"Dwayne— this is a big so what! You're telling me you got really high at a party when you were a kid and went to bed with some guy. I don't see how that comes under the category of a Fourth Step 'moral inventory.' If you could see some of the creatures I woke up next to when—"
"But were any of those creatures men?"
"No, but a few may not have even been human, so—"
Dwayne smacked his cup down on the table. He was not going to let himself wriggle off of whatever hook he had fashioned for himself long ago.
"Jimmy, that was only the first time. It only happened when I got really stoned, though. I went back to the guy, Dale's house, the next weekend. For the drugs. He had the best drugs. The same thing happened… and maybe one or two times after that. Once in college. At New York University. And then never again."
I had no idea what to say. I knew I wasn't qualified to do this. If Dwayne was scratching at some locked closet door, I was not the one with the key.
"Dwayne, so far all I'm hearing comes under the category of youthful— and stoned— sexual experimentation. It's hardly a moral failing, you know. It's—"
"IT'S AN ABOMINATION!" Dwayne smashed the coffee cup down on the Formica and glared at me. The forehead vein was now beating like a wild beast. I looked around, hoping someone would come into the smoking section. I was in way over my head. Clearly Dwayne had some significant emotional issues that the A.A. tool kit was never designed to repair.
This was what the old-timers referred to as an Outside Issue.
I avoided Dwayne's gaze and bought some time by pretending to thoroughly extinguish my cigarette. Dwayne's too-blue eyes pinned me to my seat like a bug.
I reached into the Coke and extracted the cherry, popping it into my mouth. I've been told by friends that I have a talent for saying the wrong thing at precisely the worst possible time. This was one of those times.
"Dwayne, you know, there are A.A. meetings in San Francisco for all kinds of specialized… uh, interests. They even have—"
"What the fuck are you saying, pal?" The question was a coiled hiss. Another minimal clue I missed.
"I'm just saying that they have lots of gay A.A. meetings and you would probably find a sponsor there who could help you to—"
Crash!
With a savage swipe of one huge forearm the Monster cleared the table. Glasses, ashtrays, cups, silverware, salt and sugar dispensers flew to the floor.
The Monster was on his feet, backing away toward the emergency fire exit.
"You ignorant asshole! I try to tell you one fucking thing, confide in you a… mistake and you advise me to go to Faggots Anonymous? Who the fuck do you think you are? Judging me. Do I look like some kind of cocksucker to you? I was fucking married for twelve years! I got three kids!"
The Monster was loose again, backing up against the fire exit door, still shouting, index finger stabbing the air between us, more veins throbbing darkly on his face.
Too late, I tried to clean it up. "Dwayne, I never meant—"
"Shut the fuck up! You're fired, motherfucker! Sponsor, my ass! I must have been crazy to tell you about… You say one word, one fucking word, to anyone about what I said here and you've got a war, motherfucker, a war with me!"
The fire exit door slammed shut as Cindy came in to investigate the noise. She looked at the mess of sugar on the floor.
"What are you drunks doing back here? Tearing up the place? Everything all right, Jimmy?"
"Fine, Cindy. Sorry about the mess. I'll clean it up."
"No, that's okay. Where's your big friend?"
"He just left— he doesn't feel very well."
Cindy thoughtfully assessed the clutter on the floor and snapped her gum.
"Yeah, well… who does?"
* * *
The phone calls from the Monster started the following night— at two in the morning.
Dwayne was always high. Sometimes his words were slow and slurring, at other times they would rocket out in a frenzied torrent, usually incomprehensible. The content and tone would alternate from weepy and apologetic to abusive and threatening.
Sometimes the phone would just ring once or twice, but the Monster's number was displayed on our caller ID.
This middle-of-the-night pattern continued until the wife, both exhausted and worried, insisted I resolve the problem. After unsuccessfully trying to reach Dwayne at home all week, I finally turned to Ma Bell. The phone company (for three dollars a month— no employee discount) set up a call-blocking service so the Monster could not call us from his home phone number.
Over the next month I received at least three voice mails from Dwayne. Apologizing for his behavior, for the phone calls. His voice was sober and apparently sincere.
I didn't return the calls.
It was almost a year until I ran into Dwayne again.
Maybe a day or two longer until I was reacquainted with the Monster.
* * *
In the stock nightmares of my childhood the always unnamed monster would either get me or almost get me (the usual case), but I would always wake up with enormous relief. Just a nightmare. There really are no monsters.
Once the monster has a name, there is no real waking, just a slight shift in mental and physiological states. I killed the Monster in real life just once, but he has since killed me a hundred times in my dreams.
I naively believed that I had banished the nocturnal demons of my childhood, built grown-up fortifications and buttressed them with the impenetrable armor of middle-class respectability— the wife, the kids, the job, the house, the cars. Even the cubicle and the computers; the house with an electronic keypad to beep out the burglars and the other bad guys.
To keep out the Monster.
But the Monster is only amused by these pathetically flimsy fortifications, the high-tech cocoons of cell phones, voice mail, pagers, burglar alarms, and bloated 401(k) plans.
Better get busy. Busy is the best defense against the Monster. Take the wife and the kids to Disneyland. Then Disney World. To Maui— wowee! Build a redwood deck in the backyard. Make it big, I told the landscaping contractor. Less grass that way. I do not wish to be intimate with the lawn mower in the garage. Give the Vietnamese kids thirty bucks to grapple with that thing. And the electric lawn trimmer— whatever the hell that really does.
I honestly don't know. Growing up in Brooklyn, I didn't know anyone who had a lawn, or if they did, it didn't warrant machine care. When Brooklyn Jews of my generation wanted to know about such things, they simply married outside of the faith— shiksas often know about these home maintenance issues. They know about cars too.
I married a shiksa, and coming from a pastoral background (the suburbs of New Jersey), she brought to our marriage a knowledge of snail bait and weed killer and how to change fuses in that mysterious box in the garage. In phone company jargon we had "complementary skill sets." She would alert me to things like having to periodically add air to the car tires while I helped her with Lotus spreadsheets.
The wife also had what I regarded to be, early in the marriage, bizarre and extreme ideas about recreation ("Camping is fun, Jimmy"), health ("Smoking is bad for you"), exercise (she would, unforced, shvitz like a galley slave in a "gym" three times a week), and child-rearing ("Don't give the baby a Gummi Bear").
I loved my wife.
I loved my two little girls, my house in the beautiful Bay Area suburbs, my computer, my diversified equity portfolio. I especially loved the white baby grand piano in the living room. By the time the girls grew to be eleven and twelve they simultaneously lost interest in becoming world-class pianists, so I had to fill the vacuum of a soundless parlor.
My parents didn't waste their money on my piano lessons. I could pound out a dozen versions of "Heart and Soul," handling the bass and treble all by myself— I didn't need no stinking duets! And pound it out I would— punishment, payback for the girls not appreciating the privilege of piano lessons.
"Da-ad! Could you puh-lease
not play that now? I'm trying to study." Daughter #1 was a very conscientious student, but not of my music.
"Sorry, honey, I was just experimenting with some improvisational jazz." Good dads give good culture. Girl #2 yells down from the top of the spiral (faux oak) stairway, "Dad, it sounds like 'Heart and Soul' again— everything you play sounds like 'Heart and Soul.' "
Everyone's a critic.
We lived in the idyllic town of Danville, California, located about thirty miles east of San Francisco, in the protective shadow of nearby Mount Diablo. Having lived in big cities my entire life with their crime, noise, dirt, frenzied congestion, and uninspired subway graffiti, Danville seemed like paradise to me. Immaculately kept public streets and buildings in the old western-style (calculated but charming) five-block downtown area, virtually no serious crime, lush green hidden gems of parks and playgrounds for children, secret creeks and the unconvincing artificial "lakes" in front of the newer upscale housing developments.
Farms, cows, horses, and deer coexist with the sprawling gated communities of golf courses, tennis courts, and health clubs. The business parks in nearby San Ramon and Pleasanton— the high-tech I-680 corridor— allow for a pleasant 10-or 15-minute commute from most of the homes. A welcome reprieve from the traffic horrors of the Bay Bridge leading to San Francisco. The phone company moved its headquarters from San Francisco to the business park in San Ramon in the early eighties. We could now plot rate increases in the isolated splendor of the suburbs and feel safer doing it.
The public schools are the kind where parents stay enthusiastically involved in all aspects of education, generously contributing their time and dollars with a zeal normally associated with the alumni of private colleges. The public high schools consistently pump out adolescent grist for the polishing mills of U.C. Berkeley and Stanford.
There are still large patches of woods, tree-laden walking paths, scenic bike trails, and even a shrine for the local literati, the Tao House, where Eugene O'Neill is said to have written The Iceman Cometh.
Downtown Hartz Avenue is dotted with antique stores and art galleries, boutiques striving to be chic and quaint and charming all at once and often succeeding, elegant restaurants and European-style alfresco cafés where the young, the old, or just the weary can sip exotic coffees or a glass of chardonnay. Young mothers in bright summer dresses push baby carriages and window-shop, stopping to chat and laugh with friends and neighbors they encounter on the street.
With its almost all-white demographics and high concentration of professionals, Danville is an easy target for satire by our friends in San Francisco, a bridge and a universe away. To them it is a privileged enclave of Republicans and smug materialism. To them I would say, "So sue me!" I felt I had paid my urban dues.
For me, a survivor of a thousand nightmarish D train subway rides in New York's stifling summer heat, Danville was a place of such surpassing beauty and mountain-shadowed serenity that if it didn't exist I might have invented a place in my heart for it.
Danville, with its sheltering canopy of majestic old oaks, with an old-fashioned downtown soda fountain and an independent bookstore (where the friendly owners not only knew my name but would send me postcards to let me know when books they thought might be of interest to me had arrived), was to me a refugee from Flatbush Avenue, the American Dream.
With its own Monster, Dwayne Hassleman, lurking behind his curtains in a small house on Maple Street, just a few blocks from the Danville Players theater group. Just waiting. Waiting almost a year to come back into my life.
Was he really waiting for me? Waiting for me to get divorced and move in across the street from him with my girls helping me to schlepp boxes of books and blankets and towels and photo albums and old vinyl LPs? Was he watching us even then as the former wife gave me decorating suggestions and the piano movers wrestled with my piano so later I could pound out the music of pain and loss and despair?
Was it the sharp scent of my pain that roused the Monster, that was once again to make me the target of his obsessive interest? Or just my bad luck?
Or maybe it was just someone playing dice with my universe.
* * *
I was unpacking boxes that the former wife had considerately labeled "dishes," "books," "bathroom," "bedroom." I had taken a one-year lease on a small house on Maple Street in Danville. For $1,500 a month I was rewarded with a washer and dryer, two bedrooms (one for the girls on weekends and Wednesday nights), a small living room with hardwood floors, two bathrooms, and a beautiful backyard with preinstalled flowers, Japanese maples, and lots of bushes and plants. (Is there a difference?)
For an extra $150 a month the homeowners' association provided an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts, and a health club. The pool even had a diving board and a lifeguard on duty. It was my deluded hope that the girls would love having the use of a diving board (no diving boards at the former wife's pool) so much it would mitigate some of the fresh pain of the divorce.
Best of all was my view of Mount Diablo, which dominates the San Ramon and Diablo Valleys.
I was removing some books when the doorbell rang.
Assuming the former wife (for brevity's sake I'll call her the F.W.) or the girls had forgotten to give me some last-minute box, I opened the door.
Dwayne Hassleman stood there.
"Welcome to the neighborhood, Jimmy. I thought I recognized you. My house is the one with the green roof just across the street and three down. Need some help with those boxes?"
We shook hands. There was no sign of the Monster I had last seen at Denny's. Or that had made the late phone calls and threats. Dwayne appeared to be calm and healthy, muscles straining against a white T-shirt over his camouflage pants. Same jungle combat boots. Intense green eyes.
"Jimmy, I don't know if you ever received my voice mails— but I want to apologize in person for how I acted, not only at Denny's that night but the phone calls after. I was just so messed up back then that—"
I waved away the rest of his words. "It's all right, Dwayne. That was a long time ago. I'm glad to see you're doing well."
"You look good yourself. You still go to that A.A. meeting on Monday night?"
"Well, right now let's just say that I'm in between recoveries. Again."
"I know how that is. I've been meaning to get back into some kind of support group but—"
"Dwayne, you don't owe me any explanations."
"Hey, you're going to love this house. It's got a great backyard that overlooks the association swimming pool. I almost leased it myself when it became available last month after Mrs. Bush died."
"Why didn't you?"
"It didn't have the right kind of steps to play stoopball."
"But there's a great stretch of sidewalk to play skelly. You have any good bottle caps?"
"Hold on. I've got some Heineken in my fridge— be right back."
Fifteen minutes and two beers later we were back again in the Brooklyn of our youth, laughing and pretending there had never been the slightest rift in our friendship. There had never been a Monster.
On that day— a very bad day— I was grateful to have my friend Dwayne back.
* * *
Dwayne was Mr. Helpful that first day in my new home on Maple Street. Although it was a workday, a Monday, he appeared to have nothing more important to do than insist upon carrying boxes to the F.W.'s designated areas. At a certain point in the afternoon I realized that someone had removed every single lightbulb in the house.
"No problem," Hassleman said. "There's a new Ace hardware store off of Hartz— I'll be back in a New York minute." And he was out the front door before I could give him the bill I was pulling out of my wallet. A compulsive list maker, I already had on my "Moving— To Do List" a trip to the hardware store, the post office, the supermarket, then some take-out Chinese food.
Through the large picture window in the living room I watched Dwayne race down the cobblestone path that led from the front door to the
sidewalk. The stone walkway bisected a colorful front garden blooming and bursting with unknown (to me) varieties of plants and flowers. Parallel to the cobblestone walkway was my driveway leading into a two-car garage. Although our homeowners' association rules prohibited parking cars overnight in the driveways, most residents did it anyway— a suburban expression of civil disobedience.
The Monster's driveway across the street boasted a late-model silver Mercedes parked alongside a spanking new Range Rover. Dwayne paused a moment, examining his set of keys as if trying to decide on the appropriate mode of conveyance for the half-mile journey to Ace. He reached into a large pouch in his cammy pants and extracted one of those huge Banana Republic safari hats designed to deflect… what? Poisonous snakes dropping down from overhanging vines? Poison blow darts to the neck?
You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish Page 32
