Plan Ahead Next Time: Part 1

Every woman in my life, except my ex-wife, has told me I’m nothing but a big softie. That underneath my growling and grumbling and howling against the universe, I’m just a sweet and sensitive guy. This has always been my undoing; and now I’m beginning to suspect they’re right.

I woke up that morning to Muriel’s loud pouting whine: “There’s no coffee!”

This was my problem for a couple of reasons. For one, she didn’t drink coffee before she married me. Didn’t even like the taste or smell of the stuff. She could manage one of those coffee drinks like you buy at Starbucks – all cream and sugar and flavor and next to no coffee – but beyond that, she didn’t like it. And at first, she didn’t like that I liked it. Scratch that. I don’t like coffee so much as I need coffee to keep at bay the OTHER aspect of my personality that gets me into trouble: the snarling, anti-social rube that, if the sweet bean nectar was withheld long enough, would melt into a puddle like that cackling green bitch in The Wizard of Oz. It didn’t take her long to see this, and, from early in our relationship when one of us spent the night in other’s college dorm room (which including the compensatory Walk of Shame the following morning; an interesting name since I never felt ashamed of getting laid) we developed an understanding: don’t talk to me before I’ve had a little coffee. That I am walking and maybe talking to myself doesn’t mean I’m fit for human company, including human company I desire above and beyond all others.

But marriage changes all of those early equations and accommodations, especially since the morning may be the only time when you are able to talk about all those annoying domestic issues: money, bills, buying cat food, taking out the garbage, what to eat for dinner that evening. (If you’re even eating together, that is.) And in this case, there was another reason why I needed to interrupt my not so deep sleep and listen to her: that there wasn’t any coffee was also my fault.

I’d known the day before that there wouldn’t be enough coffee, but I forgot to go and buy some. Now that she’s the bread winner and I’m her “cute unemployed writer” I also fill the role of June Cleaver. (Sans the string of pearls, heels, and anti-depressant painted smile. What would the neighbors think then?) She works outside the home. I work – theoretically – inside the home. We tell ourselves that we’re modern and that the old gender rules don’t apply; after all, television has been trying to convince us for years that a cock and balls is just a cunt twisted out and shaped like a small sausage and couple of rotten potatoes. Her forebears, the ancestors of all women who fought for equal rights and the option to wear pants, would all be cheering from heaven if, in fact, there was a heaven to cheer from. Mine, on the other hand, would be shaking their heads in disappointment and dismay and the decay of manhood in the 21st century; I see it in the faces of retired old men when I’m out during the day when most men my age are slaving away at some job for which they receive next to no money, no respect at all, and are compensated, if at all, with lousy health insurance benefits and a death benefit that wouldn’t pay for a pine box, a few nails, and shovel.

I’m grateful every day that they’re all dead and can’t see me. The old men on Main Street are bad enough.

But since I didn’t buy the coffee the day before, I knew I should get up and buy it. I would need it; but it was possible for me to dress, drive to the store, buy a can of coffee – being reduced to the cheap and functional in our one income household— and come home without talking to a soul – the advantage of having few friends and no one other than Muriel and the cats who cares for my daily existence. Granted, there shouldn’t have been any reason to rush, since it was Saturday; but since starting her new job, Muriel had taken to waking up early during the weekend. Her theory, as she explained it to me, was that if she woke up earlier that the day would last longer; and she hated how quickly the weekends flew by.

I think the opposite. On the surface, her logic makes sense. However, I had long begun to suspect that time worked more like quantum physics than straight mathematics. While it was true that being awake for more hours might equal a longer day, the quality of those waking hours made a huge difference. I could wake up before the sun if I HAD to and which I did when I was playing Ward instead of June Cleaver; but those hours were not quality hours; the days dragged on and I was simply subjected to more noise, stupidity, and the crowded thrall of humanity. Moreover, I was less able to cope because I lacked the minimum required hours of sleep – which for me aren’t even all that excessive. All I need are a solid six hours. Anything less, and the first few hours of my waking day are wasted.

What makes her approach so interesting and gives credence to her theory is that on days like that – Saturdays, holidays, or on those rare days she allows her workaholic soul a vacation— she will bound out of bed excited, energetic, and ready for the day. And that’s without the benefit of her cup of coffee – which is still more cream than coffee—or even a can of pop, which she will have right after finishing her coffee. Another compounding issue was that the previous night, like every night for more than two months, I woke up every night during the witching hours (between two and four) and could not sleep. That meant I usually got up and watched a movie or read or wrote in my journal until I felt sleep returning. And when I was awakened by the sound of sweet Muriel’s proclamation, it was 6:30. That meant I’d only been back asleep for two and half hours.

But I knew the coffee wouldn’t wait. My only hope was that she’d run out of steam in the mid-afternoon and I’d be able to take a nap in my chair.

“I’ll go get a can of coffee!”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’ll go.”

She was relieved and my feet were on the floor. I pulled on the clothes from the previous day, put on my boots, and wandered out of the bedroom into the kitchen and the nauseatingly bright overhead light. Muriel had gotten herself a can of pop and planted herself in front of the laptop in the living room to check her email and play those odd online games where nothing gets blown up and nobody dies – which, as far as I’m concerned, makes them pointless video games.

At that point, the coffee was more for me than for her; shed never drank more than one cup, and she rarely finished that. Since she had a can of pop, she would have the caffeine she needed.

I would’ve gone back to bed if I thought it would do any good. But all I’d do is lay there with my eyes closed pretending to sleep and hoping to fall back into the dream I’d been having.

“Coffee,” I muttered.

“Honey?”

“Yeah?”

“Why don’t you pick up something for breakfast while you’re out?”

“Breakfast or something sweet?”

“Something sweet.”

Like one more thing mattered. “Okay.”

“Love you,” she said, not looking away from her game.

And that was when it happened. I was in the process of responding in kind and before I could finish saying the word “too” my boot ran into one of the cats. He screeched and hissed and tried to move. I tried to move and get him out from under foot, but that only resulted in me stepping on him again. He howled even louder and retreated under out bed, snarling like a corned raccoon.

It was the long hair black one, Che. The one a vet had once told us was “nuts.” Generally, the cat didn’t like people; he and I had this in common. Our mutual misanthropy bound us together so much that Muriel, who wanted a lap cat, eventually brought home the other cat, a short haired orange tabby we named Nine, in honor of the 9th Ward in New Orleans where it had been rescued from. Nine was an unrepentant whore that would love on anybody who fed it or reached out a friendly hand.

Che got under my feet a lot. Cats do that when they’re hungry or wanting attention or just wanting to trip you up for shits and giggles. Cats are rascals. They’re worse imps than young children when there’s no adult around to behave for. And, they’re egocentric little fuckers, too. They expect to be fed the same time everyday, in the same way, with the same food – which they will remind you of by yowling, scratching the furniture and, if that doesn’t work, by simply staring at you until you wake up. If they’re box trained, they expect the litter to be clean or they’ll remind you by taking a shit on your pillow or in your favorite chair.

“Fuck!”

“What’s wrong?”

“I stepped on the fucking cat!”

“Which one?”

“Which one do you think? Which one likes to get under my feet?”

“Why don’t you pay more attention? You know he does that.”

This was an old conversation, and I wasn’t awake enough to have it again. Regardless of how those little sons of bitches behaved, when something happened, it was my fault. Inevitably. Always.

“Fine,” I said, digging the car key out Muriel’s purse. It was a small red purse, her latest favorite among many; but it wasn’t small enough that shit didn’t get lost in it. Cigarette lighters, the car key, her wallet. The keys were nowhere to be found. I emptied the contents of the purse onto the corner chair.

“What are you doing?” She looked up, annoyed.

“Looking for the car key.”

She sighed and shook her head. “It’s on the bookshelf by the door.”

Fuck me. “Oh.”

“Why don’t you pay more attention?”

Why don’t you put things where somebody can find them? “Sorry.”

“Just go and get you some coffee, please? I hate it when you’re like this.”

Dad’s Car -- Part 1 of 2

My first job was at a car wash. My job title was ‘Detailer’. When the cars came out of the automatic wash, I dried it by hand using a towel, used blue window cleaner on the front and back windshields and passenger windows, vacuumed it out, and put a polish on the rims. Sometimes the customer would try to give me a tip; but the manager Russ told me on my first day that we weren’t allowed to accept tips, so I never did. I was supposed to work every day after school until closing and four hours on Saturday. The job wasn’t time or physically intensive, and as long as my grades didn’t go down any lower my Mom didn’t care.

I got that job during my Senior year of high school, right after my Dad died and I inherited his car. I’d driven it a lot since I turned 16 and got my license; I even took the driving test in it. But up to that point, it had always been HIS car. After he died, Mom gave me the keys and told me it was mine as long as I paid for my own gas and kicked in on repairs. Her expectations were low, but she had other things on her mind. She was mourning Dad’s death. He had been much older than her, and I wasn’t sure if it was just the fact that he was dead or the thought of living alone, or both. But, honestly, both her and my Dad had stopped expecting anything out of me. So I figured it was a pretty good deal.

The car wasn’t a classic or anything; it wasn’t sporty or cool. But then, my Dad wasn’t a sporty or cool kind of guy. He wasn’t one of those guys who turned 40 and had to drive a little red sports car or have an affair. He was a stand-up guy who had married late in life and who bought stand-up cars that he didn’t trade in until he had to. It was a metallic green 1989 Pontiac Grand Am with two doors, cloth bucket seats, faux wood interior, a pokey V6 engine, and a factory Delco AM/FM stereo. It was most definitely NOT a cool car. But it was a car. And it was paid off. And, if I didn’t take it Mom said she was just going to let it sit in the driveway and rust.

“Nicky,” she said with an intense and earnest tone. “You need to take care of this car.”

“No worries, Mom. I will.”

“You REALLY need to TAKE CARE of THIS CAR…”

“I know, okay? I’ll take care of it.”

At that point I almost tossed the keys back at her; but she didn’t mean it the way it sounded. The next day I found an ad in the paper looking for car wash attendants, so after school I drove the car there to apply for the job. That morning Mom gave me 20 bucks for gas, on top of the two bucks she usually gave me to buy lunch (which I usually pocketed anyway. The cafeteria food was a god damn gastric nightmare.) I topped the tank off with 5 and pocketed the rest. It wasn’t the good ol days Dad used to talk about when gas was a quarter a gallon; but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it is now. At least gas was still hovering under a dollar.

The drive to the car wash was a half hour if traffic was good and if I hauled ass – and I usually did. It was near the new mall at Eastgate, spitting distance to the county line and the Cincinnati city limits. My friends and I had been driving downtown since the first one of us had his license; as far as I was concerned, it was the Promised Land. We used to sneak into some of the bars and clubs and check out the hookers that walked the sidewalks on 4th and Vine. The four or five block section of Vine Street between Columbia Parkway and Washington Street was an open-air market for anything you wanted. As long as you had cash and as long you didn’t look like a cop, nobody cared and nobody messed with you too much. I figured since I was getting a job – and one so close to the city – that I’d have even more excuses to go downtown. And while I would still pocket the lunch money Mom gave me, I’d have a little more money to blow on bootleg 40’s and weed.

Russ, the car wash manager, was extra nice to me when I applied. After he hired me and started showing me around, I figured out why. I was the youngest one there. Everyone else on my shift was an out of work carpenter. All of them but one was at least 40 and had families to support. They were beaten up, scraggly, tired looking men who didn’t really do a good job on the cars and who openly disrespected Russ and ogled the attractive female customers like horny stalkers. They’d all been union carpenters and when the economy was good they’d put down payments on houses and started families; but another recession hit and construction tanked. So their bosses laid them off to hire non-union workers who would work for much less money – usually kids or Mexicans who didn’t leave after tobacco harvest. Naturally they didn’t like me and didn’t bother to talk to me on breaks or try to include me in any of their banter. I wasn’t One Of Them. Even the youngest one – he couldn’t have been older than 25 – ignored me. They liked him because he was One Of Them, even if he didn’t have kids and a wife to worry about.

I found out later that they all took tips when the customers offered. I never told Russ about it, even though they didn’t like me.

They did notice the car, though. Vance – who lived way the hell out at the edge of Brown County and drove an hour and half one way to work at the car wash – did say something to me about it on break once.

“That’s a nice car.” He had this look on his face like he knew what I was going to say and was planning to use it later to make fun of me behind my back.

“Thanks.”

“Where’d YOU get it?”

“I inherited it.”

That stopped him. “Huh?”

“It was my Dad’s,” I explained. “He died and I inherited it.”

I learned to talk about his death from watching late night TV. I wasn’t sleeping very much. I hadn’t been since he went into the hospital for the last time. And so I read or wrote or watched TV. There was always an old movie on at 3 in the morning. Sometimes it was a black and white one. My favorite was this early Cagney flick where all he did all day was sit in this bar wearing a nice suit and drinking gin and tonic, and people would come in to ask his advice. Sometimes it was a more recent movie – a Lee Marvin or a John Wayne or a Charles Bronson. They each handled death in a very specific way. They didn’t break down and cry the way Mom did all the time; they bore it up, sucked it in, and never showed that it bothered them. When they talked about it, they spoke very matter-of-factly. If it was an unjust death, they had a few drinks and took care of the people responsible. Dad’s death wasn’t unjust; he just wore out the way people do, so I didn’t feel obligated to go out seeking justice.

Vance must’ve felt bad; he mumbled his condolences and stopped talking to me.

Not sleeping much made it difficult to go to school and go to work; I drank a lot of coffee, took up smoking, and took those pep pills you used to be able to buy at gas stations until the FDA made them illegal. Once, just to see what it was like, I bought some speed on Vine Street; but it gave me the shakes and kept me up for two days straight and made my heart beat so fast I thought I was going to die. After that I stuck to coffee, nicotine, and ephedrine. What little sleep I did get was usually in Dad’s recliner. It wasn’t a nice one – he’d had it for years and refused to get rid of it even after Mom talked him into new living room furniture; but it was comfortable. I usually managed to get a half hour or so of sleep before I had to get ready to go to school. Mom never said anything to about it. She had her own stuff to deal with.

When I wasn’t working or at school, I stayed away from home as much as possible. Saturdays after work I drove into the city and let myself disappear. Sometimes I met up with friends; mostly I went alone. Sometimes I went to the library and listened to records or found books nobody had read in years and read them. Sometimes I hung out in coffee shops or I sneaked into bars; a lot of times I just walked around and took in the city. Downtown Cincinnati after the 5pm Friday was a ghost town. The people who worked all week in the office buildings commuted from safer places like Milford, Glen Este, Mariemont, or Anderson; when the weekend came, they deserted the city until Monday morning, leaving it in the control of the people who still lived downtown and kids like me who drove in trying to escape small town suffocation. When I was downtown, I never really worried about the car. Of course I rolled up the windows and locked the doors; but there wasn’t anything about the car that would inspire any would-be car thieves or joy-riders.

Person of the Year, Part 1

Tess was exhausted when she got home after working her third double shift in a row. The trailer was deserted. She sighed, relieved JJ wasn’t home. Her feet and lower back ached from standing on the cement floor for 16 hours. The rattle and hum of the industrial printing press echoed in her head. It was a good job, she supposed. She was lucky to have a job when most everybody they knew was out of work. The pay was lousy, the benefits nearly non-existent; but there was plenty of opportunity for overtime. It was her overtime that was keeping them afloat; if they had to depend on just her regular paycheck, she and JJ have been living out of his truck months ago.

She looked around. Everything was a mess. The dirty dishes were left soaking in the sink. He’d managed to track mud in from outside, where he’d probably spent the morning four-wheeling through the woods; the footprints stood out in contrast, even against the cheap, dirty tan carpet. The heat was off; JJ was supposed to have fixed the thermostat. It was in pieces on the kitchen counter. She wasn’t surprised. Their home was usually in worse shape. Most of the time, she went ahead and cleaned it up. He would expect it to be clean when he came home from drinking and hanging out with Darryl and Billy. The two of them stood up with JJ in Tess and JJ’s wedding. He’d known them since elementary school. As far as Tess could tell, they still thought they were Mrs. Morgan’s fourth grade class.

They sure as shit act like they are. Of course, if JJ was out with them – and there wasn’t a night when he wasn’t -- that just meant he was out drinking and pushing up on those girls at the bar. Those WHORES, she thought. That’s what Granny would’ve called them. Whores. Each one of them knew JJ was married. But it didn’t matter to them because it didn’t matter to him.

She soaked in the silence and slid her feet out of her shoes. She knew better than to look in the mirror that hung next to the door. She didn’t want to see how tired she looked. She especially didn’t want to see how she looked in a novelty Time Magazine mirror with a caption that read PERSON OF THE YEAR.

“But it’s funny,” JJ had told her when he brought it home from one of his unsuccessful days at the flea market. “Besides, it might boost your self-esteem.”

She snorted. Like he ever CARED about my self-esteem.

The wall clock told her she still had time. Time to soak in the silence. Time to relax. Time before he stumbled home smelling of warm beer and the cheap perfume they sold at the Speed Mart next door to the bar. She walked towards the back of the small trailer they called home, stopping in the closet sized bathroom to start her bath water. She turned the hot water way up. She wanted it to burn her. After she got the water at the right temperature, she got the small canister of bath oil balls out from under the sink. There was one left. She sighed, dropped it in, and walked into the bedroom, where she peeled off her clothes and put them in the dirty clothes hamper. JJ’s dirty clothes from the previous two days were on the floor around the hamper.

On nights like these, she tried to imagine how Granny had put up with it. How she’d put up with her husband, Tess’s grandfather, when he went out drinking and chasing pussy. Then she reminded herself that Granny didn’t put up with it. Her grandfather had been a good man. A better man than her own father, who ran off and deserted her after her mother died. A better man than any of the boys she’d dated growing up. Of all the men she’d met in her life, her grandfather had been the only one who was worth a damn.

She tried to tell you, Tess thought. Granny had tried to tell her JJ wasn’t any good. When they started dating, Tess was a sophomore in high school. If JJ had stayed in school he would have graduated Tess’s freshman year. The first time she saw him at the Tastee Freeze, and he smiled at her with that shit kicker smile, she was done. It was love.

“Why you running off with that Tremaine boy?” she asked the second time she caught Tess trying to sneak in after seeing JJ. “You know where his family lives. Johnny Senior hadn’t done nothing worth a damn in his whole life. Nor his father before him. All they do is find some poor girl who’ll lay down, then get her pregnant.” Granny spit on the front porch for effect. “You better not let him do NOTHIN’, Tessie, or you’ll end up regretting it.”

She stood and looked at herself in large mirror that was attached to her dresser. As long as she didn’t look at her face, Tess liked the way she looked. Her body was still good. Her tummy was smooth, when most of the girls her age had been stretched and pulled by multiple pregnancies. Her tits were still high and tight. Her ass had always been a little round and flat – but she had her dad to thank for that. Granny had been wrong about one thing. JJ hadn’t married her because he’d gotten her knocked up. They got married because they were in love. He said he didn’t want kids. At least, not for a while. “I’m still trying to grow up,” he told her. “I can’t deal with no kid.” Of course, he wouldn’t wear a condom. She had to go on the pill. But it had been for the best. She couldn’t imagine having to take care of TWO of them.

She walked the two and half steps from the bedroom to the bathroom naked. If JJ had been home, he wouldn’t have even batted an eye. Tess couldn’t remember the last time he looked at her. Mostly, he looked through her; as if she were the only thing between him and the door. She tested her bath temperature with her big toe, and, satisfied, stepped in. She sat in the water and slid until her body was submerged under water. Then she turned off the water using her foot. That was when she heard the foot steps on the wooden porch that JJ was supposed to have repaired months ago. From the sound, JJ was bringing the boys in with him for a night cap and a few games of Deer Hunter on the PlayStation. She sighed, reached up, and swung the bathroom door closed, bracing for the moment the silence would end.