by John Rowell
So I got up, and made my bed for the first time in nearly two weeks, which felt like a step, if not in the right direction, because how do you ever really know what the right direction is, at least a step in some direction.
Now I’m standing in my kitchen staring into my open refrigerator desperate for a Diet Coke only to discover that there aren’t any. I must’ve drunk all my gift Diet Cokes, and there haven’t been any doorstep deliveries in the last couple of days. There is only one pitiful pink and yellow can of Tab, whose sad expiration date I believe is extremely close to the time of the Berlin Wall coming down. But this might be a sign, too, since the 1980s were good for me, socially speaking; it was a decade in which I had not one, but two, long-term boyfriends.
The Tab doesn’t taste all that bad, really; as my mother is always saying, “At least it’s wet.”
That reminds me that I probably ought to call up Mama and Daddy and tell them that I’m out of the bed, but I’ll do it later. Maybe after an Amstel Light.
I take the Tab out onto my back porch. Already it’s a hot day; the humid, salty air blows all around me. Standing here in nothing but my boxer shorts, it actually feels good, even though I generally hate the heat and opt to preserve myself almost exclusively in air-conditioned environments from March to October; like certain animals and plants, I need a cool climate in which to function. Staring out over the low dunes now, I notice the tide is out and the ocean looks smooth and calm; it usually does this time of year, late October, when hurricane season is nearly over.
I watch the seagulls skittering around on the khaki-colored sand; they’re so goofy, how they run to miss a wave when it comes lapping up on the shore. The waves rush away from the gulls too, as if they just came up to steal a quick kiss from whoever happened to be on the beach, only to run away from them like a shy child. Since I haven’t been outside in a while, watching all this natural activity makes me think about how many beautiful things there are at the beach, or anywhere, really, when you look for them, and that is sometimes a very hard thing to remember when radio stations and local newscasts can only tell you how screwed up and awful everything in the damn world is, and I’m not just talking here about missing children but about everything else, too.
WAVE, in particular, just seems to love harping on armed robbery, car bombs, murder, petty theft, homelessness in our county, the sad state of agriculture in southeastern North Carolina, all that. But here’s what just kills me about WAVE and its employees: After reporting all this negative, horribly tragic stuff, stuff that anyone with the least bit of human sensitivity is going to have their day just completely ruined by hearing about, they have the nerve to turn around and play songs like Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love,” or that “Piña Colada Song” (now there’s a number that would actually encourage a body to drink and drive) or—and this strikes me as the worst—“Maneater” by Hall and Oates. I swear somebody down there at WAVE just loves “Maneater.” Now it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that if you were the manager of a radio station in a town where a little boy has lately disappeared, in a place, mind you, where hungry wildlife and perhaps awful child snatchers are probably lurking around every corner of the shopping mall and various Quick Marts, you probably, if you’re any sort of a compassionate person, should think twice about giving the thumbs-up to keeping “Maneater” on the daily playlist.
This is the kind of thing I have to deal with down here, so that’s why staying in the bed, my bed with nothing but me in it, has been the most appropriate, and safest, place to be as of late.
Suddenly, I think of my reminder to myself to call Mama and Daddy.
On my way inside to the telephone, I catch my reflection in the one window on my back porch and I can see that I look like an absolute mess—not that I care all that much, really; looking a mess is expected when you’re coming out of self-imposed exile. Most days, in nonexile periods, I’m not so bad, actually; I’m five eleven and weigh a hundred and sixty pounds; in the men’s exercise magazines I belong to the “fit and trim” category in their little charts. I’d date me. But the sad reality is that I don’t have the Paramount Pictures hair and makeup people fussing over me and making me look like a million bucks on a daily basis. So I look like what I look like, which this morning is disastrous, most definitely not like the Paramount and MGM goddesses of yesteryear—Jean Harlow, or Norma Shearer—or whatever male version of those women would be, since I don’t mean to present myself as some kind of drag artist.
Inside, I sit down in my captain’s chair, and, using my Sam’s Club long-distance card (I’m glad to see it hasn’t expired yet), I dial Mama and Daddy, but get a busy signal—they haven’t yet taken up with call waiting. Maybe they’re trying to call me at the same time, and the wires are crossing. Daddy would call that a coinkie-dink.
On second thought, maybe I don’t want to talk to anybody yet, unless it’s somebody who can tell me that they found Donny and he’s doing OK. And it’s not like I haven’t had any human contact over the last two weeks. Yes, the phone has certainly rung, and various people have certainly been by, though I mostly would only peek out at them from under the covers to see if they had brought food, or maybe a CD or a video. The doctor came, Reverend Julian Stubbs, in the midst of praying for Donny Tyndall, came to pray for me, Mama and Daddy drove down from where they live in the middle part of the state, and I simply told them all the same thing, which is: “I just don’t feel like getting up.” And they all said: “Talbert, are you sick? Are you depressed? Do you need to go to the hospital? What do you want us to do?” To which I said, as sweetly as I was able, “Will you please, please ask the disc jockeys at the WAVE station to reconsider their daily playlist and stop playing insensitive, inappropriate material?” And they all looked at me like I was talking out of my head, but now I believe that somebody finally understood my wish, and called up WAVE; hence Dionne Warwick and Valley of the Dolls at 9:15 on a weekday morning. It could be any one of a number of people around here who might have done that—and all of them would be more than happy to let me know they had done it so as to curry my favor and pass themselves off as a good friend slash samaritan. If I go out and start talking to people again today, as I think I might do, I’ll see if anybody owns up to placing that musical order for me and my well-being.
While sitting in my captain’s chair, trying to decide if I should try Mama and Daddy again or just let them call me, I take a good look around at my tiny little house, my “shack by the sea,” for the first time in two weeks. I’m glad to see it hasn’t changed much during my self-imposed exile; I’m sure Mama straightened up the place when she was here, or maybe my friends Trey and Kelly came by and cleaned it. God bless ’em, they all know I utterly despise domestic work. I’m just happy to see my seashells are all still here, plus the stuffed sailfish my grandfather caught in 1958, which I am happy to see is still hanging intact above my couch. Hell, I’m even happy about this circa—Berlin Wall Tab in the refrigerator. I’m feeling a whole lot better.
That is, until I turn on the TV.
Because wouldn’t you know the first thing I see, after missing every local newscast for two weeks, is that god-awful Carolina in the A.M. show, with that woman host I cannot abide, Claudia Davenport Shields, who was Miss North Carolina about a hundred years ago (well, probably in the early ’70s, and before that, she was the statewide Miss Flue-Cured Tobacco for three years running—I know that because she will mention it on the air at the drop of a crown), and who still to this day sports pageant hair, big and poofy and as blond as Tweety Bird, and it hurts my eyes to look at her, not to mention having to look at the obvious little nips and tucks she’s had done to her face—oh yes, I can always tell when surgery has occurred; I have a sixth sense for detecting plastic surgery. But the thing I hate most about Claudia Davenport Shields is how she tries so hard to speak and sound like a real network journalist, like her idol, Jane Pauley (she’s always talking about her too), when we all know Claudia was born an
d raised in the pitiful hamlet of Cliston, whose populace grandly thinks of itself as living in an actual town, which I personally feel is a generous way of describing a landscape that includes one solitary stoplight, a self-service post office, and a run-down old Tastee-Freez sitting on the side of a long-shut Pure station at the edge of a tobacco field.
And that is just exactly what Claudia Davenport Shields is: Tobacco Trash, and as true Tobacco Trash she cannot get rid of that accent to save her natural life. And the worst thing: Claudia is always having to do little sponsor spots on her show, most of which are for PET Milk, whose simple slogan is this: “Get PET.” But Claudia, ex—Miss Flue-Cured, the veritable pride of Cliston, and Coastal Carolina’s pathetic answer to Jane Pauley, always says it so it sounds like this: “Git … PET.”
I watch Claudia make a fool of herself conducting an interview with the mayor of Duck Island, my mayor, I should say, whose name is Hiram Clark.
Claudia: “Mr. Mayor, we’re so honored to have you with us today. I know you took time out from your busy schedule just to come to the studio.”
His Honor: “Well, Claudia, you know I always like to visit with you all here at Carolina in the A.M.”
Claudia: “Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Now, what I want to ask you about this morning is, of course, what’s on the mind of everyone here on Duck Island and Marsh County, which is the investigation into that poor missing child, Donny Tyndall. Now Mr. Mayor—”
And I listen as Claudia and the mayor just repeat the same old information with no new developments, and with Claudia, of course, acting real concerned and condolencey, which is simply wrong since I know Donny is still out there somewhere. Claudia is a master at putting on “serious” faces and nodding her head to indicate comprehension.
But now Claudia has moved right along—heartlessly, to my way of thinking—to a segment about how easy it is to macramé pot holders from scraps of yarn you might have lying around in some drawer somewhere, and what an excellent Christmas gift that would make, et cetera et cetera, and I just have to snap bottle-blond Tobacco Trash right off my TV set, as who wouldn’t when faced with that kind of sadly insincere faux journalism.
I get up and start pacing around the room. I’m so mad, so mad that I want to throw things, and maybe even cry, because now I’m convinced I’m going to turn out to be as bitter and hateful as my grandmother Florence Moss was when she got to the age of forty, a legacy of spite and hatefulness which lasted to the end of her life (eighty-eight, which meant forty-eight years of crotchety meanness and the ill winds of bad moods blown at everyone who came within thirty feet of her), and here I am thirty-four years old, which is not all that far from forty, and I’m thinking why did I bother even getting out of bed, and to hell with Dionne War-wick’s Valley of the Dolls philosophy. Maybe I like being on that damn merry-go-round all the time, what the hell.
I decide this is as good a time as any to try Mama and Daddy again—either they’ll just make me madder or they’ll calm me down, and I’m game for either one.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Mama.”
“Talbert? Oh my Lord, Talbert, are you all right? I can’t believe you’ve called me. What in the world? Don’t tell me you’re out of the bed?”
She doesn’t give me a chance to answer, just starts screaming out for Daddy, who must be in another part of the house, probably fixing something that might not even have been broken in the first place just so he didn’t have to stay in the same room with her all day long.
“Dixon! Dixon, it’s Talbert!”
And she adds, real loud, so that I, and perhaps a few neighbors, can hear: “Our son, Dixon! He sounds like he might be outa the bed, which would be a full-blown miracle! Dixon! Good Lord, what are you doing? Pick up the extension phone in Mama’s room. It’s a miracle, I’m telling you. Dixon! Dixon! Pick up the damn telephone!”
And obviously Dixon manages to get himself to the Miracle Hotline, and I’m thinking how Dionne Warwickish and Psychic Friends—like this is.
Daddy: “T.J.?”
“Yes, it is I, Daddy.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear it. You feeling better, son?”
“I guess so.”
Mama: “Talbert, tell me something. Are you finally on some sort of a medication?”
“Oh, nothing special,” I say, in a calm voice, looking down at my nails for a “nonchalant” effect, though of course there’s no one to witness it. “Only a few over-the-counter dolls. Mostly, I just felt like getting out of bed. I guess it’s just the Lord’s will.” I like to say things that I know Mama likes to hear.
“Well, perhaps it is the will of the Lord,” she says, because she knows that I can get just as sarcastic as she can, and that we can give it back and forth to each other. “Anything good that happens is the Lord’s will, Talbert.”
“What about the bad stuff that happens, Mama?” I say. “Is that the Lord’s will too?”
“Talbert, don’t get me riled up in a theological discussion, I’m in the middle of cleaning the house and I don’t have time to think. Perhaps if you had warmed any kind of a church pew in the last six months, you wouldn’t need to be asking big theological questions of a lay person like myself. You need to go talk to Reverend Stubbs—”
“Loralee, please …” Daddy says, much to my relief. “T.J., you sure you’re all right?”
“Well, Dixon,” Mama says, “he said he was. If he picked up the phone, he must be! It’s not up to us to question the Lord’s mysterious work.”
“I want to hear it from Talbert, if you please.”
“Yes, Daddy, I feel fine.”
“Well, I am relieved and mighty glad to hear it, son, I’ll tell you that.”
Mama says, “No one will ever again look me in the face and say one doubtful thing about the power of prayer, I’m telling you that. Because I have prayed for this moment, and I mean I have prayed and prayed …”
“Well, Mama,” I say. “I am so glad I have answered your prayers.”
And I manage to escalate things in the direction of a mutual good-bye, telling them I’ll call them later before Mama can remind me that only the Lord answers prayers, not mortal man.
Still in my boxers, I go to my front porch and pick up today’s newspaper. On the front page is yet another photo of Donny, one I haven’t seen before, one of him and his awful mother, taken at Christmastime with them posed next to one of those artificial all-silver Christmas trees. He’s clutching a doll, a G.I. Joe or something, and grinning at the camera.
I throw the paper into the garbage can without even opening it and go back in the house and drain the last of my Tab.
I must have been crazy earlier, thinking this Tab was good, because it tastes like pure-tee poison now. I sit in the captain’s chair and cover my eyes with my hands, and stay there like that for a minute or so, because I can’t get that photo of Donny holding G.I. Joe out of my head.
I go back out onto the porch and pull the paper out of the garbage can and take it back inside. I lay it on top of the stack of all the other unopened papers—I realize somebody has been bringing them in for me and stacking them up for the last two weeks.
Every last one of them has Donny’s picture on the front, with the words “Still Missing” splayed out underneath.
God Almighty …
Where is Dionne Warwick when you need her most?
Noonish
If you’ve ever gone for a long period of time without taking a shower and putting on clothes, you know that when you finally clean up, it feels like you’ve been sprung from prison or something. As I bathed, shaved, exfoliated, all that, I was glad to be reminded of what I really look like, to see that I’m not hideous, after all. And even though I don’t consider myself movie-star good-looking, though I wish I were, I’ll do in a pinch. My hair is about the color of a cured tobacco leaf (though I certainly am not Tobacco Trash), a brown color about one shade lighter than what people so often call mousy. I have an average face, I guess, not a
face someone would visualize when they’re having idle sex fantasies, per se, but not one that, if they were next to it in bed, would make them scream “Oh, get out, get out of my bed, Cyclops!” My body isn’t bad, either; in fact, I’d say it’s pretty good; I had been lifting weights every day at Duck Island Health and Racquet before my exile.
Once outside the shack by the sea, I walk the sandy path down to the ocean and stare out over the water, and then close my eyes and let the late-fall salty wind whip me all over. I think how I could just take off my clothes right now and swim out into the ocean and drown, like James Mason did at the end of A Star Is Born, because he just couldn’t fathom how disappointing his life had become, even though Judy Garland was slavishly in love with him. However, I believe there would really be no point in my doing that, when you think about the fact that James Mason’s character at least at one time had a great career, while I, on the other hand, am still waiting for mine to gel. (I’m also waiting for someone to be slavishly in love with me, though I don’t want to seem greedy.) But I suspect, when all is said and done, that I’m much more the Judy Garland type than the James Mason type, more likely to be the one dressed in evening clothes who tearfully cries into a microphone, “This is Mrs. Norman Maine,” than to be the one who washes up dead on the beach with seaweed in his ears and dressed in an unflattering bathing suit.
Now I’m behind the wheel of my 1989 Datsun, which I call the Dirt Devil, since it’s compact-sized and cherry red, and I’m greatly relieved to discover the motor still runs—Daddy probably started it a time or two when they were down here. And that’s just the kind of thing he’d be thinking about too, anything with an engine or dependent on a part that you can only get at an automotive store. I don’t frequent automotive stores myself; I’m a mall person.
