Nathan in Spite of Himself

by Bernie Silver

  “How ’bout we grab a booth,” Sheldon said.

  He beckoned one of the waitresses, instructed her to take over the counter, and headed toward the rear. By the time I arrived he was already seated in the next-to-last booth. I slid in across from him.

  “Something to eat?” he asked.

  “Tuna sandwich.”

  “Drink?”

  “Coffee.”

  He waved the other waitress over, a girl of about high school age with a quick smile and a wagging ponytail.

  “Hey Francie, bring us a tuna and BLT, hold the bacon, and two coffees.” He matched her smile. “Gracias.”

  After she departed, Sheldon looked at me as if awaiting a comment. When I offered none, he explained his meager lunch. “Sally threatened to divorce me if I didn’t lose weight. She was kidding, I think, but I’m not taking any chances.”

  “You look good.”

  “I’ve lost thirty-five pounds, but there’s still a lot more where they came from.”

  Before getting to my mission, I told him about my own “diet.”

  “No booze at all?” Sheldon said.

  “None.”

  “Not even beer?”

  “Not even.”

  “But why? You’re not a shikker. I already told you that.”

  “You were wrong.”

  I summed up how I’d come to realize this, describing in broad strokes my use of alcohol to cope with Jane dumping me, Switch cutting me and Wonderman dying on me.

  Sheldon’s response was no less than I expected.

  “Holy fuck!”

  “So you see, I’m basically a drunk,” I said.

  He gave me another “Holy Fuck,” this time adding, “Jesus, my diet’s a piece of cake compared to what you’ve been through.”

  Was his pun intended? I doubted it. Sheldon often missed my own efforts at wordplay, which, granted, were often on the clunky side.

  Our sandwiches arrived and he checked his to ensure it was baconless. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he kept kosher.

  We ate in silence for a minute before I informed him, “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  He stopped chomping. “That wasn’t it?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  I asked if he’d be willing to advise someone on running a business. He asked who and I told him.

  “Gee, I’d like to, you know. I feel bad for what’s-her-name …”

  “Doreen.”

  “Right. I mean I’m sorry for her loss and all, but—”

  “She’s black.”

  “Nah. I’m past all that. Half my customers are shvartz.”

  “Then what?”

  He waved his hand at the semi-crowded room, implying what I already knew. He was a busy man.

  “I know you’re jammed,” I said, “but she’s in over her head and if you could have seen her …” I gave him my best hangdog expression.

  This worked, as I knew it would, because beneath all that crust Sheldon was mush.

  “Okay, all right,” he said. “Give me her phone number.”

  I grabbed a napkin off the table and a pen from my shirt pocket.

  “Is that it?” Sheldon asked after I handed him the number. “’Cause I gotta get back to—”

  “There’s one more thing.” I ignored his look and plunged ahead. “I know you’re busy, but could we maybe call each other more often, go out for coffee once in a while?”

  He swallowed the last of his sandwich. “Where’d that come from?”

  I told him.

  He remained quiet a moment, then, “Hey, your friend dying is a kick in the ass, but believe me I don’t plan on croaking anytime soon. And I’m guessing you don’t either.”

  “And I’m guessing neither did he.”

  That seemed to have an effect, so I kept going. “I just don’t want us to grow apart, you know, the way some friends do.”

  Sheldon went silent again while pushing crumbs around his plate with a still-stubby finger.

  Finally he said, “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “When you’re right, which isn’t often, you’re right. I’ve thought of calling you a thousand times, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Too tired, too busy, too this, too that. So yes, let’s call each other more often and meet for coffee from time to time.”

  “You’re not just saying that.”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m not just saying that. And as a token of my sincerity, I’ll call you next week. Okay?”

  “Okay. More than okay.”

  My mission accomplished, I picked up the check, examined it and reached for my wallet.

  “It’s on the house,” Sheldon said, “though you don’t deserve it.”

  I let that go and thanked him. We slid out of the booth and stood. I was tempted to give the big lug a hug but knew he’d kill me if I did, so I stuck out my hand and we shook.

  I went home and puttered around the apartment, trying not to think. I washed dishes, picked up newspapers, vacuumed the rugs, dusted the furniture, watered a plant (with a watering can). But even all that couldn’t keep me from thinking, mainly about loss and how painful it was, and about Wonderman and how painful his loss was to me.

  And so my eyes watered too, and then I cried outright.

  But mainly on the inside.

  Chapter 91

  December 31, 1967

  I could barely see out the frosted living-room window of my new Ferndale apartment, but I knew what was out there. You couldn’t escape snow just by moving from one city in Michigan to another, any more than you could lose weight by doing so. I didn’t relocate to the quiet little suburb for either purpose, but rather for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me. I knew only that I had to move, maybe to get away from the Gazette and Richard Lee Tubbin, or perhaps to get closer to my parents and my one remaining friend, since Ferndale was right across the border from Detroit and adjacent to Oak Park.

  I moved the week before Christmas and, I’m pleased to say, remained sober throughout the hassle. Now instead of spending the last day of the year with my two (former) friends, Jim Beam and Johnny Walker, I was whiling it away with a third buddy, Maxwell House, a fresh mug of which I carried to the couch and set on the—what else?—coffee table. Staring back at me were the words imprinted on the vessel’s circumference in cursive gold letters: One Day at a Time. And that’s how I’d been taking it, weathering life’s ups and downs day by day without resorting to alcohol. And whenever the maxim slipped my mind, Le Voice was there to jog my memory.

  Speaking of “ups,” I still hoped Amanda Fontaine would be one of mine in the coming year, as I was more certain than ever we could be friends, if not more than that. The country was changing, meaning people were changing, and not only vis-à-vis their taste in music, clothes and hairstyles but also in their pairings. Put another way, the races were integrating in relationships as well as in schools and restaurants. I’d seen it with my own relatively clear eyes: mixed couples strolling down the street, sometimes even hand in hand, and living to tell about it. Occasionally they drew stares and whispers, but mostly they reached their destination without incident.

  Amanda couldn’t see this, so obsessed was she with her cause. That kind of fixation, it seemed to me, was the problem with causes, or at least with fighting for them. A particular cause might be just and admirable, maybe even noble, but the fight on its behalf could blind you to reality. Even when you’d nearly reached your goal, and sometimes afterward, you couldn’t appreciate your progress or success. The only thing that registered was the remaining imperfections. I had to help Amanda see past her cause, to recognize the changes taking place, because that’s partly what friends were for, were they not? To help each other honor the truth (if that’s not too highfalutin).

  And yet I had to ask myself, how truthful was I being, and how realistic? Could Amanda and I truly be friends? Forget our little two-tone problem. Any man’s friendship with a woman could be probl
ematic, especially with one who looked like Amanda. Sooner or later, more likely sooner, his hormones would kick in. Could I control mine if they did? Maybe not, but I’d never know unless Amanda and I became friends.

  Of course, she was more to me than a hormone-control test. She was important because, as I’ve said, I liked her. But there was another reason I wanted to be friends with Amanda. Increasingly, I coveted friendship itself. I realized this when I arrived at the fourth step, which called for “a searching and fearless moral inventory.” As you might imagine, my list of defects stretched from here to the moon, so I focused on them as I did on the days, one at a time.

  Near the top of that infinite list was my habit of isolating. This tendency may not have qualified as a moral failing, but it felt like one. I was aware most people made few close friends, but I had only one now that Wonderman was gone, and I saw this deficiency as a flaw of some kind. So what caused it? After giving the matter some thought, I concluded that I didn’t reach out enough, partly because I tended to find fault with people, which I used as an excuse not to connect with them. Further, I began to see the regression of factors that led to the faultfinding. The immediate cause was my fear of people, which arose from my fear they were judging me, which resulted from me always judging me, and of course finding me guilty, which led to the assumption that not only were other people judging me, they were rendering the same verdict.

  Make sense?

  Anyway, I knew instinctively that isolation was unhealthy, that people may not need people but they’re better off with them, and that a lack of people in my life had led to my drinking, or at least was one of its causes.

  Fortunately, I still had some people in my life, including Sheldon Feinberg. True to his word, he called last week, both to invite me over for dinner and to trade insults.

  (Regarding the latter, and to digress for a moment, women will never understand this, but it’s a fact that unless they’re faigelehs, guys would rather eat maggots than say “I love you” or even “I like you” to another guy. And yet they’ll readily exchange gibes, which translated means the same thing, or close to it. End of digression.)

  Besides Sheldon, I also had Rachel Solomon in my life, sort of. We’d exchanged a couple of calls and were progressing toward something, though exactly what I couldn’t say. Her closest friends these days were other adult children of alcoholics, but she’d expanded her circle and seemed open to including me in it, especially now that I was sober.

  So I had one friend, one almost-friend, and one person I hoped to make a friend.

  And speaking of Amanda, I’d made up my mind, almost, to call her tomorrow. That technically wouldn’t be after the first, but it would come close enough and give me a good excuse for calling: to wish her a Happy New Year. And yet, what if she hung up on me or declined again to be my friend, in which case I’d feel rejected, and we all know where that could lead. So maybe calling her on the first day of the New Year would imperil my recovery.

  I needed to talk to someone about this.

  “So what whaduhyuh think?” I asked You-Know-Who.

  “About what?”

  “About Amanda. Should I call her tomorrow?”

  “Risky.”

  “I know that. Are you saying I shouldn’t?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that if you do call her, you’ll be putting your recovery at risk.”

  “I know that.”

  “Splendid.”

  “So I shouldn’t call her?”

  “Again, I didn’t say that.”

  Talking to my Higher Power could be, um, challenging, but all in all it was worth it. And maybe that was the message. Calling Amanda would be worth the risk of rejection and its possible consequences. Besides, I couldn’t avoid taking chances the rest of my life merely because doing so might jeopardize my recovery. The trick was to take calculated risks and learn to deal, soberly, with failure.

  “Now you’re getting it,” Le Voice said. “Call her.”

  I promised I would, and the conversation trailed off after that.

  Still, it had been worth it.

  Chapter 92

  January 1, 1968

  I awoke in a sweat. I’d had a dream, and not an inspiring one like Martin Luther King’s, but a horrifying creep show like Edgar Allan Poe’s worst nightmare. Come to think of it, my so-called dream was a nightmare. Yet it seemed as real as the drenched pillow under my head. That’s the thing about dreams and nightmares. They seem surreal only in retrospect. While you’re in them, they’re real as hell. In fact, mine felt like hell, complete with flames raging all about me. On the other hand, the fiery environment was the least of my worries. The thing that made me perspire wasn’t the scorching heat but rather a ten-foot-tall, ax-wielding zit that chased me through those fires.

  I’m not kidding.

  The creature kept gaining on me, and I swear I could hear it hissing and spitting while its blade whizzed by overhead. I thought I’d lose my head, but as you know you can’t die in a dream, or even in a nightmare, so while my pillow was soaked, my body remained intact when I awakened.

  Where this nightmare came from I couldn’t say. I still got pimples occasionally, but they were bland and transitory, not loathsome or long-lived enough to embarrass me the way they used to. In a way, though, that was irrelevant, since dreams and nightmares were largely symbolic, at least according to the shrinks, who’d gladly interpret them for you in return for your first born, right leg or entire bank account. Your choice.

  The more I thought about my nightmare, the more curious I became about its meaning, which left me in a quandary since I couldn’t afford an analyst, or whatever you called one of those interpreters besides money-grubbing schmucks. There was only one way out of the dilemma, I decided, and that was to unravel the mystery myself.

  So that’s what I set out to do on the first day of the New Year, lying on a bed instead of a couch. After much thought and several tentative theories, I came up with an analysis that seemed to fit. My dream, or nightmare, was saying I should stop running from things that frightened me or made me anxious. I should face my fears and meet my monsters head-on. I should wield the ax, so to speak.

  This interpretation seemed apt to me because my resolve to call Amanda had waned the previous night, as all my irksome questions arose again. What if it was too soon? What if she hung up on me? What if she declined a friendship? What if I drank over the rejection? And so forth.

  These questions had come up as I was watching television, so by the time the ball dropped in Times Square I was a bundle of what-ifs and yeah-buts. Of course, my dream interpretation may have been a motivational ploy to deal with my reservations, but if so it worked because it revived my determination to call Amanda on New Year’s Day.

  Which doesn’t mean I left the comfort of bed and phoned right away. I lay there awhile, letting my analysis sink in, then I got up and shaved, showered and dressed in my winter finery of jeans, sport shirt and sneakers. Preliminaries completed, I brewed a pot of coffee, made toast and consumed both while going over the News in case a current event came up in conversation. It was high noon by the time I finished, and since calling Amanda now might intrude on her lunch,

  I brewed another pot of coffee and read the Free Press front to back to make sure I caught all of Rachel Solomon’s stories, of which there were three, including a front-page piece about the steady exodus from Detroit following the riot. I read each article twice as a tribute to Rachel and finished at 2:15. At that point I was newspapered out and tired of dallying so I finally called Amanda. And got a busy signal.

  I paced the living room, periodically staring out the window at the snow falling in sheets and burying everything beneath it, creating what some might call a winter wonderland. The parking lot, of which I had an unobstructed view, was covered in white, as were the barely discernible cars parked in their designated spaces. Beyond this delightful scene, the
streets were nearly empty, not surprising since negotiating them was treacherous while watching bowl games on TV was not, unless you counted getting fatter and drunker by the hour. I gazed a while longer before trying Amanda again, only to find the line still busy, no doubt with calls to and from friends and family. (Note to self: call Sheldon and parents to wish them Happy New Year.)

  Fleetingly, I envisioned sipping a hot toddy on this cold wintry day, but then told myself no.

  No no no!

  Which is when Le Voice arrived unbidden.

  “Damn right no no no.”

  “I already said that.”

  “I was simply agreeing with you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  On that note, I tried calling Amanda again. And got the same result. I glanced at my watch.

  3:05 p.m.

  Maybe I should go over there, show up unannounced as I’d done before she gave me her number. And if a neighbor tried anything funny, well, I’d protect us both. Hopefully. On the other hand, showing up early and without warning could piss her off. But what the hell, I was an ax-wielding, take-charge kind of guy now. I should go. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to get another opinion.

  So I sat in the easy chair and closed my eyes.

  “Well, should I go over there or not? She might get off the phone to answer the doorbell, right?”

  “Right. Go.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You’ll drive us both nuts if you don’t.”

  “Thanks. You’re a good … you know.”

  “Yes, I know. The question is, do you?”

  “I … that is, I think—”

  “Never mind, just go.”

  Well, if he insisted. I started to get up.