by Anna Bruno
“Sit,” I said. She sat. Like Lucas, she listened when motivated. I gave her the spoon.
“You’re buying the new one when she chews that one up,” Lucas said.
“Someone has to get the rice off, and we both know it’s not gonna be you,” I said.
“Two drinks,” he said.
“I’ll go for one,” I said.
“One whiskey, one beer,” he said.
“Ordered simultaneously,” I said. We had a deal.
If my math was right, this was the night Lionel was conceived. We made Lionel and then went to the bar where I had what would be my last whiskey for the next nine months.
* * *
THAT NIGHT AT THE bar we talked about death. Upon arrival, we seized the front tables with the unearned swagger of investment bankers on the squash court. We spread our legs. We stretched our arms. We made ourselves big.
All of us were there—Cal and Summer, Fancy Pete, Short Pete, Yag, Jimmy, Lucas and me, a motley crew of eight. Summer was in the second grade at the time, and her class had just finished reading White Fang. Her child mind was preoccupied by death—specifically, how awesome it was that a dog could kill a man in under three minutes with only his teeth. Summer barred her big, gapped bunny teeth and snarled. The men cheered her on.
She sucked Coca-Cola through a straw. Then she peered up at the crew, lifting only her eyes. Releasing the straw from her lips, she asked, “If you could, would you want to know when you were gonna die?”
I looked around the circle, from guy to guy. One by one, they took long, hard pulls from their drinks. Then Jimmy said, “Are we talking imminent death, or death in old age?”
“That’s the point, stupid,” Cal said. “You only find out if you agree to the terms.”
“What terms?”
“What is imminent death?” Summer asked.
“Let’s say you find out your daddy’s gonna die tomorrow,” Yagla said. “That’s imminent.” He caught my look of disapproval. “What? It was her morbid question. Jesus, Em, lighten up.”
“Imminent just means soon,” I said to Summer. “In the near future.”
“Okay, yeah,” Summer said. “Would you want to know if you were gonna die im-mi-nent-ly?”
We were in the groove, which is, as far as I can tell, the whole point of drinking. It is a looseness of the body and a dialing back of the conscious mind, not a dulling so much as a minimizing. Both the number of thoughts and the duration of rumination are cut, hour by hour, according to a long-tail curve: the x-axis being drinks and the y-axis being thoughts. The point at which the curve bends from the head to the long tail, the fat part of the curve—that is the groove.
Everything that anybody said was hysterical, laugh-out-loud, feel-it-in-the-gut funny. Lucas ordered a round of house shots and a pitcher of Amber, and Amelia served us before making drinks for all the strangers at the bar who’d been waiting longer.
We didn’t bother to clink our glasses together, but as Cal lifted his from the table, he said, “To imminent death.” Some of us repeated the toast, and all of us shot ’em down, including Summer, for whom Amelia had made a virgin shot.
Lucas stretched his arms wide, opening up his full wingspan, and wiggled his body. It wasn’t a dance, because there was no rhythm to it. It was an outward expression of inward joy. These were the moments Lucas lived for, the good times, the groove: friends, conversation, revelry. There was nothing special going on; the night was like a thousand that came before; and, at the same time, it was better.
Lucas stopped wiggling and said, “I’d want to know because then I’d be happy just to be.”
“You mean you’d live it up,” Yag said.
Lucas hadn’t thought about what he’d actually do with his final days—he knew more about what he wouldn’t do: namely, drywall a building. “Well, I wouldn’t want to spend my final hours hungover,” he said.
“So no drugs?” Yag inquired, aghast.
“I might do drugs but I wouldn’t burn time trying to find drugs.”
“If your death was imminent, it’d be pretty easy to get drugs,” I said. “You could just call up Cal and tell him you were about to die. He’d hook you up.”
Cal nodded.
“I wouldn’t need to go out in a blaze of glory,” Lucas said. He looked at me, and either he forgot a bunch of his buddies were listening or he was too drunk to care because he said, “Really, I’d just want to spend the time with you and Addie.” We did not yet know about Lionel, and if his soul existed somewhere in the ether, it was beyond Lucas’s purview. His wing closed around me. He pushed his forehead into mine and kissed me.
Cal said, “Gross—get a room.” He looked off across the bar with this huge, sappy smile on his face.
Jimmy looked lonely.
Martin Yagla rolled his eyes, wanting not what we had, wishing, probably, some hot young thing would walk through the door.
Short Pete was content to be in the company of friends.
Fancy Pete had a girlfriend at home and a project going in his woodshop.
Summer spoke directly to Lucas. “Yeah,” she said. “I’d want to know too. I’d ask Daddy to take me on an adventure.”
“Where would you go?” Lucas asked.
“You guys could come too,” she said. “We’d get out of here. We’d take a journey up the Mackenzie like White Fang.”
“Sounds like a great idea,” I said. “Lucas is basically Canadian anyway.”
He nodded. He was in.
Cal ordered another round of shots. This time, he didn’t have to say anything, because we all telepathically understood we were drinking to Youth. Summer had reminded us there was a world beyond this place, a world for all of us that held the possibility of adventure.
* * *
TAKING A SHOT OF Fireball is like eating a corn dog at a county fair. Do it occasionally and it’s ironic, a quick jaunt to an unfamiliar world: class tourism. Do it often, and lose your self-respect: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Yag and Cal are having a shot. Fireball shots are three dollars every day at The Final Final. The unspoken custom here is to bust out the Fireball to help a fellow barfly cycle through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, commiseration, perseveration, and drunken stupor. Dumped by your girlfriend? Fireball. Dog died? Fireball. Can’t pay off your gambling debt? Fireball.
As far as I can tell, Yag is in the second stage of grief (anger) and Cal is trying to cool him off. “I’ll kill him before he goes near my mom.”
“These things have a way of working themselves out.”
“They cheated,” Yag says. “Just can’t figure out how. You shoulda seen the hands. It wasn’t mathematically possible.”
“Did I ever tell you about when I went twenty-eight months without running water?” Cal asks.
True story. Not twenty-eight hours, or twenty-eight days—twenty-eight months. Cal’s spirit animal is a honey badger.
Poised to enter the third stage (commiseration), Yag orders a second round of Fireball shots on Cal’s tab.
Cal begins his story. “I planned to leave town for a month during slow season, and decided to turn off the water. The ranch is old as shit, so the water could only be turned off at the stop box near the street. The box wasn’t even on my property. The shutoff was up the street in front of the neighbor’s house. Public Works told me only thirteen houses in the whole county had stop boxes located that far away—but, no problem; they’d send someone out to shut off the water.
“The service guy used a key at ground level to close the valve, which was buried six feet underground. Shoulda been routine, but the box was old, and when the guy turned the key, he broke the valve. The water was turned off, but there was no way to turn it back on.”
“Moron,” Yag says.
“The guy reported back to Public Works, and Public Works said I was responsible for replacing the stop box, and to bring it up to code, it would need to be moved a hundred and seventy feet, to the front of
my house. That required excavating the street. They gave me an estimate. The combined cost of excavation and a new stop box came to nearly eight grand. Can you believe it? Eight Gs. I had a guy who said he would do the excavation for five, but he couldn’t go any lower because he’d have to rent equipment.”
Classic conversational narcissism: Martin owes the Wrestler ten grand, and Cal’s way of empathizing is to tell a story about owing a similar amount of money with the same amount of indigence. In the outside world, people might not put up with this kind of thing, but bars have their own rules. If you’re the one buying the shots, you have license to talk.
“That’s fucked up,” Yag says. “The service guy broke the valve. You break it, you buy it.”
This all happened before Summer was born, and before Cal’s general contractor business took off. Eight grand was not a drop in the bucket by any means, but he could have swung it. He had the money in his freezer or mattress or buried in the backyard somewhere. Or, it’s possible he didn’t have the money at all but pride prohibited him from admitting as much. Whatever the case, it wasn’t about the money for Cal; it was a matter of principle.
“Fuckin’ A right,” Cal says. “I refused to pay but the town didn’t back down. Some asshole at Public Works actually told me I could sue them if I wanted to make my point in court. I told them, ‘I don’t sue people for shit like this; only you people do that!’ ”
“So the water remained off?” Yag shakes his head at the world he knows to be unfair.
“I started showering at the community rec center after work. I got to know all the homeless people there. When I had to take a shit at home, I used a bucket. I took my clothes to the laundromat on the other side of town.
“Things started to snowball from there. Because I was pissed at the town, I noticed there was something wrong with my gas bill. I didn’t like the way they were reading the meter. They were just estimating the data, basing it off my five closest neighbors. On the bill, it was called neighborhood estimation. I knew I wasn’t using nearly as much gas as my neighbors because, for one thing, I had no hot water, and also I wasn’t running the furnace at the time. So I refused to pay that bill, and the gas was shut off too.”
At the time, people around town started talking. Cal didn’t have water or heat. He was living like a savage.
Yag says, “I would’ve marched down to Public Works and burned the fucking building down.”
“If I’d done that,” Cal says, “I’d be in prison right now. Or dead. That’s my point. You gotta hold the course. Wait ’til things right themselves.”
“The town eventually came around, then?” Yag asks with a twang of disbelief.
“Not exactly,” Cal says. “Evie was about to graduate from college at the U. I asked her to marry me and move in. She refused to shit in a bucket. She called Public Works. The guy who answered the phone took pity on her. He told her if I came down to the office after five p.m., after everyone else had left for the day, he’d give me a used stop box. I could dig up the old broken one myself and replace it.
“I called Lucas and we did the back-alley deal with the guy from Public Works. Then we drove to the house to dig a hole six feet deep. We dug straight down, shaving dirt from the sides. Lucas brought out his Shop-Vac and we used it to suck up dirt, emptying it thirty times over.
“It was obvious when the water came back on because Evie ran out of the house screaming to turn it off again. Some of the pipes had burst. I said no way—now that the water was on, nobody was gonna turn it off. I pulled Lucas out of the hole by his ankles, and we went inside and capped the pipes. Later, I ran all new piping by myself.”
“If you did all the work, didn’t the town win?” Yag asks.
Amelia serves them a third shot of Fireball. Cal raises his glass to Yag and says, “To getting so drunk it doesn’t matter.” Drunken stupor: the fifth and final stage of grief. Cal doesn’t take the shot, though. He turns his head toward Summer and hands it off to Martin, who takes both, rapid-fire.
“At the end of the month, I got a call from the Water Department. A woman said, ‘Sir, we have a problem. We’ve identified a twenty-eight-month gap in our billing cycle.’ She couldn’t figure out why. She’d never seen anything like it before. I calmly explained that the water had been off for twenty-eight months, and now it was back on. She informed me that even if I hadn’t used any water, I was still responsible for the sewer fee, which was thirteen dollars a month. I told her to send me a bill. I’d pay it. I’d never been delinquent on a bill.”
Cal believes his name is on a list somewhere, but I highly doubt it. If the government had the wherewithal to surveil every crazy white guy in town, they’d put eyes on The Final Final, and as far as I can tell, no one gives a rip about what we do here.
“Sure, you could say I lost,” Cal says, “having gone so long without water and all. But here’s the kicker: within the year, the town installed a new stop box across the street. No one notified me, but I watched it happen while I drank in my lawn chair.”
“Fuck, man. I don’t have your stamina,” Yag says. “Those assholes cheated, and they’re gonna get away with it. I should break in and light the poker table on fire. Send a message.”
Cal puts his hand on Yag’s shoulder, a wise father calming a hotheaded son. “Wait it out. Pay off your debt. The water eventually comes back on.”
I can’t help but smile into my drink. The passage of time, all twenty-eight months of it, didn’t solve Cal’s problem, as he insists. Evie solved his problem. She picked up the phone and forced him to get out of his own way. If Yag doesn’t do something crazy first, his mom will solve his problem. I’d put money on it, if gambling didn’t seem like such a bad idea right now.
* * *
A WHILE BACK, I noticed a pattern in my students’ presentations. They’d finish a section, like a SWOT analysis, or an exploration of Porter’s Five Forces, or a rundown of KPIs, and then they’d say, “Now John’s going to talk about the financials,” or, “Here’s Alice with our recommendations.” Students assume these are transitions simply because they hand off the proverbial baton.
One day, a group came to me and asked where they should put the financials in the deck. The simple question of where, not what or how, made me realize that MBAs think of transitions in the wrong way. They think, How do I move from one point to the next? when really they should be thinking about how one point builds into the next. If content is optimally structured, the transitions don’t feel like handing off a baton. They feel like shifting a manual transmission at about 3,000 rpm. In other words, transitions should feel natural—like the right time to shift—and if successful, the engine gets a boost.
The engine, or in my students’ case, the content, dictates the shift. But unlike an engine, which is mechanical, content is organic. It is a living extension of the speaker, and transitions aren’t optimized at fixed points (the financials do not always come toward the end). I encourage my students to command transitions to work to their advantage, which is easier said than done. After beginnings and endings, transitions are the most important aspect of any presentation, whether it’s a stock pitch, or product launch, or an old story much told at the bar.
* * *
FOR OUR FIRST WEDDING anniversary, Lucas and I took our bicycles to France with the goal of escaping tourist traps and exploring the countryside. On our third day, in the hills to the west of a town west of Lyon, we came across a tiny village. In its heyday, two hundred years prior, the village was home to approximately five hundred people.
Today, it has one business: a juice bar run by a jolly old lady who makes crepes on request, and her husband, who keeps bees and sells jars of honey. They have a big, old, lazy dog that hangs by the man’s side all day long. The juice bar is located right in what was once an active town square.
Lucas and I parked our bikes and watched the old woman press the oranges for our mixed juice. Then we walked to the middle of the square, where we found the statue
of a man holding his hands behind his back, as one might do when taking a leisurely stroll.
There are so many statues in France that it’s impossible to care about any of them, but this one caught my eye for two reasons. First, the subject smiled, a rarity for European statues. And second, the inscription on the stone base read Le Maire—simply, The Mayor. There was no name on the statue—I found the name, Gerard Dupris, later, back in a library in Lyon. And he wasn’t actually the mayor. In the nineteenth century, this district was unincorporated and had no governing body.
On Dupris’s fourteenth birthday, his mother, who had fallen gravely and mysteriously ill, died suddenly. Later that year, his elder sister and primary caretaker died in a tragic accident, according to legend, falling into a ravine. By sixteen, Dupris fell in love with a beautiful girl from the village. They married quickly and conceived a child. His young wife, who bore a son, died during childbirth. Dupris never loved another woman. Dupris’s son was, quite literally, raised by the village. He helped the bread baker deliver morning loaves across town. The villagers fed his belly with homemade treats and his mind with stories. He lingered in their homes and brought joy to everyone who knew him. He grew up to be very handsome and charming.
Dupris and his son farmed the land that their family had worked for generations but they also roamed freely, traveling by horse, and developed friendships throughout the provinces. They cultivated reputations for trustworthiness and sincerity, and they began to broker deals, first among merchants and landowners, and then among the ruling class.
They were welcome in monasteries and palaces; they attended feasts as guests and distributed rations to the poor as volunteers. They spoke many local dialects. They could have chosen wives for love or wealth or status, but they broke many hearts instead. Their bond with each other, forged through death, was singular and unbreakable.
Dupris and his son returned regularly to their village, bringing gifts of knowledge and medicine and invention that created great prosperity. The village had an annual festival in the town square when father and son returned for the winter months. It erupted spontaneously when they rode into town and ended as many as seven days later, when the wine jugs ran dry.
