Thirty-Seven

by Peter Stenson

  She says, “Are you a good worker?”

  “I’ve never had a job.”

  “Jesus, you aren’t making this easy.”

  “I imagine I’m a good worker.”

  “I can give you like two shifts a week, tops twelve hours. No benefits. Shitty pay. But you’ll get to play with clothes.”

  She winks. I smile. I say, “Do I have to talk to your manager or something?”

  “Because a girl can’t own her own store?”

  “No, I mean, I thought…”

  “Go ahead and finish that thought, sport.”

  “You’re young,” I say.

  “Hasn’t anybody ever taught you not to judge a book by its cover?” She shakes her head. She points to the sign reading Talley’s Tatters. She says, “I’m Talley.”

  I nod.

  “This is where you offer up your name.”

  The words feel thick in my throat, “Mason Hues.”

  Talley kind of laughs and shakes her head. “Well, Mason Hues, you have a job, at least a test run to see if it’s a good fit. Come in on Thursday. Nine o’clock. Oh, and wear that shirt.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  I place the shirt in my plastic bag.

  “Once again, now would be the time for a thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You may be the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

  “Thank you.”

  Talley smiles. “I like that you heard that as a compliment.”

  3. WELCOME

  Here’s the truth about my upbringing: it was good. It was better than good. It was great. My parents loved me and they treated me like I could do no wrong and I played soccer and was good and I kissed a girl and rounded second base during an eighth-grade dance and I felt loved or at least I didn’t think about its lack thereof.

  My father made money in the tech bubble of the late nineties, selling at the correct time, buying a nice home in Boulder, never really working again. He was a small man, athletic, a cyclist, a lot of strength packed into those sinewy muscles. He read The Washington Post every morning. He drank a fair amount, but not alcoholically. He kissed his wife twice a day.

  My mother found her second life, post changing diapers, in the industry of betterment. She was an early embracer of yoga and organic foods, a champion of quinoa before everyone knew what it was. She let her hair gray at thirty-six.

  Sometimes I think about how hard it must’ve been for my father. If a person pleasures himself to the sight of his sleeping son, then he obviously has strong pedophilic wants. If he has strong wants, yet doesn’t inflict them—at least directly upon his son—he is relying on self-will to keep these desires hidden. Any man acting wholly on self-will is in a constant state of mental, emotional, and spiritual hell. Therefore, my father was in hell. I love him for keeping his transgressions to my doorway.

  He had his escapes.

  He liked to fly fish.

  Or perhaps he liked the idea of fly fishing. He liked to sort his gear. He liked to tie his flies with skinned rabbits and quail feathers. He liked to load up his Range Rover and drive up into the mountains and be seen as a rugged outdoorsman instead of a man who retired at thirty-nine. He also liked the notion of me enjoying this activity. I’m sure he envisioned fly fishing as some great bonding experience. I can’t blame him for that. He wanted to connect with his son. Perhaps he believed that if he were to develop a closer father-son relationship, the urges would leave, or at least become more taboo.

  I was a natural athlete.

  I could cast thirty feet on a dime by the time I was seven.

  I often out-fished my father. He pretended this made him happy.

  I had no interest in catching fish. I had no real interest in nature. I had no interest in gear.

  My running away wasn’t like you see in the movies. I wasn’t addicted to drugs and I wasn’t homeless and I wasn’t engaging in degradation in order to keep a habit going and food in my stomach. Essentially, my father led me to Dr. James Shepard’s massive mountain home. We were out fishing the Crystal, just west of Marble, Colorado. We’d snuck onto private land. My father was a few hundred yards ahead. The browns were biting like they’d never seen a man-made grasshopper. I got bored, as I tended to do. I stared walking up the mountain. I halfheartedly searched for arrowheads. The trees were mostly dead from the mountain pine beetles. I walked for maybe half a mile. I came across a dirt road and figured it was a relic from the days of marble extraction. I followed it for another half mile. That’s when I came to a huge home tucked into the western-facing slope of a cliff. It was huge and beautiful, glass windows and cedar logs the size of small cars, angular to help with snowfall.

  This was not an uncommon sight. The mountain towns of Colorado were littered with random multimillion-dollar getaways for the Robert Redford types. I walked up to the home. I wondered if there was some small souvenir I could steal for the hell of it. I pressed my face to the glass next to the oversized front door. I saw five or six people, all bald, all skinny, all wearing black scrubs-like outfits. I focused on two sitting on a leather couch, a man and woman, the woman holding the man, the main’s face wincing, the woman whispering into his ear, rubbing his chest in circular arcs, this sight the most intimate thing I’d ever witnessed.

  A car came crunching down the gravel road. I quickly walked away from the front door. I felt like a trespasser, which I obviously was, but more of the aggressive voyeur type. A black Jeep parked. I didn’t have time to hide. The door opened and out stepped a handsome guy who fit the mold of a mountain man with his canvas Carhartt jacket and dirt-speckled jeans. He wore a wool beanie pushed back on his head. I realized he was bald, bald like the others.

  He smiled and walked toward me.

  I mumbled something about having gotten lost while fishing and accidentally stumbling to his house.

  He stopped a few feet away. He was tall, easily six foot three. He said, “Accidents are a way of shirking responsibility.”

  “I’m sorry, really, I didn’t…”

  “You did. And that’s okay.”

  He smiled. I wasn’t sure if it really was okay. We stood there for an awkward moment. “I should get going,” I finally said.

  “You remind me of myself when I was your age.”

  I thought about this man wanting to have sex with me. I wondered who all the people were inside, and why they were all evidently going through chemo.

  “Too smart for the world around him. Too stubborn to ask for help. Disenfranchised with the options laid out before him.”

  “Sorry, again.”

  He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Never apologize unless you are one hundred percent committed to changing your actions in the future.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You did it again.”

  “I should go.”

  The man kept his hand on my shoulder. He nodded, which I realized was more of a motion to the house. “They’re sick. We’re sick.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re getting better.”

  “My grandmother beat cancer,” I said.

  “That’s not what’s wrong with us.”

  I turned and glanced back at the house, but I couldn’t really see anything from that far away.

  “I know you,” he said. “I know things come easily for you. I know you have friends. I know you are popular. I know you come from money. I know you are probably out here with your father, who loves you, but not in the way you want. He wouldn’t have left you for this long unattended if that weren’t true.”

  He knelt so that his eyes were level with mine.

  “But I know you think there is more. More to life. Something with meaning. Something of substance. I know this because people who don’t yearn for these things don’t walk up to random houses and look in the windows.”

  I shifted backward. His hand clenched harder on my shoulder. “It’s okay. I was like you. They were like you. It’s a g
ift, really.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “The knowledge that all of this isn’t enough. It just takes the courage to act upon this insight.”

  “I really should go.”

  The man let go of my shoulder. He nodded, smiled. He said, “By all means, by all means.” I started walking away. That’s when he called out. I turned around. He said, “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Mason.”

  “I’m One.”

  “Juan?”

  “One, like the number.”

  “Oh. That’s cool.”

  “You’d be Thirty-Seven.”

  “Huh?”

  “If you ever need to talk, we’re here for you.”

  I’m pretty sure I saw a movie about how a single thought can burrow its way into your mind, germinating with time and experience and want, and grow, the roots mimicking the natural flow of your brain’s synapses, first manifesting in dreams, the tentacles breaching your frontal lobe, active thoughts, fantasy creation, the insertion of Self in order to create a version of reality where you’re a willing participant of what was now an obsession.

  I didn’t tell my father about the house in the woods. I didn’t tell anyone. I searched online for cancer wards in Marble and didn’t find anything. I searched for spiritual retreats and didn’t find anything either.2

  Three weeks later, a bus brought me to Glenwood Springs. I hiked for four hours and twenty minutes. I sweated and then got cold when the sun set. I found the house. I knocked on the door. The man answered. He extended his arms and hugged me. He said, “Welcome to your life, Thirty-Seven.”

  2 In CMHIP, Dr. Turner talked to me about various groups’ creation myths. She’d say they were designed as a recruiting tool, one with a loose and broad narrative, one that invited a person to see himself as the hero, the persecuted, the one being described. She’d say the first tool of recruitment was the empowerment arriving with the notion of being chosen. I once asked her how this was different from the narrative of Jesus. She’d smiled. She’d said, “It’s not.”

  I understand One was planting seeds in my mind that summer afternoon. I’m not an idiot. I even understood this at the time. But he was right; I did want something more. I did see the hypocrisy and futility of everything around me. I kept seeing the bald woman holding the bald man, whispering bits of encouragement, love.

  Sometimes I think about there being no accidents, just the shirking of wants. If this is true, then my father led me to One’s doorstep. Maybe he did this on purpose. Maybe he knew about a group in the mountains who were all sick and trying to recover together. Maybe he knew I’d gravitate toward the burning lantern of empathy and inclusion. Maybe he did it because he knew he was losing the battle of the twenty feet separating my doorjamb and my bed, the battle differentiating the size of his transgressions. Maybe it was an act of love.

  Back when I was fifteen, I’d lie in bed, forcing myself to stay awake. I’d wait for the alcohol-weighted steps of my father to ascend the attic steps. I’d wait to hear his methodical breathing. I’d wait for the thirty seconds of his internal battle, his mind screaming to turn around and take a cold shower, to live another day. Then I’d hear the unmistakable unzipping of his fly. Sometimes I’d wait all night and it wouldn’t happen, and this felt like an even greater betrayal.

  4. MOLLY

  I wear my navy-blue shirt when I go to Talley’s Tatters. I have my hair slicked back and to the side and I think I look handsome. Talley shows up and she’s all smiles in a red dress with white polka dots and a lacy bodice. Her hair is longer, darker, a fifties bob, a wig.

  “Told you that shirt would look good,” she says. I thank her. She opens the door and disarms the security system. She turns on the lights. We walk behind the purple cash wrap. She pats the stool next to her. I sit. Our knees are close to touching. She opens her computer and asks what I feel like listening to. I tell her whatever.

  “What kind of music do you like?”

  “Anything is fine.”

  “I know this. But I’m asking you. What do you listen to?”

  The last album I downloaded had been three years ago, probably rap. I shake my head.

  “Here’s the deal, Mason Hues. I’ve offered you a job. Although this place isn’t exactly rocket science—oh, all you have to do is type in the style number of the piece into this screen here, and then take their money, that’s it—it’s still a job. That means you can at least try to talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sorry, that came across way bitchier than I wanted it to. What I meant to say is don’t be nervous. No wrong answers here, okay? Just two people sitting behind a counter pretending to work. Sound good?”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Now, what do you want to listen to?”

  “Elvis.”

  Talley raises one eyebrow. “I like it.”

  She puts on a live show, something from the early seventies. She looks around the store and sighs. I feel like I’m failing because I’m too quiet. I try to think of something to say and then I chastise myself for feeling nervous and in need of making small talk. The silence becomes a physical mass. Talley adjusts her wig.

  She eventually gets up and tells me to follow. We go to the far side of the store. There are two cardboard boxes full of used clothes. She tells me to hang each item, steam it, more for bedbugs than to get the wrinkles out. I nod and Talley stares and then I apologize.

  “For what?”

  “For being quiet.”

  “Shut up,” Talley says. She smiles, but it’s not a real smile because the skin connecting her ear doesn’t tighten. “I’ll break you out of your shell. Probably sooner rather than later.”

  I start steaming clothes. I dig through the lives that people no longer want. I think about people getting too fat or too skinny and then about a husband having died and some widow finally, after two years, mustering the strength to box up his things and drop them off.

  The hanging bells above the door ring. A guy walks in with tight jeans and an even tighter T-shirt. He navigates the store like he knows it well. He sneaks up behind Talley and pinches her sides and she screams and laughs and then kisses this boy who might be a man. She presses her chest to his, her hands slipping around and tucking themselves into his back pockets.

  I feel jealous.

  One always said that jealousy could be a useful tool to gauge the level of which Self was running your life.

  I pretend not to watch, to avert my eyes from intimacy.

  One and I talked about this tendency of mine on multiple occasions. The first time he brought it up was after I’d been in his house for a week. He asked what, specifically, spoke to me loud enough to come find Truth. I felt embarrassed, as I did any time an adult spoke to me. I told him it’d been what he’d said about looking for something else.

  One shook his head.

  “Thirty-Seven, it’s natural to lie. It’s what we’re conditioned to do. It’s a form of survival. But what good does it do?”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Whenever somebody tells you they aren’t lying, they are.”

  “I don’t think I’m lying.”

  “What made you come here?”

  I thought of something smart to say. I started telling him what I thought he wanted to hear—I was sick of the bullshit life of school and popularity; I was in search of something real and authentic— and then One grabbed the back of my head. He pressed his forehead to mine. I worried he was going to kiss me. His skin was greasy.

  “What did you see that made you come here?”

  “The couple on the couch. They were sick. They were tender.”

  The edges of his lips curled upward. “There it is.” He let go of my head.

  “What?”

  “The first honest thing you’ve said since arriving.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why was that so hard?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”<
br />
  “Because it felt…”

  “Words may be imperfect tools for bearing Honesty, but at times, they are all we have.”

  “I shouldn’t have been looking in the window in the first place.”

  “There are no accidents.”

  “I guess.”

  “You were attracted to a showing of intimacy. A selfless act of love not predicated upon sex. Do you know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because it’s the rarest thing on this planet. Unconditional love. Love without sex. Love without expectations. Love of helping somebody worse off than yourself.”

  Talley introduces me to her boyfriend, Derek. We shake hands and then he’s back playing grab-ass with Talley and I steam a small, shelled fleece jacket and think about the boy it belonged to, him leaving home, probably first to college, then to some city that paid for his services, his mother cleaning his closet, her holding the jacket, pressing it to her face, lost for a good five minutes in the memory of him in that coat, his boisterous energy taking up every inch of their home, the stillness since his departure, stillness and silence, her marriage nothing without the active duties of parenthood.

  Derek leaves and Talley saunters over. Her energy has changed. She’s lighter on her feet.

  She says, “He’s cute, right?”

  I shrug.

  “Please, you know he’s beautiful.”

  She obviously wants me to agree, so I smile, nod.

  “He’s in a band.”

  “Of course he is.”

  Talley gives an insulted laugh. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. He just looked like a guy who’s in a band.”

  “Beautiful?”

  “Beautiful.”

  “They’re good. Really good. Kind of like stoner punk, you know? Like soulful early Ramones.”

  I have no idea what she’s talking about. Elvis sings an uninspired version of “Mystery Train.”