As a director, I don’t know who or what I am supposed to direct. I lack a clear sense of purpose. I sit in my office and drink coffee and read the newspaper. Sometimes I bang on the typewriter, really get the keys clacking so that people will hear the machine and think I am busy. I take three-hour lunches, telling the Dean I am out recruiting new students. As far as I can tell, everyone is very happy with the way I am doing my job.
Home Life
My wife is a beautiful, kind woman who watched me go mad once before, ten years ago. They called it alcoholism, but after they dried me out, they discovered I was still crazy. This was in the waning days of electro-shock, but they gave me a few jolts anyway. I was one of their last customers. It didn’t help my mind much, but for some reason it increased my sex drive. I left the hospital a better lover, for which my wife, at any rate, was grateful.
I am not happy. I’ve been telling my wife this lately. What she wants to know is why. I find this astonishingly simple of her and yet astonishingly difficult to answer. Why? Why? Why? I groan at the question as if it is incredibly stupid, which, of course, hurts her feelings. But the truth is I can’t answer.
I have no right to be unhappy. Why am I going mad again? In my case, it is only a lack of character. That is all. I am the fellow on the bus who plugged Jesus. I am willful. I am the worst lunatic of all. I deserve no sympathy. You should kick me in the ass.
***
Why?
Because I lack a clear sense of purpose. I feel apart from God. I feel apart from my fellow man. I feel apart from my wife. I feel apart from myself. I intensely dislike our cat.
Retracing My Steps
I’m going home. Back home. Down south. Kiss the wife. Honey, I’ve got to go visit the folks, see what’s up.
I take a few days off from work and fly home. Momma’s drinking. Daddy’s drinking. Brothers are drinking. We barbecue a bunch of beef and drink. Daddy whistles. Momma keeps hugging me, glad I’m home. Brothers and I practice chip shots in the back yard. The old castrated beagle retrieves the balls, carries a ball around in his mouth, showing off—look, I still got balls. You a good ole hound dog, you is. I shank a nine iron and break the kitchen window. Daddy yells. But we’re all happy as hell.
So happy I can’t figure it. Can’t walk, can’t talk, start to cry, vomit all over myself.
Check-in Time
Dry me out time. Hello, Mr. Psychiatrist.
Nothing? Nothing ever troubled you? Nothing bad ever happened to you?
Well, I was fondled.
He is delighted to hear this.
But frankly it wasn’t all that bad. Was twelve. Spent the night at a friend’s. We slept in the living room on the floor. Woke up and his old man was lying next to me. Had his arm around me. I thought he’d made a mistake, was walking in his sleep or something and just happened to lie down next to me. Just happened to have his hand on my little, twelve-year-old pencil. I was embarrassed for him. I knew he’d be embarrassed when he woke up. His face was scratchy against mine. His hand felt kind of gnarly. I moved a little, pretended I was just waking. His hand tightened a little. My fellow was trapped. His breathing was hot in my ear. Didn’t move. Didn’t say anything. Thought he’d be mad at me if he woke up. He had his nose in my ear. In the morning I didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t think he remembered. I wasn’t sure it had happened. I started taking a lot of showers. I could feel that hand there. Made me wince. That feeling like when chalk screeks across the blackboard. Hey, let go of that! I’d practice shouting. Hey you, let go there, hands off! Next time I came over, Leroy saying, hey Dad, can he stay over? Can Jimmy stay over? Why sure, Jimmy can stay over. Oh no, no sir, I gotta go. Oh no, sure, we’d be happy to have Jimmy, I’ll call his mom. Oh, she won’t let me; I just know she won’t let me. Oh, I’m sure she will; I’ll just give her a call. And I’m dying, I’m shaking, but I’m trapped, I’m on the floor, up all night, watching, waiting, and he doesn’t come and I think, I did, I did, I imagined it all. And it all fades away and I forget and like his old man again, he’s always taking us out for hamburgers and he lets us have a beer sometimes, so when he asks me to go fishing with them I say sure, cause I really do want to go fishing. And we’re in the camper getting undressed for bed, and there’s two beds and Leroy says, I want my own bed, you can sleep with my old man. Now, wait a minute here, thinks I, and his old man’s drooping his arm around me and leading me to bed.
It happened again?
I had a fever in the morning. I hardly remembered.
So you felt powerless?
Powerless. Sure. I felt powerless.
Well, I don’t know how much all this has to do with my problems, but it makes my shrink happy anyway.
Release
Checkout time. Kiss the wife. I was fondled as a child, I tell her. I’m recovering. Slowly. Be kind.
Bundle of energy. Sober. Wide-awake. Dynamic lectures at school. Foreign students impressed. Throw roses at me every class. Wave flags. God bless America.
Oh, and I am so very tolerant to the man who asks for money. I am open. I do not try to protect myself. Here, sir, is a quarter. Here, sir, is a dollar. Here, sir, is my billfold. I, too, was once a lunatic. I was fondled, you see. What’s that? You put four holes in Jesus? Well, I’m sure He won’t hold it against you, but for heaven’s sake, don’t let it happen again.
Purpose
Getting cool, that old sun going down earlier and earlier. They’re going to shut down the course tomorrow. Last day of the season, I shoot a forty-three. Great score for me. Jazzed up now. Decide to play the back nine. All by myself. Partner slumps away to the parking lot, had enough. Thank goodness. Was playing with a troubled taxidermist. Worried, you know. “Taxidermy business is going to the dogs. It’s those goddamn vegetarians.” Kept scratching at the crotch of his polyester pants, lime-green, just before each shot. Disturbed me somehow.
I lose four balls on the thirteenth. One after another, chip them into the water hazard. Wide, wide, wide water hazard, stinky, muddy, a bog, foul bog, devourer of balls and men; hopes perish here. Step up to the brink and heave my clubs in after the balls. There they go, down, down, into the bog, beneath the muddy water.
I turn to leave. A sudden pain in the chest. A heart attack. No, a sudden realization. I love golf. I love the great game of golf. I want to come back next season. And the season after that, as I grow wobbly, led about, half-blind, I’ll totter to my ball, take aim, ah, I must look upon those red flags that flutter in the wind, take aim, take aim again.
I suddenly have a clear sense of purpose. I must save my clubs! I will regain my clubs. I will practice my chip shots. I will improve my game. I will not despair. I will be back next season!
I wade in after my clubs. Water’s deeper than I think. I’m up to my chest. Water rat dives out of the bushes. My shoes squish around in the mud. I kick around through the weeds, trying to feel the clubs.
The groundsman drives up on a cart and looks at me. Not quite a frown. There is a touch of stern kindness on his leathery face. He is dressed all in khaki and wears a pith helmet, to protect his noggin from errant balls. Sitting in his cart, he looks like a general. Or he is a sad old psychiatrist of the fairways. He knows what strange torments we suffer as we batter our way from tee to hole. He has witnessed it all. He has seen the farters play, the manic-depressives, the unemployed tax accountants, the troubled taxidermists, has seen us all pass, all blow our shots, hit into traps, lose our balls in the hazard, bounce off trees, throw our clubs, break our clubs, swear, shout, dance, holler, and all, all out of love.
“I’ve lost my clubs,” I tell him. “I hit four balls into the water and then I lost my temper and I threw my bag in after the balls. Now I want my clubs back.”
He only stares at me.
I try a different approach. I laugh. I say, “I’m sure I’ve got a shot if I can find
my ball.”
He nods his head, ever so slightly, and climbs out of his cart. He steps to the bank and, with a sigh, rolls up the bottoms of his trousers.
THE THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT
Ernest Hemingway once said that when he was a young writer he decided to write one story about everything he knew something about. When I was in my mid-twenties, setting out to be a writer, I was panicky about all the things I did not know about.
For one thing, I knew nothing about guns. My readings of contemporary fiction had made me pretty well certain that no book, and certainly no book by a native Texan, could climb to fame without at least the appearance of a gun, and preferably a veritable profusion of guns, liberally used. I would need to write lines like: Wilson coolly sighted his .430xx2 semi-loaded Swiss Mitzer three degrees north, allowing for the torque of the heavy-oxide, brass-rimmed bullet . . .
But even as I brooded over guns, something else I didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, grasped my attention. Now that I was living briefly at home again, after returning from Mexico where I’d been writing a bad book and teaching English to support myself, I became aware of my mother’s coughing. Her wet phlegmy hacking. Her wheezing. Her throat clearing. Her spitting into a handkerchief. Her struggles to breathe.
Shortly after my return, she’d taken me aside. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said, outside the hearing of my younger brothers. “Now, I don’t want you to worry, but I’ve been told I have a touch of emphysema.” As I stared at her, she gave a girlish laugh, her eyes still lively then, full of light. She nudged my shoulder. “Now, don’t worry. It’s just a touch.” A touch of emphysema? Like a touch of cancer? A touch of AIDS?
But she didn’t slow down much—worked as a secretary, kept up the housework, did her typing and research in the evenings, attended a college class or two. The emphysema had years left to do its work, years left before it stole away her happiness and hope and finally her life. In fact, there was only one thing it did not steal. In her last months, as she lay in bed, wasted to the bone, her eyes frightened and hollow beneath the oxygen mask, she held to love, to her capacity to love, as tightly as her skeletal, papery fingers clutched her rosary beads and our hands. That was her final fight; she battled not for time, but for love.
During the day, she managed, to some degree, to conceal and stifle the cough. But she went to bed earlier than the rest of us, and then the coughing followed a predictable pattern. First a few, rather mild, clearings of the throat. Then an uneasy silence. Then a cough from deeper in the chest, and another, increasing in tempo until the coughs came one on top of another, formed an unbroken chain, and then finally a wet throat-clearing release. An expectant silence. Then the cycle was repeated, but by this time the coughing had turned fierce so that as the pattern reached its crescendo I thought her chest must be torn apart, and indeed as time went on, her coughing sometimes broke a brittle bone.
Perhaps, I hoped, there was a remedy for one of my failings. I turned to my seventeen-year-old youngest brother, George. George knew guns; he was something of a collector and the only one of my five siblings who hunted. I was embarrassed to tell him why I wanted to know about guns; I just told him I wanted to accompany him to the shooting range.
He was delighted at the possibility of an ally. Guns had been a sore spot in our family since the year before when George brought home his first rack of horns. My father remarked that he saw no sport in killing a defenseless creature, and my mother, ever vigilant toward the hazards posed by animal parasites, sprayed copious quantities of Lysol on the horns and skullcap. For several weeks, my vegetarian brother Sean, a year older than George, feigned fits of horror whenever he beheld the horns mounted on George’s bedroom wall. As George read in bed, Sean appeared in the doorway, with a quaking finger pointed at the horns as if at Banquo’s ghost, clutched his throat and popped his eyes wide, wailing, “Why? Why did he die?” As George ignored him, he swooned and thrashed about on the floor, blubbering, “Why! Oh why! Oh noble forest creature! May God forgive my brother!” His eyes hidden behind his book, George sighed, muttered, “Asshole.”
For the last few days, ever since his girlfriend had broken up with him and the crown on his front tooth had snapped off yet again, George had been bearing himself with a certain fatalistic, slump-shouldered, Devil’s Island stoicism. But his steps were jaunty as he carried his leather case to the shooting stand. He gave me a snaggle-toothed pirate’s grin and produced his pride and joy, a gun he’d assembled in secrecy, fearing that once again the family would fail to appreciate his endeavors. He ran his hand lovingly over the smooth wooden stock of the old-fashioned Daniel Boone-style powder rifle, and as I stared at the flintlock it slowly sank in on me that I was doomed. While the other writers got rich and famous arming their heroes with high-tech weaponry, my good guys would be reduced to abject, absurd missions of doom. They’d fire off one futile round and spend the rest of their time pathetically scampering for a safe place to cram down the ramrod. What self-respecting hero would arm himself with a one-shot muzzle-loaded powder rifle? I’d have to create louts, eccentrics, misfits, incompetents. The hell with suspense; I’d have to write satire.
But I clucked with appropriate enthusiasm over the rifle. Westerns? Maybe I could write westerns? But I did not know much about horses, and I sensed that could be a drawback.
Fire leapt from the muzzle. Smoke wreathed our heads and filled our nostrils. My shoulder ached from the fierce buck of the gun. My ears rang, became deaf to any sound but the explosion of the gun. George and I grinned and gesticulated at each other. We’d attracted a crown of admirers. I remember the sheer happiness on George’s face, his eyes wet from the smoke, his snaggle-toothed grin saying things like: Isn’t it beautiful? Haven’t I made something lovely and fine? He was gentle with me, his older brother, pouring the powder in for me, loading the shot, working the ramrod. I was caught up in the moment with him; we were side by side at the Alamo, at Gettysburg, two against a thousand, shoulder to shoulder, man to man, brother to brother. Over and over the gun belched forth its fire, and though quite a few years have passed now, I think of that day when I think of George. He was magnificent, his head wreathed in smoke, his cheeks splashed with tears, firing away on that crisp, golden autumn afternoon as if each explosion might hold at bay some coming sorrow, might overcome the other sound that had disturbed our suburban slumbers.
When the coughing started up at night, Sean and George and I would gather in George’s room, the room at the far end of the hallway of our ranch-style house. It was something unspoken between us. We just needed to gather, to sit with one another as the cough traveled down the long hallway. Two of us sat on the edge of the bed and the other took up the desk chair. We’d hear our father checking on her. We talked of many things, laughed at times, but we’d catch ourselves clenching our hands, gritting our teeth against the sound of the cough. Every few nights, as if I’d forgotten, I’d ask my brothers, “How long has she been like this?” And they would glance at each other as if they too had forgotten, as if each hoped the other might recall. Then finally one would say, “Oh. A while now.” And the other would nod and say, “Yeah. It’s been a while.”
I went away again. I went away for a while. And each time I came back, I’d find she’d grown a bit worse, but she lived long enough to see me married, lived long enough to fall in love with my young children and to have them love her.
After my mother’s funeral, Sean and George and I gathered, as of old, in George’s old bedroom. We were laughing and crying over our memory of Mother coming in to apply Lysol to the horns, which were still mounted on the wall. Tears ran down George’s face. His front crown had snagged off just that morning over a hard piece of candy; caught between tears and laughter, he looked as he had on the day fifteen years before at the rifle range. He is my younger brother by almost a decade, but at times he seems older. I have kept my hair, and he has lost much of
his, though he combs long strands over from the side to cover the balding patch on top. I have maintained my weight, but he has grown heavier. He’s become something of a tycoon in real estate and oil, and I think his business affairs and his troubled love life have burdened him, put a weight upon his shoulders. He deals with things I do not know about.
When I lived back at home that year, my mother was researching our roots. She’d become a skillful researcher and she could write well herself, but she wanted me to put our roots into fictional form. She was particularly enamored with the story of her great grandmother Rebecca, whose husband had died when she was young, leaving her alone with her children on a ranch in hostile Comanche territory just north of San Antonio.
I could embellish, she said, make it interesting, add some action.
My mother had always encouraged my fiction, so indeed I did embellish. Apparently, there had been a few times when Indians had run off with the horses or where outlaws had camped on the land. Rebecca kept a shotgun handy, but there was no record of her using it except against an occasional rattlesnake or to scare off a coyote.
But perhaps my recent curiosity about guns flavored my writing. I turned my great-great grandmother Rebecca into a killing machine. Nightly, droves of Comanches attacked the ranch, and Rebecca blew them away, firing out the window as they whirled their horses in exultant rings around the cabin. The high casualty rate of the Comanches diminished their esprit de corps not in the slightest; the next night they’d swoop in again. The nightly sieges became such old hat to the children that they slept right through the gunfire, and when Rebecca got bored with the action, she’d fling upon the cabin door and fire off a few one-handed salvos as she hitched her skirts and chased the Indians across the moonlit prairie.
Then I created a madman named Buck, who was sinister and degenerate enough to frighten away even the stalwart Comanches. He terrorized Rebecca and the children. In the night he’d slaughter a horse, then build a small campfire just out of gun range, and in the eerie light of the fire he’d perform disgusting rituals. He’d eat the horse’s liver raw, smear his chest with blood, drop his trousers and moon the terrified, mesmerized pioneers in the cabin. He moved his campfires closer each night, crept around the cabin at all hours, walked on the roof, made belching noises outside the windows. There was, in the story, some hint of sexual urgency, even a mild flavor of misguided romance.
A Night at the Y Page 10
