Big Bad Love (19 page)

I tried to write all I could. I tried to put balls and heart and blood into it like a good writer had once told me to do. Sometimes it wasted me, just laid me out. I knew that at least some of what I was writing was good, but I just hadn't found anybody to share my vision yet. Nobody with any power. Nobody who could say yes or no to publication. I knew about the pecking order, and jealousy, and interdepartmental office
memos and the little notes that were jotted with a quick hand. They didn't know about the careers they were advancing or retarding with their little papers, the numbers of us who lived and died with a stroke of their pens. They didn't have any idea of the power they wielded. We were a vast unfaced effluvium of authors with unproven work, and there was so much bad that it was hard to find the good in all of it. Maybe they became jaded with it, their eyes turned to stone by the shit that fell before them. Maybe so much bad work had convinced them that it all looked alike, that nothing was going to come from the shit pile, that the quest was already over and they weren't going to discover the next Hemingway. I felt these things strongly. I couldn't prove them, but I felt them.

I wondered if the great Betti DeLoreo was somewhere in her high ivory tower, her fingernails painted red, her black mane of hair drawn to one side, reading manuscripts, one load of shit after another. I wondered if she was thinking of me. I knew the chance was small. There were many of us and only one of her. And she was only one cog in a big machine. It seemed almost hopeless sometimes, but I knew I had to keep going on. I had chosen my own path. Nothing could turn me from it.

I was in a bar one night and I had been drinking before I got there. I knew I was treading on shaky ground, drinking at night in town and then having to drive myself home. The state troopers nailed people with regularity. It helped to take
secondary roads, to be responsible. I had good intentions that were often spoiled by drinking.

The evenings began it. The two or three beers in the late evening, then the false sense of security when night fell. To be driving on the backroads, the cooler in the floorboard. Little music playing. The road just slowly going by at thirty-five miles an hour. But sometimes the road wound to town.

Sometimes you see somebody you don't like and you know when you look at him that the feeling is mutual. Your eyes meet briefly and then part, like two dogs sizing each other up. And any time later that night when you look at him, he'll be looking at you. You only have to wait for the liquor to do its work to get your surprise. Your mouthful of fist, if it comes.

That was what I happened to be facing that night. Some fucker with a freaky face. I guess he was jealous of my handsome one, or relatively unmarked one anyway, which was the main difference between us. First off, somebody'd kicked both his front teeth out. And then bit off half of one of his ears. Then they, like, tried to
gouge
his right eye out with a class ring or something, really grinding it deep into the tissue of his eyelid, so that it hung down halfway over the eye and gave him this . . . freaky look. Man has a problem. You understand it immediately. He won't go to a plastic surgeon. Whatever in his life led him to his altered state won't let him repair himself. He'd rather take it out on unscarred people like you, try to make you look more like him. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to turn your back and finish your beer and find another place to drink in that night. Because after he's given you that pit bull look, you know you won't go unchallenged.

I knew a few people down there shooting pool. They had some peeled cedar posts propping the ceiling up. Playmates were plastered over the same ceiling. You could look up and see titties of the most delectable types. Small rounded asses reclining over velvet couches, their elegant legs stretched out. Where do they find these women? They're not out here in the world. I've never seen them. They don't hang out in this particular bar, anyway.

I just moseyed around for a while. It was really pretty dull. I should have been at home writing. But I'd written so much I was temporarily tired of it. And I was hoping I might find some disreputable woman or some cast-off woman disreputable enough to take me in for the night. I knew I had no line of chatter, none. I just couldn't open up. I knew they thought I was unfriendly, that I had no rap. But it really wasn't that way at all. What did you say after you said Hi? You from around here? Why did they look so snotty when you tried to talk to them? Weren't they lonely, too? Didn't they want some warm flesh to press up against? I didn't know any of the answers. I'd met my wife on a blind double date. We'd gotten pretty well acquainted in the back seat before we ever got out of her daddy's driveway.

The young lady who was barmaiding smiled when she came over to pick up my empty.

“Another Bud, please.”

She stuck the empty in a cardboard case and bent over the cooler for a fresh one.

“Here you go. Dollar fifty.”

I paid and waved away the change. What was wrong with
me? No rap at all. My ex-wife was probably getting all the good loving she needed. I couldn't understand why the male had to court the female. Was what she had better to him than what he had was to her? I didn't think so. I thought it was an equal thing. And then of course there was the question of homosexuality and lesbianism. Whips and chains, foot fetishes, all that other kinky stuff you read about.

I saw a boy I sometimes painted houses with, and went over and stood by him. Like me he wasn't much of a talker.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“How's it going?”

“All right. You?”

“Pretty good. You need a beer?”

“Nah.”

We watched some people shoot pool for a while. I didn't even know why I was up there. I always expected something to happen and it never did. It wasn't going to, not to me. I turned to leave and the guy I'd seen earlier was in my face. I've had it happen before.

“I don't like your face.”

“Oh yeah? Tough shit.”

He swung. I ducked. He swung again. I ducked again.

“Hey, man. You're drunk. Why don't you fuck off?”

He swung again. This time he hit one of the cedar posts with his fist. I heard his hand break. It took the starch out of him right away. I saw then that he wasn't some badass who could kick the shit out of anybody he wanted to. He was just a wimp with a broken hand.

He went down on his knees and did quite a bit of howling, holding his hand. I could have kicked him as hard as I wanted to, right on the side of his head, or on the back of his neck. I just stood there and watched him, and enjoyed it, which is one of the negative traits of my character, I suppose.

I was up there another night and some old guy was collapsed over the bar, mumbling and muttering to himself. I bought a beer and stood close to him. If you tuned out the television and the guys shooting pool and the stereo and the MTV you could hear what he was saying. He looked about seventy, ragged coat, untrimmed hair, disreputable shoes. Just about what I knew I'd look like in thirty more years if I kept going the way I was going. Have none of my work published and be an old wasted guy, bitter at the world. It wasn't a very pretty picture.

“Nineteen sixty-six,” he said. He shook his head viciously and stared at his beer bottle with murder in his eyes. “You. Her. Everybody. The whole world. Yeah. The whole world knows. And what good did it do to try? Huh? Three goddamn weeks. Only time when you was little it did any good to try and talk to you. Just one right after another. Keep on hoping and hoping and it don't do no good. It ain't no way. Never will be. Grow their hair and smoke cigarettes and run off away from home and get in trouble and call wanting money. Or sell your ass in the street. Just make more like you. Don't even know how many. Gather em up and send em off to China or Africa or somewhere don't nobody know you.”

I leaned against the bar next to him. “Emptiness,” I said. “That hollow feeling. The empathy of the whole world or the uncaring glance of a businessman in a car. Trying to sell newspapers with gum stuck on your shoe. Raining. Cold hard snow ice sleet falling from the sky. A biscuit and no jelly to put in it.”

I looked at him. He looked at me. He looked back at his beer.

“She had geraniums,” he said. “Little black notebooks crammed full of em. You couldn't tell how many.” He shook his head. “I started counting one day at eleven forty-five p. m. and got up to three hundred and seventy-two and the doorbell rang. I went to the door, I was thinking, three seventy-two, three seventy-two, three seventy-two. Guy with a delivery van out there. Had fourteen chrysanthemums for Mrs. Rose Dale Bourdeaux. Small guy, black, little pencil moustache. Sneaky eyes, trying to see all in the house behind me.”

“Drunk,” I said. “That's where I've been. Night after night after night. When even the whole world don't want to wake up and look at you. And why? Because they don't like it. Not in their house, not in their car, not in their church. Throw you in the garbage. Pick you up the next morning. Wipe you off and set you down and say, Boy, walk straight, now. Walk the straight and narrow. Walk the straight and narrow arrow.”

“Shoot em all,” he said. “Just line em up against the wall and line their goddamn drivers up too and give em forty whacks. What they did to that guy out there in Utah. Made him feel better. It let all that poison out of him. He had that poison in him and it wasn't no way for it to get out except when he went
to the bathroom and then just a little bit at a time. His body was making more poison than it could get rid of. It was making about two quarts a day and this was in the wintertime.”

“They should have bottled it and sold it,” I said.

“What?”

“His poison.”

“Oh no. No no. No no no no no. There ain't a container made that'll hold it. It won't ride in a truck. First thing you know it'll have done fell off and rolled down the hill and busted open. Then where would you be? Little kids running around stepping in it. No, you best not bottle it,” he said.

I shut up. He wasn't looking at me any more. He had said his last sentence with a finality that left no room for discussion. I didn't try to engage him in any more conversation, and after a while, after looking around the whole room fearfully for a while, he hurried out.

I started having wet dreams at night and sometimes in the daytime. I'd have these tremendous ejaculations that felt like lumps of lava flowing down my urethra. And it would always be on the verge of putting it in. I never got to put it in. The sight of her titties or something, maybe just her puss, would make me skeet off. Wake up with wet underwear and just moan and turn over. But I often had fantasies about women while I was awake. I would imagine a whole elaborate scene with dirty dialogue, just construct a short erotic film in my head.

I wasn't hearing anything from my work. I had plenty of money, but not much desire. I was drinking more and writing less. I read the reviews of books in the local papers and noted what was on the best-seller list each week. I dreamed dreams of having my stories published in magazines and having my name on the covers of books, things the people I was raised around had never thought of. I knew people who were illiterate or nearly so and drank with them. One day I rode across the river with a boy who lived near me to get some beer. He was a pulpwood hauler but he knew that I wrote, somehow. He wore a T-shirt thick with sawdust and the cooler in the floor of his truck was full of beer already, but it was Friday and he'd been paid for two loads that day and he just came by the house and asked me to ride over there with him. It turned out he wrote poetry and wanted me to read some of it. The more I talked to him, the more I found out about him. He wasn't from around here. He'd been educated at Washington University and he had a degree in neurobiology but had decided suddenly that he didn't want to do that. Now he was cutting pulpwood, risking his life and neck every day for pine logs, and writing poetry at night. His name was Thomas Slade, and he told me he was ready to start writing a novel.

Once we were in the road, he gave me a beer, and I smoked cigarettes and started reading his poems. They had a strange meter and rhyme and his words were good. We didn't talk while I read them. We drank beer and enjoyed the sunshine and the feeling that maybe two kindred souls were about to come together. The first poem was about his father, who was an alcoholic, and it had some vivid images. It was strong and
I told him so. The next one was about a family of children whose father ran over a squirrel in the road, and they all screamed until he stopped. The guts were squashed out of it but it was still alive. The father had to stop and back over it a couple of times to kill it. It was a really good poem and I told him so. He smiled shyly, but I could tell that he was pleased. We had a Stihl 041 Farm Boss chainsaw on the seat between us. Jugs of oil and gasoline were on the floorboard. I was really starting to enjoy myself.

We got pulled over two miles this side of the beer joint by a state trooper. We'd been listening to Patsy Cline on his tape player. It was just sort of hammered into the dash with wires hanging everywhere, but it played, and he had some excellent speakers hung from the roof of the cab with coat hangers. We'd been moving and grooving and wailing with Patsy, God bless her soul, slammed into the side of a mountain so many years ago. My driver had had several beers, which the trooper smelled after he noticed that Thomas had no lights of any kind on his truck. He didn't have an inspection sticker either. His tires were like soft shit. I knew we wouldn't get off lightly.

I stayed in the truck while he talked to the man. While he walked the line. While he closed his eyes and leaned his head back and walked a line backwards down the side of the road. While he did ten push-ups and clapped his hands together under his chest each time he came up. After all that the man let us go. Told us to “get them fuckin lights fixed.” Seemed disgruntled that he couldn't carry us to jail. Well, he had his job, and we had ours.