by John Hansen
“Don’t overreact,” Scott said, taking a sip of the last of his wine.
He motioned to Steve for more by pointing at my glass and then his. “She’s just got cold feet – probably has picked up on the fact that you’re proposing or something – she’s young and she really acts like it sometimes.”
“No she’s ending it. You didn’t hear her voice.” I shook my head slowly, looking around the empty bar. I was trying to think of a way to convey to him this new rising feeling of loss and anger and loneliness I was experiencing right there in front of him, but what could I say?
“I knew this was coming,” I said. “Something told me … something about her changed at some point.”
Scott was nodding slightly. He seemed to be listening still, which was a good sign, not too drunk. I tried to keep talking but then I gave up and just frowned down into my beer. The drinks came from Steve and he plopped down bowl of unshelled peanuts between us.
Scott picked one up and crushed it in his fist.
“Well?” he asked, “what are you going to do about it?”
I pictured the way Holly always bounced up and down and smiled at me happily when I came to her door after driving to see her – it was my favorite image of her. She was always such a fresh charge of joy for me, like refilling my cup when I was dead thirsty, each and every time. I felt myself tearing up all of a sudden – there in that ridiculous bar at 12:30 pm on a Monday.
Scott and I were not the type of guys to cry and carry on in front of each other, even as close as we were, so I fought back the tears and took a big gulp of the beer.
I swirled the beer slowly in my glass. “She just up and said that we were done, so sudden, not a half hour ago, man… broke my heart…” I trailed off.
Guys talking about emotions with each other is usually done only with slight hints, embarrassed and sarcastic wisecracks, indirect suggestions, rarely the pouring out of your heart that many women do so well. It’s always this awkward dancing around the real feelings with men, always a show of cynical bravado amidst the pain. But Scott’s next question took me by surprise.
“Will? I been thinkin’” he swirled the wine in his glass. “What do you want out of this life?” He said it with such a strange voice, with a quiet, almost embarrassed conviction that I looked up at him. Conviction was something rare for him.
“You hate your fuckin’ job,” he said, holding one finger up, “you hate this town,” a second finger, “and you hate your life,” third finger. “You’re gonna hate Holly soon.” Fourth finger.
“I’ll never hate her,” I responded.
“So,” he said, ignoring me and closing his fingers, dramatically making a fist and shaking it in front of my face, “what would make you happy then, in this screwed-up world? Really? What would make you happy?” He put it to me like a challenge.
“Where’s all this coming from?” I asked him. “Is this all from that weird motivational speaker your parents sent you too in Orlando?”
“Answer the question, if you can,” he said with a half-smile, shaking his head, “hell, if you even know.”
“What do I want?” I asked. “I don’t know.”
I paused and thought about it a moment. I looked back at him, a strange conviction fighting to surpass the pain and loss in my heart. It was difficult to put into words what that arising feeling exactly was (difficult for a guy to say it at least) but I did my best.
“I… I want to get what I want!” I stammered, glancing around the completely empty bar and nonetheless lowering my voice. “And I want the girl of my dreams waiting at home for me, in a big house, and I want that house to be in a place that I like, where I’m happy, that’s what I want...”
Scott looked down with a smirk on his face and grabbed some peanuts, spilling some on the table. “You need to get more specific than that, buddy,” he said, “if you want to get anywhere in this life.”
Ironic it was that Scott, of all people, was trying to be my life coach – my drunken, usually-unemployed, erratic motivational speaker who veered back and forth between the six-figure jobs and the bar stool. But then again he had already lived twice of my lifetimes. But then again he had me meet him at Coco Joe’s without a shred of embarrassment.
But he was sincere about what he had just said, I could tell that much. He spoke in sarcasm perpetually, but behind it I knew he was as invested in my being happy as I was – he needed my life to be working out, as the only life raft for him to hold onto.
I took a big sip of my beer and sat forward, looking at him, trying to find the words to spell out some kind of a feeling that was I had been carrying around inside me all morning. My face felt hot and my throat hurt as I swallowed down more feelings.
“There has to be more than this for me, for us,” I said. “Don’t you think, Scott?”
He shook his head, “No.”
But I pressed on. “I just want to be someplace where I feel like… like I’m not missing out on something, you know? I fucking feel like I’m missing out on everything now, man, and I want to be in a place where that feeling stops.”
“And it’s not here,” Scott said, pointing a finger down on the table we were at, and then draining his wine. He looked back at me. “Everyone feels like that you know.”
“Not like this,” I said, my voice constricted. Regret filled my heart as I thought of all I had said.
It was pretty much what most people felt, Scott was right, but to the same degree that I was feeling right now? Was the whole world so sick and disappointed, so angry?
“You’re just stuck in the moment, overreacting,” Scott said.
No. Holly saying what she had said just woke up what was already slumbering inside me, and she woke it up with a vengeance. I thought, as I sat there in Coco Joe’s, of other girls I had loved before Holly that hadn’t worked out. I thought of other things I had tried so hard to get or to accomplish over the years: music, sports… a kind of… specialness.
I thought of loss and disappointment, of past faces and images, and goals, of bitter memories and embarrassing things. I was quickly spiraling into a worsening depression, sitting at that table at Coco Joe’s, and I was supposed to be the life raft! Who could I hang on to now that a storm had truly come for me? Didn’t I need a life raft?
From out of the storm clouds Scott said, “So what you want is Montana.”
He smiled at me as he said that, with a slight sarcasm in his voice, but this “Montana” thing was an old joke between us. The joke existed because I had announced, more often than not in desperation and more than once to him over many years that I was “moving to Montana.”
I really had in fact always been obsessed with Montana since I was young and had travelled through parts of the state on Boy Scout trip. After seeing my camping trip slide show pictures after returning, I was hooked and was thereafter obsessed with what I imagined to be the visceral struggle and the harsh majesty of living up there year round – Eden-like summers, hellish winters in the harsh and beautiful Rockies.
Montana had fascinated me ever since that boyhood trip, living in the mountains, living wild and free; and it had become of kind religious mantra of mine when things got bad – that I would soon be “moving to Montana;” a kind of “screw this place!” statement. It was funny also because it was so damn far from Georgia.
My worship and cult-life reverence for Montana was further engrained in me when I was in college and saw the movie Legends of the Fall, with Brad Pitt. After watching that I had decided right there, in the theatre, that I was going to live in the remote and majestic mountains in Montana and start up a ranch, somehow, someway, or at least get some kind of job up there. I had even looked at jobs there my senior year, teaching English Lit in high school, and had even applied to work on a ranch. I spent time studying maps that semester, working out where the best land was to buy, and what the state law required in terms of ranch operation and land management. But the grind of reality and distractions of the present had
slowing caused that feverish obsession to fade – not slowly, actually, it had quickly faded that senior year like a candle in a jar puffing out into smoke – faded into a joke.
The practicalities of life had slowly extinguished the ember of that childhood dream in the ensuing years, and my obsession had been whittled away to a mere nostalgic regret, to a mere joke to be uttered in a dive bar in Atlanta on a Monday afternoon.
“I don’t know,” I said with a frown. “I’m just sick of it all, sick of wasting my time.”
Even as I said this, I knew it sounded whiney, self-pitying, but I couldn’t now stop once I had gotten started, not after this morning, not after Holly’s scare, not after this grind in which I felt trapped. These feelings were actually growing more intense within me as each second passed as I sat with Scott. I didn’t care if I sounded “woe is me.” I had never felt this level of dismay before, dismay bordering on a rage, and it was starting to scare me.
I raised a finger back at Scott now. “There was my making it in music,” I raised a second, “my publishing a novel…”
Scott took a gulp of wine, not looking at me, as I continued.
“My working on a ranch in Montana,” third finger, “my marrying a beautiful girl,” a fourth finger slowly raised.
“God ENOUGH!” Scott suddenly slammed his hand on the table loudly, nearly knocking it over as the glasses shook and spilled over. Steve looked up quickly from the bar, frowning again.
“Fuck all that!” Scott said angrily, his speech slurring slightly. “Fuck this defeatist bullshit, man. That’s not you Will. You aren’t that type of person. Go out and fucking get it – if you want it. If you got the balls.”
He looked closely at me, as if seeing something strange in my eyes. “Where’s the guy that put off college to tour in a band, against his asshole father’s express orders not to, who ended up playing on stage with R.E.M.?” he asked. “Where’s the guy that fucked his college Shakespeare professor even though she was married and her husband is a well-known cop?” He looked around the bar theatrically as if looking for “that guy.”
Both of those stories about me were true, and Scott was always mentioning them when I got down, but it didn’t necessarily make me feel any better as he catalogued them. But then Scott looked back at me and grew serious, leaning towards me.
“And where’s the guy who talked me off the ledge that day, missing his college graduation ceremony to do it?”
I did feel something as he said that; that story was the darkest time in Scott’s dark life. He was going to kill himself, the only time I had seen him try it. He had taken an entire bottle of Paxil and drank a half a liter of Vodka by the time I found him. H had sent me a bitter and heart-wrenching farewell via text, which I got right before the start of my college graduation ceremony, with my father in the audience, gowns and hats on and everything.
It was so disturbing that I got up from my row immediately, stepping past all my seated classmates, and I called 911 as I ran to my car and drove off to where he was. The next thing I knew I was on his bathroom floor, my graduation gown still on, tears in my eyes, making him puke with my finger down his throat as he lay on my lap, half dead, yelling at him to wake up.
He was put in a psych ward for two weeks after that. They made him wear pajamas and told him when he had to go to sleep at night. Just thinking of him there still jarred me.
I did not like to think of that day at all and Scott never mentioned it either, until that day in the bar, when I had pretty much lost my way. He brought up that terrible moment, his darkest, most embarrassing moment, the moment he looked the most foolish, desperate and crazy. And he brought it up to shock me back into life. I loved him for things like that. He did stuff like that sometimes.
I didn’t know what to say after he said that, so I said nothing and just looked back at him.
He continued. “Will, you don’t need to stay here if you don’t want to.” He meant Atlanta. “You can do anything you want. There is a huge world out there, and you have what it takes to make it anywhere.”
“And you know what?” He leaned forward again, holding my attention. “You are lucky.”
“How so?” I asked.
“You haven’t ever made any real mistakes, not yet, not like me,” he said. “I had everything before, as you know, and I lost it all. I’ll have it all again I know, but I’ll probably piss all that away too again. You, however, went from childhood to school, from school to work, and from work to home, without really fucking anything up. You’re untainted, man. You can do anything you want.”
I thought this over, and marveled, not for the first time, at Scott’s erratic philosophy of life – a mix of a reckless, kind of “fuck it” fatalism, and a stubborn, hopeful, bullet-proof optimism, all rolled in together into a person who defied labeling.
“And as for Holly…” he continued, his voice slurring slightly, he crushed a peanut shell in his hand as if to emphasis his point, “man, she wasn’t the one for you. Don’t you see that?”
I just sat in silence, wondering if what he was saying was in fact true.
He shook his head, “No, you don’t.”
I was about to respond but he wasn’t finished. “And you should remember one thing. You have the entire world out there,” he pointed a finger back toward the window covered with blinds which dimly let some light in. “A whole planet that you can take on. You have nothing at all holding you back. Nothing. I wish I had your freedom. You could go anywhere.”
He drained the last of the wine. “You not being a part of anything, means you got nothing to keep you here, nothing keeping you.
You can go anywhere,” he repeated quietly.
Scott had a little girl with his ex-wife, a sweet little girl of two years old, named McKenzie. She had some serious heart valve issue that was constantly worrying him and that needed continual and costly medical care. But Scott was lucky too, because she was a beautiful girl, who was the only pure thing that Scott had left in his life.
He got up from his chair, patting his suit pockets for his pack of cigarettes, “You can go anywhere.” He repeated a third time. I looked at him – he was starting to sound strange.
“Stevie! More wine!” he suddenly shouted at the bar, the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.
It was unnerving, I thought, Scott making serious statements about my life, my situation, when his was life so erratic and on the edge. But some people are just better at discerning what other people’s lives need, rather than what their own life requires. That’s what made him a good salesman, probably, knowing instinctively what people need. And as I looked over through the blinds of the window out at the street, I knew he was right, about me, about the whole thing.
I remembered also, just then, what had brought to the bar that day. I called over to him as he walked towards the door, swaying a little bit. “What should I do about Holly?” I asked. “What about all our plans, the engagement, all that stuff? I’m supposed to just walk away from all that?”
He paused by the door and lit the cigarette, glancing over at Stevie – it was a non-smoking bar. “Take all that as a lesson learned and experience gained.”
And he shoved the door open. He stood there for a moment and said, almost to himself, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and he walked out into the stark sunlight.
What lesson was to be learned by all of this? I wondered, as I sat back down by myself in an empty bar. Maybe this was the last chain that needed to be broken to snap me out of this place I was in – a job I hated and a girl that dumped me. I loved Holly, but what good had the relationship done me, really?
Maybe this was the shock I needed to snap my heart back into beating, like a love defibrillator. What had happened to me? Where was that guy Scott used to know? I shook my head in a haze of doubt and fear, and finished my beer alone.
I eventually left Scott smoking outside the bar. He stood there secreting little sips of wine on the sidewalk. I told him I had to go figu
re out what to do as I left. He told me to come by his place later to have dinner with him and Brooke.
I had a beer buzz as I walked to my car. Self-medicating, I thought; Scott rubbing off on me. But he was right, was he not? His words had an effect on me, even though I had known him so long and knew pretty much every thought that came to him before he said it; his words had hit me in a place that registered deeply.
I had gotten soft; I had grown weak, accepting, defeated, and hesitant. But when had I become a victim?
Another favorite movie of mine had always been Smokey and the Bandit, not as ridiculous a movie as some believed. The Bandit’s philosophy of life, his freedom, his fearlessness, and his lack of concern about… anything, had seemed the pure distillation of American swagger and adventurism, and had always inspired me. Couched in a silly comedy with a trivial plot was this iconic hero that represented so much of the American male, at least what the American males wanted to be represented as.
And one line in the movie said it all. Bandit, when asked by his hitchhiker pal/love interest played by Sally Fields, why he was doing what he was doing in the movie, he simply responded, “For the hell of it.”
Unapologetically, without sarcasm, or duplicity, or explanation. Simply. He then looked back at her and asked her casually, “Haven’t you ever done anything just for the hell of it?” A trivial brilliance I would say.
But on that lonely afternoon as I staggered in misery to my car, not going back to work, but not sure where I was going, with a beer buzz and Scott’s desperate challenges swirling in my brain, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so confused, alone and so sad. Not the careless Bandit at the moment was I, not by any means... And I am a little ashamed to admit that when I got into the car and drove off, I cried for a short while. Definitely not something the Bandit would do either. I doubt the Bandit had ever cried in his life.
