Marcel Solves All My Problems

Virginia Blare didn’t come back to the Sleep Center for her analysis until the end of last week.  I didn’t know what took so long for her to come back, but it apparently involved having tubes down her throat and claw marks down her face, at least according to Rex.  Just before Rex left for the weekend and the two of us were watching her get checked in with Marcel, I pointed out to him that Virginia didn’t have any claw marks on her face.  Rex said that’s what proves their were claw marks, since the hospital wouldn’t let her come until her self-mutilation had healed.

About a half hour after Virginia was in the private room, Marcel came and found me.  He told me Virginia refused to even try to fall asleep unless I went into the room with her and stayed a while.  I told Marcel that Rex didn’t clean the bathrooms all day, so I was going to have to spend time on that.  Marcel told me that this took precedence, even after I told him that she believed in ghosts.  “I believe in ghosts,” Marcel told me.  He told me a story about how he spent some time on an oil rig, and how all the workers knew about the ghost that haunted the outer deck, a man who was once killed by an explosion.  “So one night I was on duty and looked up, and there was this man with burned clothing standing in front of me.  He told me I needed to get out of there, that there was going to be an explosion.  So I ran down to the sleeping quarters and woke some guys up, and told them there was going to be an explosion.  Once they figured out the ghost had told me, they realized nothing was going to happen.  Don’t get me wrong—they knew the ghost was real.  It just so happens that the ghost always cries wolf about explosions.  Apparently that’s what happens to you when you get blown up in an explosion that no one warned you about: your ghost just warns everyone in sight about explosions.  Eventually, he’ll be right.”  I told Marcel that maybe that’s what caused the explosion in the Gulf Coast—the ghost kept warning people every night, so they didn’t pay any attention when he warned them right before an actual explosion.  And Marcel said, “Maybe Cyrus.  After all, I saw him in the gulf.”  My god, it’s a good thing you’re so handsome, Marcel.

When I went into Virginia Blare’s private room she was lying on the bed with her eyes open.  She asked me to sit down and tell her about the ghosts that I see.  I told her ghosts aren’t real, but she said the reason she wanted me in the room with her was that I clearly see ghosts.  I said, “No offense, but you just came from a mental institution, and possibly just had some tubes removed.”  She laughed at that, but since she was in a track suit again, her laughter didn’t come off well.  It was like the kind of laugh a friend’s great-aunt would make when she was coming on to you.  She was convinced I saw ghosts, and I tried to convince her that ghosts aren’t something to see.  “You know why I can’t sleep?" she said.  "It’s not because I see ghosts.  It’s because I can’t see ghosts.  My husband used to come see me.  Now he doesn’t.  I told them at the hospital I can’t sleep, that I’m going crazy because I’m not seeing things.  Did you know when you don’t sleep you hallucinate?  So I stopped seeing ghosts and started hallucinating.”  I told her I once had a friend named Hank who couldn’t sleep, and he died.  And maybe she’d die and then she could find out once and for all if there were ghosts.  Though I suppose if there aren’t ghosts she’ll never know because then she’s dead and gone.  So even if I dug her up and shouted into her rotting bones, “See? I was right!” she’ll never get proved wrong.  That's just the way things go sometimes.

Virginia Blare said that I probably lived in an old house that once belonged to someone else in the family.  She said it was probably that relative that I was seeing all the time.  She was really insistent on this, and I told her that I lived in my mother’s old house.  “You’re so unhappy,” she said, “I bet she was mean to you.”

Once, in high school, I was invited to a party by some of the popular kids.  Boyce and Sammy weren’t invited, and they told me to watch out, that maybe it was a trap, like the time when I brought my swim trunks to what turned out to be a hazardous material recycling day at the landfill.  I didn’t listen, so I went to the back room of this café where there was a meeting for a young communists group.  Turns out there was no party except the Party.  I actually stayed for the meeting, and after about a half hour the whole philosophy started to make sense to me.  Maybe it was because people were willing to make eye contact with me, or didn’t exclude me from a circle made of folding chairs, but everything started to fit together.  Once I left the meeting and met up with Sammy and Boyce at a Dairy Queen, the whole communist idea fell apart.  But while I was there, it kind of made sense.  I couldn’t help it.  And even though I don’t believe in ghosts, when Virginia Blare told me that, I felt like I was in that meeting with friendly communists again.

Virginia told me that I “shined” like there was a mean ghost around me, and if I couldn’t see it, it sure could see me.  I told her maybe I wasn’t unhappy because there was a mean ghost, but because a nice ghost wouldn’t visit me instead.  That I was unhappy because this was a world where there was more motivation for mean ghosts to bother me than kind ghosts to console me.  She thought about that for a second, but then got really mad and said, “Who are you, Jesus H. Christ?  I told you.  It’s a mean ghost.  Now hold still so I can sleep.”

Virginia Blare said having me in the room was the next best thing to her husband visiting me.  She went right to sleep.  Marcel came in and told me thanks, and then gave me some advice.  He said for what it’s worth, maybe if my mother was haunting me I should just move.  And if I wanted a nice ghost, I should go where nice ghosts live.  I tried to explain to him that ghosts don’t exist, since now that Virginia Blare was asleep I remembered it was a silly thing to believe.

I had the rest of the weekend off, and I did a lot of sitting around the house being very quiet.  I’d be lying if I wasn’t listening for my mother on some level.  I tried to concentrate to see if I could hear her voice, and then started walking a certain direction with my eyes closed to see if she would lead me.  I forgot I left the basement door open and walked right down them, crumbling down the steps more than falling down them.  At the bottom of the steps, clutching my knee, I realized that if my mother were leading me, she would have led me down steps with my eyes closed, so the entire test was inconclusive.  Still, I couldn’t help staying very quiet.  And I tried to hear so many voices, but in the end all I could hear were bird songs, and those were always going around my head.

At first I was angry I had paid attention to what Virginia Blare had said.  Then I got more calm about it all.  After all—no one could prove ghosts didn’t exist.  Rachel used to say that she knows her mother loves her, but she couldn’t prove it.  That example was lost on me, but it made me think that maybe it was the same kind of thing with ghosts.  Then on Sunday night I got a phone call from Rex.  Feeling vulnerable, I nearly confessed to Rex everything that happened to me that weekend.  I began with, “Rex, I know we’ve had differences, but I want to say—”  But he said, “Shut up, stupid, and let me talk.”  Then he told me that Virginia Blare had hanged herself with bed sheets in her hospital room that afternoon.  Then he said, "Burn!" but I wasn't sure what he was referring to.  Did he know I wavered in my beliefs because of her?  Or was he making a theological claim that Virginia was now in a supernatural furnace with Hitler and Sisyphus?  Or did he simply put his hand on something hot?  Hard to say, because he hung up right after.



When I told Sammy and Boyce all this they both pointed out that Virginia Blare’s suicide and the truthfulness of her story about a ghost are unrelated to each other.  Maybe.  But I bet if she had given me financial advice instead of talking about the supernatural, they wouldn’t want me to make any investments for a while.

But then I thought about what Marcel had said.  And even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I’m pretty sure he solved all my problems.  And I said as much to Sammy and Boyce—that everything was fixed—that I wasn't going to have to worry about being left behind anymore.

Questions to Ask

Sammy reported to us that two days ago an attractive woman came into Arby’s and ordered a roast beef sandwich.  When he gave her the receipt she flipped it over, then asked why she doesn’t get any great quotes from that great author.  “Charles Brockden Brown?” Sammy asked, and she said yes, that’s it.  Sammy explained he stopped doing that since the Year of CBdB was an utter flop, with no one really caring anymore who he is.  The woman leaned across the counter and said she’d like to care, and to care really badly.  Sammy got excited and she should start reading Wieland, but the woman said she’d rather start with him, then pointed at Sammy himself.  “You realize I’m not Charles Brockden Brown, right?”  And the way she said, “I don’t care about him, just you,” made everything clear to him.  It was four in the afternoon, so there weren’t any customers in line, which allowed Sammy to lean forward and say, “Anyone too good for Charles Brockden Brown is too good for me, too.”  She told him that she’d already been paid, and Sammy said he had as well, tapped the cash register, and told her to have a nice day.

Boyce said that yesterday he got a call from his realtor, Bruce Barenburg, who was very angry that a second realtor, our old high school classmate Keller Bigsby, was going to start showing the house.  Boyce told him he had no idea what he was talking about.  Bruce said that Keller told him the reason that Boyce was switching realtors is because Bruce is a lonely liar who makes up stories about drifters in closets.  Boyce told him not to worry about it, that everything was a mix-up, and to keep sending prospective buyers to the house.

These stories were told while we grilled hot dogs at Boyce’s place.  I did my best to act shocked, but both Sammy and Boyce told me I couldn’t do things like that anymore.  Sammy said he hadn’t decided if he was leaving or not—though he did admit that if our town had a fair supply of literary prostitutes interested in Colonial Gothic writers he could probably make the decision right now.  Boyce just said he was only doing this because he had to, and that I shouldn’t make it any worse than it has to be.

I tried to change the subject by bringing up Virginia Blare at the Sleep Center, but once they found out that I didn’t ask her about her supposed ghost they were even more disappointed.  Hiring escorts coached into a fraudulent interest in dead writers and impersonating rival realtors over the phone did not elicit the same confusion and disgust as did my lack of curiosity about Virginia Blare’s ghost.

Last night I found out, however, that I would get another chance to be curious.  When I went to work last night Marcel was leaving, and told me the results of Virginia Blare’s tests.  Apparently, she never went to sleep.  The entire night.  She stared up at the ceiling the entire time, and every time an attendant came in to tell her that this wasn’t going to work unless she at least tried to sleep, she said, “I can’t go sleep alone.  That’s why I’m here.  Funny, right?”

I’ll try to make things up to Sammy and Boyce by getting some information from Virginia Blare tonight, since Marcel said she’s coming for another analysis.  In order to prepare, I have come up with several questions for her about her ghost:

1.    Does it walk on the ground?  If it does, does it seem to have to concentrate on its step?  To me, it seems like a ghost that walks on the ground is like a person walking on water.  As soon as that ghost puts its weight down it should sink.  I would guess ghosts are always trying to take a step on a creaky staircase and ending in some Indonesian village. 
2.    If the ghost is someone you knew, at what age does it appear?  The age that the person died?  If Sammy had murdered the prostitute I got him, and she wanted to haunt him, could she come back as herself at just twelve years old?  That way when she appeared to him and said, “You were my lover,” not only would Sammy be scared, but everyone else in the room would think he was a pervert.
3.    Does your ghost seem to be at all interested in confusing you rather than haunting you?   For instance, if I were a ghost, I would clearly come back as a bird.  I would appear on the kitchen floor and tell the living that birds can’t fly in the afterlife, mainly because the only things that fly after death are people who refused to recycle because it’s for nerds.  When they said, “Huh?  Really?” I’d tip their fridge over with my beak and scream, “Suckers!” then fly away. 
4.    Does the ghost have any power to travel backward in time?  If so, why you right now?  No offense, but if you could pull John Wilkes Booth’s pants down right before he shoots Lincoln, wouldn’t you do it?  Is it that you’re so special or that the ghost is so shortsighted?  Or is it that if ghosts can travel back in time, then Booth's own ghost would attempt to prevent it from pulling down his mortal self's pants?  Who would win in a fight between your ghost and the ghost of John Wilkes Booth?  How long into the fight before it got confused that if Booth's ghost is fighting it, maybe Lincoln's ghost could stop gazing at his monument for one damn minute and come help?
5.     Can the ghost still learn things when it’s dead?  If it didn’t know how it died, could you inform it (assuming it didn’t have an axe coming out of its head, in which case it could merely deduce the fact)?  If ghosts can learn, that would then mean ghosts could learn everything, and since they exist outside of time, they would appear to learn it instantaneously.  When you told the ghost, “My mother killed you,” it would say, “I know.”  Then you'd say, “She did it because of the inheritance,” but the ghost would say, “Duh.”  So you’d say, “Her husband helped her do it,” but then the ghost would get snobbish and say, “Did you know I can speak German now?”

Virginia Blare

By the time I got to the Sleep Center on Friday I had already been prepared for the evening by several text messages from Rex Tugwell.  Although they began very cryptically, they slowly made sense: a woman was coming for analysis that night who I would find fascinating.  Rex’s texts went like this:

--Freak!  Coming yr way and ur going to like it!

--Weirdos stick together.  Don’t get excited, she is older.  U like that?

--Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

--Read her file when you get in, unless ur illiterate.

When I got to the Sleep Center I found Rex before he went off-shift.  Since I wasn’t about to read her file due to my promise to Rachel, I told him to give me some details about the woman.  Rex told me that Virginia Blare was coming to the Sleep Center tonight, and according to her file—and he was very excited by this—she’s a regular at the local “nutbag joint.”  I had no idea what this meant.  Was Virginia Blare a prostitute or a line worker at an almond processing plant?  The fact is I still cannot rule out either possibility, but what Rex meant was that a psychiatric hospital recommended Virginia Blare to the Sleep Center.  Once Marcel entered the break room he was able to give me straightforward facts.  She is voluntarily imprisoned in a mental hospital.  When Marcel told me this Rex began an array of pantomimes of different suicide attempts, but Marcel said he didn’t know why she was in the hospital. 

We began to talk about any experiences we had with people from mental hospitals.  Rex said his uncle once ran a guy over with his semi, but no one was ever sure if he was drunk or suicidal.  I didn't even ask if Rex meant his uncle or the guy who got run over.  I told them I didn’t know anyone from a hospital like that, but my mother often told me that my father had escaped from one. 

Marcel told us about a guy he worked with on a fishing boat on the North Sea.  He had recently been released from a hospital and told Marcel and the guys on the ship that if there was something to find in the world, it was most likely to be in the bottom of a cold ocean.  No one ever knew how to take the guy, but Marcel said they sometimes stayed up together at night.  The guy would want to hear about Marcel’s adventures in the different ports of the world, but the stories he shared in return never made any sense, and often contradicted each other.  Rex and I asked Marcel what happened to that guy, and he said he wasn’t sure.  “He was only with us for one season, but a couple of the guys the following year said they saw him in an Alaskan town, buying supplies to go in-country for a year.  What I would give to know what happened to that guy.”  Lunatic or not, eaten by wolves or not, that guy is clearly awesome since he got Marcel to say, "What I would give to know what happened to that guy."  Maybe one day I'll wave goodbye to Marcel from a dinghy on Lake Erie, then, when he's not looking, hide in the weeds while the dinghy floats into the horizon.  After a month or so, I'd hide out in the bushes by Marcel's car so that when he walks a beautiful woman out for a date, he'd stop everything to say, "What I would give to know what happened to Cyrus, one of my best friends.  You would have loved him."  Whether I remain content or jump out of the bushes and say, "Wings, everyone?  I'm buying!" is undecided.

Marcel said he had already down a preliminary interview with Virginia Blare, and she was so open about where she was currently residing that he had no worries about talking about her to me and Rex.  He said if I so much as pass her in the hallway I’ll hear her whole life.  I told him I generally didn’t care what other people had to say, especially someone from a mental hospital.  Marcel said people that are called crazy have the most freedom to talk, so they should be listened to.  But Rex said if you spend any time at a gun show you’ll know the crazy people just talk about crazy stuff, and the only reason you listen is because they have a rifle in their hands.

I didn’t meet Virginia Blare when she got to the Sleep Center, but I did when she threw up when they were putting a whole bunch of the nodes on her.  They paged me and I came, and Virginia Blare apologized.  I said, “They’re not going to electrocute you with those,” and one of the attendants told me to hush.  But Virginia Blare thought it was funny and laughed.  She said I must have known where she was coming from, and one of the attendants said, “Oh god, does he ever.”  Virginia Blare laughed at that, too.  The attendants left while I mopped, but Virginia Blare just watched me do it.  She asked if I knew why she was in the mental hospital. 

“I tell everyone.  I’m not ashamed.  You know why?”  I knew it would be good for The Bird Casino if she told me, but I just wanted to pick up the vomit and leave.  “What’s your name?  Cyrus?  You know what it is, Cyrus?  Do you want to guess?  Maybe if you guess you’ll see you can’t offend me.  Go ahead.”

I leaned on my mop and told her I had no idea why anyone would put themselves in a mental hospital, but it seemed like a good way to get a free bed.  So I asked if she was just lazy.  She said no, giggled, and laughed again.  I said suicide, but she said, “Lord no, I don’t ever want to die.  One more guess.”  So I guessed that birds talked to her, but no one believed her.  She said no, and my slight hopes for caring about Virginia Blare’s life disappeared as quickly as they came.

“You want to know, Cyrus?”  This, despite the fact that I was doing my best to show I didn’t care.  “A ghost, Cyrus.  I’m in the hospital because of a ghost.”  Then she looked at me like she could read my mind, which made no sense because her track suit whooshed a little bit, and I’ll be damned if anyone in a track suit can read my mind.  “That’s right.  A ghost.”  I told her that was great, slapped my vomit-filled mop into the water, and rolled the bucket out.  I know she was expecting more of a reaction, and it felt pretty great not to give it to her. 

Once Sammy and Rachel were talking about books, and they talked about one that had a ghost in it.  We all started talking about the believability of ghosts.  Sammy said he didn’t know if ghosts were real, but if he only had one choice, he’d wish for ghosts over love.  Rachel made him explain himself, and to be honest, I don’t know how Sammy replied.  Rachel generally shredded Sammy’s clever lines, which made Sammy love her even more.  “Man, am I the biggest bullshitter or what?” he’d say, like he won a prize.  Boyce didn’t think there were ghosts, but if there were, he’d appreciate a ghost who came back and said, “You know what, I don’t want to haunt you, but I’ll help you bale some hay because what better things do I have to do?”  Rachel thought that was brilliant. 

I said I didn’t believe in ghosts because I had no reason to believe in ghosts.  I had no reason to believe that anything happens to us after we die.  Rachel didn’t believe in ghosts either.  She believed in a whole bunch of stuff, like heaven and angels, but she said ghosts didn’t make any sense and she’d like to have a few words with anything in this universe that claimed to be a ghost.  So I told her I would ask one to come.  I told her I knew a lot of dead people, that a lot of people seem to die around me, and there were plenty to pick from.  I didn’t pick my mother because if she did come back, she’d just do weird stuff like make some exaggerated burping noise when I talked to Rachel.  So instead I called out to my father to come visit us, and guess what, my father never came.  Primarily because my father doesn’t exist anymore. 

Once, in the eighth grade when I told my teacher my father didn't exist anymore, she said he’s still alive in my memories.  Rachel called stuff like that “de-balled religion.”  Even when I was in the eighth grade though I knew that was silly talk, so I told my teacher that if my father was still alive in my memories, then he’s just going to die again when I finally get killed.  What's more, if my father lived in my memories, wouldn't that have been the case when he was still alive?  Which meant that the father in my memories was actually some kind of Frankenstein-like pseudo-father built out of childish perspectives and distorted recall who probably saw my real father as an enemy; at his death, no doubt the pseudo-father of my memories rejoiced at the destruction of his nemesis, leaving him free to erase all record of the existence of the actual man.  The teacher started to cry, and when another teacher came by and asked what had happened, I just said, “My father is dead.”  It took like thirty minutes to get everything straightened out, and by the end of it I think everyone just wanted me to go away.

Which is what I wanted in the first place, and which is exactly what I did with Virginia Blare.

More News

Sammy came over to the house yesterday and asked me how I was dealing with the fact that Boyce would be leaving soon.  I told him one of the most upsetting parts about all of this is that we will be separated because of money.  It is a generic, faceless reason for the separation of loved ones.  It lacks the gentle denouement of death by old age, and the sublime spontaneity of accidentally being shot in a bowling alley brawl.  If a plague forced us into separate quarantine wardens, we could at least find solace in the fact that we were involved with an event spectacularly unique.  Or perhaps we could be separated because Boyce was placed in an Indonesian prison, and Sammy and I had to bust him out.  It would have to be a long separation, the kind that would make others in Boyce’s prison say to him, “They aren’t coming, man,” that way when we finally pulled part of the prison wall away with a chain from a pick up truck, Boyce could squint in the tropical sun and say, “What took you so long?”  Then we’d laugh and I would scream, “Come on—we’re not out of this yet!”  But really we are, because I don’t fantasize about the escape after we get Boyce.  Generally we get him out of prison and then suddenly we’re having drinks and eating pizza rolls in the backyard.

Sammy told me he’d been having some dreams lately, and he wondered if I could interpret them.  He said it sheepishly, so I thought maybe it would be something hilarious.  I had no idea how terrifyingly non-hilarious it would be. He said that he’d had a recurring dream for the last few nights: “We're standing in a river holding a canoe.  Inside the canoe is Boyce and a bunch of bologna sandwiches.  We tell him, ‘You’re going to be fine,’ and he tells us the same.  Then you let Boyce’s canoe go and he begins to float away with the current.  We watch him float, but as we do the river begins to get much larger with a much faster current.  But you, Cyrus, you begin to grow enormous.  I started to shrink, though.  I scream I'm going to drown, and you say, ‘No, just take that owl out of here.’  I look up and this giant owl comes and picks me up out of the water.  You say, ‘This is the way it ends,’ and the owl takes me up into the clouds.”

I watched Sammy’s face as he narrated the dream.  I tried to hide my facial expressions to the whole thing, but when he finished I couldn’t help but blurt out, “You made that up.  You never dreamed that.”  He swore he did, and asked me what it could mean.  I told him I had no idea why he was making things up, but there was no way he dreamed it.  If he did dream it, based on the archetypes, his storytelling, and Sammy’s personality, it could only mean that he believed himself to be the life-giving messiah of a world populated by Jews and firefighters.

Sammy nodded his head a bit and said, “Right, okay.  I guess that’s it, then.  Thanks.”  I told him again he made the dream up, and he should tell me what the real dream was.  So finally he said, “Boyce came and told me you shot yourself.”  I stopped him to say he shouldn't be nervous about a literalist reading.  Often times death signifies something different, at times even life.  “Well you shot yourself, and I was traveling through traffic in a canopy bed on wheels.  Your ghost jumped on the bed and I asked you what it was like, death I mean.  You didn’t answer me, but you did grab me by the shoulders and say, ‘You’re worth three mabbits of diamonds.  Three mabbits!’”

I asked him if that’s all, and he said yes.  He told me he had no idea what a mabbit was, and he must have made it up.  I told him it didn’t matter, and then asked him if he had made up his mind or not.  Sammy knew I already understood everything, so he said that since Boyce was leaving, nothing was going to be the same.  That if either of the two of us were leaving, we would be eaten up by the idea that the other two were still together.  I told him that’s not true, but he kept going and gave me the details: the Tax Day promotion had finally caught on with some of the corporate bigwigs at Arby’s.  There were a few regional manager jobs out west, and any of them were his if he wanted them.  “I’ve lived here my whole life, Cyrus.”  Me too.

On his way out he said it wasn’t for sure yet, that he was asking for time to decide.  He told me that if things were too hard on me, that I should just come with him.  I said maybe, but we both knew I wouldn’t.  Rachel would always be here, even now.

Once, when Rachel was going through some of my father’s old photo albums, she got really excited.  She pointed at a picture of my father as a young man.  My uncle (my mother’s brother) was with him, along with a couple other people I didn’t recognize.  They couldn’t have been older than sixteen, all sitting at a diner booth.  Rachel asked me if I knew what was so special about the picture.  I said that my uncle apparently was never offered a straw by the waitress, because there wasn’t one in his glass nor an extra one on the table.  "No," she said. “Your dad is smiling.”

That wasn't the only time I saw my father smile.  Once I saw him smile when we were at the grocery store and a cart full of groceries got away from a lady in the parking lot.  It rolled right out of the lot and into the road and a minivan came by and hit it.  Those groceries blew up into about ten thousand pieces, and I thought my father's heart would explode he laughed so hard.  I also one saw him smile when we saw a Cooper's Hawk steal a tennis ball in mid-air from a couple of little kids who were playing with it.  The Cooper's Hawk carried it about two hundred yards and then dropped it in the middle of a pond.  My father smiled for about three days over that one. 

#11: The One at Graduation

I don’t think I’ve ever had a fight with Sammy or Boyce.  I didn’t know if Boyce and I technically had a fight at the casino.  We were in a fight certainly, but we were on the same side.  Can you fight with someone while fighting with them against someone else, especially if that other person was a walking beaker of molten loser like Dr. Shades?  We didn't really talk much the morning after the casino, so I wasn’t sure.  That's why this morning I called Boyce up to make amends, and without saying any kind of introduction, I went straight into #11: the eleventh time I was punched in junior high and high school.  Even though Boyce knew all these stories, I knew he loved to hear them, especially from me. 

#11 came on the very last day it could: our high school graduation.  We were all in purple gowns, the color of our school, and lined up in a hallway just outside the auditorium where our seated families awaited our entrance.  I wasn't even sure why I was there since my father was dead and my mother had informed me that when I had kids one day, I’d understand why she'd rather stay home.  Maybe I wanted to have Boyce’s and Sammy’s parents see me walk across that stage.  Even that rationale was dubious, though.  Sammy’s mother didn’t trust me, and every time he had a lady friend, his mother was convinced I was trying to steal her from him.  If we were all over at the Clifton farm, and Sammy had to go to the bathroom, Sammy’s mother would come into the room so I wouldn’t try anything funny.  Sammy even tried to tell her I was gay just so she'd relax, and while she instantly believed him, she still didn't trust me around anyone her son was interested in.  Boyce’s parents didn’t dislike me, but despite the fact that I was best friends with their youngest son, I was never convinced they actually knew who I was.  When I’d see them I would say, “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Lancaster,” and they’d look at me hesitantly, as though I just walked out of a crashed space rocket. 

With the name Wetherbee I was one of the last people in line, and standing near me was the valedictorian Josh Elliot who was preparing his speech.  He was part of another line who would enter after us regulars, and then be seated on the stage.  He was going over his notecards and those of us at the back of the line were watching him prepare.  I certainly didn’t envy him.  Every time I had to speak in public it was a disaster.  At my father’s funeral I just played a bunch of bird songs that I recorded, and that worked decently well.  After that, every time I had to speak in public I would recite a bunch of bird calls and songs to calm myself.  When I saw how nervous Josh was, I walked up to him and we chit chatted.  Excited that my attempts at small talk were going well, I told Josh about my strategy of calming myself with bird sounds.  He asked if that worked, and I told him it always worked to calm me down.  It never made the speech go well because I never actually knew what I was saying from one sentence to the next, but at least I was able to physically deliver the verbal nonsense thanks to the relaxation technique. 

I told Josh to think of a bird he knew, and concentrate on it really hard.  He said he didn’t know any birds, but I told him to think hard.  He said a robin, and I knew he was saying that just to say one.  That’s okay, though, because the American Robin is a gorgeous, lovely bird.  When my father would see an American Robin he would say, “Cyrus, did you see it?”  I would say no, and then he’d say, “Just like the rest of them,” and hold out his hand to blow on his palm like he was getting rid of a handful of dust. 

I repeated to Josh the call of the American Robin, and he got excited when he told me he could actually hear it.  It’s a bird call he’d heard his entire life, but only now did he know he had heard it.  I sang over and over again, “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny,” and Josh was so nervous and so desperate for help that he didn’t even notice the people giggling at us, including the one guy who screamed, “God, Cyrus, are you shitting your pants?”  I repeated the call again and told Josh to try it himself, and he did, and for a beginner, it wasn’t bad: “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny.”  I told him when he was on that stage to just think hard about that call and imagine an American Robin singing in his front lawn.  He shook my hand and said thanks. 

Our line was called out before Josh’s, and I waved good luck to him on my way through the doors.  I sat in my place near one of the aisles and impatiently waited through all the ceremonial stuff.  I was excited for Josh’s speech.  When it came his turn, I watched him approach the podium with a completely bloodless head and shaking hands.  I thought he might even faint he was so nervous.  He struggled in silence with his notecards for a second, then hemed and hawed a hello and how are you to the audience.  It was awful.  It went back to dead silence, and I had to help my new friend out.  So in that silence I put my hand to the side of my mouth and called out, “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny.”  The people sitting next to me acted like I just threw up into my gown, and there was some chuckling in the audience.  I didn’t care though.  I was a safety line to Josh.  I called out again: “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny.”  Josh squinted and stared out into the audience.  He started his speech, and my god, it was terrible.  Clichéd, stuttered, and delivered in a shaky voice, I was sure Josh would never get through it.  Sometimes he’d go quiet and I’d call out again, “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny.”  A guy sitting a couple people down from me told me to shut the hell up, but I leaned over and said, “No one can shut the American Robin up.”  Then I did it again.  I couldn’t tell if it was helping Josh or not because he was so terrible to begin with.  Sometimes he just looked upwards toward the lights for an amount of time that must have, at least temporarily, blinded him. I tried another American Robin call, but it was interrupted by a man in a suit who approached the end of my row, leaned over toward me, and said, “If you don’t let my son give his speech I’m going to take you outside.”  Then everyone around me broke into applause and Josh’s father marched back to his seat triumphant and proud.  I’m not even sure how Josh’s speech ended because I was so afraid of getting beat up by our valedictorian’s large, mustachioed father.

When I went across the stage to get my diploma a spattering of people booed.  There were a few applause to combat them, but it was just Sammy and Boyce doing their best.  After the ceremony when people were meeting up with their families, I walked around trying to find Sammy and Boyce.  That’s when I saw Josh approach me.  I extended my hand and said, “I hope it helped.”  I didn’t really get out the last word though because Josh punched me right in the stomach.  That’s the last time I ever saw our valedictorian.  Boyce and Sammy found me on the floor moaning, “Cheer-up, cheer-a-lee…cheer-ee-o, whinny” to myself.  They were the only ones in a large lobby full of graduates and parents to bother picking me up off the floor.  Everyone else just walked around me like I was the an epileptic piece of furniture.

As I recounted this final beating to Boyce, he laughed nearly non-stop.  He told me that during the ceremony, when he heard a bird call go out during Josh’s speech, he knew he was either going to have to fight someone or pick me up off the floor.  “My grandparents were there, so I’m glad I just had to pick you up off the floor.”  Then Boyce told me thanks for the story, but he needed to get off the phone so he could call Bruce Barenburg to begin a sale listing on his house. 

Dr. Shades

On our way out to the casino last night, Sammy took the opportunity to tell everyone in his path—waitresses at the diner, gas station attendant, drunk at the on-ramp asking for change, that we were, “On our way to the Indian reservation to gamble away our friend’s last paycheck as an employed man.”  The waitress looked at Boyce like he was on his way to a gas chamber.  The gas station attendant was horrified.  The drunk high-fived Sammy and asked if he could come along.  There was a spirit of brotherhood there, so when Sammy said, “Not a chance, man.  You stink,” the drunk just waved happily and shouted, “Brkghhhhszzz snake eyes mmmmmmphhhahh, yeah, all right!”  I’ve seen fights break out at neighborhood parks over which family reserved the gazebo first.  But tell a drunk man that you’re potentially burning money on a socially unacceptable activity, and you’ll see what real goodwill means.

When we got there I stationed myself at a craps table and explained to Boyce what our strategy was going to be.  We would need patience and some luck.  Boyce stopped me and said he’d called ahead and reserved a place at a different table.  This isn’t the Boyce I was used to.  When I looked at Sammy he had no reaction, which made me realize that he already knew what was going to happen, which also meant the two of them had consulted without me, which meant I wasn’t going to like what was going to happen.

We walked over to a room that had quasi-walls made out of fake shrubbery.  There were a few tables there and people were playing poker.  I just stared.  Boyce said, “You’re going to help,” and then walked over to one of the tables.  He patted the pocket that had an awful lot of cash, then pointed to the chair for me to sit down.  I shook my head.  “That’s against my rules,” I said.  But Boyce told me to stop messing around and come sit down.

I wasn’t going though.  I just shook my head.  Some of the people at Boyce’s table looked over at me and smiled.  One guy, wearing sunglasses to play poker like a wannabe douchebag, said, “You going to play or piddle your pants, amigo?”  I shook my head again, but instead of making fun of me Dr. Shades got real quiet.  Anyone who wears sunglasses to play poker is the gambling equivalent of a 13 year old girl singing into a hairbrush pretending she’s on American Idol, so this guy probably thought I was Rain Man.

Sammy was standing next to me when Boyce came over and asked me to play poker for him.  Boyce said he was terrible, Sammy was terrible (to which Sammy said, “Oh my, yes.  But I could take that guy,” and pointed over at Dr. Shades who looked even more nervous that we were having some super-autism conference and would soon take his money), and I used to be a very, very good poker player.  This part was true.  I used to be very good at poker, but then I made up new rules and wouldn’t gamble against other people.  It wasn’t that I always won, it’s just that it made me want to destroy other people, and most gambling tables were not full of toolboxes like Dr. Shades who rather than a conscience was just a collection of centipedes and splinters.  See?!  Even being around a poker table has made me hate my opponents.  (No.  Dr. Shades really was an unbelievable dork.  You should have seen this guy.  He wore a ball cap backward with a black, silk shirt.  The tone of everything he said was clearly based off any number of random, R-rated stand up comedians and AM radio hosts.)

Boyce made me look him in the eye.  He said he wouldn’t blame me if I lost.  I told him that didn’t worry me, and he said he knew that, but it needed to be said.  I told him about the rules, and he said, “I know those rules.  But they aren’t really yours.  They were Rachel’s.”  I started to say that just because she invented them doesn’t mean they’re not good rules, but Boyce said, “And she’s not here anymore.”  The dealer at the table said he wasn’t waiting, and Dr. Shades began to say something.  Sammy stepped forward though and pointed at Dr. Shades: “If you so much as breathe this direction I will murder your entire family.”  I had never heard Sammy say something like that before.  He always wants people to like him.  Besides, he’s like me in that if he did say something like that, he would be perpetually worried that someone like Dr. Shades would take the opportunity to murder his entire family—he is clearly capable—since a suspect has publicly been created.

I expected Sammy to be asked to leave.  I know based on personal experience that people, including dealers and security guards, cannot threaten you.  The dealer only said, “Gentlemen,” in a really non-committal way, and then waited.  Boyce apologized for saying anything harsh, but added, “These are the facts.  One: I don’t have a job anymore.  If I don’t make money fast, we have to put the house up.  That means we leave and go live with Charlotte’s parents.  Two: I can’t make money this way, but you can.  And three: I’m sorry, Cyrus, but Rachel’s not here anymore.”

The dealer said, “Gentlemen,” again, but this time it was clearly directed at the three of us.  Sammy stepped forward and said, “We’re trying to figure out the rules here.”  A couple guys at the table took that to mean the rules of poker, and told the dealer they could wait, speaking like salivating dogs.  Dr. Shades, however, must have thought that rules meant the way I was going to use autistic superpowers, because he wanted the dealer to go ahead and get started.

I told Boyce I couldn’t do it.  Boyce said please.  I said no, and started walking out of the room.  Boyce said, “She’s gone, you know.”  I didn’t turn around.  At least not then.  I did, however, when I heard Dr. Shades, newly energized because I was leaving to watch Wapner or something, say loudly, “Ohhh, she’s gone.  Bitch.  See you later!  Deal, amigo, time to rock and roll.”  There was this groan that followed and I saw that Boyce had gone apeshit.  He charged at Dr. Shades and put him in a headlock.  Other guys at the table tried to pull Dr. Shades away.  Sammy charged and leaped on top of the growing pile.  He didn’t even do anything.  He just kind of landed on everyone’s head, then rolled off to the side.  To his credit though, he got right back on again.  Even though what Boyce said was cruel, I came charging, too.  I put my shoulder down and rammed myself into the growing mass.  I pumped my legs like I was Bart Farv rushing for a touchdown.  Later Boyce told me I actually rammed him in the side, but he didn’t mind, because that made him fall and he was still clutching Dr. Shades’ neck.  Once he fell to the ground with him Boyce seemed more concerned at smashing the sunglasses into the carpet than actually hitting Dr. Shades.

Eventually security broke it all up.  Since no punches were actually thrown they didn’t call the police.  They did, however, ban us from the casino for life.  I watched Sammy when the floor supervisor told us that, because Sammy thinks banishment is the greatest punishment you can have.  I think the dealer must have told the supervisor that Dr. Shades was a real idiot, because he shaked our hands on the way out.

 It was a pretty quiet ride home.  Sammy had borrowed his brother’s car for the evening, and we tried to distract ourselves by going through his glove box or trash under the seats.  The only talking was Sammy’s occasional words.  He’d say, “I think I’ll get a car now.  It can be the group’s,” or, “Wasn’t that better than a card game anyway?”  Finally Boyce spoke up and said that he was putting his house on the market.  They didn’t have the money to wait for him to find a job with this economy.  They’d have to move south and live with Charlotte’s parents.  I felt like all those words really meant: “You could have helped if you wanted to, Cyrus.”  Not like that, though.

As we had earlier planned, we all stayed the night at Sammy’s apartment.  Right before we were going to sleep Boyce came over to me and said that after I left Rachel’s priest’s house, he told Boyce, “Cyrus can see her again if he wants.”  I said I didn’t go for that religious stuff, and Boyce said he knew, but he thought I might like to hear it anyway.  Then things got quiet for a few minutes.  Then Sammy said, we all needed to admit that even if you've lost your job and are going to have to move out of state and away from your best friends, pummeling a dumbass on a casino floor was a pretty sweet way of spending an evening.

Covering Rex

While Boyce has found his work hours completely disappear, mine have temporarily increased.  Rex knows I’ll always cover for him when he wants to take time off, so he generally waits until the last minute to call—preferably late at night, impersonating a repo man, murderer, or as he did two nights ago, a ghost.  I asked him why a ghost would call me on the phone to haunt me.  He said it’s certainly possible that as a ghost, if he can pass through walls and dimensions, he could use a telephone.  I suppose, but why would you do that?  That’s like the army using an atomic bomb by asking the enemy to hold it, hoping that the bomb's weight would eventually make the enemy’s collective back go out.  Besides, I told him, even if ghosts could use the telephone, would they argue with me about their ability to use the phone, or just get straight to the haunting?  “Shut up and go to work for me, Virus,” Rex finally said.  I told him that on Friday night I’d be heading out to the casino with Sammy and Boyce, but he said he’d be back in time.

Apparently Rex is taking his son Rex up north to do some camping.  He told me he’d bring me back a sack full of bird legs, to which I simply sighed heavily into the phone.  I have known Rex for nearly ten years, and nearly every time he leaves for assorted trips he promises to bring back some evidence of ghastly behavior to class aves.  I don’t want him to ever do it, but I am frankly tired of wondering what would happen if he did.  Would my violent reaction be the way I finally fulfill my nightmare of being sent to prison?  Rex already hunts doves which is an abomination on several levels, not the least of which is the metaphorical value.  He doesn't bring that up much, however, because he doesn't do it to make me angry--he just likes shooting doves out of the sky.  I can only imagine the kinds of things his son is going to hide in his crawlspace as a middle-aged man.

As Rex was about to hang up the phone, I told him to be careful about bears.  He told me if he saw a bear he would shoot it in the face.  I asked him if he wanted to hear how I would escape from a bear attack, and he said no, and hung up the phone.  I’ll say it now, though.  If I ever come across a bear, and I’m with someone else (Everyone in the woods is with someone else.  Either because they are hiking with someone, or burying him), my plan is to attack my partner in the most maniacal, grand-mal-seizure way possible.  By my calculations, the bear’s instincts will identify me as  rabid, and not a hilarious way to spend five minutes.  This probably wouldn’t work if we accidentally came across a mother’s cub.  If that happens, I think I’ll turn to the person I’m with and kiss them really deeply.  At some level their mind will suddenly focus on the kiss.  Then I will quickly say that I have several cold sores.  All this will hopefully distract the person from the fact that their arms were just removed.  Even when you know you have only seconds to live and those will be spent in fear and physical agony, part of you will still think, “Cold sores?! Oh god.” 

On my way out the door today to cover Rex's shift, my neighbor stopped me and asked me when I was going to do something about the camaro.  I informed Reginald, who lived next door when the house was still my mother's, that the camaro doesn't belong to me, and I'd be happy to have someone take it away.  "Drive it away, then," he said, despite the fact that Reginald knows good and well the only thing under the hood of that car is a family of raccoons.  When I told him this, he completely ignored me.  "Just get rid of it.  Don't think I didn't see you and your friend ramming it with that van of his."  Reginald has some kind of sports car hidden in the garage behind his house, and I think it offends him to see the car just rot there.  No one knows where the car came from.  For the first two years it was there I expected it to be associated with a missing person.  Then I went through a phase where I was sure money was hidden somewhere inside it.  As of late, I've been using it when I can't sleep at night, and I need something to lie on top of to wait for any owls or whippoorwills.  Once, Rachel and a few of her girlfriends came over to Boyce's house in what turned out to be a disastrously awkward night.  To break up the discomfort, Rachel asked everyone a parlor question: if they were allowed one piece of information, anything at all, what would it be.  One of Rachel's friends said the cure to cancer, and Boyce said, "You've got to be kidding me," but then we found out her mom had just died of breast cancer.  So I spoke up really quick to help out Rachel and I said, "I want to know where that camaro in front of my house came from."  For a few minutes--if you ignored the young woman fighting back tears and scowling at Boyce--it looked like things would get fun as we imagined different possibilities for why the car was there.  All of them turned really dark though, and in some way all led back to a missing person who by now has long been presumed dead.  And then Boyce said, "I'm so sorry," and Rachel's friend just started crying again. 

Last Days of a Locksmith

It’s been a over a week since I went on a ride-along with what proved to be Boyce’s next-to-last locksmith call.  The one I went on was memorable to me, and necessitated another break from the blog (if Charlotte thought about her reputation more, she would say again to me, “It’s getting worse.”  But since she’s awesome, she says instead, “Would I be the only one to eat biscuits if I made them?”).  Boyce’s last call, however, proved memorable to him and stunning to the rest of us, so maybe I should start there. 

It was something of a routine call.  New homeowners needed to change the locks, so Boyce got the call.  And like Boyce says every time he gets that type of call, he told this happy couple, “It would be cheaper to buy and install new locks.”  The couple didn’t care, though, and told him to go ahead with the job.  While Boyce was changing the locks, he watched the couple talk to each other.  The way the wife sometimes used her hands reminded him of something, and Boyce started looking around the house.  It was his last day, so he thought what the hell, and asked the couple if he could see upstairs.  They didn’t care at all to show him.  Boyce was sure he could have asked them for three pairs of soiled underwear, their passports, and a shovel, and they would have asked, “May we bring the lime?”  When he looked into each of the rooms he said he started to smile really big, and told the couple if they answered the right way he’d finish their locks and walk away without charging them a dime.  He didn’t even bother saying how it was going to sound weird.  He just said, “Tell me something that has come out of one of these closets.”  They told him a story about how a homeless man walked out of one of the closets, put a knife on the window sill, and told them, “My sister is deaf.”  Boyce didn’t ask them to explain anything more.  He told them he’d finish those locks in just a few minutes and then be on his way.

When Boyce told us that story, Sammy asked him what he would have done if that couple had said nothing has ever come out of those closets other than dust and cobwebs.  Would he have assumed he had the wrong couple, or even more hysterically pleasant to Sammy, would he lie to us about what they said?

That call was Boyce’s last, but the one before that was mine.  Boyce was sure that we were going to end up at Sammy’s parents’ farmhouse or Dr. Keegman’s office.  When he picked me up, however, he said he didn’t recognize the address at all.  Even when we pulled up to the house it didn’t seem familiar.  We had to walk through a bit of mud because of all the rain we had, and when Boyce got up to the front door and saw the busted lock, he looked back at me and asked me whose place this was.  I told him I didn’t know.  That’s when the door opened, though.  All three of us involved had different expressions on our faces.  Boyce looked angry, because he was sure he was going to jail for this.  He said, “Cyrus…?” But I didn’t answer because I was busy getting burned up by the smirk on the face of Rachel’s priest.

He came out to meet us on the porch and shook Boyce’s hand.  He told me it sure was pleasant that I should be on his doorstep, but I told him the only thing pleasant about any of this was that the mild flooding of his front yard due to rain would soon bring many songbirds to feed on the insects and worms.  Rachel’s priest told Boyce that this must be an odd case for him.  He pointed out that his lock had been completely disabled with minimal damage to the door.  “But would you look at this,” he said.  “Whoever it was didn’t come inside.”  He showed us there wasn’t a single muddy print in his house.  “They just wanted to take apart the lock.”  I pointed out that perhaps the thief took his shoes off before entering.  When Rachel’s priest asked me what kind of thief would do that, I told him a polite one.  “Nothing was taken,” he said.  But I replied that maybe the thief saw that everything inside sucked and figured he was better off robbing a homeless shelter.

I thought Boyce was going to abandon me right there on the porch.  I know he suspected me of this, but I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders, and gritted my teeth as best as I could to wordlessly convince him I had never been to this house.  Rachel’s priest invited us inside, and Boyce declined.  But then Rachel’s priest sort of hinted that maybe this was a police matter instead of a simple locksmith matter, and Boyce agreed that we would come in.  I didn’t know what to expect in a priest’s house.  I thought there would be a lot of furniture made out of crosses and apostles, but it looked pretty normal.  I would have been weirded out by the fact that there were kids toys strewn about, but Rachel told me a long time ago that she wasn’t Catholic, and that priests could marry in her Christian conference.  Not just marry, Rachel, destroy lives, too.

I think Boyce wanted to avoid it, but he couldn’t help noticing the record collection on the shelves.  He and Rachel’s priest talked for a few minutes about music, and after a few tries, Boyce finally got him to understand that he wanted a list of his favorite album covers, not albums.  Once they swapped lists, and Boyce described Led Zeppelin by ramming his fist into his open palm, Rachel’s priest invited us to sit down.  He told me he was happy to have us over, and that he still remembered Rachel talking about not just me, but Boyce and Sammy, too.  Probably while he was listening to his secret recordings of Rachel’s confessions, and she told him she was struggling with me having two best men. 

Once we sat, Rachel’s priest smiled at me for a moment, like the way my high school pyschology teacher would when he thought he was intepreting us based on our handwriting or the way we held our hand up in class.  (Nice try, Mr. Randall, official school weirdo.  You made the mistake of telling our class one of your dreams: you were wearing a football jersey made out of pineapple wedges and threw lava rocks at kids who were on your lawn.  Everyone else might have laughed at the absurdity of that, but at least one of us wasn’t shocked when you wound up six years later prohibited from being five hundred feet from schools and churches.)  Rachel’s priest asked me very slowly how long since Rachel’s been gone.  I told him, and he asked me if I blamed him for that.  “I do,” I said.  He said, “You probably blame God even more.  I wonder if you even find a way to blame yourself.”  I told him he had no idea.  Just no idea. 

I didn’t want to be there anymore and stood up to leave.   Boyce explained he still had to fix the lock.  I told him I would walk back by myself and he could pick me up on the way.  Rachel’s priest asked if there wasn’t anything I wanted to say.  He stared for a while.  Boyce nearly had his entire face in his hands.  So I said, “I miss her.”  I could have added that he would bring in a lot of Evening Grosbeaks with a couple feeders, but I decided to stick with the dramatic.

My exit destroyed that momentum, however, since I had to put my shoes on, which we had taken them off because of the mud.  I got a knot in one of the laces so I tried to just shove my foot into the shoe, but all I could do was push the back of the shoe down on the sole.  Boyce started telling me to just take his shoes instead, but I told him he couldn’t fit in my mine.  Man, I really got my ankle rolling back and forth trying to get into that shoe with the knot, but I couldn’t, so I just walked out with my heel on the back of it, limping like some peg leg sailor who lost his leg from cutting bread.

I tried to listen to the birds as I walked but it was hard.  Sometimes when I went with my father on one of his walks he would tell me to be quiet so he could hear the birds, even though they were extremely loud.  Since I had often just come from having spent a weekend with my mother, I just assumed he wanted me to shut up.  But maybe it was because he couldn’t hear the birds for all the noise in his head.

Eventually Boyce caught up to me in the van, and he wasn’t very happy.  I tried to get him to understand that I didn’t do anything to that guy’s house, and that it could have been a coincidence.  Or if he was determined to see a conspiracy, maybe Rachel's priest did it himself, undoubtedly right after he closed down his poisoned milk stand next to the elementary school. Boyce just kept saying I owed him big.  I told him that’s fine, knowing he meant at the casino.  When he dropped me off at my house he asked me if he could back the van into the camaro.  I told him it was the least I could do and he put the van in reverse and rammed it with the van’s fender, right where it was roped on due to Janice’s mailbox.  He got out and we both stared at the damage, which was actually minimal.  It is a shame that the emotional abyss which comes to a man when his family’s welfare is in jeopardy cannot be soothed by slamming a van into an abandoned car.  I told Boyce that I would need a week, and he said that’s fine, that he could use one, too.