Ash Wednesday

by Ethan Hawke

  I wanted to be able to give more than I take, to carry more than I’m held. But I felt so weak. I could have wept with disgust at my own ineptitude. We paused in front of the police station for maybe ten minutes before the male officer led Jimmy in. We didn’t even say good-bye to each other. It was only just before the car door slammed shut behind him that I heard Jimmy say, “I’m gonna come after you. You know I will. The question is, Would you come after me? That’s what you gotta figure out. ’Cause one day I’ll stop chasing.” The door closed and I was alone.

  The policewoman behind the wheel announced that she personally would be taking me to Sam Houston Memorial Hospital. We drove on, passing roads I had driven often as a child. I was sixteen the last time I was in Houston. Summers when I was a kid, on our way to Grandmother’s, Daddy and I would pull over at a watermelon stand, sometimes twice if it was ridiculously hot. In the winter we would stop for coffee and orange juice at the White Elephant café. From Grandmother’s bedroom you could hear freight trains rumble through late at night if you were still awake. Texas is a true-blue mythological place, at least it is for me. Maybe I left too young. It was strange watching the familiar landscapes pass by with no remnants of me as a child to be found anywhere. We passed the Doll’s House, a large building designed like a fairy-tale home of Hansel and Gretel. When I was little I thought that was where I wanted to work, until I turned about twelve and realized it was a strip club. Now I kept expecting to see myself come strolling around a building carrying a frosted angel-food cake from the Snow White bakery, but all I saw were more parking lots and modern glass and metal architecture.

  Sam Houston Memorial Hospital was where I had been born twenty-six years earlier, January fifteenth at exactly three minutes after midnight. I would call my father as soon as this policewoman dropped me off, I decided. Somebody would need to be there with me if things turned out as badly as I was anticipating. Ever since I’d seen my dad at my wedding I’d been missing him tremendously, which is funny because I don’t remember ever missing him in Albany. A wash of forgiveness and love for him had arrived out of the unknown. For so long I’d been angry with him, telling every new friend I made what a selfish prick he was. Now—maybe from working at the hospital and seeing so much real abuse, or maybe it was the baby, or maybe it had to do with time—I was realizing how much I had to be grateful for. Recently I’d even begun admiring him. His life had been so focused. A life seems to hold much more substance when it’s been deliberate and purposeful than when it’s been scattered. I wish I had found something to do much earlier in life and stuck with it. I’ve bounced around like one of those off-center balls that dogs love to play with because you can’t predict where it’ll go next.

  I poked my finger inside Grace’s little case and let her rub her wet nose against my fingernail. I’d never told Jimmy the reason I left this animal back in Albany was that cats are notoriously bad for pregnant women. They can carry some peculiar germ in their claws. At least that’s what I’d heard.

  It’s funny. I had had this notion that when you were married you could put to rest all the insecurities and musings about whether you should really be together, but it didn’t work that way. Marriage just seemed to have loaded the relationship with responsibility and fear of failure. I knew I had to stop caring whether it was a good marriage or a bad marriage, the right decision or the wrong one, and realize that it was gonna be all those things. It almost made me angry, the effort and courage it takes to keep slogging through. There’s something familiar about despair; it’s like a soft old blanket. I know depression; I feel welcome there. To believe that my life may be full of joy, laughter, and understanding fills me with so much fear of disappointment that I would prefer to smoke a cigarette and not believe at all. I either want everything to be magic and mythic or I want it to be dead. But I can’t take the everyday living with small disappointments and fragile victories, the grayness of maybe-it’ll-work-out and maybe-it-won’t. I always feel the end is right around the corner, so why even try? I can’t look at a calendar without wondering if I am looking at the date of my death. But then I will arrive at a perceived end, only to find it was a turn and the road goes on.

  At that moment, just minutes before I arrived at the hospital, I felt my baby move. As if I’d been given a shot of adrenaline to the heart, I awoke. That baby moved, and the heated glass walls of depression around me were once again splashed with hope.

  The simple action of that child moving let me know that I was gonna have to keep plodding forward, trying to do the right thing, trying to understand, trying to be understood, trying to pretend to be mature, trying to learn, trying to fake being strong. I could’ve laughed. You think something’s over but it’s not. You gotta exhale to inhale. I clearly, distinctly, felt my baby spin on some internal axis of my belly—and more than anything else, I instantaneously longed for Jimmy. He was the only one in the world I wanted to tell.

  THE MIDDLE WAY

  “Listen to me: no, no, no!” I was shouting into the sheriff’s department pay phone. “For two seconds, all right? Just listen to me.” Like I’ve said before, my lieutenant was a fuckin’ prick and he’d been talking to me like I was his twelve-year-old son. “If marrying my pregnant girlfriend and taking her home is suddenly dishonorable, then go right ahead. If that’s the truth, that’s what I want.”

  Dishonorable discharge. It had a terrible ring to it. I definitely wanted out of the military, but not this way. I wasn’t sure what kind of long-term ramifications this would have on the rest of my life—I couldn’t imagine much—but I hated the sound. “I am a terrible soldier,” I said. “I would never deny that. But I am not dishonorable.” I glanced over at the two police officers working the phones at the desks behind me while my lieutenant lectured me further. Being patronized by someone with an extraordinarily low level of intelligence is an indescribable humiliation.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I answered him, “and I haven’t been thinking too clearly.” I wasn’t sincerely doubting myself; even as I spoke I knew leaving the military was one of the most clearheaded decisions I’d ever made. “There’s no war going on. I didn’t let anybody down. The only people I could’ve let down were me, my wife, and my child, OK? They were the only people I might’ve failed in this situation. I saw the priority and acted accordingly, all right? Give yourself a little credit, buddy, you taught me that.”

  I shouldn’t’ve said that; it pissed him off.

  “Relax,” I said. That was another bad move. Never tell anyone to relax; it doesn’t help. “Listen, you taught me a lot. Mainly that I was never meant to be in the military.” My situation was deteriorating with each sentence. “So please release me, OK? I don’t mind, discharge me if you want, and you will never have to have another conversation with me again. But in one regard be generous, all right? Don’t fuck up the rest of my life with a dishonorable, OK? Nothing bad happened; nobody got hurt; I didn’t leave anyone in the lurch.”

  That was when he brought up Kevin Anderson and his mother and the assignment I completely botched.

  “That was your job!” I screamed into the pay phone. Everyone around me was now openly staring. “Kevin Anderson was your job, you know that.” Apparently, Mrs. Anderson had filed a complaint. Of course she complained; she should complain. Despite the anger I felt toward my lieutenant, there was a swell of shame inside my chest. For that action alone I probably did deserve all this shit. Actions have reactions; that’s what Christy would say.

  “Is there anything I can say so you won’t do that?” I asked, following one of my lieutenant’s longer monologues about my inadequacies and further threats of a dishonorable discharge. “You know what?” I asked. “I take that back. I deserve it and I’ll take it. Do whatever you want. God bless you.” And I hung up the phone. I couldn’t fight any longer.

  On the pay phone was a sticker with the familiar image of the Christian fish. It was an advertisement for the United
Protestant Foundation of Texas, accompanied by a phone number. My dad hated Protestants. Jews, Buddhists, even Muslims, were more popular with him than Protestants. “They’re weak-minded and uncommitted!” he would say.

  I need a new mentor, I thought, as I stared at the police desks.

  Seven months after my father died, I’d joined the army. Searching for some kind of order in my life, I was attracted to the regimen of the military. I wanted someplace I had to be. The chaos and freedom of adult life were overwhelming. Also, I could see now, I had been pursuing some kind of definition of manhood. It sounds drippy if you talk about it, but it was something I needed. Nobody was going to prop me up, I knew that, and I needed something to orient myself around. Six weeks in, it was clear I’d made a mistake. I stuck with it, though, hoping against reason that if I put in the effort the situation might right itself and I wouldn’t have to face my idiocy; but now that was all over. For a short period of time you can pretend you don’t know the truth. It’s like holding your breath. Eventually you have to come up for air. The deeper you bury a lie, the greater the pressure when it explodes.

  Officer Parks looked at me; he was a pleasant enough guy. We’d gone through the process together of fingerprinting, picture-taking, the whole nine yards, and he’d made it as undegrading as possible—which was still pretty degrading. I was so tired I could barely walk as he escorted me back to my holding cell. It doesn’t get much worse than this, I thought, as he locked the door behind me.

  For some reason I thought of July 4, 1976. Lying on a Navajo blanket in the open trunk of my father’s old yellow Plymouth, the sky exploded with fireworks around me. I was in the bull’s-eye of the universe. My father and I both wore Cincinnati Reds baseball caps and whooped and hollered and tossed them around as blue and white explosions rat-a-tat-tatted over the Ohio River. We were hiding in the woods by the river where you didn’t have to pay. The dull hiss of the flaming embers sifting into the water was like the sound of applause. This was my cleanest moment. This was pure grace. I was five years old and my dad’s best friend. My childhood seemed light-years away as I walked back into the holding cell.

  The cell was larger than I would’ve imagined, a rectangle with bars on one wall and benches on the other three. Two other guys were in there with me, one of whom was pretty much of a lunatic. He was scroungy and bearded, about sixty years old, sitting completely at ease in the far corner of the cell. The old torn tweed suit he was wearing was so large it hung on him more like a robe. Officer Parks had explained that every year the old guy tries to spend all of Lent in prison emulating Christ. Ash Wednesday, apparently, was the day Jesus himself was put in jail. Some people like to give up chocolate or maybe quit drinking, but this guy vandalizes property till he gets arrested and then stays in jail, refusing to pay the fine. He didn’t want to have to do any more property damage and pleaded with the officers just to leave him there in prison till the day of resurrection. He smelled like a homeless person. The cops were gentle with him. It was his third year in a row of pulling this stunt. They kept trying to explain to him that the taxpayers didn’t want to subsidize his peculiar faith habits.

  The other guy in the holding cell was a chatterbox named Steve McNally. About forty-five and a redhead, he was super nervous, pacing around the cell talking pretty much nonstop. He had been arrested for driving through a toll booth without paying, and he was complaining bitterly about being arrested for such a trivial crime. He had already come up with the fine and was anxious as hell to get released.

  “McNally,” a heavyset police officer called from his computer.

  Steve quickly snapped up his head. “Yeah, man, what’s the status?”

  “You checked out, you’re cleared, you’ll be outa here in a minute.”

  “All right, all right, all-right-a-rooney!” Steve shouted. “Open these doors, Long Arm, this bird’s gotta fly.”

  “Relax. I have to finish up the paperwork; it’ll still be a minute,” said the officer.

  “I told you, Long Arm, you can’t hold me—check all you want—my record is squeaky clean.” He turned around to us, singing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” Then he looked at my ring. “How long you been married?”

  “Three days,” I said, my nose still killing me. I sat on the aluminum bench just holding my face.

  “Good start.” He laughed. “Rock on, cowboy, you’re doing great!” He kept pacing back and forth, dragging his fingers along the bars. “Don’t be fooled, Tex, that ring around your finger is a tracking device; it’s a matriarchal society out there.” As he spoke, he was stealing glances over at his arresting officer, trying to see what was taking so long. “You’re gonna be in trouble!” he sang. “Women run everything, and they’re so goddamn good at it they’ve even snowed people into believing they’re the victims.”

  “Oh, yeah, but it’s really you, huh? You’re the victim?” I mumbled, not wanting to talk to anyone. There was a kind of magnetic rattle in my balls telling me I had to get out of this place and back with Christy.

  “No, man, I’m nobody’s victim. I’m just saying, don’t you go thinkin’ it’s a fair ball game out there in the world. Chicks make all the rules. One day you’re hanging out drinking, carousing, havin’ a good time in the local bar, right? Ladies think you’re sexy, you’ve got a good sense of humor. You’re a good guy, not doin’ anybody any harm, just enjoying life, takin’ it as it comes. Then you knock up one of them gals and you try to go back out to the bar—to laugh, to get a little play, throw some quarters in a jukebox—same old you, only now you’re a fuckin’ asshole.” He pointed his finger in my face. I really had no energy at all and just sat and listened. “ ’Cause you should be at home. You should be taking care of the baby. You should be gainfully employed. Grow up, all the women will tell you—but they want you to grow up on their terms. They want you to turn into the person they want you to be, and if you don’t, shame on you!” He brushed one index finger against the other, taunting me like we were in a schoolyard.

  “Don’t listen to him,” the homeless guy in the corner interjected, scratching his cheeks through his thick beard with both hands. “As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us,” he added, as if he were quoting from scripture.

  “Shut up, you’re a crazy person.” Steve waved his hand at the man as if brushing away a horsefly. “You think you’re Jesus, right? I mean, you lose all credibility right there.” He cupped his hands, imitating a loudspeaker, and continued, “You are totally out to lunch!”

  “I am Jesus,” the man said, still scratching his face as if he had fleas.

  “Well, if you’re Jesus what’s that make us, the two thieves?” Steve laughed, amused with himself.

  “We are all Christ in our own story. Both of you are Christ as well.”

  “Oh, brother.” Steve sighed and turned back toward the police desks. “Hey, Long Arm, get this guy a straitjacket, OK?” he shouted. “He doesn’t belong here with the healthy criminals of the world.”

  I rubbed my eyes with my wrist, trying to avoid contact with the pain in my nose and in my hand.

  When Christy and I were first going out and my father had only been dead a little while, I had a dream where he appeared to me with a blank look in his eyes and asked me if I had found Jesus Christ. That night in Christy’s bedroom, I wept my living guts out, like blood would come from my eyes. Christy held me but I couldn’t stop crying. “I won’t let go,” she’d said, and I just howled.

  Steve took another quick peek at the cop and then turned back to me, speaking more quietly. “I like young girls, right? I’m comfortable saying that. But I don’t like young girls for the reason my wife thinks I like ’em, not ’cause their tits are perky, not ’cause their pussies smell fresh like a spring day, because—I’ll be candid with you, and I’d be willing to bet you already know this—young chicks can smell just as bad or as good as their
moms, and there are plenty of twenty-year-old girls out there with saggy tits. Are you following me?”

  I remained expressionless, wondering how Christy was and what was going to happen to us tomorrow.

  “I don’t like young girls because they’re cute, and I don’t like them because I secretly still want to be eighteen myself; I’m comfortable getting old. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. I like young girls because they laugh.” He paused for effect. “When women get older, they forget how to belly-laugh. It’s like responsibility is their one fuckin’ line, their be-all and end-all.”

  Christy had a wonderful laugh.

  Steve sat down next to me. “Responsibility,” he hissed. “Screw a woman over thirty-five and she’ll give you the ride of your life—makes an eighteen-year-old look like a blow-up doll. I’m not talking about sex, I’m talking about a sense of play. My wife, man, she doesn’t understand that. She’s forgotten how to laugh.”

  “Maybe you never say anything funny,” the bearded man blurted out from his corner.

  “Oh, I’m funny, don’t you worry about that.”

  “Funny to an eighteen-year-old maybe?” the old guy suggested.

  “No. Funny, period,” said Steve.

  I’ve heard guys talk like this my whole life. I didn’t want a young girl, I wanted my wife. I wanted to be in her arms and cry my fuckin’ guts out.