Junktique Memory Palace: The solace of certain things / Essay on the Eight of Swords (Draft)

It is not down in any map; true places never are. ~ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?” ~ Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

My memory palace is one, giant flea market.

Which is to say, it's entirely possible that one of the reasons why I tend towards a certain precision -- what my daughter sometimes calls "picky" and my wife lovingly refers to as "being particular" -- about certain things:  like where I leave my keys, how I organize the house, where I'd prefer things are stored and how, and how clean I try to be, is because a large portion of my mental landscape is an odd mix of old stuff, bric-a-brac, used books, dated movies, music, oddly random and seemingly pointed connections between disparate things, several rabbit holes of useless information, and picture memories... a long with a massive card catalog in which I file every useless piece of datum ranging from historical dates to my chili recipe.

NOTE: the greenscape has long since been ruined by cement.

If it helps you imagine, once upon a time I conjured my memory palace as a large library, not unlike the interior of the Camden-Carroll library at Morehead State University.

Which is to say, my memory palace probably resembles the library in that episode of The Twilight Zone in which the poor bastard that just wanted more time to read after the apocalypse ended up breaking his reading glasses.

But, it's my mess, dammit, and I like it that way. Besides, no one rummages around there besides me.

This mess does bleed out into my life in certain ways. While I am, admittedly, particular about the condition of my living space, that's not to say that I'm much of minimalist. It's true, I've whittled down things to what I think I need. But this includes a lot books, random rocks, various mementos and, yes, bric-a-brac, that helps make our house a home.

Every once in a while The Kid will ask if I've actually read all the books in the house, to which I usually replay something to the effect of " Most of them." Truthfully, I never want to run out of books on hand that I haven't read. That way if I owe the public library too much in late fees (which is as inevitable as the sunrise), I can lean on a few books on our shelves until the drought passes.

So why, you may ask, do I keep the books I've already read?

Well let me ask you: Do you never talk to old friends just because you've already talked to them and only make new friends?

The books I've read are old friends and fine company. And I like being able to go back and read them, revisit, 

My writing area in the basement -- that I affectionately refer to as The Bunker -- is similarly organized. I have hard and digital files and old journals dating back to the early 90's, when I started journaling. I have records -- the kind that go on record players -- cassettes, CD's books, a shiny brass compass that was a gift from my brother, a skull shaped candle I got for Christmas from my niece. There's a little silver bell with no ringer. A pink magic wand that is the only thing left from my teaching -- a prop from a teacher in-service. A beech wood candle stick I turned on a lathe in Menifee County, Kentucky.

All of these things -- and the others I haven't listed here -- I keep because they, in some way, embody an important memory. It's true I can live without most of them. It's true that I still have the memories even if everything is lost, locked up in my cluttered but somehow manageable by me memory flea market.

The solace of certain things helps when the world leaves me feeling daunted. It's important for me to be able to get lost sometimes, maybe even hide. I don't get out and about like I used to -- which is usually what I'd do if I need to get some mental breathing space. Now I either retreat to The Bunker and write or find some other way to tilt at windmills using the weapon I've been granted -- words

And lately, there's a lot that leaves me daunted. If I draw any comfort from these, the days of Trumplandia, the days of the yoke and the bit, the days of democracy's death rattle, it is in the fact that it will go on whether I take notice or not, that change is perpetual and inevitable. I also draw comfort and strength from the faith I have that even if all I'm doing is taking care of my house full of people, books, and animals and writing like a madman in basement, that maybe it does help bring some measure of grace to the world. If that's all I ever do, then at least it's time well-spent. Art is created in such ways. If I'm lucky.

Essay on the Eight of Swords (Draft)

Transitional dreams portend a seasonal shift:
like the tarot, not all is as they appear.
There is wisdom in The Hanged Man.
Escalators and hotel employees suggest
it will be a long autumn.
Train stations do not suggest travel,
but it’s better to be prepared anyway.
There are signs, and rumors of signs.
You will meet a beautiful hitchhiker.
Do not trust her.
The raggedy man will bring you a message.
Offer him beanie weenies and bottled water.
He will ask for wine, but it’s only a test.
There are no wrong answers,
only more appropriate ones.
But they do offer varying degrees of detail.
Do not be afraid to drink beer with the devil.
He wants your soul, but does not know
you have been spoken for.
The Eight of Swords is still your card.
But you are not bound to that narrative.

 











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Wayward Sacredness: The Plenteous Nature of Obligation (A Pocket Journal Transcription/Explication)

You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you get what you need. - The Rolling Stone


Sunday, 18th March, 2012

On some level, life ends up being about who you owe.

Sense of obligation leads around, determines where we go, how we live ... or how we don't ... what kind of jobs we take or don't take. No matter how independent we are, so much of our lives come back to our relationships with others, our obligations to one another.

Started out the day yesterday  at the bowling alley. Drank a few Guinness and had 2 shots of bourbon. I've been staying away from the costlier stuff as a general rule... even bourbon. Which, being back in Mount Carroll, isn't easy.

I've been drinking of course. Dave has been kind in regards to covering quite a bit of my bar tab and Billy's always good for a few in reciprocation. I've paid for some, too; but what I've paid doesn't nearly cover what I've been drinking.

Wanted to splurge a little, though, it being St. Patrick's Day and all. But I was going to take it easy, too.... or, at the very least, PACE myself. (In this, I was largely successful, believe it or not. Penny pinching and making sure I'll be be able to travel are far more effective motivators than worries about my health and welfare.

[I know I'm not a martyr; I never died for anyone but me. - Over the Rhine]

Hung around the bar even after Dave and Julie disappeared into the basement with Billy, Jeanine (Billy's wife), and J.R.

[The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all undimmed. -Fortune Cookie]

After a bit Doug and Laurel come in for the corned beef and cabbage*. (NOTE: Doug is on city council and a die hard historical preservationist. His wife Laurel's business has something to do with some facet of community and economic  development -- not here as much as other places. She and her partner Ernst are essentially hired guns. They dig up and apply for grants, put together project proposals, look at the viability of business projects based on the area the business is thinking of building in. And that's only the stuff I've overheard them talking about At Brick Street Coffee.)  So I moved from the bar to the back table where they sat down, chit-chatted with them while they ate. Doug ordered the salad bar and made a respectable looking salad loaded down with ham and bacon. Laurel ordered the corned beef and cabbage, though she pretty much only ate the cabbage, potatoes and carrots.

We talked a little about my leaving out (again), and Doug tried once again to talk me into staying. Laurel seems much more at ease with people coming and going than Doug... which I find interesting since he prides himself on being  progressive and forward thinking. You'd think he would be more transition-minded of the two.

But then again, he is a die hard preservationist... which is sort of ironic on the surface.

"You're a local fixture," he told me. This was maybe the 2nd or 3rd time he talked to me about staying on since I came back from my Eastbound jaunt. The times before he tried to appeal to my sense of community and obligation -- which are legitimate tactics to use, since I do feel like I'm a part of the community here... which  in part means I have incurred a certain sense of obligation to the place.

[I carry my home on my back. But the cops only frown every time I put it down. - Utah Phillips]

It's difficult to explain the exegesis of why I have to go to people who aren't similarly afflicted. Doug and Laurel did their share of bumping around early in their marriage, but they have been settled here in Mount Carroll, undertaking the renovation and preservation of their historic house on Main Street for 15 years. They understand what Melissa sometimes calls "being a gypsy." But this itch is an entirely different thing. And generally, the only people I have found who really understand it are those who feel it, too.

[I don't know if I'll ever find the way back home. -Utah Phillips]

And it's not just the fact that Melissa is here. It would be relatively easy to avoid her, if that was what I really wanted... even in a town as small as this one. It's still an emotional mind fuck when I see her and talk to her, and I have put off going over the house to finish packing just because my natural impulse is to avoid the emotional pain of visiting A Place That Used To Be Home.  But I knew I'd have to deal with that before I came back here. And really, it's a problem that's all about me -- which leads back, of course, to onfree of the factors that contributed to the end of the marriage.  That I make most things about me and only me... whether they really are or not. 

I have not always been mindful of my obligations. And though I do try, sometimes that underlying selfishness bubbles up to the surface. It's something I work on, something I am trying to be ever present and thoughtful of these days. And it is primarily because I've been traveling and writing and being reminded of just how lucky I am to have a multitude of friends and of how good-hearted people can be if they're given the chance that I can come back here and be aware -- sometimes awkwardly -- that I carry the weight of certain obligations. 

One of those being that I have to be honest about my part of the blame in the breakdown of my marriage to Melissa. This was brought back, clear as the sky is today, when I woke up with a hang over and the residue of a feeling that I had felt a lot over the last year and a half or so. That feeling of being an asshole. Primarily because, while I was certainly drunk enough prevail upon the men's toilet at the bowling alley to vomit in, I wasn't drunk enough to pass out. The drink rarely makes me sleepy. Actually, it usually does the exact opposite. I was sitting up, by myself, trying to get myself to sleep. And then I started to think about things. About being here. About needing to get away. About how what we want and what we need isn't always the same thing. Oh, I'm a fucking genius when I drink. And what do you think this genius did at 1 in the morning?

You know it. I texted Melissa to see if she was awake, knowing there was a better than average chance that she would be.

Me: 

You awake?

Her:

 yes

Her: 

whats up

Me: 

Nothin. Me.

Her: 

What did u want? U asked if I was up?

Me: 

Sorry. I'm just awake. Ignore me.

Her: 

Stop treating me like i chose this.

Me: 

That's fair. But stop treating me like I wanted it.

Her: 

You did.

Her: 

Are u drunk?

Me:

 Been drinking, yes. Don't wanna fight.

Me:

I didn't choose either.

Her: 

I dont either. Why did u text me?

Me: 

Sorry. I have moments. It'll pass, I guess.

If nothing else, my temporary return has been effective at reminding us both what it is about me that pushed her away. Clarity isn't always kind. 

The conversation goes on a bit after this, but the gist of it was: Don't be an asshole. And I can't say I blame her... because... well ... I am. Often. I am and have always been my worst enemy. Sure I have good qualities... I'm well-read, a snappy dresser, a decent writer, a polite guest. My mom likes me. My friends like me. Women occasionally enjoy my company for brief amounts of time.

But I was, in all honesty, a shitty husband in many respects. That I really did try is only a testament to the fact that I was horrible. Not violent. Not mean spirited. But an asshole, nonetheless. Because I wasn't as mindful about my obligations as I should have been.

Of course, that my obligations to my marriage often ran contradictory to my obligations to myself were the real problem.

And when I was talking to Doug and Laurel, trying to explain why it is I have to go... because I'm really only truly happy when I'm Out There, and being Out There is the only place where I can live and not turn into a total asshole because the work I need to do is Out There. And there's a lot of it to do.

There's a lot of it to do because of the obligations I feel. Because my friends have been more than generous, and so has the universe. Because I left the bowling alley without paying ... intending to come back later and pay at the end of the day... and when I did return I found that Doug and Laurel had paid my morning bar tab.  Because Dave and Julie have put up with me for almost 3 weeks. Because John Briscoe sometimes buys me a bowl of soup. Because a homeless guy in Norfolk gave me a dollar and a cigarette. Because I don't want anyone to regret the love and goodwill they show me, and because I want to find someway to share that back with the universe. 

[This post is dedicated to everyone who's been gracious enough to let me sleep on their couches, share their food, and listen to my stories. There's too many of you to list all at once. I hope you know who you are.

And thanks to all the people who read and who, I hope, will keep reading once I get back Out There. Which will be soon. Very soon.]

Pendleton Underground: Parts 3 and 4 of 7

3.

After I got off the phone with Red, though, I was in no mood to growl at the kids for hitting my door. I was in no mood to growl at anybody. Except maybe Brenda.



She didn’t like me because I stood her up once. Not long after my ex and I split, Brenda invited me to her house for dinner. I ended up getting drunk and forgetting about it. She never forgave me. Actually, I’d forgotten all about it until she started dating Pendleton. Naturally, she brought it up. “It’s no big deal,” she said smiling through her triple chins. Brenda was not a petite woman; then again, Pendleton liked his women on the big side. She was a pious and broken woman who was easy to impress. She didn’t think she was smart, and all of Pendleton’s books impressed her. She worshipped him – which he loved – because he ex-wife, my ex-mother-in-law, was a bitter shrew who never showed him any respect at all.



We were all friends for a while – Pendleton and Brenda and Linda and me. We went to their house for dinner all the time, and we played cards after until well after midnight. Pendleton usually cooked because the only food Brenda knew how to cook were TV dinners and frozen pizzas. Eating with them made me glad I’d forgotten that dinner date with Brenda; Pendleton was a decent cook and liked things spicy, the same as me.



We stayed friends until they got married. The small ceremony happened in Pendleton’s living room with a few friends attending and a homemade wedding cake that always seems to lean a little to the left. After she married him, Brenda took ownership of everything –including Pendleton. She didn’t mind if Red came around because he could help her husband work on the cars or fix the lawn mower; he was useful. I was all thumbs and useless and I drank too much; plus she thought I was mean to Linda sometimes. She also didn’t understand why I couldn’t seem to hold down a job, even though she’d never been able to keep one more than two months in the entire time I knew her.



“Fuck her,” I spat at the empty apartment. “Fuck her and her fat condescending head and her TV fucking dinners and fake piety and her hollow fucking prayers.”



After Pendleton married Brenda he rediscovered religion. He’d always had his own point of view on the subject; he once told me that God spoke to him and explained the purpose of evil in the world. But when I asked him to tell me, he only smiled and shook his head. “You need to find that answer for yourself.”



Give m a fucking break, I thought. Pendleton thought of himself as a spiritual man, but he didn’t go to church very much. “There’s nothing there I can’t get sitting on my back porch,” he said. Mostly I think he didn’t like the idea of having to dress up. Cleaned up with his shirt tucked in, Pendleton looked more like an irate bus driver than the misunderstood mountain man he wanted to be. But Brenda had insisted they go at least once a month; it was her family’s church and she wanted to prove to them all that she could land a husband who wasn’t either a stumbling alcoholic or her fourth cousin.



The scotch bottle was empty, but I wasn’t done drinking. I considered my options. I probably could’ve closed my eyes right then and gone to sleep; that would’ve been the smart option. But I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to stop thinking. I didn’t want to stop remembering. I didn’t want to stop the waves of anger pulsing in my arms and legs and chest. Normally Linda could talk some sense into me; but she was working an extra shift and wouldn’t be home until late. I was supposed to get up the next morning and teach. If I kept on, I wouldn’t feel like getting out of bed. All I’d feel was hungover and angry and all it would take was one stupid question and I’d bite some empty-headed student’s face off.



I put on my shoes and left. The sounds of the children playing echoed in my ears, nearly split my ear drums. So be it, I thought. If I’m deaf I won’t have hear anything anymore. No more children playing. No more silly questions. No more phone calls from Red. Nothing. Nada. Nunca. Silence.



The bar looked unusually crowded, so I didn’t go inside. I didn’t feel like being around people and having to play at being friendly. I kept walking. The scotch made my blood warm; I felt every drop of it coursing through my veins, pumping my heart, propelling me forward. Forward was all that mattered. I got as far as the corner drug store. I didn’t have enough cash for another bottle of scotch, so I settled for a reasonably cheap jug of table wine. The girl working the register eyed me carefully, but didn’t refuse my money. I walked out the automatic doors and cracked the seal. It was a serviceable burgundy; not usually to my liking, but it was the only red wine on the shelf.



If she had been there, Linda would have told me I was begging to be arrested. It was sweet that she still worried about – god knows why, since I rarely worry about myself; but she could never seem to grasp the basic laws of equilibrium. I wouldn’t get picked up because 1.) it was mid-week; 2.) I didn’t look homeless or like an illegal, and 3.) I wasn’t blocking traffic or impeding the forward progress of civilization. The only time anybody cared about a wandering drunk was when he became an affront to some respectable person’s sense of safety and balance. If we still lived in a small town, things would’ve worked out in a different pattern. Small town cops have nothing better to do than to set up speed traps and harass harmless drunks stumbling home from the bar; they have to do something in order to justify their existence. In a small town, one wandering drunk embodies the shaky line between order and chaos. In a city, especially one as self-involved as Phoenix with its image of being the new west coast, a wandering drunk in a decent pair of shoes isn’t the harbinger of anarchy; he’s a symbol of the economic recovery.



I kept the receipt, though. Just in case.



4.



Pendleton was annoyed by my ability to use reason to justify what he saw as unreasonable and unjustifiable behavior. He probably cut me some slack because my drinking didn’t pick up until after his daughter (Actually, she was his step-daughter.) and I split up. Also, I think he felt a little responsible, since he was the one who bought me my first beer.



I was eighteen and my ex and I had just started dating. She was seventeen and occupied nearly all of my attention, and he was worried that we were getting too serious too fast. To try and pull me away, he started taking me with him on his junk jaunts. Almost every Saturday he’d get up early and hit every yard sale, estate sale, and junk shop he knew. And he knew them all. And they knew him. He never looked for any thing in particular. Mostly, when people collect things, they focus on something specific. Baseball cards. Comic books. Tiffany lamp shades. Native American Figurines. Rare books. But not Pendleton; he collected everything and anything. It was like unearthing rare treasure to him. He kept piles of figurines, broken machines, buttons, pins, books, records, and furniture. He had two old Victrolas that, had he put the working parts together, he would’ve had one working record player; he didn’t, though. “It’ll ruin the value,” he said.



The junk dealers laid in wait for him with boxes of knick knacks and odds and ends. Once he came home with the carcass of an iron belly wood stove that was rusted beyond recognition and use. All it needed, he claimed was some repair and it could be useful again. He had to leave it on the front porch, though, because there was no room in small trailer for it.



I tried to understand his fascination, but I never really got into it. I kind of thought he went on his jaunts to get out of the house and away from the harpy voice of his wife and her continual attempts to force him into her idea of respectable self-improvement. My ex told me, with critical tone, that he’d been “that way” since the accident. It happened at work. One of the other mechanics was moving a truck full of engine blocks and rolled over Pendleton’s feet and ankles; the guy was clearly high, apparently. But he was the owner’s son, and when the doctors told Pendleton he’d never be able work on his feet again – they didn’t even think he’d be able to walk again (mostly because the insurance wouldn’t pay for the necessary operations) – the garage made it out that he’d been working on car in the path of the truck, making the accident his fault. That meant that not only did he lose his job, but he didn’t get any worker’s comp, either. I can’t say I blamed him for being a little bitter.



On one of the jaunts he took me on, we stopped and looked at an old Chevelle. It had been beaten up and abused and left out at the mercy of the elements. The body was covered in rust. The wheel wells in the front and the back were deteriorating. The tires were rotting. The engine was locked up. The seats were torn – done by cats, the owner said. He wanted $500 for the wreck. He would’ve asked for more, he told Pendleton, but his old lady was tired of looking at it and was making him get rid of it. Pendleton stared at the car for a long time. After a while, the owner stopped talking to him and wandered away because Pendleton looked like he was in trance. Had it been somebody else, they guy might’ve made him shove off; but Pendleton was good head and half taller and half a man larger. He wasn’t someone that anybody forced to do anything.



At first, I thought he was going to buy the car; but then he looked over at me and asked if I was ready to go. We left and before we stopped at one of his usual stops – a junktique shop housed in an old gas station on Elm Street – Pendleton stopped at a 7-11 and brought a couple of 22 ounce bottles of beer. He gave me one and drank his without saying anything. He just stared out the windshield. I drank mine. I’d never had beer before, and I’d always heard that nobody liked it the first time they drank it. But I did. It tasted like ginger ale to me. I drank it down pretty quickly, and Pendleton and I went on. He never mentioned it to his wife or my girlfriend, and we never talked about it.

Pendleton Underground: Part 2 of 7

Pendleton hated my drinking; he grew up with parents who were rotten, miserable drunks that took their miseries out on him. Even after they quit drinking they still acted like drunks, and well into his adulthood they heaped whatever abuse on him they could. He called them dry drunks. Sometimes he spat on the ground when he said it. Yet while he despised my drinking, he only ever mentioned it to me twice. The rest of the time he just shook his head in his silent, disapproving way.

I drank my tumbler of cheap scotch and sat on the balcony, smoking. The sun was setting. The weather finally cooled off and Arizona was tolerable.

My voice came back just in time for Red to call; somewhere on the bus ride from Cincinnati to Phoenix I lost it. On the 21/2 day trip that had been an advantage; not being able to talk meant that other, more gregarious passengers lost interest in me. I’m not sure what it is about travel that compels people to find complete strangers to talk to. Filling the empty hours with stories and not-so-funny anecdotes from their lives does nothing to make the hours less empty. A big boned woman got on the bus at Fort Hood and sat down next to me. She started telling me that she was going to Hollywood because her high school sweetheart had cheated on her before he deployed to Afghanistan. “I’m going to be a movie star,” she said. “And when he sees me in the movies, he’ll see what he missed out on.” I guess that was as good a reason as any to get on a bus and bother total strangers; if I had been able to talk though, I probably would have told her that she was more likely to end up giving $20 blow jobs in the front seats of cars and taking it up the ass for an extra 10. She was cute enough to hook, but the camera would not appreciate her broad chest, round face, and saddle-bag hips. There was a vacant look in her dishwater eyes that made me think of dead fish. When she found out I couldn’t talk, she moved next to a nice looking old man who, (I overheard) was carrying his dead sister’s ashes to some ancestral place in order to release them.

Pendleton would’ve enjoyed eavesdropping on them, and he would’ve enjoyed talking to the jilted girl. Despite her broadness, she had firm grapefruit tits and he would have enjoyed picturing her topless. Of course, he would’ve been polite; he prided himself on being a gentleman. He called it Southern Gentility.

My tumbler of scotch was empty again, so I refilled it. The cooler weather brought people out of hiding and into the twilight. My neighbors were sitting out on their balconies and all the kids were playing in the small patch of green space that substituted for a courtyard. Sometimes when the kids played kickball one of them would inadvertently hit my door. When that happened I usually stuck my head out and told them to hit somebody else’s door. I made sure to sound mean enough to scare them off. That worked usually worked for two or three days before it happened again.

I learned about being a man from Pendleton. He was really good at it, too. Mean and scary. The first time I went to pick up my ex-wife for a date, he sat in his chair and stared at me the entire five minutes I stood in his living room. Actually, it’s unfair to call it a living room. They lived in a small rundown trailer at the time. The closet-sized back bedroom was occupied by my ex and her sister. Pendleton and his wife slept in the front room. The bed doubled as a couch, and his chair sat facing the door. I was so nervous that I never took my hand off the door knob. He told me later that it was a game he liked to play with people – especially boys who came to date his daughters. He didn’t have to talk, he said, because he was big enough to not have to. “Being silent is better than cleaning a shotgun or showing off a knife collection,” he said. Silence was a less specific threat that relied on the other person’s imagination. Then he told me he liked me right off because I was clearly scared shitless. That, he told me, meant I had a vivid imagination.

Pendleton Underground: Part 1 of 7

He was dead and buried for a month before anybody called to tell me.

“I wasn’t s’posed to tell ya,” Red said through the phone. “Brenda made me PROMISE. But I jus’ didn’t think it was RIGHT. Ya know?”

That Brenda didn’t want me to know didn’t surprise me. She and I didn’t get along even before Pendleton married her. She was about the same age as me, which made Pendleton 20 years her senior. He and I had managed to stay friends even though my marriage to his daughter didn’t last; I suppose it had something to do with the fact that his marriage to my bitch of an ex-mother-in-law failed not long after and he moved in with me instead of living in his truck. Even though we got along alright, the two of us in the same living space wasn’t ideal for a lot of reasons – not the least of which that it caused tension between him and my soon to be ex-wife. By the time my divorce was final, I had abandoned the trailer we’d been living in (that I had been living in with his daughter before she left) and moved on to less greener pastures. We managed to stay friends, though, and when he married Brenda I did my best to be happy for him.

The last conversation I had with Brenda was in a hospital waiting room. Prior to that, I hadn’t spoken to her or Pendleton for about two years.She told me to keep in touch. I knew she didn’t mean it. So I didn’t. I liked to think he understood; it’s hard being friends with someone when you don’t get along with his wife, and I didn’t want to cause any trouble. It was easier to move on. It was Red who called to tell me Pendleton was in the hospital and that his condition was pretty serious.

Red first came around because he was dating a friend of my future ex-wife’s; and when that relationship ended because he wanted to settle down and have kids and she wanted to collect stuffed animals and relive the sexual abuse heaped on by her step-daddy, Red stuck around. He and Pendleton could talk about cars. Before the accident that ruined him for work and eventually contributed to his death, Pendleton was a mechanic… and from what I could tell, a pretty good one. He had that magic touch. All he had to do was put his meat hook hands in an engine and regardless of what was wrong or how long it sat, the fucker started every single time. With me, Pendleton talked about books. He never went to college; but he thought it was important to be educated, and he read everything he could get his hands on – from history and sociology to theology, new age medicine, and economics. He told me once that he thought of himself as “a student of human nature.” I asked him what he thought of my nature. He laughed and didn’t answer. Before long Red started reading books so he and Pendleton could talk about that, too.

“Did he go back to the hospital?” I asked. I could hear Red breathing through the phone and he sounded like he’d been drinking. “Was he there for a while? In the ICU? Was he…”

“It was kind of sudden,” he cut me off. “He died at home. It was his heart. It just gave out, ya know? I mean… hell. It was under so much strain anyway, and along with everything else…”

Pendleton was a big man. He once bragged to me that he caught an engine block when the chains holding it up came undone. If he hadn’t caught it, he said, his boss at the garage would have been crushed.

“Thing is,” he also told me, “if I HADN’T caught it and he had died, I probably would’ve ended up getting his job. And if that had happened, I’d probably still be working.”

Red was trying really hard to get off the phone. So I let him. There was no point in prolonging the conversation anyway. Without Pendleton as a common factor, I wasn’t sure there was anything left for us to talk about. I wondered briefly how he felt about breaking his promise to Brenda; but Red clearly saw a larger obligation. That was just the way he was; his days were ruled by his obligations the way a dog is ruled by a leash. Red lost sleep if he got to the end of his day and some small thing was left undone. That was another thing we didn’t have in common; my only obligations have always been to myself. And if I can’t sleep, I drink until I do.

We exchanged our goodbyes. He said he’d call again. He said for me to call him. He told me not to be a stranger. He told me I should visit him so that we could go out drinking the way we used to. I said goodbye and thanked him for telling me. I told him to take care of his family. Then I hung up and poured myself a drink.