Less Of Me

by Edward Goble

  Chapter 8

  He fell asleep at his desk at 1:45 am, while pushing the Broadback story forward. His mother hadn’t called back, which was predictable. Didn’t want to call late and wake him when he had to get up in the morning for work. She couldn’t understand that he couldn’t rest without knowing that she was all right. He remembered feeling the same casual, maybe - maybe not, attitude when he was out late as a teenager. She would sit up and wait for him and it made him feel like such a baby. Now the shoe was on the other foot and Andy didn’t like the fit. He knew she wouldn’t call at this hour so he went to bed. He tossed and turned for thirty minutes; several times thinking he was hearing the phone ringing, before drifting off to sleep.

  It rang for real at 9:30 am. Andy groped for the phone by braille and tried to sound awake.

  “Hey, I worried about you.”

  “Oh, we got home too late to call. We went over to Denny’s after the service and talked till eleven. Didn’t get home till almost midnight.”

  “I was up. You should have called.”

  “Well,” she said. Which was Andy’s mothers way of saying she was sorry he was worried, but that she would do it the same way again because she didn’t call after 10:00 pm. It was a personal rule and if he didn’t like it, then, “Well...”

  “So, how was it?”

  “It was amazing.”

  “Really? I’m surprised.”

  “I’m serious. It was like Reverend Wheat had a card with all my questions and he graciously answered every one. Like I was the only person in the building.”

  “And that didn’t strike you as a little weird?”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what,’ Mom? The man’s a pro; he’s the best of the best. Don’t you think he knows how to work a crowd and push peoples buttons?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, what if its not pushing buttons? What if the questions and concerns are legitimate issues that people are really wondering about? I mean, what he said was very helpful.”

  “And then he asked for all your money.”

  “I don’t know why you are so antagonistic towards him. He never asked for a dime, if you want to know.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Well he didn’t... Now, there was an offering taken, but there was no pressure, it was very low-key, during a beautiful solo.”

  “Hmm.”

  “There was no underlying agenda, Mr. Private Investigator. It was just really good. I’m glad I went. And I wish you weren’t so negative.”

  “I’ve just seen things, you know? I’ve heard...”

  “That’s the problem with people, they make judgments about things they really don’t know about. We judge people before we know them,” she said. That point hit Andy between the eyes. It was exactly what he felt people had always done to him, and now he was dishing it out on someone else, in double-measure.

  “That’s a good point, mom. I’m sorry... I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  “I’m going back tonight.”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm, Marg said each night is going to be different. I might go all three nights.”

  “How does Marg know everything?”

  “Her niece is working the crusade. She’s an usher or a counselor or something. We didn’t get to see her last night, but she’s maybe going to coffee afterwards with us tonight. You should come.”

  “Yeah, Better not. I’m taking every extra minute to write. I was at it till one-thirty in the morning.”

  “No time for a break?”

  “No, not right now... But listen, I’m sorry I was a jerk about it, I’m glad you are enjoying it and, who knows, if Jimmy answers all your questions maybe you can let me in on the secret, I’ve got some questions of my own.”

  “It’s Jefferson, and I know you’ve got questions, I read your last blog.”

  “Yeah. When I write them at night they tend to be more philosophical, less witty and snide.”

  “I enjoyed it. I liked the part about being like Charlie Bucket.”

  “Well, I read them later and just about barf. Leave the blogging to the morning when the day is fresh and my sarcasm is rested and ready to pass judgment on the world.”

  “I think people like to know you have an actual heart, too.”

  “In the mornings I’m like the Tin Man and at night I’m the Cowardly Lion.”

  “Just not Dorothy, okay?”

  “Ooh, a little humor from the old gal. Nice.”

  “We are in San Francisco, you know.”

  “Funny... Listen, you guys leave plenty early tonight, this rain is going to cause a real mess on the roads.”

  “Yes, Dear. We will. You have a good day. I love you.”

  “Okay, I love you, too. Bye.”

  Andy hung up the phone. He had relocated to the edge of the bed during the call. Now he went straight to the refrigerator door, which he shut immediately upon realizing that his bladder was about to explode. “First things first,” he muttered as he jog-walked to the restroom.

  After a shower, he put on a pot of coffee, deciding to forego his usual pattern of walking over to Starbucks for a calorie-ridden flavored coffee and a few donuts. Instead, he chugged a cold Chocolate Royale and took the half-empty can of Pringles and a cup of Folgers back to the office. November 3rd seemed like a day with promise.

  As the iBook spun to life, Andy took ½-inch stack of Pringles and fitted them in his mouth, crunching them and running the salty sides of the chips across the thankful taste buds on his tongue. He sipped the hot coffee and opened a new entry in his blog:

  Andy’s Weblog - November 3rd

  Feelings

  Why is it that if you wake up on the right side of the bed, as they say, that you feel good and see the day ahead as if it were full of possibility and promise. But then again, if you wake up on the other side, the wrong side, you just want to crawl into a hole till the sun goes down? What is the difference? It seems to me like it is simply a matter of feelings. I feel good, or I feel bad. I feel like working, or I feel like jumping off a building. The day is the same, there doesn’t appear to be anything forcing the feelings, one way or the other, it’s just a fluke of nature, a roll of the dice. I’m going to wake up chipper and hopeful (there’s that word, hmm,) or shitty and rotten. It’s like I don’t have a choice in the matter.

  Take today, for instance. Man, when I woke up today I felt like lunging into work with a vengeance. Like I could pound out and entire book in one day. It was as if my fingers and mind were so connected that words flowed mystically to the computer screen. But what makes today different from yesterday when I wanted to cover my head and make the world go away? What makes yesterday different from tomorrow? The only thing I can figure is that my feelings are a product of something, either physical or chemical. I had pizza last night, so in theory, maybe each night I have pizza, really good pizza I might add, then the next morning I’ll feel great. Isn’t that the kind of logic I’m talking about? My good feelings, then, are a product of some kind of chemical reaction in my body that happens as a result of eating good pizza. That could be it. Or, maybe its something else, maybe my outlook on the day is simply a choice I make in the first few waking moments of the day. Or, even in the last few subconscious moments as my body prepares to stir awake. I decide, somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain, whether or not I am going to feel positive or negative.

  It’s weird to think that I might have that much control over my outlook. Either way, man I feel like a million today. I don’t know why, and, while I’d like to know, at some level I don’t care, I just like it and wish I had more days like this. Whether it was a good choice, or just a good pizza, I think I’d like to try a little more of both. Yum.

  Happy day - Andy

  He posted the blog and opened the Broadback book to review what he’d written the night before. Sometimes his late night prose was thick and rambli
ng and he had to delete the whole mess before continuing with the story during his usual working hours.

  ----------

  Applalacian Malady

  Jim Tate was reading a magazine from his perch in one of the rich leather chairs that decorated the living room of Broadback’s town home. His presence wasn’t a surprise as he carried a key and was one of three people who knew the code to the alarm. He often made himself at home while waiting for his stealthy confidant. The unassuming day had begun quietly enough, but now, as he checked his watch and realized that he had been on the job for a little over fifteen hours, he thought about finding work at the post office. “Eight to Five, Jimmy, that’s what you need,” he muttered. He just finished a loud yawn when Broadback entered the room through the garage stairwell.

  “My man,” Rance said. “Hope I’m not keeping you up.” he smiled as he walked past his friend into the kitchen. He returned in seconds with two bottles of mineral water.

  “Big day, Ran,” Tate started, tossing the magazine back onto the end table where he found it. “Thanks,” he said as he received the Perrier, twisting the lid off, he took a much-needed swig. “I’ve been on that Hagin thing all day.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “It’s too clean, you know. I mean there is nothing to go on. CSI’s combed the place, zilch. We tore the guy’s apartment apart, went through the records in his office, the whole nine. They’re still at it. FBI’s in there, us, everybody.”

  “Hey, maybe it just is what it is, you know? Maybe the guy took himself out. People do it all the time.”

  “That’s what Kramer’s boss said,” Tate said, sitting back as Rance took a seat on the sofa.

  “Williams? That skinny weasel is proof they’ll let anyone be A.D.”

  “How do you really feel about him?” Tate smiled.

  “Sorry, I just ran into him on the hill once in another role. Wasn’t impressed.”

  “Well, anyway, he’s pushing the suicide angle on Kramer. But Kramer smells something. I do too, just don’t know what.”

  “Forced entry?”

  “None. He either knew the person or it was the pizza deliver guy.”

  “Or, if it was a pro, he was already inside, waiting.”

  Tate nodded and took another sip of water. He closed his eyes and arched his back against the big chair.

  “You find anything else out about the guy?” Broadback said. He had taken a seat on the couch and was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees studying the green glass of the bottle and trying to think like a hit man, something that, unfortunately, came pretty natural to him.

  “Just his soapbox thing. He was on a sub-committee studying the potential impact of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use. You know, they have that set up out in San Francisco, although they are always fighting with the state about it. So these guys are talking about making it a federal issue, take it out of the states hands.”

  “Sounds good to me. Legalize drugs and make a new federal bureaucracy, all in one decision.”

  “Right.”

  “It does sound like something these crackpots would do, though.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “So, how about you, Jim? Theory?”

  “Well, I had an idea. But it’s from way out in left field.”

  “Try me.”

  “Have you ever heard of the ‘Marijuana Belt’?

  “Is that something a hippie uses to hold up his pants?”

  They both smiled at the visual. “I wish. No, it’s a big swath of continental geography, the Appalachians, Kentucky, West Virginia, hundreds and thousands of square miles of forest. Some of that land is completely unsettled, just like it was in the days of Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett. Forest wilderness.”

  “So if you know where it is...”

  “Oh, we work it, trust me. We eradicate more MaryJane in the state of Kentucky than any other state in the country outside of California.”

  “That’s hard to believe… So, if you burn it all, why is it an ongoing problem?”

  “Well, number one, the people are tenacious. They are smart and creative and know the hills like you know the racquetball court. And number two—the terrain is wicked. Our version of Southeast Asia.”

  “I had no idea. So, what’s the connection?” Rance said, interested, but not convinced.

  “I don’t know, Ran. But that’s where the guy is from, you know. It’s his turf.”

  “Seems like he might have been fighting for something that would be good for his states economy. If Florida can grow the oranges then Kentucky can grow the weed, even steven. Build some state-of-the-art farms, improve the roads, give everybody a good high,” Rance had some fun with the idea, though his friend was in no mood for levity.

  “I told you it was a stretch.”

  “Hey, your hunches are usually pretty close. Personally, I would tend to think he was porking around with the wrong woman, or, you know, the usual stuff, gambling debt or drugs. These guys are never quite as noble as they would lead us to believe, he either got found out, you know, ended it all himself, or somebody who’s pretty good made it look that way. One or the other.”

  “You’re probably right. Hey, thanks for the tailboard.”

  “My covert residence is your covert residence,” Rance said as both men stood. Jim left out the front door.

  Rance locked up and reset the alarm before heading back down the garage stairwell, disappearing down the shaft behind the false wall, into the tunnel and across the street.

  “Two of my best friends think this thing has roots in Kentucky. Interesting.” He thought, which led him to think about Tami Beatty. “Interesting,” he tried to imagine her saying again.

  ----------

  “Interesting,” Andy said out loud to the quiet little office. “Interesting.” He tried to make it sound sexy, like Tami Beatty might have said it. “Hmm.” Andy pounded away at the novel for the next three hours. The story was still in the early phases, but the scenes were so vividly played out before him, the characters so much a part of his real/imaginary world, that almost the moment his eyes locked on to the page and his hands touched the keyboard, the movie began to play. He just wrote down what was happening before his very eyes. Sometimes it felt like the world of Rance Broadback, even though completely fiction and based in a town Andy had never visited, was more real than the one outside his door; where his mother got her hair done by a little Vietnamese girl and his friend at the neighborhood deli had problems with a punk-ass nephew.

  Andy sometimes wished that Rance Broadback were around to help him navigate the deeper waters of his life. Mr. Martin could use a little of the Super Spy’s horse sense right now. What Would Rance Do? He would waltz in, real laid back and casual, and ask a lot of questions, asking you things that didn’t seem like they applied to anything, yet were important to him. And then, when he thought he had enough he would tell you he’d do what he could and he would disappear and completely drop out of sight. The next time you’d see him would be days or weeks after the problem had mysteriously been fixed. He had done something to trigger a chain of events that culminated in the issue being resolved and the bad guy getting burned and the right people showing up at the right time to be awarded credit for something they really had little to do with.

  That’s how he worked. Never receiving the praise, never shaking hands with the President. Broadback was a shadow, a guy people had heard about but never met, one they talked about but didn’t know. He was N-Sec’s top off-the-books agent. He was also a civilian with the highest clearance and the highest day-rate. He’d been stalked by hit men, staked out by foreign agencies and all anyone ever saw was a regular guy who played racquetball, lived in a modest town home, and rode around eight or nine months a year on a pretty nice motorcycle. Those he actually allowed to make it home after tracking him would confidently report that he wasn’t the spy type. He was more of an anti-spy. He was nice and approachable and never wandered far from the s
traight and narrow. He was a faithful member of Georgetown Presbyterian and anyone looking at his life would think, quite accurately, that he was just a regular Joe.

  For a few minutes, sitting in the little 2nd floor apartment talking to Mr. Martin, Andy felt like his altar ego, taking it all in, gathering information, preparing to disappear into the night to fight the bad guys and fix the problem. But he realized, luckily, that he was just a chubby guy from up the street who asked if he could help. His help involved lending an ear, that’s all. He was no super-spy; he just wrote about the one who lived in his mind.

  He stood to stretch and walked the familiar path to the refrigerator without the slightest conscious consent and peered inside. He opened each of the food cupboards in his pantry, one at a time, looking in and expecting something to catch his eye. There were peanuts and Doritos, cookies and Ho Ho’s. From the looks of one shelf you would have thought he robbed a Little Debbie truck. He finally grabbed a cream-filled oatmeal cookie that was wrapped in its own little clear, plastic wrapper. He held it in his chubby paw and looked at it, as if trying to get a taste in his mouth for it, something he rarely took time to do, and then he tossed it back in the cupboard and shut the door. “Nothing sounds good... I wonder if that’s a good sign.” Andy walked over to the window and squinted through the wet glass to try and get a look at the entrance to Martin’s Deli, all was quiet on the street; the rain had driven everyone inside. He was feeling antsy and he knew he couldn’t concentrate on writing when he was like this, so he put some clothes on, grabbed his coat, hat and umbrella, and set out for Martin’s. He thought about driving, but since the deli couldn’t have been more than 100 feet from his front door he figured that his garage was probably about as close a parking space as he could get to the shop, anyway. He scolded himself for using brain space to ponder such stupid things.