Greetings from the Vodka Sea (15 page)

“Huh?”

“The bird. Maybe it's an emissary from God or from some other Higher Power. Some kind of go-between between heaven and earth, between the possible and the drearily obvious.”

Boyd paused.

“And maybe Carver's saying that by killing the bird he's cut off the link between the high and the low, he's forced us, the high and the low, to come together, to meet on equal terms.”

“I like that.”

“It's a standard motif.”

“Still . . .”

See. That was why she hung in with Boyd after all these years, why she still loved him. When you scraped off the layers of varnish and bullshee-it, there was still a decent man inside.

“So, what about that video? The new Russell Crowe is in. We could check it out, audition him right here on the couch.” Boyd smiled wide and stretched his arms wide apart to suggest that their couch went on forever in either direction. April did not respond. She picked up the movie offer and thumbed through it. It was almost too good to be true.

“I wonder if we should get an agent or something. Or at least let our lawyer go through it.”

“It'll all work out in the end, dear. It always does.”

“It's so — you know. You wait your whole life for something like this, and when it finally happens . . .”

“It is a lot of money.”

“And we didn't . . .”

“We didn't do nothing to earn it. It came looking for us.”

“We're just really on the edge of the story here . . .”

“We're furniture, honey. We're the back-story. We're white noise. But you know, maybe our time has come.”

April read the offer through again from the beginning, the thick yellowed vellum scratching her fingers as she turned the pages, her eyes straining to read the infinitesimally small small print, handwritten in a fine hand, almost Lutheran in its pained, beautiful precision. Boyd put on a Mingus CD and played drums with two swizzle sticks, a red one and a green one, both shaped like little swords, both effortlessly mutilating the air in perfect time. Right bang in the pocket. And so they sat, each one resisting destiny, until April realized that things had gotten pretty quiet in the guest bedroom. A moment later, she heard someone stirring, then the door opened slowly and Ford emerged. He was holding a small lap dog that looked like one of those knitted dogs you'd put over a Kleenex dispenser. April had never noticed the dog before.

Ford stood in the hallway for a long time, not speaking, his eyes watered over although he was not actually crying. Every once in a while the little dog looked up and licked his face. It had a goldy yellow bow in the middle of its forehead, a bow the same colour as Ford's tie. They looked quite comical, the two of them together. The dog kind of resembled him, with its narrow eyes close together, its nose that hadn't quite been grown into yet.

“Well . . .” Ford said finally, drawling the word into extra innings. “It's finished. I'll be going now.”

April got his coat from the coat rack by the front door and helped him put it on.

“You've been most kind.”

“Think nothing of it,” Boyd said, and he meant it.

“It's been an awful imposition.”

“Nonsense,” said April.

Ford closed his eyes, his lids fluttering quickly for several seconds, the little dog lapping his chin, before he finally reopened them.

“It's a far, far better —”

“Yes, yes, yes.” Boyd deftly nudged the writer out the door.

Ford thanked them both quietly, then left.

“He's a very polite man,” April said.

“Yes,” Boyd said. “Almost too polite.”

“I'm glad he's gone.”

“Me too.”

“I wonder why his wife never showed. Carver's, I mean? You'd think she'd of been here.”

“Maybe he wasn't married, April. Or maybe he was, but she got stuck in the snow.”

That was a good point. It had been snowing for days.

Boyd got up from the couch and moved to April's chair. He put his arm around her. He snuggled up to her, almost bored into her like a tick in a deer's ass. You can only get so close. There there there, she wanted to say. You get some rest, Boyd. You just let yourself get some rest. April put her hand on his shoulder, and at that moment she looked at Boyd and Boyd looked at her and it hit them: Carver was really dead. Now he was their problem.

Gris-Gris Gumbo and Mrs. Charles Bukowski at the Mardi Gras Detox Centre

T
HEORY I
. A body at rest tends to remain at rest

Six weeks. The doctor was clear. David Plumber would be in a coma for six weeks, then die, just like that. Kaput. Maybe that started his latest binge. It was ugly news for any man, and Plumber took it particularly hard. He'd never seen it coming. He'd just signed a new contract, two years with a two-year option. He wasn't ready to die. He'd rather move to Siberia.

The clinic had been his father's idea. Dad had struggled on and off with booze for years and knew the signs. Dad insisted, Dave resisted. He was too handsome to be a drunk. But then when he got the death sentence — six weeks — he relented. It was the mechanical inevitability of existence. What could you do?

Plumber quickly understood why actors were always checking themselves into these places. First of all, the coverage was great. Lilly really did a great job there. She must have been working the phones 24-7. Every major tab did something, and the stories were uniformly sympathetic.
¹
People
was talking cover. They'd already sent a guy round to shoot it: Plumber nearly unconscious in a hospital bed,
²
Dad posed grimly in the background, holding his son's hand. Both looking haggard and handsome,
³
an effect produced with harsh cross lighting and a special filter, which added a curious grainy texture to the final print. Kudos to the shooter, he really knew his stuff. But it wasn't just the coverage; the atmosphere suited Plumber. It was actor heaven, everyone paying attention to him all the time. Talk about falling into a part. He was intuitively into it. All he had to do was show up, say some lines, whatever came into his head, really, and everyone seemed tremendously pleased. Dad was a bit of a pill — he always was, you'd almost think he was the one with six weeks left to live — and of course all that stuff with Nancy. But all in all things were good. Life, in fact, couldn't get much better.

THEORY II:
A straight line is the shortest distance between two pints

The last binge started like this. Plumber out for a walk, completely innocent. In fact, he'd left his apartment to get away from all the temptations it contained: the liquor cabinet (empty but inviting), the phone (Dad could be calling again at any minute to check up), and the general air of nothingness — that nameless boredom that Plumber could not stand. He was the kind of person who just couldn't sit there alone with himself, with his thoughts, with his memories. It left him in a panic. He had to do something, and over time, through a process of trial and error,
⁴
he'd found that booze filled the void quite nicely.
⁵
So when Goldberg called Plumber to tell him he had six weeks to live, Plumber looked at the liquor cabinet, the phone and the void and decided that a stroll was in order, if not to deliver him from temptation, at least to delay it a little. Everything was fine until he took a wrong turn and passed a bar offering Glenmorangie eighteen-year-old high-land single malt for five bucks a shot. Obviously fate was interceding; he'd have been insane to pass it up.

The first drink was no problem. He ordered it calmly, as a man only passing through for a single social single malt might do, and accepted it with such nonchalance that the waitress might have thought he'd changed his mind about a drink after all. Plumber tried to sip, God knows he did, but found himself gobbling the drink down, as much as any man can gobble a drink. The warm wave washed over him and covered him like a comfortable watery blanket, and Plumber was on to the next drink and the next before he knew what hit him. That's when the camera shut off. The director in his head called cut, and his brain took five for who knows how long. Days? At least.
⁶
The next thing he remembered was waking up in Goldberg's guest bedroom, the door bolted from the outside, in a pair of pee-soaked pyjamas, in the clutch of a pee-soaked mattress, covered with a ragged pee-soaked quilt, feeling deeply, if not urgently, the need to pee.

He'd made it to work, Goldberg had seen to that, and had apparently done quite well. All that was asked of him was that he lie in a bed looking hideous and fitful, but still, he pulled it off with unconscious aplomb. In fact Plumber's popularity seemed to have soared. The phone lines had been jammed by viewers concerned with the state of his health. This was Plumber's greatest fear. They didn't want him to go. Maim him. Cripple him. Leave him a living vegetable. Just don't kill him. The dying he could handle, it was the lingering he wasn't keen on. He had a friend who'd played Blaise, the evil twin on
Santa Clara Nights.
The producers had him run over by a horse-drawn carriage; the doctors gave him two weeks to live. It was the longest two weeks of his life. He lingered for four full seasons before suddenly, miraculously regaining consciousness. Four years of dragging his hump to work, punching the clock, getting paid for pretending to be on death's door five minutes a week. It was work. It paid the bills. But it wasn't art and it wasn't even craft. The poor bastard left the show the following year, depressed and disillusioned.
⁷
In Plumber's case the worst part was that the producers must have known it was coming. Levitz and Sherwood must have offered to renew his contract early because they wanted to lock him up on
To the Ends of the Earth
. They knew that other soaps were calling, and it's a cinch Goldberg would have bolted in a second if he knew his client would be spending six weeks — an eternity, surely — unconscious and drooling, growing older and less marketable as each week-long second ticked past.

Dad arrived mid-stream as Plumber was enjoying what might have been the most satisfyingly, bladder-soothing pee of his life. Dad had a stuffed duffel bag in one hand and a large bottle of Evian in the other. “Any blood?” Dad moved closer to inspect Plumber's urine. “All clear.” He sounded upset. He was the kind of man who thrived on crisis, who in fact could barely function unless there was a crisis to react to, who in fact, not to stress the point too finely, would go out of his way to create chaos with almost biblical precision out of the day-to-day nothingness of existence. Simple example: Dad moved more often than some men
⁸
changed relationships. On average, three times a year. He'd be in one apartment or another and then, without warning, give notice. A few weeks later, he'd be setting up house in a new place, subconsciously plotting his next foray into the void. On the one hand, Plumber understood this as a kind of quasi-spiritual quest, or rather, an anti-quasi-spiritual quest, an example of his father's ongoing search to find peace of mind in his surroundings. But just as important, the moves ensured that Dad's life was in constant flux. So the What, the chaos, was easy to figure, but the Why — the Why had Plumber puzzled. And there was no sense asking Dad about it. He was a walking recessive gene, emotionally speaking, who'd evolved past the alcoholism and then hit a brick wall.

Plumber: So, Dad, I want to ask you about the chaos.

Dad: What chaos is that, son?

Plumber: You know, the overwhelming chaos wherein you live your life.

Dad: I'm not sure I follow you.

Plumber: Okay, let me put it this way. If you were to live your life in a constant state of chaos — theoretically speaking — do you think you'd be doing it out of a sense of comfort, because maybe you grew up in a chaotic home and longed to return to some kind of blissful, familiar disorder? Or do you think you'd be doing it as a kind of distraction, to take your mind off higher matters of philosophical importance — life, death, the meaning of existence and so forth? In other words, do you think you'd be trading one addiction, alcohol, for another, chaos? Or is it possible that you'd be extracting a certain sense of power from it, the desperate machismo of the self-generated messiah, leading yourself from the wilderness of complacency into a funhouse-mirror promised land? Or could it simply be that you wouldn't know any better? This is how you've always lived your life — theoretically speaking — and this is how you will continue?

Dad: Sorry. I'm still not sure I follow.

Plumber: Then answer this: why did she leave?

Dad:
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point
.
⁹

The purpose of the stuffed duffel bag was quickly explained. Dad was doing an “intervention” with Goldberg's blessing and support.
¹⁰
Dad had been to more than one intervention in his day
¹¹
and knew the drill. Confront the victim with his problem, give him the ol' man in the mirror routine, offer an empathic word or two, hug (required), cry (optional), then hand the poor sod his bag
¹²
and push him into an awaiting limousine. Failure — which in this case meant measured response and careful consideration — was not an option.

Fast forward to Plumber, showered and dressed, strapped in the back of a stretch limo, packed bag in lap,
¹³
Evian in hand, airport bound. He'd succumbed willingly, all things considered. Of course, he'd resisted, everybody does. Dad's hugging and crying
¹⁴
did little to undermine his resolve, and even Goldberg's tough love (“I can't spend all my time babysitting you, I have other clients”
¹⁵
) failed to move Plumber. The young man wasn't arguing with the facts. He knew he had a problem, although he did dispute how that problem was characterized and even maintained that, at this precise moment in his life, his problem was as much a solution. And maybe he never would have gotten in the limo if it hadn't been for a timely phone call from Nancy, who said that if he got treatment maybe, just maybe, she'd talk to him. Isn't love strange?

THEORY III.
The acceleration of an assumption is directly proportional to the force exerted on that assumption

So, we go through life burdened by false assumptions. Plumber, for one, had some odd ideas. His unattractiveness. That's a curious bit. Practically the entire world telling him how handsome he was, strange women
¹⁶
stopping him on the street and offering to perform unsolicited and, in some cases, truly complex sex acts on him, and still nada on the self-perception scale. The child psychiatrist
¹⁷
had pegged him early: low self esteem. Go figure. Practically the entire day-time-TV-watching country thinking Plumber was one of the finest pieces of man flesh ever to strut across the face of the earth, while inside he seeing himself as a repulsive smudge with a seashell lip and asymmetrical eyes and ears too big for his too-small head. Maybe that's why he drank, to mask the ugliness he felt inside. Or perhaps to wallpaper over the unresolved conflict of his parents' divorce and his mother's subsequent and o'er-hasty suicide. Of course, this is just another assumption, the belief that people — you and I, say — do things out of emotional need. Certainly Dr. Prock assumed as much when he treated the young David Plumber, years ago. Back then, alcohol wasn't the problem. Back then, Plumber was addicted to school, or more precisely, Plumber was addicted to not going to school. Maybe it happened gradually, Plumber couldn't remember exactly now, but he does remember a point when he was going to school and then a point when he wasn't going to school, and nothing anyone said or did would make him go. The shrink pegged it as an emotional problem, which to David's young mind was about as useful as saying the night sky was black. Dad had handled it all right, though. Dad had learned that while time didn't necessarily heal all wounds (in fact, David Plumber Sr. would tell you the inverse was true), there was never a bad excuse for a holiday. He took young David on extensive bus trips, to folk festivals in the Ozarks and Newfoundland, to arctic-circle fish camps with nonsense names several dozen syllables long. Mostly, he took his son to the movies. Lots and lots of movies. Dad said he was studying. Dad said he was the luckiest man in the world because to learn his craft he didn't need to study textbooks; it was all up there for him to learn, on the silver screen. So there Plumber the Younger sat, fifteen going on sixteen, inwardly ugly, unattended and unattending, diagnosed Paranoid Neurotic School Phobic with Underlying Depressive Tendencies, assumed by most everyone
¹⁸
in his little town to be wildly fucking up, alone in the dark but surrounded, studying and learning too, and slowly working his way to becoming the most famous, handsomest man ever to come out of Bradenton, California.
¹⁹
The irony was lost on everyone.