Romeo's Hammer

by James Scott Bell

  Cicero believed in summum bonum, the “highest good.” Plato thought it existed in actual reality somewhere, and our job was to look around down here, in the shadows, and find it. Or at least get as close to it as we can.

  All I could think about as I looked at myself in the mirror was, nice try, humanity. You almost made it. But the forces against you are too strong.

  I splashed cold water on my face. Then I got a Dos Equis from the refrigerator and sat down with my laptop. A search for Gary Pasfield led me to a UCLA website and this faculty description:

  Dr. Gary Pasfield

  B.S. in Biological Sciences, University of California at Los Angeles

  Ph.D. in Integrative Ecology, University of Cambridge, England

  My chief interest is research in biodiversity models, including the elasticity of energy, water, and carbon exchange affecting land surface temperature. My aim is to translate scientific findings into practical information for the guidance of conservation planning, protection of endangered ecosystems, and preservation of the Earth.

  The page told me his office was in the Life Sciences Building on the UCLA campus.

  Maybe it was time for me to go back to college.

  But before that I had to do some schooling.

  Because C Dog was at my door once again.

  “Sup?” he said.

  “I’m tempted to say sup too, but I resist,” I said.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Enter.”

  He did.

  “Got another beer?” he said.

  “The refrigerator,” I said.

  He got the refreshment and sat on my futon.

  “Is this just a hanging out visit?” I said. “Because I’m actually working.”

  “On getting my guitar back?”

  “Believe it or not I have other things on my plate.”

  He took a sip. There was something he wanted to say and he was trying to figure out a way to say it.

  “What’s on your mind?” I said.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Well there’s your problem right there,” I said. “You need to have something on your mind. Otherwise, what’s it good for? It would be like having a fine guitar that sits in the corner, never gets played.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right,” I said. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  He smiled.

  “But I have a feeling you want to ask me something,” I said.

  C Dog took a pull on the bottle. He lowered it and held it with both hands, as if it were a crystal ball. “What do you think of suicide?” he said.

  I closed my laptop and put it on the coffee table.

  “Why are you asking?” I said.

  “I just been thinking about it, and you’re a thinker,” he said.

  “Do you have suicidal thoughts?”

  He shrugged. “I was just thinking about it is all. I was thinking what’s the point of going through all this? Why not check out? How come you stick?”

  Out of the mouths of babes. Carter “C Dog” Weeks had managed to ask one of the most profound questions of life, for anybody.

  “I stick,” I said, “because I want to find out.”

  “Find out?”

  “Why I should stick.”

  C Dog furrowed his forehead. His gray cells were working hard.

  “You get this one life,” I said. “Instead of ending it, why not observe it? You’ll die eventually. Why not try to find some answers?”

  “Maybe there ain’t no answers.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe so. You’ll never find out unless you give it a shot.”

  He took another long drink. “I woke up today and it was the same as yesterday. That’s why I get high, man. It gets me through. Now you want to take it away from me. You take that away, what’s the point?”

  “You want your life to be dependent on a plant?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Give me a year,” I said.

  “A year for what?”

  “You don’t think about suicide for a year. We’ll mark our calendars. One year from now we’ll have another conversation like this. Between now and then, we’ll work on things the way we set it up. How’s that sound?”

  He didn’t answer right away. The waves on the beach were louder than usual. Maybe a storm in Mexico feeling its way north.

  “Agreed?” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Yes or no. And mean it.”

  With a sigh he said, “Okay. Yeah.”

  “Now spit in your right hand,” I said.

  “Whu?”

  I spit in mine. “Like that.”

  “You crazy?”

  “Compared to whom?”

  Then C Dog laughed, like we were in on a goof together. He spat in his hand. I got up and went over and put my hand on his and we shook.

  “This is a solemn oath,” I said.

  “It feels frickin’ gross.”

  “That’s so you won’t forget it,” I said. “Now say, I, Carter C Dog Weeks, do solemnly swear not to dwell on thoughts of my own death until one year from today.”

  He hesitated then repeated the words.

  “Any questions?” I said.

  “Can I have a paper towel?”

  I got us paper towels and wondered where I’d come up with this ritual. Maybe it was an old TV show I’d seen when I was a kid.

  “So you think you can find my guitar?” C Dog said.

  “I’ll work on it,” I said. “But if you never got that guitar back, could you accept it and move on?”

  “No way!”

  “Yes way. You accept that you can deal with the worst and that makes life easier to manage.”

  The answer didn’t please him, but he gave no rejoinder. He got up and put his beer bottle on the coffee table. He moved to the screen door, stopped and turned.

  “So what’s one thing you’ve found out?” he said.

  “Found out?”

  “That makes you think life maybe doesn’t suck?”

  I was about to give him a flip answer, to avoid going any deeper today. But then it hit me, what I did have going. And it was as clear as a cloudless day on the beach.

  “Her name is Sophie,” I said.

  I’D PLANNED A visit to the UCLA campus to try to collar Dr. Gary Pasfield. According to his schedule, posted online, he had a seminar in the morning. So I took that time to drive all the way to the Argo.

  I got there right as the store opened. Not that I was anxious or anything.

  Sophie had just unlocked the door. When she saw me she looked surprised.

  Then pleased. “Hello,” she said.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” I said.

  She played along. “Looking for anything special?”

  I’m looking at it.

  “Ah, maybe some poetry,” I said. “I’m in the mood for verse.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Over on aisle six, the left side toward the end. I’ll find you in a little while.”

  So I wandered over to the poetry section. Scanned the shelf a little. Took down a volume of Theodore Roethke. Turned to his most famous poem, “The Waking.” I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go …

  I read the whole thing. It had been twenty years since I’d read it the first time, as a fifteen-year-old Yale sophomore. It knocked me out then, and did the same now.

  Right next to Roethke on the shelf was Shel Silverstein. Where the Sidewalk Ends. This was a nice collection Argo had going on.

  And good old Ovid. He was a Roman poet born in the first century B.C. He’s known best for his Metamorphoses, which tells entertaining stories about gods and their bizarre interactions with human beings. It was written during the time of Caesar Augustus, when the empire was under heavy taxation and fear of foreign enemies.

  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 
Ovid wrote fantasy, like telling us how we got echoes. Echo was a nymph who could only repeat the last part of whatever she heard. Her unreturned love for the self-centered Narcissus caused her to waste away in bodily form until only her voice remained.

  Narcissists make all of us feel like we’re wasting away. And there seem to be more of them all the time.

  Scanning for more I caught a collection of the Cavalier poets. Got a nice warmth from that. My mother loved the Cavaliers. She introduced me to them when I was ten and smitten with a girl named Brenda Mumford, with whom I had no chance. Mom gave me some Cavalier poetry. There was romance in it, but also honor and duty and things I wasn’t getting much of in school.

  I was just turning to a favorite old poem when Sophie tapped me lightly on the shoulder.

  “What have you got there?” she said.

  I put my thumb in the book to hold the place. “Sir John Suckling,” I said. “Poet and the inventor of Cribbage.”

  “I love Cribbage. But I don’t know the poet.”

  “Ah.”

  “Which of his do you like?” She put her hand under mine, the one holding the book, and raised it. The wiring in my body started to hum.

  She took the book out of my hand, placing her thumb in the place where I’d had mine. She opened the book and looked at the page.

  “‘The Constant Lover’?” she said.

  I nodded.

  She began to read out loud:

  “Out upon it! I have loved

  Three whole days together,

  And am like to love three more

  If it prove fair weather.”

  She looked at me and said, “That one?”

  I answered by putting my arm around her waist.

  She came to me willingly, her body soft against mine, and the kiss was warm, brief, sensational.

  When we parted, our faces inches from each other, she said, “Wow.”

  “Is it fair weather?” I said.

  “Sunny and warm,” she said.

  “No sign of rain?”

  “Not even clouds.”

  I kissed her again.

  This one lasted longer.

  An elderly woman came around the corner and almost bumped into us. Sophie sheepishly smoothed her blouse. The woman smiled.

  “You make a lovely couple,” she said.

  The blush is an involuntary response of the blood vessels, triggered by the brain’s release of protective chemicals. I don’t know that there is a good evolutionary explanation for the blush, what adaptive advantage it held. All I know is my cheeks were responding as if I were a sophomore.

  We were both like that, Sophie and me. We said nothing to the woman because I’m not sure our mouths were working properly. The kiss had melted them.

  Finally, Sophie said, “I should get back to the counter.”

  “When can I see you again?” I said.

  “Saturday?”

  “Not soon enough.”

  She laughed. “I think it’s the only day, I’ve got—”

  I kissed her quickly.

  “Saturday then,” I said.

  “That’s specific enough for me,” she said.

  I WALKED OUT of the store without buying a book. I can’t remember the last time I’d left a bookstore without at least one book under my arm.

  It was another perfect day in L.A., as the song says. I went to the coffee house on the corner and bought a dark roast drip.

  When I came back out there were three men waiting for me.

  One of them was Josh, Sophie’s ex. The other two guys were linebacker types. One was white and one was black. They wore tight shirts that showed off their mounds of muscle. If you have to flaunt it, you’re already two strikes behind in the count as far as I’m concerned.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Josh said.

  “But I like coffee,” I said.

  “Not what I mean. You know what I mean.”

  “Help me out,” I said.

  “Where Sophie works. Where Sophie is anywhere.”

  “You stalking your ex-girlfriend?”

  “There’s three of us,” Josh said. “You want it now or you want it later?”

  “Here on the street?” I said. “With kids around?”

  “Stay away from her,” Josh said. “I don’t want to see your face around here.”

  “Don’t you think Sophie has a say in this?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Let’s go in and talk to her about it,” I said.

  “Gonna be no talk,” Josh said. “You walk away.”

  I looked at the other two. “You boys play football?”

  They tried to make their faces look like bricks. It wasn’t a stretch.

  “This is between us,” Josh said.

  “But they might want to avoid career-ending injury, which is what I’ll hand out.”

  The brick-faced ballers tried to look like they weren’t concerned.

  “I don’t want to fight anybody, okay?” I said. “It’s not necessary. Let’s be prudent about this.”

  Josh slapped the coffee cup out of my hand.

  It hit the sidewalk and exploded.

  Hot coffee hit my jeans.

  It also splashed on a boy of about four years old. He was just to my right, walking out of the store with his mother. He grabbed his cheek and started to cry.

  There was a half second pause when both Josh and I knew what was going to happen next.

  WHEN I WAS five I got into my first fight. It was in the play yard at the kindergarten I was attending. A new boy had joined our august company and he seemed to have something I did not. I noticed it immediately, as boys do. It was a confidence, a strength. He was the exact opposite of me.

  His name was Dylan.

  And I wanted to be him. He was better than everyone at games. He could swing on the bars like a gibbon. The girls flocked around him. My best friend in the school, Owen Palatsi, started playing more with Dylan than he did with me.

  Generating feelings I could not yet analyze. All I knew was that I felt abandoned.

  I told my mom about it, crying one night that this boy had taken away my best friend and nobody liked me. She tried to talk me down. She did her best.

  It didn’t take.

  One day at school I was out in the yard playing with a fire truck, rolling it on the ground by myself, when Dylan came running by and snatched it up with one hand.

  “Give it back!” I did not shout it, I screamed it. Even then I knew it was an overreaction. A red cloud covered me as I got to my feet.

  Dylan stopped and laughed.

  Normally, a situation of such obvious schoolyard injustice would have been handled by one of the aides. But for some reason today’s helper was on the other side of the yard. I think Fate was experimenting on me for the first time.

  “Give it!” I said.

  “I just want to look at it,” Dylan said.

  “It’s mine!”

  This is also how the Trojan War began.

  When he did not give me the fire engine, I unleashed all the anger that had been building up inside me. It came out in my wildly swinging arms. I threw fists at his body, but the blows lacked power. Throaty screams made sounds in me I’d never heard before.

  When I’d softly landed seven or eight of these feather-duster punches, Dylan dropped the fire engine and put one of his hands on my face—it seemed the size of a catcher’s mitt—and pushed.

  My head snapped back and I fell on my butt.

  Flames erupted and I knew for the first time what blind rage was. I don’t even remember getting on my feet, but the next thing I knew, with tears pouring out of my eyes, I was standing in the time-out corner of the yard with the aide, Ms. Fambry, telling me that fighting was absolutely forbidden and she was surprised at me.

  I tried to tell her what happened, the unjust act that triggered the whole thing. She kept repeating that I was fighting and that I would not be able to play if I did it again.

 
I noticed that Dylan was not in the time-out corner. He was over playing on the climbing bars, laughing.

  This is when I made a mental note to myself. Life was unfair. And I’d better learn how to really fight someday so I could knock the Dylans of the world on their own fat cans.

  JOSH WAS A Dylan. I was not the same Michael.

  I drove Romeo’s hammer into McBurney’s Point. That’s the spot just above the belt line on the right side of the human body. Normally it’s where a doctor might poke you to find out if you have pain associated with appendicitis.

  I was giving Josh the pain associated with my fist.

  He doubled over and dropped to his knees.

  The white football player made his first, and last, aggressive move. With my left foot I made his right knee bend the other way. Down he went.

  The black guy’s face was a riot of conflicting emotions. He did not want to back away and lose face. But his two buddies were on the ground in various states of moan. It was now just him and me.

  I motioned him forward with my index finger.

  He just stood there, his fists raised to stomach level.

  The mother of the boy who’d been splashed was hugging him and also looking at me. Her face reflected a certain horror at what she’d seen. She was afraid of me, afraid of what her child had just witnessed.

  I couldn’t blame her.

  “Would you mind calling the police?” I said.

  The black guy was now attending to his fallen counterpart.

  Josh was trying to get his breath back.

  Another black gentleman, about sixty years old and wearing a newsboy-type hat, came over. He was smiling. “I saw the whole thing,” he said. “You did right.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I have an appointment. Would you mind telling the police what you saw?”

  “I’ll tell ’em exactly what happened,” he said. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Just tell them it was a guy who used to live around here,” I said.

  Then I walked around the corner and got in my car.

  No one tried to stop me.

  THE CAMPUS OF the University of California at Los Angeles is in the heart of a place called Westwood. It’s a pretty campus, full of that old college look. Brick buildings of European design right next to modern classrooms. I walked along a path that was a nerve center of activity, students going every which way, backpacks slung and heads down over phones, and tables with various clubs passing out literature.