You're Married to Her? (15 page)

This was the most difficult decision to make and one that, in my addled state of mind at least, was strangely paralleled by a bizarre story unfolding on CNN Newsroom. A Midwestern teenager, an honor student, had been caught cheating for his final exams. As punishment, his father, a minister, decreed that he was barred from attending the senior prom. Unaccountably identifying with the kid, I imagined the choices running through his mind. He could try to talk with his father and work out an alternate punishment. He could beg for mercy. He could run away from home. Instead, according to Wolf Blitzer, he calmly broke into the living room gun cabinet, loaded a pump action shot gun, and blew the old man's face off at close range.

Why this story resonated was a mystery to me. Only a psychopath would be driven to murder because he was docked from the prom, only an unstable, catastrophic mind unable to accept a decision he could not control. Certainly no normal person could be driven to this extreme. Unless you found yourself in a situation in which you were thoroughly convinced there is no alternative; that a malicious injury has taken place; that if the people
responsible are not stopped they will simply do it again, to you and to others, forever more, with impunity. Once you begin to think this way you may very well be prone to making a decision you will regret.

I called the reporters.

 

Two hundred people crammed into a meeting room built for half that number. Those who couldn't find chairs crowded the aisles. An angry mob gathered in back. Many more stamped their feet in the cold, watching through the windows thrown open in spite of the Chairwoman's order to close them. The town was at war. Dudley's supporters, some of whom had never been to a meeting before, and others who knew him as a fine dart player but were surprised to discover he was the Town Administrator, pumped their fists and demanded answers.

The Chairwoman shuffled her papers, afraid to face the crowd. “We request that due to the impossibility of addressing everyone's concerns here tonight people will please frame their questions in the form of a letter.”

“Yeah, and you'll find it through your window tomorrow morning wrapped around a rock!” The outburst was affirmed by a loud series of rhythmic hoots. The old wooden floor shook. Meetings, the newcomers in the audience discovered, could be fun.

Now frightened for her safety, Mrs. Flay requested a side meeting with the police chief who duly radioed for backup. My decision to alert the press had fomented
the show of support for Dudley and frankly it was difficult not to gloat. But I had decided to exercise magnanimity. I raised my hand to read aloud a call for healing. The Chairwoman looked straight through me and duly recognized a friend of hers from the audience, who stood up to read a letter she had posted to the district attorney.

“Madame Chair, we believe that Massachusetts General Law has been breached, and we cite Penalties for Violation of Confidentiality. May I go on?”

The color returned to Mrs. Flay's cheeks. She suddenly looked hopeful. “Oh, yes, do go on.”

The letter reader detailed a significant penalty. “A fine of up to $100,000. . . .”

Did I hear one hundred
thousand
dollars? For violation of
what
?

“. . . and imprisonment of up to two years. . . .”

Imprisonment
? For calling a couple of reporters?

“Madame Chair, we intend to take this to the highest levels.”

“Well, I would hope you would.” Mrs. Flay nodded sincere agreement. “A breach of the sanctity of the executive session is a serious offense, not to mention the privacy of Mr. Dudley who must certainly be considering a civil suit against whoever leaked the information.”

Dudley file a lawsuit? Suddenly
he
looked hopeful. But I had tried to help him.

“We will not rest until the mole is exposed and punished.” The letter reader looked directly at me. “One of
you has disgraced this town in the eyes of the public and ruined the reputation of an innocent man.”

“Ira?” The voice was Mrs. Flay's. “Ira?” Sweat was seeping from my hairline and collecting in my ears. “Ira?” she repeated sweetly. “Did you have something you wanted to read?”

I managed to shake my head in the negative and pocket my carefully crafted speech. My face was hot with fever. My arms and legs were numb. I had no idea if what I had done had any legal implications but my imagination played host to a catastrophic array of police interviews, cross examination, and criminal litigation. In a pique of rage I had compromised a legally constituted executive session. In the eyes of the dart players I might be a hero, a whistle-blower; but in the confident smiles of Hammer and Flay, I was the new target and my action the perfect decoy for theirs.

Newspaper reporters whom I had not called, angry at having been scooped by the ones I had, now worked to expose the rat. Dudley, having no idea where the leak had come from, hired counsel to pursue a civil action for disclosure of information relating to his employment. Passions were divided between Dudley loyalists and those who sought vindication for Hammer and Flay. Arguments broke out at the post office, businesses were boycotted subject to their owners' opinions; someone claimed his tires were slashed. It was not uncommon for people who had known each other for years to push their supermarket carts straight past each other
without a word. Mrs. Flay demanded police protection. Everyone, however, wanted to discover the identity of the snitch.

It is hard to disappear in a village but I tried. I shopped out of town. I went for my mail at five minutes before closing. I called in sick to meetings. I had dreams of my home being raided at 4 A.M. by surly federal agents in blue wind breakers, of shuffling to court in shackles and running a gauntlet of reporters and protestors who prodded me with signs and chanted slogans about the sanctity of executive session minutes.

Although it was months before I stopped jumping at the sound of the ringing telephone, no action was ever taken. Nonetheless, I had lost the stomach for politics and public life, even reading the local papers. On those rare nights when I could relax enough to sleep, it was only by visualizing the stagnant silence of a paper-strewn office, the innumerable trips to the bathroom, the futile search through the refrigerator for lunch, the mailbox full of rejections, the telephone that never rang, the dusty pile of old
New Yorker
magazines that beckoned from the rack beside the toilet; in effect, the tedious life of the mid-list writer and the sublime futility of knowing that as a novelist at the beginning of the twentieth-first century I was blissfully invisible and all but irrelevant to the world.

W
e were ordered to report on a Saturday morning at 8 A.M. By eight-thirty over a hundred men were stomping their feet in the mid-December cold, pounding on the gray metal doors and shouting curses at the red brick facade of the old school building. An argument over a parking space had already turned into a shoving match, a couple of guys were playing keep away with a shorter guy's hat and I started to think that if they kept us out here much longer this was going to turn into something out of
Lord of the Flies
.

As the bitter wind gathered force over the playing fields, I pulled my watch cap low over my ears and turned my expression to stone, determined to appear tough and inscrutable.

Two faces peered at us through the wire mesh windows of the auditorium. Sporadic outbursts of grumbling grew into waves of rage and at 8:45 a rebellious spin-off group began kicking the doors. “Open up, you bastards.”

“It's freezing out here! Let us in.”

“Let us in! Let us in!” A small crowd picked up the chant.

One guy took a running start with a trashcan and used it as a battering ram. A flurry of ice balls pelted the windows. A man in a leather jacket climbed on a concrete balustrade to address the crowd. “Is this what we're paying for? To be treated like animals?” He threw his cigarette to the ground and stormed back to the parking lot, loudly announcing, “I am the fuck out of here!”

“Very smart,” said a man behind me. He was no more than five-foot-three and wore a Sherpa cap from Nepal with earflaps and a long red tassel.

“Not so smart,” I said. “The deposit's not refundable.”

“Oh, he'll just sit in his car with the heater on until they open the doors. I'm talking about Golden, the organizer. He's brilliant. He trained with Werner. He's already weeding out the leaders from the followers. In most workshops it takes hours.” Arms folded across his thick Guatemalan sweater, he did a little jig every few minutes to stay warm. “I think you're going to get what you paid for.”

“Pneumonia?”

His half smile was an expression of patience. “In
Finding the Shaman Within
they herded us into a freezing lake.”

“Somebody could have had a heart attack.”

He nodded as if remembering it fondly.

If I hadn't sunk $500 into “the training” I would have headed back to my own car and home. Had I actually believed I'd learn to “connect with the lost masculine power within?” I knew it was all a crock back at the free introductory evening (cost to be applied to tuition) when we were lectured by a hirsute jock spouting dialog straight out of
Dances with Wolves
. Est, primal therapy, Transcendental Meditation, The Forum: just like this one, scams every one, I knew it, cults, quick-fix fads. But I simply didn't know where else to turn. I hadn't been in a fight since the lunch line in junior high when some nitwit stuck me in the butt with the needle of a drawing compass and I kicked him in the kneecap and ran. Now I was forty years older, my lip split, my face bludgeoned, two stitches in my eyebrow, and I mailed off a check in the hope of learning “to become the man I always wanted to be.”

When the doors finally opened we poured into an overheated hallway smelling of floor polish and chalk. Men in white shirts and pants and identical brown vests herded us into a single line, shouted instructions, and ordered us not to speak. My little friend did not rush into the building with the others but lingered at my side. “At least we're out of the wind,” I said, when a thick palm dropped on my shoulder. “Are you deaf? Zip it up. No talking.”

Waiting until he passed, I whispered. “What kind of bull shit is this?”

“It's a little like
The Inner Path of the Wayfinder
.” My
friend sounded impressed. “They physically restrained people in that one. Tied them up in the dark for a few hours until they cried for help. The key is to locate your personal level of fear. Where does your ego stop and the true courage within you begin?”

“Tied them up in the dark?”

An enormous block of a man strode straight for us. He had a wide protruding forehead that cast his eyes in shadow and wore a cheap toupee with sideburns, like a helmet made of stiff brown hair. “Knit your lips, Asshole.”

“Talking to me?” I asked.

“Who else?”

The entire line of men awaited my response. Would I stand firm? Shout back? Run? My little mentor lowered his eyes and placed his palms together, willing me to hold my tongue. What the fuck was I doing here?

I'd had the fight over a month and a half ago. My wife and I were in the car, returning from the annual Oyster Festival. Town was full of partying tourists but the only thing on my mind was the screenplay I'd recently submitted, the final draft, on schedule to the day, and that I hadn't heard a word from the producer. It had been over three weeks and I had to assume she hated it, that the script upon which I had based my hopes of a screenwriting career was not only bad but beneath comment. My entire weekend was tension amped to near hysteria. I had no appetite. I couldn't concentrate. Driving the country road back from town I noticed a car following
too close. He flashed his hi-beams. I tapped my brakes. He blasted his horn. I dropped my speed. He screamed out the window. When I flipped him the bird he tapped my bumper. When I pulled off the road, he drew up behind me. “Where are you going?” Marge grabbed my sleeve as the doors of the car behind us flew open. “Get back in the car!” she screamed.

We were marched into a classroom with eight long tables. Helmet hair handed each of us a release form. I AGREE THAT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL I HOLD THE INSTITUTE LIABLE FOR PHYSICAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE. We were further prohibited from publically divulging any aspect of the training and requested to list the names of our physician, closest living relative, health care proxy, incidence of heart failure, and blood type (if known).

I glanced apprehensively to my side.

“In
Empowering the Inner Shape-shifter
,” my friend whispered, “masked men held us at gunpoint.”

Long green shades were drawn across the gymnasium skylights to block out the mid-morning sun and we were ordered to stand at military attention as the thugs in brown vests strode between our ranks and pushed us into uniform rows. Anyone who spoke was dragged out of line. One guy insisted on using the bathroom and was not allowed back in. It was standard large group awareness training, of course. Harass people, break them down, make them feel helpless, and then reverse the process. In fact, it was textbook, the same bogus technique
they used in revival meetings. Once the entire group was in despair the leader gave them hope. Everyone experienced a collective endorphin high and was softened up to receive “the message,” whatever crap they were serving. After standing in line for over an hour, I felt a kind of kinship with the guys around me, as if we were all inmates in the prison yard. We whispered jokes about the “guards” sotto voce and passed around a contraband package of gum. After another hour of shouting orders, Helmet hair barked, “At ease,” and everyone started talking at once.