by Odie Lindsey
Through the bar’s smoke and neon, Colleen stared at him. She wished to god she’d had the old Browning .22 her father taught her to shoot with. She’d inhale, hold her breath, line up, squeeze. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Center mass, as the Army commanded. She figured Van Dorn might even laugh when he saw the .22. Might hold up a hand and charge her, convinced of his ability to absorb the rounds in his palm. All the better, she thought. All the better he forget the kinship between her Browning’s 5.6mm bullet and the 5.56mm round of the carbines slung in theater. Forget that the U.S. military chose the minuscule 5.56 round for a reason; forget that instead of a fist-sized cavity left by an AK-47, that counter to any Cold War profundity, the sole intention of the 5.56mm round is to ricochet: off the bones, sinews, spine. Forget that you can in fact shoot a man in the legs, or the ulna, and the round may well bounce all the way into the abdomen, shredding muscle and artery. She’d give it all to him, center mass just as trained, secure in the pinball-like reflection of the bullets inside his rib cage.
“That about right?” she asked him. “Anything I forgot?”
Van Dorn looked to the mirror behind the bar. The men turned their eyes from his reflection.
“What I thought,” Colleen said. “Anyhow. I’ll just let you get back to tellin’ these boys what a badass you are.”
She fumbled in her skirt pocket for her keys and some money.
“Hey?” the bartender asked, startling her. “You good?”
“Well,” she said, pausing to consider. “I’m better.”
He nodded. “I hope so.”
She threw a $20 on the bar and walked to the door.
“Come see me,” the bartender called out. “If you need to talk or somethin’.”
Within a minute Colleen was stomping the gas pedal, kicking up a hail of oyster shells as she peeled onto the county road. She was drunk, and the car drifted across the yellow centerline now and then. No matter; she was heading deep into the countryside, nowhere near anything, let alone a cop. The clean night air pushed like a river against the mildewed odor of the Cavalier. The tires squealed as she took a curve, and her headlights flashed over vast fields of row crops, cotton and soybean and corn, and the endless steel trusses of center-pivot irrigation arms. She was not Civil Affairs. It didn’t matter what her job was, anyway. She held an intimate knowledge of every weapon at the company’s disposal. She could break down and clean and refit and reassemble any standard-issue rifle—SDM, A4, M16/AR-15, M203—any of it, faster than anyone in the battalion. M60 and .50-cal. “What the?” She pounded the wheel as the tears came, then gunned the accelerator, the car lilting as she hit the dips in the road.
Her life was pinned between Highways 7 and 15. It always had been; whether as a child riding to town with her father, or on the middle school bus, or while tooling around with handsy high school boys. Her homeland had been carved up before Colleen was even born. Driveway to asphalt, highway to interstate then back again, she ran on a track forged by someone else, by men; a map, a guidance system, a grid, thrusting her from point to point, repeat, repeat, the cycle punctured only by trauma.
She whipped the Cavalier off the road at full throttle, thrusting into farmland, nearly rolling the vehicle. The tires threw gravel, then dirt, and then the windshield was gummed with plant life. Young corn stalks lashed the window frames, their row spacing a drumroll, their shorn silks and tassels, confetti. She then steered the vehicle into wide arcs and curls, exactly as she had in the desert.
As the car shaved the crops, its engine near redline, Colleen knew that nobody had ever forged that particular pathway, in that particular way. She laughed at the landlessness of it all, at her authority in motion, and then yelled out in glory with the choir of snapped stalks . . . until the Chevy smacked dead into the irrigation tower and her face cracked the steering wheel.
Blood streaked her chin as she processed the pain. She listened for fighter jets, or the bleating of goats, her muscles locked in anticipation of a blast concussion.
When nothing came to engage, Colleen let go of her fear. She lay her head on the wheel as her body went slack. Her consciousness drained out to the wobble of gooseneck pipe that spanned the quarter-mile sprinkler truss.
She wasn’t dead. She was twenty-two years old, and very much alive.
11/19/98
This unusual episode is one of the series’ best ever, with the non-stop comedy roller-coaster suddenly throwing a brilliant surprise ending at you.
—“THE ONE WITH ALL THE THANKSGIVINGS,”
from Friends Like Us: The Unofficial Guide to Friends
ANOTHER GLASS OF Beaujolais Nouveau. Every year, Shea tells me how special it is. Every year, it tastes terrible. Finally, this time, this year, at the Whole Foods I asked her to buy a new California wine instead. Called simply “Nouveau,” it was positioned right next to our horrible stuff. I mean, great marketing. It was from Sonoma too, I think, which would’ve been pretty good. (After all, Williams-Sonoma is pretty good, right?) The debut Nouveau also had an artistic and flashy wine label, just like the French stuff. Beyond even Beaujolais, the fake wine came with Christmas-ornament grapes in bronze patina, noosed around the bottleneck, for free.
Shea didn’t go for it. She said that some traditions are just that—traditions.
Anyhow, it’s Tuesday. It’s Wednesday. It’s Thursday. Must-See teevee. Friends and co. at six o’clock, six-thirty Seinfeld noosed around its neck. I’ll get another glass of this crummy wine. “Shea? You want anything?” “No, thanks, hon. Six minutes!” God bless her, lounging on the weathered brown Italian leather of the retro Cotswold sofa. The ruby Pakistani rug at her feet—what’s that rug pattern called again?—by way of Nieman’s. Resto Hardware oak coffee table, matching end table, bronze patina lamp and knickknack closing in. The laughable Burberry pajamas by seven p.m. The skin-tag polyps in her armpit. Another glass of wine.
Here’s the kitchen, here’s the wine, Access Hollywood. I need some wine. Kitchen. Should have gone with the Viking stove, for resale. Or at least the FiveStar. The rust-colored, Italian-style, Mexican-made-tile so slick under sock feet. Countertops wiped to a gleam. The cobalt-blue triple-Moen-sink; the green digital numbers of the stainless microwave. Travertine abounding, and Sub-Zero fridge, stocked. Museum of Fine Arts The Impressionists magnet smack-dabbing photo of Shea and me from the newspaper’s About Town section. I bought the Jenn-Air stove but was wrong to do so, despite what I argued to Shea and later had to admit, no problem. The Jenn-Air was $2,701, cheaper than Viking—ridiculous. Now I notice that 2-7-0-1 comes up all the time, just to mess with me. Like, there were zero commercials shown on 1/27. No kidding. Instead, at every break the network ran news clips of the President saying, “I did not have sexual relations . . .” So depressing. And of course 12/07 is the “Day That Will Live in Infamy,” year after year. Point being, the Jenn-Air does not have (a) the resale value, nor (b) the conversation value of the Viking. Or even the FiveStar, for that matter. And since we’re not going to cook anyway, well, what the fuck? We need all the resale and conversation value we can get. Yes, I’ll be the first to admit it. My mistake. I hope we’ve moved on.
“Honey?” she calls. “It’s about to start”—12/71 being her birth month/year.
“Okay, coming.” I am hungry, am I? We’ve been watching for years and years and years and . . . since right after college. This and Seinfeld and Frasier and, well, things have gotten interesting. Seinfeld and Frasier are the new Cheers and M*A*S*H, rerun- and real-episode-wise. Five-thirty Seinfeld, six o’clock Friends, six-thirty Seinfeld, nine-thirty Seinfeld, ten o’clock Friends. Seven o’clock new Friends and Frasier on Thursday. Shea and I joke that if you flip the remote exactly right, you never have to hear a single syllable of Peter Jennings or Dan Rather, or anyone else depressing. The other evening, around five-thirty, she said, “I’ll trade Chandler Bing for Vernon Jordan any day.” I said, “Ditto me for Joey Trib instead of Linda Tripp!” Do they still show Cheers and M*A*S*H
? No? Maybe, yeah, sometimes, where?
“Honey?” I call to her. “I’ve got one.”
“Uh-uh, here we go. Better be good.” A few times a week, Shea and I do this thing where we’ll claim exterior-only parts of each other that we love.
“It is,” I yell back. “Oh, hey—can you hear me? Hold on a minute.”
I think I should piss. Moen faucet in bathroom, icy granite, extra-deep basin. Silent-flush, cavernous bowl. For a while, the whole Phoebe-gets-pregnant story line on Friends was hard for us, but the show is just too funny to stay down about. We try to do the thing where Shea pulls her knees up to her chest after I come. We’ll see. I despise the doctors, the specialists. Mostly, we never know whether to be excited or depressed when Shea doesn’t get her period. I can’t even ask her anymore. Textile-linens from Monte-somewhere in Italy, via Neiman’s, which are supposed to be “exquisite,” but really don’t sop up all that much. Bed, bath and shower curtain. (Still not sure if a downstairs shower is good resale or not.) The preview of today’s Friends Thanksgiving special says they’ll all remember their Worst Thanksgivings Ever—which I guarantee you will come up for a laugh around the table next week, at Thanksgiving. Aveda Energizing Body Cleanser and Aveda soaps promise “the art and science of pure flower and plant essences.” What the hell? Woman stuff, I suppose. Shea raves about this crap. I got a pimple after using it. Hadn’t had a pimple in years.
I call to her, “Okay, ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she says with a laugh.
“The backs of your front teeth,” I announce.
“Really?” she asks.
“Yeah, really. I mean, unless it doesn’t count. Does it count? Wait, you don’t have to tell me. But I think it should. And you know what?”
“What?” she asks, smiling as I walk in, zipping up.
“Even if it doesn’t count I love them, okay?”
“No. I think it counts,” she says. “When my mouth is open.”
Today’s episode airs on 11/19, a sibling of 11/91, which was when I came home from combat deployment. I was 19. Shea was there, waiting. I’d sent her weepy letters. She’d watched CNN. And of course there’s 9/11, the date G. H. W. Bush formally laid out his plans for war. (Ugh, I’ll never forget it, 9/11/90, because as soon as he gave the speech I got this sinking feeling. I just knew our unit would be mobilized—which sure enough it was, in mid-November, 11/90—heck, maybe even 11/19/90. I’ll have to look. That would be too weird.) Next week, Thanksgiving is on November 26—1-1-2-6—the exact last four digits of my Social Security number. They won’t show a new Friends episode, which is totally depressing.
Bokhara. That’s the rug pattern. It’s Pakistani, and mostly red but with small golden octagons in two rows, lengthwise. Real soft. The wool has great lanolin content. The guy at Nieman’s told us the octagonal shapes were supposed to represent elephant footprints. Crazy.
It was difficult at first to try and deal with the Must See evolution: Where was regular Seinfeld? Where was Thursday night? (And where did Cheers go, anyway?) When they first started messing with the whole lineup, specifically when Seinfeld bailed on us, it felt like things might fall apart. No kidding. I mean, what happened?
Miraculously, we’ve only become thicker. Richer. This is partly due to the fact that Frasier is now on Tuesdays, in Seinfeld’s old spot. Also, Shea and I are trying to put our faith in Jessie—the new show between Friends and Frasier—because of its decent premise and time slot. Will & Grace is . . . well, was an odd one to get used to. We weren’t sure if we’d be into faggot comedy. In fact, we were pretty sure we wouldn’t be. (Plus, this whole Shepard-boy-Wyoming-thing with the barbed-wire fence is a super-downer.) But they’re hilarious! That one little queer guy is just so queer that there really isn’t anything to worry about. It’s not like he’s trying to sneak up behind you, you know? Plus that other guy isn’t so gay all the time. And, as Shea points out, Grace is hot.
What’s next? We are hungry. Are we? Wolfgang Puck’s frozen pizza, four cheeses? Lean Cuisine? Amy’s vegetarian burritos? Uncle Ben’s bowls? “Honey,” Shea calls. “Can you bring me the throw when you come in?”
“The what?”
“The Sundance catalog thing. The, uh . . . Western Blanket!”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” I fumble with the blade of the Waiter’s Friend wine key. Nick the inside of my upper thigh, then put a cocktail napkin in my boxer briefs to sop up the blood. Sometimes there are episodes that leave things on a heavy, sort of deep note. Sad pop music plays over memorial clips, like that Green Day song did during the last Seinfeld. Sometimes they hit you pretty hard.
“Honey! It’s on! What are you doing?”
Sometimes I wonder when a thing is a thing, or a them. Like, in the war we made them become things. (I mean, a guy is only a guy before you thunk him with an M203 grenade. Afterward? He’s Ragú. Ragú is what we called it, what was left of it. Of them. So, like, he was a them, and then he was a thing. A Ragú.) Shea and I try to make a them out of a thing. A something out of nothing. Which we did, one time, just after the war. But the baby wouldn’t stick inside her—for lack of a better term. So I suppose it went back from being a thing . . . to a them? I can’t find a formula to describe it. Yet.
Sometimes I need to bleed just a slip. Eight, seven p.m. Central.
Gulp and gulp and gulp Nouveau and picture the friends in the fountain. The fountain, the fountain. Azure marble silver finish triple-Moen spontaneity. The friends jump in the fountain. The actors don’t really look like their own show opening anymore. They’re older in real life, with different hairdos and everything. To some people it’s probably kind of weird that they stay the same age during the opening theme song, when they all jump in a big fountain. But Shea and I like it. We were their age when they started jumping in, so it’s kind of neat, you know, dreaming about being just out of college, right when they were just out of college. And every week, this fountain sort of kicks us into history. And there’s this stereo that Shea got me from Restoration. It’s a brown resin-plastic, fifties-style radio but with a CD player in it.
The friends always go to commercial after the fountain opening, so a touch-up of wine to get past the break. I ask Shea if we’d run out of body parts to compliment. She says no way.
“Here’s the Western Blanket, babe,” I say, and drape it across her small feet.
“It’s actually a throw.”
Oh. “Man, I love that radio,” I say.
“Me too. It’s dineresque. Oh, okay, I’ve got one.”
“Where?”
“Sit down and lift up your shirt.” I do, and she pokes me near my left kidney. “That one. That inky bubble of mole. It’s gross, by the way.”
“Haven’t you already said that one?”
“Of course not,” she says. “Wait. Maybe it’s the one you keep scratching off, dummy. So yes. But no. It’s new—you know? I don’t know, check this out.” She snatches the Restoration catalog from this bamboo-looking magazine holder we got at Pier 1. “I really want this chair. Listen.” She puts her hand on my forearm and begins reading. “A happy marriage of club chair and wingback produced these seats of compelling comfort and superlative style . . . Studs Terkel populism meets Dorothy Parker wit. Our La Porte Pressback Chair is built in the USA with a kiln-dried, double-doweled hardwood frame, high, rolled arms, and an angled wingback that promotes lounging, long talks, literary escapism, and languorous naps. Clad in luscious café velvet and accented with nailhead trim . . .”
“What the hell does all that mean? Who’s Studs Turkey?”
We laugh ourselves to pieces. “I don’t know,” she says. “But look at that chair. Pretty cool, huh?”
Melt into photo, the crisp setup: (a) is the chair, (b) is the dual map lighted globe, (c) the leather archival photo albums, (d) antiqued bronze magnifying glass, (e) and (f) the black cherry bookcase AND credenza. And, and it’s all quite intelligent. And I do like whatever that long literary talks thing.
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br /> “Well, maybe we could,” I say.
She beams and starts to squeeze me, then, “Shhh. It’s back on.”
At the start of the season, Ross said Rachel’s name while taking wedding vows with Emily. He tried to explain it away. Said they all live together as friends, etc. Shea and I agreed that the stupid foreign Emily character wasn’t going anywhere, and sure enough it got done.
“Are we taping?” she whispers. “Yeah,” I say. We have taped almost all of the Friends episodes, which is a lot. Tapes and tapes and tapes, and I’m toying with the idea of buying a DVD burner at Sharper, so we can melt them down to a decent size. It took us all last Labor Day weekend to catalog episodes. It was a blast, though. Wine and wine and wine and wine, though no Beaujolais, all fountain.
Beer commercial. “Shea, do you want to skip Jessie and just watch an old Seinfeld tape before Frasier comes on?”
“Are we gonna eat anything?”
“Sure. What do you feel like?”
“I don’t know. What do you feel like?”
“Mmm . . . not sure. Oh, it’s almost back on.”
We both think Ross will marry Rachel. Shea thinks that Joey will marry Phoebe. Feebee. “What an awesome job,” Shea says, when Monica talks about being a chef.
“Maybe. But I guarantee you she’ll be a mom soon. And nothing’s more important than that.” I say this and then I don’t know why I say it, because it’s so goddamn hurtful.
Shea looks down at her chest.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say. “Really. Need a splash, babe?” “Sure.” “Hungry?” “Um, not yet, maybe. Hurry, you’ll miss something.”
People can be high-art or dismissive and snobby, but there’s no getting around the fact that entertainment can be fun. I mean, holy mack, not only did Joey just remember getting a turkey stuck on his head, but Phoebe remembered a bad Thanksgiving from a past life. And get this: Monica just remembered the Thanksgiving when she actually cut off Chandler’s little toe! (Jesus Christ, she was fat during the flashback. And Rachel had such a big ugly nose.) Shea and I hold hands, we smile, we have a drink of wine and laugh our eyes wet. We can talk to each other if things get bad enough. Shea’s thick-socked feet are burrowed into the folds of fine Anthropologie Cotswold leather. The waft of her delicate Aveda hair billows up from my lap. It’s addictive. She looks up at me during the commercials and we talk about stuff we like. Sometimes she doesn’t look up, and maybe there’s stuff we like on the commercials, which is fine because we’re warm. In the show there are no cysts on anyone’s ovaries. No scarring no blockage no residue of thing. Here, flutamide takes care of her extra hair growth—which never bothered me in the first place. Shea is incredibly clever and funny. She points out that during all of the Bud Light commercials, there’s a three-part comedy blueprint: Quirky Scenario, then Humiliating Explanation, and then, after the “talking part” where they espouse Bud Light in a sentence, and more importantly when you’ve become convinced that the story couldn’t get any funnier—bam!—they hit you with Part Three: an instant, knockout joke to end the commercial.
