by Meghan Daum
“I know how to get ratings,” he said. Then he winked.
I will be forever indebted to them for this, I thought. Even as I had forced them to perform like midwestern monkeys, even as I told them what to wear, even as I privately mocked their provincialism and then exploited their provincialism for the sake of my career while insisting that my role was to debunk the myth of their provincialism, the Prairie Cityites were never less than perfectly gracious.
* * *
EVEN WHEN the folk dance music was replaced by Neil Young and Frank Fussell tried to call attention to himself by jumping over the campfire and explaining that he had learned the technique from the Pawnee Indians, they stayed at the party. Even as Mason didn’t once come out of the tack room and instead held court with anyone who came in to look at his paintings, which in the candlelight looked less like the work of a Picasso-influenced abstract expressionist and more like the product of a mental patient, the Prairie Cityites had the decorum to get drunk and stand around in their groups talking about the change in management of the health-food store and how disappointing the turnout was for the Prairie City March Against Intolerance this year and—despite the gnawing feeling I had that something was terribly wrong, despite my fear that they held it against me that I had not participated in the Prairie City March Against Intolerance—entertained the notion that I could entertain them.
Jeb wanted to make sure to get some shots of the stallion and so even in the darkness, as I held a small floodlight to supplement the light from the campfire, he filmed Lucky prancing around, bucking up against the fence, and letting forth loud whinnies. Lucky was as good a sport with the camera as the dancers had been, so much so that Jeb summoned the courage to move the camera inside the corral to get what he hoped would be an “artsy shot” of the horse’s face.
“I’m thinking if I shoot from below, if I crouch in front of him and point the camera up, I’d get a really cool shot,” Jeb said.
Suddenly Jeb was ambitious. Perhaps the success of the dancing scene had sent him dreaming of a regional Emmy (an honor Prairie City Public Television hadn’t received since a long-ago documentary about ethanol production). And suddenly Mason was out of the tack room, delighted to act as Lucky’s handler while Jeb set up the shot, which required floodlights that a number of the Effie’s people, as well as Joel and Sue and Teri, had to hold up.
It must have been while they were preoccupied with the lighting (and I was preoccupied with gauging Mason’s state of mind, which had seemed to lurch from comatose to manic within five-second intervals) that the horse had brought out his giant penis and begun slapping it against his belly. At first, the motion was little more than a source of amusement.
“Good grief!” said Sue, who had consumed a number of margaritas. “And I thought that scene in Boogie Nights was intense.”
“I think he likes you,” Joel said to the Effie’s woman.
“Better get thee to a nunnery,” Mason said bizarrely. He was holding Lucky’s bridle and laughing. I was standing off to the side in an effort not to get any more mud on my skirt.
“He’s not going to do anything, is he?” I asked Mason. “I mean, this isn’t going to, like, result in anything, is it?”
“Ah, hell no,” Mason said. He was snickering like an adolescent boy.
Jeb seemed willing to ignore Lucky’s behavior on account that at least the horse was standing still. He got on his knees and tilted the camera toward Lucky’s face, motioning for no one to move while he got the shot.
It must have been their midwestern work ethic, that Prairie City respect for authority, that kept the makeshift production crew from leaving their posts even as the sound of Lucky’s fully engorged, one-and-a-half-foot-long appendage hitting his chest and gaining momentum in both speed and volume caused nearly everyone at the party to cease his conversation and turn toward the horse at the very moment that he released, in the manner of a fire hydrant illegally unplugged, a spray of semen that traveled through his front legs and onto both the camera lens and Sue’s and Teri’s western-style shirts as well as one leg of Joel’s pants.
The party fell silent except for Neil Young’s “Ohio” playing from the tack room. A few seconds went by and Joel threw down his light and yelled “Jesus fucking Christ” and Sue dropped her light and tried to examine her shirt but Teri screamed “Don’t touch it! It might get in your mouth!”
People swarmed into the kitchen, wetting paper towels and rubbing them with dish soap. I followed Mason into the tack room, where he claimed to be looking for a towel. He seemed for a moment like he didn’t want me to come inside, and when I forced my way in there was a terrible stench, neither pot smoke nor cigarette smoke. More like something from a chemical explosion.
“What the hell is that smell?” I asked.
Mason, though he looked like he could barely stand, doubled over and started laughing so hard that tears fell straight from his eyes and onto the floor. There were beer cans every where. An ashtray brimmed with cigarette butts. The music was so loud that I couldn’t hear him laugh and he appeared to shake silently, his head bobbing up and down as if he had an uncontrollable twitch.
“How could you let that happen?” I yelled.
“That was a money shot if I ever saw one,” he said. His face was red from laughing. “Those people can’t even tell when a horse is about to spray himself on them. They might as well be from New York!”
“You better get a towel,” I said. “You better help me deal with this.”
But then I knew that something worse was happening. Mason’s paint brushes were spread all over the floor and tubes of acrylics with half the paint squirting out were on the rug. He had taken one of his finished pieces and begun painting over it. Stripes and polka dots now covered the demonic face and a new, even more demonic face was emerging where a perfectly rendered hawk had been.
“I gotta finish this painting first,” Mason said.
As if to contain the damage—not the damage of the horse but of Mason, who, in the time it had taken him to return to the tack room, had apparently forgotten that we had guests at all—I closed the door behind me and went back to the campfire. Sue and Teri, wearing borrowed jackets, were walking toward their SUV carrying their shirts in a plastic Hinky Dinky bag.
Had the event occurred under the auspices of anyone other than me, it might have been admitted into the canon of Prairie City folklore. Surely if the offending animal had belonged to the Peter Fonda county commissioner or to Joel or even to Sue herself, the episode would have instantly been converted to an anecdote that would dominate their party talk for decades. The horse himself would become an in-joke. “Don’t pull a Lucky on me,” they’d say while lounging around Sue’s pool. The phrase “Look, no hands” would be a constant refrain.
But the horse had been on my property. And the incident, whether or not they blamed me (and, after the initial shock, they all insisted it wasn’t my fault), was forever tinged with a larger feeling of unrest. Though they didn’t say it—not then anyway—Mason was a troubling specimen. The impression he made that night went beyond the adversarial note he’d sounded a year earlier at the Lasagna Factory fund-raiser. In his curious seclusion in the tack room, his insistence on Neil Young and nothing else, his affiliation with the regulars from Effie’s (and not the once-a-week Effie’s types, not the schoolteachers and secretaries who gave the place its populist cachet but the every-day-of-the-week Effie’s types, the perennial holders of odd jobs, the welfare check collectors, the borderline and not-borderline drunks, the bikers) Mason’s persona was no longer problematic, but an actual problem.
The Hidden Benefits of Tanning
The day after the barn dance, the Sunday when things officially began to unravel, Mason got up early to pick up Erin. The visit was at Julie’s behest, to make up for the way the barn dance conflicted with Erin’s prearranged Saturday stay. I was still in bed reading the Prairie City Daily Dispatch when they returned. Erin, as if there were a magnet drawing her to the telev
ision, immediately came upstairs and handed me a Pokémon video.
“Dad said to put this on for me,” she said.
I put in the tape, then got dressed and went downstairs. Through the kitchen window I saw Mason sitting in the yard with his head in his hands. When I walked outside I could see he was crying.
It was a breathtaking day. Autumn was fleeting in that part of the country and the morning was edged with a crispness that probably only happened six or seven days every year. The few trees, though they didn’t turn red like the maples and elms of the East Coast, had worked themselves into a respectable gold. The pasture gurgled with pheasants.
It was all working in his favor. The bucolic tableau. The Thornton Wilder backdrop that I used in my bullshit scripts, it was actually alive and real that day. Like it was mocking me. Like it knew the terrible thing that Mason was about to tell me. If only it had been a hot and miserable day. If only it had been anything other than a beautiful and miserable day.
“What is it?” I asked.
He continued sobbing. He couldn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “I never thought it would happen to me.”
And he spilled it all. Mason, who had gone forty years never getting addicted to anything, who had swallowed more acid, more pills, done more lines, drunk more beer than the Rolling Stones collectively (well, maybe not that much, but if he had been able to afford it, who knows?), was now addicted to the cheapest, trashiest, smelliest, most chemical-laden (we’re talking ammonia as a major ingredient) drug there was. He was addicted to meth. How it had ended up this way he just couldn’t figure. After all, as he explained it, he’d never even really tried the stuff before. It just wasn’t around his scene. But some guy from Effie’s had some, a guy he’d known for years, whom he used to go to Grateful Dead concerts with in the eighties. This guy was getting it from his son, his twenty-year-old kid. It was a family thing. This guy was a respectable guy, he owned a hardware store, the kid went to junior college. So how bad could it have been? And it’s not like they were making the stuff. We’re not talking about labs that explode inside barns—that’s for the Mexicans and the serious scumbags. And Mason, having some extra cash from selling his cabin, just happening to have ten thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills stashed in his night table, simply thought he’d partake a little. And the months went by. The months seemed to run together like a movie on cable TV; he was waiting for the commercial but it never came. He’d stop soon but somehow he didn’t. And six months went by, six months of taking money every few days from the night table, and the ten thousand turned into six thousand and then three thousand and then twelve hundred dollars, and, suddenly, a day before I was having dozens of people who disliked him out to the farm so I could put them all on television in New York, he realized he had three hundred dollars left. And he hadn’t paid off his creditors. He hadn’t helped me with any of the bills. He hadn’t gotten a vasectomy. He’d barely kept up with child support (though he never failed to pay it—he might have gotten behind, but it was always there, eventually it was paid, that’s what separated him from the sleazeballs). So he took the three hundred dollars and scored half an ounce of the stuff. He’d told the guy who got it from his son that he wasn’t doing it anymore. He’d told himself that even though he tried to stop back in August, tried to stop for two hideous days when he’d almost wanted to slap me after I freaked out over a mouse and he realized he couldn’t stop, that he’d stop now. He had to stop now. Because he was out of money. The ten thousand dollars was gone. The cabin was gone. And I, if I had any common sense, would see to it that he was gone, too.
I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist. It was not yet 8:30 A.M.
How to respond to information like this? Mason had resumed his sobbing and walked into the pasture. And as his plaid flannel shirt—the shirt that had, from a certain angle nearly a year earlier, as he had bent over to lock the gate near the cabin that he had sold for drug money, made him look like Sam Shepard—disappeared into the tall grass, suggesting Days of Heaven, a movie where Sam ended up tying Brooke Adams to a chair while the farm was engulfed in flames, my thoughts turned to where they invariably turned: myself.
Fucking moron. Self-destructive, naïve, blind victim not even on the Montel level but the Jerry Springer level. The filmed-in-shadow “I had a $300-a-day habit, I lost my kids, I lost my trailer” Up Early real-life-health-crisis-segment level. And I’d had the audacity, the gutlessness, the lack of imagination to sit there on the grass during his confession and say things like “What?” and “Oh my God.” As if it were a shock. As if I hadn’t suspected something was wrong, hadn’t wondered where his money was going, hadn’t noticed his leg jerking in his sleep (a common side effect of the drug; I’d even mentioned it in an early draft of the Up Early script).
In the house, in my office, I went through the closet looking for my notes from the segment. I’d dragged them all the way from New York to the apartment in Prairie City to the farm. You should always keep your notes for a few years. You never know when you might be sued. There was an entire box of them, downloaded data from the drug czar’s office, graphs and pie charts and National Institutes of Health figures, brochures from the Prairie City Recovery Center for Women. EMBRACE, EMPATHIZE, EMPOWER. If nothing else, it was ironic. That was something to hold on to, the narrative value of the situation. Surely that was greater than if not equal to the trashiness of the situation. Lucinda Trout, the girl reporter who had nodded in faux sympathy as women who lacked her innate sense of dignity and judgment spilled their drug-addled guts into her microcassette recorder; Lucinda, the smug Smithie who woke two million New Yorkers up to the news that a terrifying plague was gripping these once-innocent heartlanders, now found herself seeking a purer and more moral existence with a guy who blew through ten thousand dollars of meth in three months.
And like a child’s puzzle that takes the adult forever to put together, I suddenly realized why I’d turned my head all those times. It was the meat loaf. It was the flowers in the garden. It was the amazing enthusiasm he’d put into turning that heap of a house into a passable sound stage for a “Quality of Life Report.” The act of articulating the truth to myself, of forcing myself to recollect every instance of pretending he was an intact man, of literally walking in the other direction when he walked toward the barn, felt like throwing up a year’s worth of dinners. I sat on the love seat and made myself mouth the words. Here was the truth: Mason was better when he was high. He was funnier, nicer, and more sociable. Though, unlike the woman in the Up Early segment, “crazy sexual positions” hadn’t exactly figured into his addiction, he was, in some ways, a better boyfriend on meth. Perhaps (and this was horrifying) I’d even been afraid he would stop doing whatever it was that made him that way. Certainly I’d been afraid that I would find out and then be forced to make him stop. I would have either had to make him stop or leave him. And despite every thing, there was a spark in him that had addicted me to his bizarre, addled presence. I was addicted to his addiction. And now we both had to kick.
There was other stuff in the closet. Amazing what you just throw in there in the rush of moving into a new house. Winter coats in piles on the floor. Boots I’d forgotten about. A framed Tanglewood poster I’d felt exhibited too much class anxiety to hang up. There was a bathroom scale underneath a couple of sleeping bags and, out of a need for distraction, I stepped on it.
I’d gained six pounds. Five if I subtracted for clothing. Since when? I’d never been much for weighing myself. Bonnie Crawley actually had a doctor’s scale in her office and periodically a staff member, as if seized by a self-dare, would dart in her office for a midday check. But not me, not the serious journalist Lucinda Trout who aspired to work for public television and was above such concerns. Now, however, as though I were being transported back to the offices of Up Early, back to that moment when my proposal to move to Prairie City had been approved and I stood on the threshold of a purer and more moral life, I could hear Faye Figaro’s
shrill forewarning: “Don’t get fat.”
And it had happened. Just like she said it would. I was a blimp. Okay, not a blimp, not even fat, just a little soft around the edges. A little heavy in the hip, a slight paunch in the belly, eyes embedded a fraction of an inch farther into the flesh. Still reasonably attractive but now by midwestern standards. With hot rollers and the proper application of Maybelline bright lash, I could have been in the running for Miss Swine Queen in the county parade, a hot number standing in line for tickets at the state fair; pretty enough, but no longer, by New York standards, a player. Instead—and here was the horror—I had assimilated into the culture of Prairie City and the whole Midwest. The Thousand Island dressing, the spreads of deviled eggs at the parties (though when was the last time I’d been to a party?), the nightly margaritas had fomented into the person who now stood in this closet, Little Mermaid sheets tumbling onto her head from the shelf where Mason had carelessly stuffed them, a bound copy of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Schedule One chemical substance list jammed between an old computer and a broken CD player. In that cluttered room of that creaking house, as a hastening breeze shook the elm tree outside and the sound of cartoons seeped out of the bedroom, I realized that at that moment, in fact not even at that moment but many moments, many months, perhaps even a year before, I had crossed over into the error margin.
“Dad!” Erin shouted from the bedroom. Suddenly she was in the doorway of my office. She clutched the news anchorwoman Barbie I’d bought for her birthday after she once again declared she had no interest in Where the Wild Things Are.
“He’s outside, Erin.”
“The show’s over,” she said.
“What’s on after it?” I asked.
“Will you play Barbies with me?” she asked.
“Not right now,” I said.
“Can I go outside?” she asked.
“Do you want to watch your movie?” I asked.
