Self-Esteem (2 page)

Their leader is taken aback. “And why am I so happy?”

“Because you like yourself! That’s why!”

“That’s right,” he says, his stare zeroing in on the camera. “You know kids, you always have to be a friend to yourself
first
.” His head then jolts to one side, to a puppy named Sandy. “Why is that?”

“Because that’s what makes you feel good!” Sandy says with a toddler’s voice.

“That’s right, Sandy. And we know a song about that, don’t we?”

Happy Pappy nods as the puppets surround him, groupies to a rock star.

And then the song again, complete with a libretto at the bottom of the screen (in case you want to sing along).

Be kind to yourself.

Be fond of yourself.

If you’re not a chum you’re a bum to yourself.

“Come on!” Happy screams.

Be a friend to yourself.

Without end to yourself.

Remember it’s the best thing to do for your health.

“Please,” Crawford said, or thought he said. “Turn it off.”

She was sitting on the bed, her hair draped over her neck, reminding Crawford of Eve, the Garden of Eden, the fall of Man, Sin with a
capital S
.

“So you’re going to be a novelist now, is that it?” she asked with vague disrespect.

Crawford saw Happy Pappy jumping up and down, even though he wasn’t looking.

“Going to be Hemingway, are you?”

“I don’t like Hemingway. Please. Turn it off.”

She laughed softly. “You’ve always got your self-esteem.”

Her laughter became bigger, louder — like an audience. Then there was applause.

“Don’t you?” she asked giggling. “Don’t you have your
Self-Esteem
?”

“I don’t know,” Crawford said, taking another drink. “Do I?”

Written across every housewife’s afternoon TV screen,
Jan Live
had become an icon of elegance and sophistication. Its beautiful calligraphy, floating above the immaculate studio of greens and oranges, somehow let everyone know that Life
could
provide sanctuary once in a while, that Life
could
always be better than it really was.

Everyone needed Jan Hershey. The audience of mostly middle-aged women clapped and smiled and cheered as they did everyday at 2pm Eastern Time, 11am Pacific. It was their expressions that revealed the most, revealed their hopes and dreams, as well as the bliss they felt in the presence of their host.

Jan was perfect. Everything about her worked in harmony to form a picture of loveliness and womanhood. Her suit — business-casual — spoke confidence with its effortless design and pastel hue. Her eyes sparkled, her teeth shined, and her hair was more beautiful than silk — a blonde in her late thirties only God could make.

The audience watched attentively, but something was different. She wasn’t saying
hello
to the home viewers. She was looking straight at Crawford.

“What is the definition of self-esteem?” she demanded.

Crawford felt like he couldn’t speak. “Well,” he began slowly, “it’s essentially the view we have of ourselves.”

Jan nodded. “And you say this is a significant component in our lives? Perhaps the most important in terms of our happiness? Our prosperity?”

Crawford didn’t know why, but he felt like he might throw up. “Yes, of course. I…”

Looking icy, Jan leaned toward him. “And where does this Happy Pappy character fit into all of this, Dr. Crawford?”

Almost in unison, the audience started laughing.

“Isn’t this the kind of nonsense created by someone with
low
self-esteem?”

“But I…” Crawford couldn’t speak.

The audience laughed louder. Some held their sides while others fanned in Jan’s direction, delighted by her audacity, encouraging her to go further.

“What’s the matter, Doctor?” she said stepping closer, her chin creeping over the top of her microphone. “Cat got your tongue?”

Deafening laughter, Crawford couldn’t breathe.

“Just making a buck, aren’t you!” she yelled. “You’ve fooled the poor and the innocent into supporting your drunkenness, your skirt chasing and your hypocrisy. Isn’t that it, Doctor?”

Crawford was drowning. “I didn’t… I…”

“Answer me, Dr. Crawford!”

Her face was so close she was almost inside his eyes. That’s when the studio vanished.

“I…”

“Answer me, fucker!”

A screeching bell sounded.

He breathed. The air came in like a tender breeze through a rickety house and then went out again. And Crawford was back home.

It sounded again.

Dr. James Crawford was to turn fifty-three in two weeks, but this morning he was almost ninety. Reasonably tall and bulky, Crawford had a broad jaw and a high hairline that made him appear more masculine and more confident than he was. Many thought his appearance scholarly, yet almost everyone considered him a tough sort — the type of guy who wore turtleneck sweaters but could still kick your ass.

That is, of course, if he wasn’t too drunk. This morning Crawford had a hangover, and it was a bad motherfucker. It would take him a moment, like it always did, to realize where he was and what he had done the night before. But first he needed to know what the hell that noise was. He finally realized it was the telephone next to the bed and reached over and answered it.

“Hello?” Crawford grumbled. He sniffed quietly then waited a moment. “Yes?”

“Dr. Crawford?” The voice was staggering, unfamiliar.

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“How’s your self-esteem?” someone asked.

“What?” he said, still only half awake.

“How’s your self-esteem?”

Crawford registered. “Who?”

The caller hung up and so did Crawford.

He didn’t give it much thought. He was too sick. He was neither awake nor asleep. His mind was swimming in the previous night’s booze, somewhere between dreams and consciousness. He put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. Later, he thought.
Later
.

Then he heard something else. Something faint. It was Frank Sinatra, or someone trying to be Frank.

I’ve Got You Under My Skin
.

I used to love that goddam song, Crawford thought. Then he fell asleep again.

“Jim, it’s seven-thirty.”

“Okay,” he said, instinctively turning on his side.

“Who called?” she asked.

His voice trailed back into sleep. “I don’t know.”

“Jim? Who was it?”

“Wrong number, I guess.”

“You guess?” She waited a moment. “Jim,” she said. “Jim,” she said louder.

“
What?
”

“How do you feel this morning?” she asked.

Dorothy Crawford was still very attractive at forty-nine. In the last few years she had finally lost much of the weight she had gained after their son Cal was born. But this improvement didn’t matter much to Crawford. She could still be an unpleasant sight, especially when his eyes were bloodshot and throbbing. He was fond of her youthful demeanor, her magical adolescence, but he wasn’t fond of the morning interview she required each time he awoke from a night of heavy drinking.

Crawford found the sight of her particularly nauseating that morning. It must have been that pink exercise suit, something an eighties porn star would wear.

“How do you feel this morning? Getting out of bed today or not?”

Dorothy had been pretty proud of herself lately. After going through a number of diet and exercise programs over the years, she had finally settled into one she could stick with long enough to see results. For the previous six months, she had been using a program called
Swing and Sweat
, which was where the faint sound of Sinatra had come from. Of course, it wasn’t really Sinatra, most likely an unknown lounge singer eking out a living in the exercise market. But from upstairs it was impossible to tell. Crawford only heard the faint sound of tunes he used to love —
used
to love. No longer could he put on a Sinatra album without having the unwanted thought of Dorothy in her pink bodysuit, bent at the knees, reaching in the air and swinging from side to side to the strains of
I Get a Kick Out of You
and
Summer Wind
. Not only had the exercise program tainted one of his favorite artists, truth was he also preferred Dorothy’s bigger butt.

“
I said
, how do you feel this morning,
dear
?”

His voice was muffled under the sheets, “I don’t know yet.”

“I thought we were over this, Jim.”

The word “we” meant it was time to roll over and face her.

“Dorothy, please. I’ve had a lot of anxiety lately.” He sat up.

“So have I,” she said, standing before him like a field marshal. “And so you had to get drunk last night, is that it?”

“Honey, please.”

“Don’t
honey
me,” she shot back. “What is it that’s so damn stressful anyhow?”

Crawford looked straight ahead, straight through his wife.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled, just before she stormed out, her pink bottom jolting with each step. But he
did
know. For one thing, he had been seeing Jenny again, and the guilt was just starting to set in. Dreams about the Garden of Eden — they always happened sooner or later.

Jenny had done all those things he liked best, all those things he could never ask his wife to do. But Crawford thought of Jenny’s skills as a classy menu in a shitty cafe. The arching of the back, the parting of the lips, the panting of words like “Oh, Jim,” “Yes,” “Harder,” and so on. It was wrong, he knew. Wrong, wrong, wrong — like that one more shot of whiskey that seems like a good idea at the time.

Best of all, though — or worst of all — she didn’t object to the drinking. In fact, she joined in.

Oh, yeah
, he thought, finally piecing together the evening.
That’s what happened: after the drinking and the screwing they had a talk, a “discussion” as Jenny liked to call it. Right in the middle of the street she had yelled, “You’re not going to treat me like a piece of ass.”

But even a public display of anger didn’t matter. Her apartment was in a commercial part of downtown Los Angeles and no one was ever around. It was one of those places where the streets always look wet, even when they haven’t seen rain in months.

Crawford remembered hearing her yell, “No fucking way,” over and over again.
But over what?
He must have told her something she didn’t want to hear — like the affair had to stop. Again, he wasn’t sure.

Crawford’s head ached. He walked into the bathroom without turning on the light and sat on the toilet. He leaned over, his head resting on his forearms.

“Honey?” he heard Dorothy ask. “Are you okay in there?”

He farted.

“Yes, dear. I’m okay.”

CHAPTER 2

Cal Crawford was watching the puppets dance, but he wasn’t listening. Leaning against the headboard of his queen size bed, his portable audio player beside him, Cal could watch but he wouldn’t listen. It was a strange ritual of morning entertainment, something to do while smoking the day’s first joint.

The music in his headphones was raucous, the venomous beat taking his head back and forth as he watched Sandy the puppet approach her bouncing mentor. The movement of the characters, out of time with his own, only made the percussion more pronounced and defiant, especially now that Cal was stoned.

Then the advertisement: this made Cal’s heartbeat quicken more than the pot — seeing his father with that feigned, toothy smile, with that shit-brown suit on, next to a pile of books and tapes, in front of a goddam purple background, behind a 1-800 telephone number.
What a lie
, he thought.
A very stupid lie
. And how vulgar. And how laughable. And there he is with my name,
my goddam surname
, written on the screen for everyone to see.

Dumbass
.

Dr. James Crawford’s Self Series
™

Followed by the “claimer,” as Cal called it, scrolling up the screen, a psalm giving sanction to a crooked evangelist.

The techniques set forth on the “Happy Pappy Show” are based on the principles of Dr. James Crawford, whose Self Series
™
has helped millions improve their lives.

These principles have been modified to accommodate the self-esteem needs of a younger audience.

I know what accommodates a younger audience, Cal thought, deeply inhaling another hit.

Calvin Crawford was James and Dorothy’s only child, a one-time addition whose imminent arrival had ended the debate as to whether they should get married. Dorothy didn’t believe in abortion and Jim didn’t believe in pushing her, so when the news came they simply set a date to get hitched and that was that. But Cal’s personality turned out to be so unlike either of his parents that it was like a stork had dumped him there to point out that Jim and Dorothy had more in common than they thought.

Long before the venerable Dr. Crawford had struck the seven-figure deal for the
Happy Pappy Show
, Cal was fed up with his father’s enterprise. Now it was this puppet shit and the latest installment of the
Self
Series
,
Self-Esteem
. Cal felt his father had finally reached the bottom of the capitalist barrel, and for months he cringed at the thought of him.

Cal turned up the music even louder.

Yeah. Rotten Tamales.

Rotten Tamales. Yeah, fucking rocks. What a fucking rock star.

The tune was the title track from his latest album,
Erectum
. A month earlier, Cal and his dad nearly came to blows over a poster Cal put on the wall. It wasn’t just an ordinary depiction of Rotten Tamales — a skinny white boy (painted to be even whiter) wearing a monstrous leather bodysuit with shiny spikes coming from every pleat. It was classic Rotten — bending over with what appeared to be a large erect penis ascending up out of his backside under the leather.