“I can’t believe this. You didn’t even think to ask me first?”
“You would have just said no. You’re like a hoarder or something. You’ve been talking about burning this shit since we met.”
“Well, it looks like you got it all. Maybe you should go inside before you give Mapes a coronary.”
She glances over her shoulder at the neighbor, whose eyes are undoubtedly glued to Alice’s firm little ass.
“Hi, Mr. Mapes!” she smiles and waves.
“Hey, lil girl,” he drawls in his Appalachian twang.
A shudder runs through me.
I think about throwing my arms heavenward and shouting “How did I end up here!” but don’t want to be that dramatic.
“Betcha feel like crying, huh?” Alice takes the last drag from her cigarette and flicks it out into the yard. I look at the grill as if to say, “Couldn’t have just tossed it there?”
“No. You’re right. Someone had to do it.” I blink against the smoke and wipe at my eyes. “I feel more unburdened now. Like I can move on. Start the next phase of my life. Maybe take that programming class.”
“You’re full of shit.”
* * *
For dinner, we have store brand ravioli from a can, store brand potato chips, and tap water, which is probably toxic. Alice looks like she’s about to cry while we eat. She’s told me on more than one occasion the only thing she likes about eating is the cigarette she has afterward. I don’t know if this because of the bad food we eat or if she resents the fact that eating could make you gain weight and I’ve never cared enough to ask.
“So,” I say, “did you read any of the shit you burned?”
She flinches and pokes at a gelatinous glob of ravioli.
“Some of it.” Now she looks mad. “But, you know, I can only read so much about Callie. It’s boring.”
“Ah-ha. That’s why you burned it.”
“Why did you even want to keep it around? So you could jerk off to it after I went to bed? You told me you were over her. I helped you take the last step, I guess.”
“That’s ridiculous. You know it’s fiction, right?”
Nothing clicks in her eyes and I decide to elaborate despite the risk of sounding condescending.
“That means it’s not true.”
She scoffs as though offended. “I know what fiction means. I’m not that fucking stupid. Besides, if there was fucking in it at all, I know it has to be fiction. And just because you changed her name to Carly doesn’t make it fiction.”
I don’t let her finish dinner. I stand up and grab her by the arm, dragging her into the bedroom.
She doesn’t protest.
Afterward, we lie in bed, naked, feeling the cool breeze from the ceiling fan and sharing a cigarette. The window is open and Mapes’s little dogs are yapping like crazy. The sound of the dogs sends me into a rage spiral and I take a drag of the cigarette and tell myself that Mapes is just a lonely, simple old guy and not a creepy 400-pound tumor who has been pressed up against his fence listening to us fuck.
“Are you going to write about me one day?” Alice asks.
“I don’t think I’m going to write anymore. Besides, if I do, all of my male characters will be impotent and alone.”
“Depressing.”
“Viva misanthropy.”
4
Dr. Jolly
Dr. Jolly is not really a doctor. He has a framed certificate hanging on the wall of his ‘office’ from something called Dr. Blast’s School of Enlightened Well-Being. Curious, I researched this one day and, from what I could figure out, discovered that Dr. Blast’s School of Enlightened Well-Being was a mail scam that reached its heyday in the mid-seventies.
Really, he’s just Claude Jolly, a rangy man with a thin white ponytail and big white beard. Dr. Jolly’s Godwater was born from his love of hydration, enthusiasm for glassmaking, and good fortune.
The love of hydration stems from his boxing days, something he made a genuine go at in his late teens and early twenties (a really long time ago!). Hydration is essential for any athlete and Dr. Jolly decided he trained and fought better when his water bottle was loaded with the good old stuff from the family farm’s well. Perhaps this was just an excuse for getting his ass handed to him when he ventured away from the rings of the Midwest and into more legitimate areas like New York or Las Vegas. Boxing is not something he abandoned altogether and it is not unusual to arrive at work and find him or one of his employees laid out in the parking lot. He says it’s essential for the destruction of ego.
His enthusiasm for glassmaking was discovered when he retired from the ring at age twenty-four and began smoking marijuana and dropping acid to deal with the physical and emotional traumas suffered during his boxing days. He took a glassblowing class and an apprenticeship with a man who had a shop at one of the local renaissance festivals who he found wandering the grounds of his family’s estate one fall morning in a mushroom-induced vision quest. He began traveling the circuit of renaissance festivals all over the US and Canada and, when there wasn’t one of those to be found, he sold his wares out of his Volkswagen Vanagon in the parking lot at Grateful Dead shows. On his trips home, he would fill up his empty vessels with water from the family’s well, to give them weight as much as anything. “After all,” he would say, “a bottle filled with water is a bottle filled with life. An empty bottle is just an empty bottle.” The philosophy behind this was inarguable.
His good fortune came when both of his parents were killed by their prized bull, Clancy. His parents had amassed a small fortune by operating a dairy farm on the outskirts of Twin Springs and that fortune landed squarely in Dr. Jolly’s lap. He took the death as a sign, sold all of the cattle, closed the ice cream stand (which disappointed many of the townsfolk, as it had really become more of a low-grade amusement park and was a local staple and something of a tourist attraction), and became vegan long before it was the trendy thing to do. He sold off two-thirds of the farm to a local developer who specialized in eco-friendly housing developments long before that was the trendy thing to do, the amount made from this sale ensuring him he would never again need to do anything he didn’t want to, as if he ever really had. He started Dr. Jolly’s Godwater in the early eighties—locally sourced water in a hand-blown glass bottle with his patented E-Z Cork stopper plugged into the opening. Since his first week of operation, the demand has always been higher than the supply.
I learned none of this history from actual conversation with Dr. Jolly. It’s a heavily abridged version of what can be found on his website, which runs in excess of 20,000 words. I remember applying for the job with Gus, both of us laughing about it and thinking, “Well, this won’t last very long.”
That was ten years ago.
I pull into Dr. Jolly’s Godwater Campus (so says the ornate wrought iron sign over the long gravel driveway). The campus features a large Quonset hut where bottles are made and the water is poured, the Well of Purity, Dr. Jolly’s ‘office’, and, farther back up a small hill, the sagging remains of the Jolly farmhouse. Dr. Jolly’s office is a large tent set up beside the much larger Quonset building. He says he’s sensitive to noise and prefers not to be around the sounds of industry all day. We all know he mostly stays out there, reads obscure philosophy books, and partakes of endless bottles of two-thirds Dr. Jolly’s Godwater and one-third vodka, the good stuff.
He does venture into the building two or three times a day and today I find him on his hands and knees in my station, rooting around on the floor.
“Morning,” I say.
He’s holding something between his thumb and forefinger and muttering, “Blueberry.” He picks up something else and says, “Flax seed.” These are presumably from the last batch of trail mix I ate at my station, something we’re not supposed to do. Or it could just be residual detritus from my beard, carried to my station from the break room.
“It’s like a forest down there, huh?” I say because it doesn’t really matter wha
t you say to Dr. Jolly. He doesn’t really listen to anyone.
“Place is filthy,” he says. “Get a broom and sweep up before you start.”
I’m convinced he still doesn’t know my name.
“Sure thing,” I say.
I’ll probably wait until Gus comes in and tell him Dr. Jolly told me to tell him to do it.
I think about asking him for a raise, something I’ve been trying to work up the courage to do for the past several years, but he’s out the door too quickly.
I look at the wall of twenty-ounce bottles ready to be filled, the basket of corks that will need to be twisted into them. I sit down in my chair, wheel myself up to the charged quartz faucet, and get to work.
Dr. Jolly’s Godwater. Now with even MORE beard hair!
5
Charle
“Harder?”
Smack!
The sounds of Alice come through the bedroom as my phone vibrates in my pocket and I pull it out to see my ex-wife’s number on the screen. Instant panic. My body immediately erupts into a fury and I use my right hand to vigorously scratch my shin while pressing ACCEPT with my left thumb.
“Hello. Everything okay?”
Smack! Smack! Smack!
I get up from the couch and move into the kitchen.
“Everything is not okay,” Jen says. “We need to talk about Charle.”
Jen usually skips any pleasantries and gets right to the point. Charle is my fifteen-year-old son. We named him Charle after much debate. I wanted to name him Charles, after the only grandfather I liked, thought maybe we could call him Chuck—a robust, manly sounding name—but Jen had said Charles sounded “too plural.” So I’d sarcastically suggested Charle and that’s what stuck. We should have known the boy would be fucked up since he started life as a passive aggressive argument.
“What’s up?”
“He bit another kid’s finger off at the Academy.”
“Well . . . did the other kid deserve it? Wait . . . another?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Do you need me to talk to him?”
She laughs. “Um, no, definitely not. His therapists and I have decided you’re part of the problem.”
“So what can I do to help?” I know what she’s about to ask. When we got divorced, she moved to Florida to be closer to her parents, thus putting me, physically, out of the picture.
“I need you to start sending me a couple hundred dollars a month so we can move him to a better school.”
The Academy is basically a military school and, I imagine, not very cheap.
“I’m already paying child support. And I’m barely scraping by as it is. I don’t think there’s any way I can do that.”
“Are you serious?”
“Um, yeah, pretty serious. I’m living off water and party pizzas. I think my insides are rotting. I have a rash.”
“Haven’t you had the same job for like ten years? Can’t your teenage slut pay some of the bills?”
This is why I had to get off MyFace. I’m not a paranoid person but Jen has proven time and time again that she stalks my movements and if there is ever a public demonstration of me remotely enjoying life, she will do whatever she can to put a stop to it. We don’t have any mutual friends and don’t talk much, so that’s the only way she can know about these things.
“Okay,” I say. “First of all, Alice isn’t a teenager.” I think about saying, “And she’s not a slut,” but, I don’t know, maybe she is. I’m just not judgmental about it. Instead I say, “And asking her to pay for our son’s transgressions is a little fucked up.”
“‘Transgressions?’ What kind of a word is that? Oh, and speaking of words, when are you gonna get that big book sale? I mean, that’s what you like to do, right? Write stupid little books? You sure didn’t have time for me when we were together. Isn’t that why you’ve never gotten a real job.”
“I don’t really do that much anymore.”
“Oh, so your little teen slut’s good enough to give it up for but the mother of your only child wasn’t.”
Ultimately, this is what the phone call is about. It’s not really about the money to send Charle to a better school. It’s more about her making me feel small, like a deadbeat loser. It’s something I think of as a semi-annual adjustment to my ego.
“Look, I’m not going to be able to send you an additional two hundred bucks a month, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“What about your tax return? Don’t you have anything left from that?”
“Tax return?” I laugh. “I never paid off my student loans. They take that every year. They have ever since I dropped out.”
She scoffs.
Alice wanders into the kitchen. She’s naked, red stripes streaking her tiny pale ass.
“Thanks for wasting my time,” Jen says.
“Um, you called me.”
“Do you know how useless you are?”
“Thank god if I ever forget, I have you there to remind me.”
“Send me what you can. It’s important. Charle is important.”
Charle is important. Almost like an afterthought.
“Yeah. I’ll see what I can do. Tell him I love him, okay?”
She chuffs out a laugh, says, “Yeah, okay,” and hangs up.
“Who was that?” Alice says, even though I’m pretty sure she knows.
“That was my conscience.”
6
Easy J’s Travel Plaza
Some guys hang out at bars or around TVs watching sports or playing video games. Gus and I like to hang out at Easy J’s Travel Plaza, a truck stop off I-675. It’s something of a Friday ritual. We’d also done it when neither one of us felt like going to work, opting to spend a day in the Easy J Inn, their restaurant, watching the various truckers and other patrons come and go. The people watching is what sets Easy J’s apart from bars. Hip bars are full of trendy, reasonably attractive people ostensibly on their way up. Dive bars are great but are often too crowded on Friday nights and they’re filled with gruff people who have nothing to lose. Fuel these people with cheap, additive-laden booze, and it gets a bit scary. Many of them are often of a certain redneck, blue-collar persuasion, and Gus and I stick out like sore thumbs. We tried it exactly once but our long hair and beards were like calling cards for abuse. We debated trying a biker look but ultimately decided there was something overwhelmingly soft about us we would not be able to cover up with any amount of leather or patches. Jerry Garcia could not become Lemmy from Motorhead overnight.
“I’m ready to try it again,” Gus says.
“Try what?”
“Infiltrating the well.”
I’ve already put our previous botched attempt out of my head.
“Remind me again why you want to do this?” I ask.
“Principles. Symbolism. Metaphor.”
“What if people end up getting sick?”
“Then it won’t really be a well of purity, will it? Plus . . . think about it . . . Doesn’t Dr. Jolly drive you insane? The way he walks around all high and mighty and self-righteous . . . for doing absolutely nothing at all! He hires people to make bottles. He hires people to fill them. He hires people to drive them to stores. While he sits in his stupid tent office and drinks and reads and listens to weirdo music.”
“I like weirdo music.”
“That’s not the point. Shouldn’t he be grateful? I mean, come on, the dude hasn’t had to work since he was like in his thirties. We make his life easy. What does he even need money for? He doesn’t have any kids. He’s not expanding or franchising or anything. He doesn’t donate any of it that I know of. He just hoards it. Meanwhile, people like you and me are fucking struggling. I mean, I’m paying for you to eat tonight at a shitty greasy spoon truck stop because you can’t afford it.”
“I can afford it. You offered.”
“That’s not the point. Maybe you can barely afford it, but you would still feel the cost of it. Like, you would have to ask yoursel
f, ‘Can I afford ten dollars to eat with Gus tonight?’ I know I had to ask myself that. And we shouldn’t have to! We work full-time fucking jobs. If we want to have a night out to eat or drink a couple beers or watch a fucking movie, we should be able to do it without thinking about it, without feeling guilty about it. I still live with my fucking mom!”
“How is infiltrating the well going to change any of that?”
“Because we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“That Dr. Jolly is a fake.”
“And how does that help us?”
“Self-satisfaction.”
“It seems like it would almost make it worse. Like, it’s bad enough that we’re essentially helping Dr. Jolly live whatever life he wants to live. Wouldn’t it be worse if we were also helping him sell water from a well of purity, filtered through a charged crystal faucet, even if it were garbage water? It just seems like then we’d knowingly be aiding him in the perpetuation of a lie. Like if we just went into our job and filled fancy bottles with municipal tap water. At least this way we can convince ourselves he’s maybe sort of special because he inherited rights to some kind of sacred water reservoir.”
Gus shakes his head. “Do you really believe that?”
“Not really. But sometimes I want to.”
“Anyway, like I said before, it’s about principles.”
“Is this about not getting a raise?”
“That certainly plays into it.”
“Have you ever asked him for one?”
“No. Have you?”
“No.”
“Fuck. That’s why he employs people like us. The spineless. The weak. The failures. We’ll never be fired, but we’ll never get a raise either. Because we fuck up too much. Like, it’s hard to ask for a raise when you call in or just don’t show up three-to-eight times a month.”
“I’ve considered that. Why do we fuck up so much?”
“It’s in our blood. We were born to be stout working class Appalachians. We were not meant to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The second we picked up our first book and developed big ideas, we disqualified ourselves. Maybe college would have helped but we have enough wild hillbilly in us to feel imprisoned by it. We should be mountain philosophers, drunk or stoned all the time, holding venomous snakes in one hand and filling notebooks with the other. We should have insects and rodents in our beards.”
Failure As a Way of Life Page 2