And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (15 page)

To my pleasure and everlasting gratitude, I was right.

I sent an e-mail to the general inquiry inbox listed on their website explaining that I am an author and the editor of an online magazine, outlining my goals and asking whether they could point me in the right direction to get some advice, either over the phone or through content—books, videos, websites—that Bean may have prepared. Less than two hours later, I had an e-mail in my inbox from a man named Mac McKeever. He was a hunting and fishing public relations specialist for Bean and he asked if I would call him to discuss how he could help. I was stunned to say the least. I hadn't expected a response, let alone a personal one and so quickly. I wrote the number down on my hand and stepped out of the office and into the enormous parking lot to make my call. I work in a creative environment full of young hipsters and didn't want to be discussing my desire to learn how to hunt in front of them for fear of recoil or, worse, attention.

“This is Mac,” he said.

“Hi, Mac, this is Craig Heimbuch. I just got your e-mail about . . .”

“You're the guy who wants to learn how to hunt,” he said. “Was it pheasant in Nebraska?”

“Iowa, actually,” I said, impressed that he had actually paid attention.

“Iowa pheasant, that's legendary,” he said. “How can we help?”

“Well,” I said and tried to fight my voice from sounding too much like a groupie, “I've never done it before. I've shot guns, but not a ton and I've always loved Bean and I thought maybe you had a guide or somebody I could talk to for some advice.”

“I'll do you one better,” said Mac, and he told me about the company's Outdoor Discovery Schools program, which is basically a series of workshops in Maine teaching skills from kayaking to dogsled racing. “You've got to take one of our Wingshooting classes. I'll comp you the admission. I just think it would be perfect for what you're trying to do.”

I thanked him aggressively and hung up. Had I just been invited to Maine by L.L.Bean so they could help me learn how to hunt in order to impress my Iowa relatives and feel like a man? I believe they just had. We set a date over e-mail for early October, and I went back upstairs to begin looking for flights.

Look out, Maine, here I come.

12

Instruction

I
t had been a rough week. Late on a late September Monday night, a severe rainstorm weaved its way through a gap in the bushing around a vent on the roof and opened up a backwater creek down the plaster of our vaulted (and mercifully sloped) living room ceiling. This prompted a call to the landlord, who we'd been trying to get to come out for weeks to take a look at the cracking linoleum floor in the kitchen and a strange gap in the padding beneath the carpet. Or, more accurately, it prompted several calls. Rebecca would call me, I would step out of a meeting or interrupt my writing to call the landlord who would not answer. I would then call Rebecca to tell her that no one had answered and she would call me back twenty minutes later to see if anyone had called back and ask me if I thought it was strange that no one would return our calls. I would tell her that, yes, I thought it was strange and the whole process would repeat again, seemingly ad infinitum.

I finally got a call from the maintenance guy who said he would come Wednesday or Thursday, though what a three-day wait for service did for a leaky roof, I could not be sure. I told him I needed to confer with my wife on the schedule and call him back. I called Rebecca and we agreed that Wednesday would work just fine. She had some things to do with the kids, but I had a relatively meeting-free morning and could stay home for a couple of hours. I called him back and left a message saying as much, satisfied with my manly handling of this precarious situation.

That Monday at work had been a blur. Meetings forgotten, deadlines missed, and the constant interaction with my phone. It seemed I could do no right. Tuesday wasn't much better. There were too many places to be, too many commitments with the kids. I found myself alone on the high school track just before midnight, huffing and puffing my way through a three-mile run listening to a podcast about the various techniques of fitting a gun to a larger-framed man without hearing a word. I had hoped the run, the fresh air, the podcast would help me relax, help me sleep, help me let go of the stress at home and the stress at work.

It did not.

The next day was Dylan's birthday and I barely got to see him. I put Jack on the school bus and walked back to the condo to wait for the maintenance man. Rebecca had made plans to take Dylan and Molly to meet some friends at one of those indoor inflatable gyms, the kind with air-filled slides and bounce houses that serve the dual purpose of entertaining children and serving as host to dozens of flesh-eating communicable diseases.

When I had spoken to Joel, the Kentucky-mumbling oddly dusty maintenance man, on Monday, he had told me he would be out between 9:30 and 11. So having the rare opportunity to be home alone on a weekday morning, I did what any self-respecting husband and father would do, namely drank coffee and watched
SportsCenter
in my underwear, waiting until 9:29 to pull on a pair of jeans and a sweater. One must always be presentable for guests after all. By ten, I'm getting restless, so I do the breakfast dishes, vacuum the carpets, and fold some laundry. At eleven, having cleaned the bathrooms, checked my e-mail, made all the beds, and refolded all the T-shirts in my middle dresser drawer, I call Joel and get his voice mail. I call Rebecca and get hers. I have a meeting at noon, one I assumed I would be able to make given the times Joel had laid out. I'm beginning to dread what was to happen next—namely, Rebecca getting mad at me for somehow failing to make this all come to fruition—when just before 11:30, Joel calls.

“Yeah, it's Joel,” he said. “You called me?”

“Yeah, Joel, hi,” I said. I've never been the kind of person to seek confrontation. I've never sent back the wrong order. I've never asked to speak to a manager—except under the direst of circumstances and only then over the phone with a customer service representative whom I assumed was based somewhere closer to Kuala Lumpur than Cleveland, and only then if something was actually on fire. I've always subscribed to the distinctly Lutheran precept that you get more friends with tuna hot dish than you do by shooting their dogs. (Okay, maybe it loses something in translation, but if you say it with an Upper Wisconsin accent it sounds much less menacing.) So I go the nice route. “Joel, it's Craig, the guy with the leaky roof? Just wondering how long you were going to be?”

“Huh?” he says, and I could hear his confused mouth-breathing through the phone.

“We had an appointment,” I demurred. “You said you could come out between 9:30 and 11 and I took the morning off work. You remember?”

“I never did got no call back from you,” he said.

“I called back within five minutes of hanging up,” I entreated. “I left you a voice mail.”

“No, you didn't,” he said.

“I'm pretty sure I did,” I said.

“No, you didn't.”

I don't know if it's because I generally have a guilty conscience or if it's because my first instinct in almost any situation is to apologize, but I've always been amazed by some people's knack for delusional deniability. Had I been on the other end of this call, my first instinct would probably have been to apologize profusely then begin immediately trying to make amends. But not Joel. No sir. It had to be my fault. No way had he not missed a phone call. No way was it his fault. I could feel my blood pressure rising like the thermometer in one of those old Saturday-morning cartoons when an ill-meaning and inept cat is goaded into eating a hot pepper by his intended prey—a small, sarcastic bird with a superiority complex and questionable sexual predilections. It was genuine anger, true, but also a sense of dread, a feeling that I had actually somehow screwed up. I wanted to reach through the phone and grab Joel's tongue and say something to the effect of:

“Listen you cousin-loving bastard of an excuse for adulthood, I absolutely did call you and you damn well know that you got the message. And if you don't get your drop-out ass up here in the next five minutes to fix my ceiling and floors, my wife is going to have hell to pay for me which can only mean that I will be well within my rights to come to your single-wide, tear up your collection of White Snake and Lynard Skynard commemorative beer coozies and use your syphilitic three-legged dog as target practice before setting the whole thing up in flames in a vengeful conflagration against you and all the other dim-witted self-absorbed jackasses who have ever screwed me over. Believe me you, buster.”

Of course I actually said none of that. What I said was something much more benign and in keeping with my long history of timidity in time of conflict. Something like, “Gosh, this is a real pickle. Any chance we can schedule something when it's convenient for you?”

“Let me check my messages to see if you called and I'll call you back,” he said.

“Okey-dokey.”

Had I thought about it, I might have realized the evidence of Joel's lying that he had just presented. He was going to check and be sure that I had called on Monday? Hadn't he just returned my message from earlier that morning? He called back moments later.

“Well, I still didn't get no message, but I suppose I can squeeze you in tomorrow,” he said in that way that the self-satisfied have, as if he were doing me a favor at great personal expense and expenditure of effort. I could not believe he was acting like he was doing me a favor. This was not our first issue with Joel, who had done a subpar job recaulking our bathtub once and had sent my wife off into a near-apoplectic rage. She yelled at me to yell at him. Clearly she is more comfortable with confrontation, but when it comes to dealing with Joel and our landlords, she prefers confrontation by proxy. I did my best to get answers from Joel, but all I managed was a weak-tea apology and the implication that my time would be better spent by engaging in a vigorous—if not physically challenging—sexual act elsewhere. I ended up recaulking the tub myself and while I wouldn't say I did a better job, it was certainly no worse.

All this—the caulking memory, the tongue lashing, and Joel's behavior—was in the back of my head when I accepted his offer to come out the next day, then took off for work in such a frenzy and with such rapidity it was almost therapeutic.

That night, traffic on my evening commute was worse than normal. The twenty-seven-mile drive usually takes just over an hour in the evening, but took nearly twice that because of a couple of accidents. I was late getting to Dylan's birthday dinner, which earned me a doleful look from my loving wife, who took me aside to complain—not at me but to me—about the situation with Joel. It was her position that I needed to be stronger with him and if I really cared about my family and the condition of the home they are living in, I would have no problem finding that strength. I kissed her head and hugged Dylan, sang Happy Birthday, then grabbed Jack, went home and changed, and took him to a Cub Scout meeting.

I share the den leader responsibilities with another dad in the group, which meant that after the meeting I took Jack home and made sure everyone was in bed before heading out to meet with the other leader to plan out our meeting schedule. I had quickly earned the ire of the type-A suburban moms in our den by not having a full and comprehensive schedule prepared by our first meeting. How could they manage the next nine to eleven months of their sons' lives properly with such an imbecile at the switch? I had sensed an impending mutiny—after just a single meeting—and my wife said an e-mail campaign had been launched demanding greater accountability. She recommended that I plan through May, just to get the ladies off my back.

I couldn't sleep that night. I kept having these terrifying visions of being late for work, hearing a clap of thunder and looking up to see the ceiling collapse and hundreds of blond crows in Dolce & Gabanna sunglasses flying through the hole to peck away at my flesh, with my wife standing by telling me that if I had just cared more, none of this would have happened. I went out onto the couch and flipped through the nine-hundred-odd channels of our cable service, finding nothing but infomercials and reruns of bad shows from the 1990s—and just who exactly wants to watch old episodes of
Blossom
at two in the morning? I turned off the TV and sat quietly in the dark for ten minutes before I saw a flash out the window and heard the patter of rain on the roof, at which point I fell right to sleep.

Thursday came early, with Dylan tugging on my shoulder a half hour before dawn. The hole in the ceiling had gotten worse overnight. I got out of bed, put some coffee on, and situated our biggest sauce pans under the ceiling so they would catch a majority of the still-dripping water. I made breakfast, got everyone ready and out the door, and even dropped Dylan off at school. Joel and the woman from our landlord's office showed up within fifteen minutes of on-time and Rebecca stayed in the bathroom while they scanned the floor and ceiling, the screen door we had told them needed to be fixed four years earlier, and pretty much everything else we have ever complained about in roughly the time it took me to have a sip of coffee. They then spoke in hushed tones as if I weren't standing right in front of them and were gone before I knew what happened.

“What did they say?” asked Rebecca, toweling off her shower wet hair.

“Not much,” I said. “Joel said he'd call later.”

He did, later that day, and told me that they were going to replace carpet padding but not the carpet itself, put a veneer over the cracked kitchen floor and talk to the condo association about fixing the source of the leaky roof. Not exactly the cure-all we had in mind, but it was a start. I moved all the furniture out of the dining and living rooms, then went to work, promising myself that I was going to do whatever was necessary to get us out of renter's hell and soon.

As you can probably imagine, the repairs were hasty and the process a clusterfuck of incompetence and disappointment. (I'll note here that more than four months later, the hole in the ceiling has not been patched, though the leak did mysteriously stop.)

I needed to leave. I needed some distance. I'd been carrying a lot of extra water at work, taking on side jobs to help make ends meet, and with everything going on with our stupid ceiling, it was just time for me to go. Lucky for me, I was leaving the next day.

The night before I left, I didn't sleep a wink. Too much pressure. Too many frayed nerves.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca has a way of snapping at me when I wake her up late at night.

“I can't sleep,” I whispered. “I'm going out on the couch. Just go to sleep.”

I don't generally like being awake at four in the morning. My dad does it every day. So does my friend John. Both engineers, both grew up in the rural Midwest. Must be something in all that rusty water that makes them believe this is an appropriate time for a human being to be awake. It patently is not. I flipped on the television in our dark living room and for a moment the light burned my eyes. There is something absurd about television at this time of night. With a thousand channels constantly angling for the most engaging prime-time programming, I wonder why they never consider the early riser or late-night watcher when they force-feed infomercials for the next miracle abdominal exercise machine and the get-rich-quick real estate moguls hawking their wares. I have a hard time imagining my midsection will end up trim if only I make three easy installments of $39.99 and am willing to attach a car battery to my navel. I also have a hard time believing that a man making $25,000 a year was able to pay off his thirty-year mortgage in nine months without robbing a bank.

H
ad it not been such a bad week, I might have been giddy with anticipation when my plane landed in Portland, Maine, as I arrived for my L.L.Bean workshop. But, as it was, my nerves were fried. I was tired of the stress at home, tired of the hassle of traveling—who wouldn't be with a two-hour layover in Baltimore?—and I found myself getting short with my wife on the phone while I was waiting for my bag to come out of the carousel. It was almost midnight. No sleep. I just wanted to get to my room and go to sleep.