Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

by Paul Hawkins

  *

  I am an electrical repairman's son. Oh, my father was more than that - he understood the math and the physics and the secret ways of electronic things, but all that theory is no good if a man can't make money, so my father was an electrical repairman, back when people didn't used to throw whole TV's away. He never could obey anyone else so he worked for himself or with his partner.

  He also fought in World War II and was of the generation that made the world safe and free and more or less American and at once made it indefinably greater and smaller than it had been. Safe, clean, tidy - for a while - different food but the same Levi’s, the sitcoms from Sheboygan to Shanghai.

  I grew up in an inner city Catholic neighborhood, but when our friends' families sprang on sudden lucre to the white flight neighborhoods up north, we did too - or thought we had. Like everything else my father attempted, he messed it up. We ended up not in a ranch house on a cul-de-sac, but in a tilting farmhouse one notch farther away, one century older - a place my father's car-graveyard owning brother Dave had "guaranteed" the city would grow out to any minute but never did.

  At least, it didn't build out there for decades, and in those times my father sank into despair, and I sank into despair and had adventures, or misadventures, but as they say I am clean and sober now, and I am ready to move on. I can sit on the tin steps of my dented, tarnished silver airstream trailer on the back acres of my father's 40-acre farm and see where they are building a new mega-church out here in the hinterlands of Oklahoma's foremost metropolis, after decades of inertia. I can sit in the twilight and watch the last puffs rise from the yellow and black dirt movers, planing and sculpting the red clay, clearing the way for a new church that will look more like a medical plaza than a temple of the Holy Ghost.

  Now over twenty years have passed since I committed the horrible deeds that sent me to prison, and I am out and free, and life is creeping into these sticks at last but in a different way than the eighties oil boom once foretold. That boom, when it seemed boundless, promised something like a stampede of wealth. It was to be a frenzied, hopeful - let's call it greedy - colonizing, romanticized all out of proportion by propaganda cowboy poets who still find success even today. They go to cocktail parties and wear string ties and recite snippets of bad verse and pretend they don't live in condos. They pretend to understand abstract Indian art and bless the billionaires who perpetually try to get the city to pass a temporarily permanent 1/3 cent sales tax increase to build a business park, a convention center, and a streetcar line between these places and the State Capitol because lobbyists shouldn’t have to pay cab fare.

  As I said something like vitality is finally creeping into these acres, decades after it was forecast to do so, but it is a different sort of life. It has an impulse of charity. My neighbors and I are seeing to it that our land is used to build a church or two, a school, and a charity hospital. That is to say, my sister Janet is seeing to it that my land is sold to people of such interests. I have given her that authority. I could never manage details the way she does. In any case, my neighbors and I collectively adopted this strategy as a hedge against a recently leaked plan of eminent domain and annexation. The Sisters of Mercy are building a hospital, the diocese is building a Catholic church and school, and some non-denominational Protestant group is building a mega-church that looks like a spaceship.

  For now there is still a house on my acres. It is a small house, the one my father used to live in, and the one I refused to inhabit after he succumbed to his own dark despair. But it is a good sturdy house, although the back door sits crooked and has to be latched to stay shut. That is where my friend Jude Drewyer is staying now, temporarily. He has been my friend since we were in gradeschool. He has just received some news that will change his life, and so he is staying on my acres to think things through. When he is troubled his businessman persona slips aside and he channels his hippy father and religious mother. When he was in prison he went all granola. Twice in these past few days I have seen him walking alone in twilight in my wide, dry fields. He seems to be walking and watching and waiting. When he thinks to look up and see me, he waves. It’s nothing that good woman couldn’t fix, but he has a fiancé.

  I hope he is doing okay. I will bring him a basket of fruit tomorrow. I will ask about his plans.

  Tonight I have my own preparations to make, my own packing and planning to do. I am leaving soon. But before I do I feel I should record what I went through, in the lean decades, in the depths of my despair and desperation, so that others might avoid the innate selfishness of prideful misery and its concomitant temptations. If the world does not learn what I have learned, it will perish. The world is already in love with death and the idea of its own demise like some fat German opera.

  From Rosalind’s Journal: About Blaise

  My name is Rosalind Russell and I worked with Blaise as a local clothing store model and later in a miserable venture called "Fashion Shots" in a has-been mall in the 1980's.

  Blaise Bohrs grew up in the 1980's in a small brick house on a largely untilled square of land on the furthest edge of this prairie metropolis that had not grown as far as it had dreamed it would, thanks to the oil bust, which itself was nothing more than the implosion of a speculation scheme dreamt up by men in cowboy hats strutting around like they were characters from the TV show "Dallas" until they believed their own lie and started selling East Coast bankers worthless paper. When the bankers found out there was no oil in the ground to back the paper up, Oklahoma's oil bubble burst, and one banking scandal hoisted itself above the rest due to the sheer magnitude of dollars and gall behind it, and it shuddered through the state like the word “Cops!” hollered into a gambling den. Speculators packed their bags like cartoon bandits hefting canvas bags with dollar signs, and those who remained slinked behind their 100-foot crosses, looked at the ground, shook their heads and muttered pieties until the sirens passed.

  Therefore Blaise's estate (or rather that of his father - his old man was nuts) had not been visited with urbanity although it shared a border with a well-paved, well-intended road to nowhere, a non-thriving apartment building, a half-developed moneyed white-flight neighborhood (Ritzville), the foundations of a ghost town to the north, and a WPA mudhole lake. Those of us stuck in that area after the threatened tide of wealth receded called it the Sub-Suburbs, and it was the kind of place in which a sow and a sorority princess and a car-graveyard owner and an angel might accidentally share an adventure and be the better for it if they lived to tell.

  Blaise is still blissfully and dopefully unconscious of everything - I don't think he ever did a single thing from bad intentions, but after the money receded and his father died he was left alone too long in his own despair and got himself into trouble. He is that way. But he is the kind of person God made just so it'd be someone else's duty to look out for him.

  Blaise and Jude are both out of jail. Jude was Blaise's best friend but he had no more sense than Blaise did, although he was smarter and skinnier and he looked like the kind of guy who should be the bean-counter type, the sensible one. But he wasn’t. His fault was that he was too loyal to Blaise and he would throw himself into harm's way to try to protect his friend but just end up making everything twice as bad - a break-in becomes a kidnapping, an assault becomes a murder. The excesses of enthusiasm. I think Blaise beat up a kid who was picking on him once. It is like that little dog following a big dog you see in cartoons.

  Now that they are both out of jail, Blaise is letting Jude live in his dad's old farmhouse on his dirt acres. Blaise hates the farmhouse. He has refused to live in it ever since his father died decades ago. Well, not died in exactly – it was more complicated than that. But in any case after his father died Blaise would go into the paint-peeling house only to store or retrieve supplies, but for actual living he chose to abide in a trailer his uncle Dave (the car-graveyard owner) gave him, although it was supremely hot and cluttered.

  For decades he was a man-boy stuck
somewhere between 27 and 49. Did the exact age matter? When his father died he had stopped. Well, he had proceeded, of course, but only in the kind of fits and starts that flared now and then into adventures, only to subside and reveal the disappearance of decades.

  I have known him for decades - I have watched him in the way men who are oblivious to the nicest women around them don't know they are being watched. And I have concluded that if he could be said to enjoy one thing, other than his sparse, concerted and sometimes creative stratagems for blocking out the event of his father's demise and its subsequent, related effects, it is the indefinable emptiness of the sub-suburbs themselves, the association of scattered things in proximity but disconnected, available but cut off, alive but alone and forgotten. The handful of people he knew and has known here have arrested personalities similar to his own, except they are one notch more adept at putting on masks when necessary to interact with the rest of the world for the purposes of securing money and companionship. I am describing myself when I say this. My mother ran a hair salon across from a trailer park but I managed to pull off being in a sorority, and I managed to act the part of a bimbo and still make straight A's so as not to waste my mother's money. So why did I wind up where I did? Was I scared to succeed? Let a therapist answer that. I did what was comfortable. We all learn to assemble an inventory of masks. Except Blaise. I think he is only who he is.

  A few days ago he got out of jail after ten years. It was his second ten-year stint in jail, with brief spectacular episodes in between. His past is somewhat complicated, although now that he is out again he intends to makes a clean start, and his sister Janet has come back from halfway across the country to see that he sticks to it.

  His father died twenty-odd years ago. The one beautiful girl from his youth had left him at the same time as the city died back to its husk of its self, and everybody interesting had moved away, including his sisters - Tess (older, perpetually running off with bass players) and Janet (younger, sensible to a fault, taught by her late mother to be tough and to escape the fate of so many of her peers who got knocked up at 17 and found themselves chained down with the concomitant commitment the rest of their lives).

  Five long years after his sisters left him, and his girl left him, Blaise had been stuck with his old man, who was stuck in his own inertia, brought on years before by the death of his wife and the sudden replacement of vacuum tube electronics with solid state circuitry - for he was a TV repair man - and the events conspired to make a man whose brain had grown up dancing on electrons and unraveling their physics now collapse - a man who had grown up marveling at yoking electrons into order, only temporarily, ever, only momentarily making use of their capriciousness to spring a word to souls across the ether - to bring a song, a sermon, a bit of news, a warning - yoking invisible angels utilized slightly to dance on glowing orange filaments of vacuum tubes, each with a message and their own joy of being - all the joys of his life left the old man at once - the wife his one and only love succumbing to a cancer that left her a dried dish-rag shell of herself, then disappearing from the shell, hammering his own powerlessness into him at every turn and then leaving him abruptly alone, a daughter who for no good reason blamed him and another who wanted to stand by him but, finally, couldn't (not spitefully but from the deeper unconscious drive to live and be herself and escape the toxicity of an atmosphere of decay) - it had been five long years with Blaise and his father alone, his father increasingly withdrawn to that dry house and his electronics shack out back - alone alone, straining at headphones and listening for signals from everything that had abandoned him - straining for a whisper of reassurance, for one last will and testament from the airy angels who had danced with him so graciously before when he was young, waiting on a whisper from God that He still loved him - no whisper came.

  He died and then Blaise died - but Blaise kept on living. As I have said, Blaise has been in and out of prison twice since, but now in his late forties he is free. He wanders his dry empty acres with a sudden lightness he has not shown before, something care-lifted and angelic, as if he has suddenly been relieved of something or has consciously let go of it.

  The acres he wanders include the remnants of Boheme. Boheme is the left over weed-grown foundations of a town from the turn of the previous century, settled by a religious/artistic/utopic community made up of idealists from Europe who had decided to shed the evils of materialistic society and live purely.

  It had lasted only two years because one girl prettier and more buxom (stacked) than all the rest made even the most whiskerless wisp of a man pine for her and sowed jealousy amongst them, and there had not been one aspiring aesthete among them suited for hoeing in the fields anyway, and no one liked hoeing in the fields half so much as they liked the idea of hoeing, and all the buildings they designed and built from scratch leaned sideways so badly that even the nearby Mennonites and Amish couldn't fix them, save for one grand mansion at the far north end of the acres that they shored up out of pity.

  The community died when the beautiful girl suddenly ran off and married a fancy-dressed gambler and the men became increasingly idle and nearly starved one winter for lack of growing anything, and then when Spring came a tornado mercifully destroyed their work and sent them packing back to Europe none the wiser, and it left the foundations blissfully clean, save for the Amish-reinforced mansion, which had been spared or survived.

  Blaise now owns these acres. They had been purchased decades ago when his uncle had owned the nearby car graveyard and had been planning on expansion, but he had left the country one step ahead of the law when the 1980's economy imploded and his illegal gambling exploits were revealed, as his was private zoo, and one second before his midnight departure, just before the government could seize his assets for back taxes, he left the utopic acres to Blaise. The wilderness had long since reclaimed the ruins, but Blaise liked owning the acreage, and sometimes he found old coins or bottles. For that matter the acres were home to rare and poisonous reptiles that weren't supposed to live in this part of the state but somehow thrived amidst the ruins of a utopia that pious shallow people had tried to build and failed. The snakes and lizards abided Blaise as if there were an unspoken agreement between them and hissed softly at him in greeting. And the old people for whom he mowed lawns ten years ago in the nearby never-realized neighborhood told him there were rumors of tragedy and mystery about the mansion, and that faint lights could be seen walking through it at night, but Blaise visited upon it his own tragedy, but to tell that is to get ahead.

  Now that he is out of jail for the second time Blaise wanders the acres like a haint, a thing released but waiting to move on, a supernatural being whose future hangs in suspension, waiting for some formalized atonement.