.