Step Cousins

I'd known about Rusty's girlfriend and the landlord for a couple of weeks.

Kelderman told me while laughing his har-har pirate laugh. He wasn't laughing at Rusty, but at people in general, cheating one another. The surprise double-cross, the pretended innocence, the hypocritical revenge that may follow. All this gave the hopeless old drunk sudden, wheezy fits of laughter.

He laughed in triumph. Of what, though? Sometimes his foolishness was like a put-on. Sometimes he was truly foolish.

Kelderman was pretending to be crazy , but eventually he'd be crazy for sure. He wore a brace and used forearm crutches to walk and to smash things in his tiny apartment. I never asked how he was hurt but I knew he was a war vet. He'd been a lawyer and disappeared from his wife and kids long ago, according to one of his buddies. At the end of each month we had to support him until his government check arrived. Then he'd shower us with cash.

When Rusty found out that November day, I tried to listen to him, but despite what had happened I was bored. Aggravated too, or else I was off my drinks. The pale gloom of my apartment gave me this familiar feeling that we'd all made our fateful mistakes so long ago. The present, to me, was misshapen and like a bad dream.

Drugs, endlessly baffling miscommunication with people, broken relationships and resentments...all of it made me feel marooned and there were times I thought I could understand how the stroked out and brain-injured adapted themselves to their crumbling interior.
___
But Rusty had always been more or less responsible, compared to me and most of the rest of my friends. His politics weren't ostentatiously insane, like a get-up. He volunteered for the Democratic Party, and went to a mainstream church. He rejected Bohemianism, and easily remained oblivious to it.
____
He said it was like wax melting inside. Internal bleeding in that area where you imagine your soul exists, just behind the rib cage. There are nerve endings inside you, you forget exist.
____
"I went back after work just now to see if her car was still there. On the way, I realized that a part of me wanted it to still be there, parked in his drive. I don't know why. I know the word for it. Don't say it. "

Later he tried again: "It's like a barrel of thick paint inside me being stirred with an oar."

After sharing, he seemed all the more stunned for awhile, staring at the floor with his mouth open. I imagined that since his noon-time discovery he'd been shrinking inside, but now after telling someone, maybe this was the time to slowly reverse himself. Maybe this quiet moment was the long, braking stop.

We sat in the studio of my one bedroom apartment. It was a cold, rotten afternoon. There had been one dusting of snow the week before and now the sun wouldn't come out.

I could have said, "He has the drugs. He has the money. It's not about needs, it's about wanting."

Instead I popped open a can of warm beer and set it foaming on the coffee table in front of him. He didn't touch it. I went to the kitchen cabinet and brought out a half pint of Congress Vodka, more to be humorous than hospitable. I set it down too.

Did you know about this, he asked, chewing on his thumbnail.

No, I said. It makes me sick.

"I wouldn't be angry with her really, except when I see her again she'll know that I know. And I think she'll flip out and go on the attack. That will be the worst part. Her yelling at me. That I'm a worm or something."

"Screw her! Has she said that to you before, I suppose?"

"No."

"Someone has, then. Or you wouldn't imagine it."

He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees, giving me an grim, amused smile now.

"Room temperature beer. I like warm beer. I'm used to it here. I'll drink this while you bring me another."

"No, no! I want you to have it, old chum. I've got plenty more. And I want you to stay here awhile. Ten, fifteen minutes, hell."

"I'm homeless. I'll be camping here for a week or two. It's a lucky break for you. I'll get groceries, beer, smokes."

I wouldn't mind some bacon and eggs in the morning. Any company was good after losing my last bookstore job. I depended on people depending on me for my car or for shelter. I had three or four friends who seemed to get in trouble in rotation. I lived alone but hardly knew it.

Now after drinking some beer he was enlivened but serious again. "I'm enslaved. She's all I care about."

I argued. "It can hurt for years if you find the right girl, but you were weren't enslaved. You were en-shrewed." I knew it was all right to start insulting her now.

"I need to get my stuff out of there while she's at work tonight. Any confrontation, she'll turn on me. She'll claw my face."
______
After the 5:30 news with Frank Reynolds, we put on our jackets and stepped out into the clean cold.

Mine was the only apartment in this fancy building with its own entrance. I'd got out of his and Kelderman's apartment building a few months before but it was just down the street, as volatile as ever. I'd visit if I was broke, maybe.

My door was on a high hill. There was a large, bright and beautiful grocery store across the street, and I loved it at this time of the evening with so many commuters shopping.

I locked the door behind us. The thin layer of snow crunched under our feet on the way to the apartment garage. It was 19 degrees. Under the blue haloed street lights the snow crystals made the ground look like we were in an eclipse. Rusty walked ahead of me with the car keys. He'd wrapped a green hand-knit scarf around his neck and it looked eight feet long. He wore his usual Andy Capp style cap.

At night the skies would clear. With the street lights and the heavy traffic and the car lights on Ingersol, all the vapors and smoke caught the light and then floated up into the invisible night.
______
He talked now. He'd resumed talking and Rusty was one of those people who didn't care that much if you were listening or not.

At all these temp jobs, his aim was to be hired full-time. Everyday after work he'd bring my car back and drink with me and tell me his stories of the day.

Everything was a clue to Rusty, and for clues he never had anything more than crumbs. Nothing ever happened, ever. And he'd still have big news. Clues for great expectations or clues for frightening set-backs.

The secretaries shushed when he came into the break-room. This meant they were talking about him, he said, sometimes optimistically.

More often he found it suspicious.

If his boss didn't say hello, that was suspicious. It meant some job Rusty was promised wasn't going to come through after all. He was always right on that score. Nothing ever came of any of his temp jobs in the year we'd been hanging out regularly. I was sick for him but sick for myself having to listen to him, too.

Nothing ever happened, except Sherri. She happened along. I don't think she was a very affectionate girl-friend.

Someone said that, actually, and their idle observation stuck with me: why, yes. A chief attribute on the plus side would be that your girl be affectionate.

She was an L.P.N. too. I'd been hopeful for awhile when I first learned that. At least she must be a logical girl, and he'd listen to her.
____
Rusty was a tiresome character. His peculiarities might have helped but they didn't.

I wasn't a very good friend. I'd snap at him often.

At the bars I'd watch while people caught on that he was off, depending on how drunk he was. But it made no difference how drunk they were.

There was one blue-collar place, though, where one of his brothers' friends greeted him warmly. We called it the "cop bar" because there were always some off-duty men drinking there, and Rusty liked to think this made me even more nervous than usual.

He was at home and sometimes he'd offer his hand and bring a rural, obviously alcoholic woman onto the dance floor for a nice slow dance.

We never shared a table with strangers there. I'd sit in a booth and he'd bring a pitcher and pour himself a glass and then return to the bar and stand talking to people for a long time. If I were there to eavesdrop it was disappointing, though I admired his gift for gab here. At my bars he just wasn't right, and sometimes appeared even shy and withdrawn. These friendly people were so down to earth I couldn't open my mouth without them realizing I was 'high hat' or something.
____
In Florida he'd been a newspaper columnist and a supporter of the governor. He blamed the breakup of his first marriage on 'political henchmen'. It was a story he often told and I never could hear because my mind would stop at "henchmen". So I always listened close when he began telling the story to someone else. Not to finally hear it, but to have someone else hear it.

I knew he wrote regular columns, he'd shown them all to me, with his picture there (always the odd barbershop haircut, so when his hair grew long it grew helmet shaped.)

He'd dropped out of college, so having a column was a wonderful achievement. But five years had passed, and Florida was far away. I didn't ask if it was a paying job because I was afraid he would lie and then feel bad.

Still, all in all, we were friendly enough so I could tell him to shut up without him holding it against me. Of course he wouldn't shut up either. I'd have to plead with him at times.
______
We got into my 13 year old, gold Le Sabre and as usual when he turned the key nothing happened. It would always start eventually, he said, but we had to be calm and confident. "Relax now, " he'd say. It always sparked up so I began to believe him almost.

"That's a baby," I'd say.
____
"Let's drive by. I want to see again," he said as we waited for the big garage door to open.

"What a terrible feeling," I said.

He drove over to her landlord's house south of Grant Boulevard, into the monied district with the close trees, curving streets and rising and falling hills. We arrived and pulled into a drive-way two doors down. There was her little beat-up car still, with the landlord's badly damaged Fiat parked behind it.

"Maybe she's not going to work. Maybe she doesn't have to work at all anymore." He took the little bottle of vodka out of his coat pocket, and drank almost half in four gulps. Then he opened the door and threw the bottle so it smashed on the cement by the car door.

"God-dammit, Rusty. I'm on probation! You can go to jail. But me, I don't go to jail! I go to prison, god damn it." I'd got in trouble with drugs when I started robbing drug-stores on a three day dream binge.

He laughed, "You're paranoid. Now, can we go get some more vodka?"

He pulled out and drove away slow and innocent. I got hold of my temper after a couple of stop signs and a left turn, when we could see the traffic light of the boulevard far away but straight ahead.

The heater was working now and I opened a beer. Three sips and I thought how comfortable. "Cold wears me out. My muscles tense until I'm warm again," I said. It was unusual for me to say anything that didn't call for a response. I felt good for a moment.
____
Rusty had been staying at Sherri's apartment for two months. She was five foot tall at best, a little plump with long, light brown hair framing her round face and falling softly over her bosom. She had a tight, green knit shirt I liked to see.

She was bright, especially when she wasn't drunk, but this was only when she was provoked. She leaped at contradictions and told funny but mean little stories about her neighbors and co-workers.

He called her his dumpling behind her back, and liked to boast that they wore one another out in bed everynight.
_______
The studio apartment was in this three story slum, as I say, two blocks from my new hermitage. I'd lived there for a few months and left, realizing this was my bleak future and I'd arrived too soon.

Up and down the halls people left their doors open and roamed from one party to another. Every room with a bed had four people sleeping on the floor. The mixed up smell of home cooking was close and personal, at once confusingly reminiscent and revolting. Rusty knew everyone but ignored their calling his name, now as we passed on our way to Sherri's apartment.

He had his key ready but discovered the door was unlocked. I followed him into the darkness and he felt around the wall for the light switch. We had to adjust our eyes, slowly realizing the little studio had been visited.

It was vandalized, completely sacked by someone furious. Rusty stepped quickly around the corner to the kitchen, and called back, "They turned the oven up all the way."

Heavy bags of garbage were torn open and dumped. A bag of flour had been swung 360 degrees, over everything. The refrigerator door was open and everything inside was opened and slopped on the walls and floors. Large forgotten Tupperware from the fridge were opened and dumped on the bed.

I peeked into the bathroom and her tall wicker shelf of beauty products was pushed over, resting on the wall behind the toilet. There was writing on the mirror. Whore, slut, bitch, helter skeltor.

Was it lipstick? It was blue, though. I touched and it smeared. It was blue.

"You know what? I was the last to leave. I forgot to lock the door."

Kelderman had seen us and followed. Now he stood in the door with his two metal forearm crutches. He stared, open-mouthed, struck sober. His black framed glasses were crooked on his face but he balanced himself and pushed them back on his nose with his wrist. He licked his lips and hobbled in closer, blood-shot eyes wide open.

"Jesus Christ, it's hot in here."

I pulled another beer from my winter coat pocket. It popped and foamed. My heart was pounding and I chugged as if I were quenching a thirst, instead of settling my nerves.

"They wouldn't have made much noise except for the toppled shelves in the bathroom and all those little bottles falling." I said.

Kelderman said, "The TV is still there. VCR..."

Rusty kicked around some blankets, looking for something. He found his back-pack. His suits and an attache case in the closet were left untouched.

"Wait. What the fuck do I do now? She's going to think I did this."

"Why would you do this?"

"She's screwing the landlord."

Kelderman said, "You finally told him, did you."

"This looks like woman's work to me," I said.

Kelderman's eyes looked damp. Sometimes an emotional drunk.

"I know you were gone all day, Rusty. I've had my door open and I'd have seen you. Maybe he has another girl on the side. Or maybe she did this herself, who knows? Though if she did I doubt she's coming back."

"Look. They left my JFK and Lincoln Brigade pictures alone. My back-pack, my briefcase. " The implication seemed to be that he was cornered as a suspect.

Kelderman's low growling laugh came back. "What, do you feel left out?"

There was a half a minutes silence. Then Rusty said, "Yes. Completely."
______
Some sickly looking speed freaks and metal heads started collecting at the door, looking over Kelderman's shoulder and exclaiming obscenities. A short young black woman's face appeared for a moment. Her mouth went ajar and she pulled back away just as a smile came over her face, like she was going to go tell her friends and have a belly laugh.

Kelderman turned around and swung about. "Get the fuck away from here!" They all obeyed. Then he slammed the door shut.

He used one of his canes to remove a soiled chair cushion and sat himself painfully down. I sat on the floor. I was sorry I only had one other beer left and Rusty might ask me for it and I was going to give it to him.

But then Kelderman told me to go down to his room and bring a couple from the freezer. I said I would.

Rusty couldn't sit, though.

"Get your stuff and let's beat it," I said. "We can figure this out back at my place. I've been out too long. "

"I feel like cleaning all this up. Like I did this. Like I'd better. Now she'll come in and see I've moved out and what will she think?"

"Forget it." Kelderman said he wanted to go to the Savoy. This was a hotel downtown with golden hand-rails and a glittery bar The bar-maids were ex-strippers but they had class appeal for the traveling business man.

But what really interested him---he often said after a newspaper article had appeared--- was that Tiny Tim lived there. He said that he wanted to compare how long and dirty their fingernails were.

Now he showed me all the hundred dollar bills in his wallet and offered me one. "Let's go and forget this. Rusty, you're going forever. To the Savoy! To forget!!"

The hundred dollar bill wasn't even tempting, somehow. Anyway I knew Rusty had money. "We'll go tomorrow. Maybe. No promises."

Rusty swung his backpack over his shoulder and picked up his suitcase. "Huh. You know, coming over here I was planning to do something like this. I was going to break a window, maybe."

"No you wouldn't," Kelderman laughed. Outfoxed by the Fates, I thought.

I draped his suits over my arm and he asked me to get his two prize pictures. "Don't break the glass in the frames."

"Why don't we smash the JFK? You wouldn't look as guilty then. And you need to get over your mourning anyway. It's been thirty years."

"I've had that since I was nine."

Rusty was like me in some ways, only he'd never learned to drink as much, which seemed to me to be part of the problem. He didn't read anything worthwhile either: that was my drunken, burn-out opinion. Also he was the only person I knew who had no interest in music. It meant nothing to him except on the dance floor when he was drunk and bravely trolling.

Out in the brighter light of the hallway I took a closer look at him. He looked over my shoulder, far away. He locked the door, then slid the key under.

"So long, Ramona. Or Edna or whatever your name is."

__
Rusty didn't snore. I was watching TV until dawn and looked behind me. He was wide awake. The phone had rang three times this night, but she hung up on the machine. Or, it might have been someone for me. The last call was twenty minutes after the bars closed. Now another hour had passed.

My private entrance directly to the outdoors made me feel vulnerable. The darkness helped.
______
In another universe she'd come over here and somehow explain everything.
____
It was 3 a.m. I sat up drinking beer and watching Turner Movies. I was caught up in this horrible vortex of "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf" because I was waiting for "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" to come on, at four.

If he could sleep through a drunken Elizabeth Taylor screaming her head off, wait until Ethel Merman came on as the ultimate hectoring, howling, slugging mother-in-law. Her greatest role.

He spoke, then, as friends do in the dark. I muted the hysterical screaming argument on the Tv. I didn't mind him speaking now.

"I'm finished with Commtron. The boss takes my ideas and passes them off as his own. He had an unscheduled meeting with his boss right after we talked once and then a week later I was reassigned and they took my suggestions.

"And everyone is careless. They don't give a crap because their jobs are safe. They resent me. I admit I'm a little meticulous, and that takes extra time, but in the big picture, you know. It's best. When I go into the break room the women all shut up. I make them nervous."

"I thought you said it was a good sign, they all get quiet."

"How can I tell?" He sounded a note of urgent helplessness, which surprised the hell out of me. Like someone might finally divulge a secret he hadn't been let in on.

"Well that's just it, " I said. "You can't tell but you rush to conclusions."

"I'm going to take a few days off and have the agency reassign me. It'll upset my step-mom if she finds out though. And my step-dad."

"Huh?"

"What?" he asked.

"Oh. I forgot. So many steps."

His parents had both died by the time he was ten. His mother first, and then his dad re-married. Then after he was gone, his step-mother also remarried--Rusty was 12 or 13--- and that good man became Rusty's step-father.

Two steps-parents. Then they divorced when he went to college.

"If I don't call him often enough, he'll look for me. Once he spent two hours driving around town, business to business, so he could take me out to lunch. He's worried I'm working below my potential. He wanted to lecture me. Then I wouldn't let him pay the check. 'No, this is on me', I said"

"I hope you said thanks for the advice."

"My step-mom wants me back in local politics. Maybe if we elect Bilgey.

"Did I tell you about Thanksgiving? Almost her whole family. Big, chaotic family now. Double-wide cousins. My brothers, two of my sisters and their kids. One of my nephews is is 19 now and he was giving me some shit. 'Rusty, everyone knows you're a loser.'

"Jesus."

"My sister was embarrassed but instead of defending me she tried to justify herself. 'Why don't you have a car yet, or a phone? Don't you know how to save?'

"Oh well, it serves me right. I was tipsy, trying to persuade my nephew's girlfriend to fix me up with her sister. Actually I think his girlfriend admired how I sat back and took the abuse---my other sister and my brothers joined in and I just sat back, you know, taking it. I think she admired that. She smiled at me with her eyes."

He laughed. "She knows I've got something up my sleeve, man. She knows." He meant he would hit the big time someday, in some way.

"I need to get my good shoes fixed. There's a shoe repair shop on University, across from where the Galaxy used to be. Next to where the Town and Country restaurant was, do you remember that place? On the other side is the lamp shade store."

In all my 34 years I'd never heard of anyone getting their shoes repaired. Yet I'd seen the place, it'd been in business all my days and I always wondered who patronized it. I guessed my late grandfather may have. It was there close to the pharmacy where he drank his daily bromo-seltzer after work.

When Rusty was broke he never asked his family for help, so he had to be frugal. This deeply frightened me: like a glimpse of the end of my road. Scratching out a living was not for me, I'd have to cheat or something. Marry rich. The world seemed cruel to Rusty. And my other impoverished friends were crazy and by this time, starting to get government checks.

"You can take my car, just don't go looking for trouble."

"I'm innocent. She'll just have to take my word for it. She has an enemy and she'll know who it was. "

"Say. That's right," I said, a little surprised. It was like a knot coming undone just by pulling it. I was buzzed and slow on the uptake. It made sense. "Probably served her right, too."

"No. That shouldn't happen to anyone."

I let that go, feeling tricked.
_____
Tomorrow the sun would be out at last, was the forecast. Warm through the windows, and an end to a month of Sundays.

Rusty would have groceries and I'd be able to start on a new beer buzz. He'd take the car to get his shoes cobbeled, and maybe in the evening we'd get Kelderman into the car and take him to the Savoy and run into the down and out Tiny Tim.

Sherri would be forgotten already, even by Rusty, if we went to the Savoy.

Or, then again, all hell could break loose. Maybe Sherri and her landlord lover would hunt us down.
____
Life as a drunken spectator would never lose it's appeal to me. This couldn't last though. The world couldn't remain as cockeyed as all this.
___
Now at last Virginia Woolfe gave way to It's A Mad, Mad World, but I was unlucky and couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. Rusty slept and when I went to bed I was pleased he'd be out there in the morning.

Mr. Winrick

Luke 4 [20] And He closed the book, and He gave it again to the minister, and sat down. [KJV]

When Mr. Winrick still worked at the bank he persuaded my dad to open a Buick dealership in Oakapolohka, although a previous venture had failed.

I was five, six or seven and all I remember is Dad bringing home a new car every night. Jerry and David waited for him to arrive at dinner time. Gazing out the living room window,they'd see him pulling up and they'd gasp and yell and run outside.

Electras, Rivieras, Wildcats. "Does the top come down?"

Dad was a bear but a bear you could rush and outflank. Neighborhood kids wondered at us, all the years we were growing up, why his low growling and eventual thunder-clap didn't frighten us more.

We knew to back off, we noticed when the sound of his voice changed. The time to back off was when it was too late. But all the bear could do was make us abashed. He didn't ever kill you, like he threatened to weekly. He could put up with a certain amount of back-talk also.

The business started to fail, but then Mr. Winrick found Dad some partners and helped in other ways until Dad finally got out.

Then Mr. Winrick retired from the bank and sold us his house. No one knew it was for sale.

It was the one house in town my mother had always admired the most, a two story white colonial with green shutters and a large back yard for us. She couldn't believe it. Dad would build a white fence around the back yard, where she thought there should always have been a white fence.

For the next ten years, when we were arriving home after a long car-trip she would wake us in the back seat and, over our groaning, start to sing.

"Oh look everyone, we're home and isn't it beautiful, our very own little house on the corner. Let's stop just a minute and look."
_______
Mr. Winrick and his wife, Harriet, had lived at the corner of 9th and "B" since the late 1940's. They planned to move to the western edge of town, where there were woods and close curving roads and it wasn't so awfully close to the cemetery and the elementary schools. Those were the reasons my Dad offered, but he may have been kidding.

We arrived for a tour after church. My dad said "Hello, Buford!" and introduced my mother and my brothers and me. I had a sister on her way. Mom and my teacher and every woman in town told me she would "arrive" very soon now and asked what did I think of that?

Mom asked God for Jane and God agreed. That was explanation enough for me. I don't remember being curious, concerned, or interested until the upper cabinets were filled with baby bottles. And it gave me a small amount of fame for awhile, is all.
_____
Mr. Winrick called my Dad "Edward", instead of "Ed". He was formal and kindly.

I liked it when my dad talked to older men. I enjoyed a casual belief that Dad was at some toddering risk but would always handle himself exactly right. There was a funny solicitousness between men of different generations, a tolerant sense of superiority going both ways.

This day Mom was very happy but perplexed during the car ride home. Mr. Winrick had repainted one side of the house white months ago but left the other three sides weathered and cracked. Also there were little black twigs all over the lawn since the last summer storm.

"Oh that picture over the mantle!" she suddenly laughed.

My older brothers laughed too. David joked he would do the same someday.

I didn't know what anyone was talking about. I hadn't noticed anything. Mom turned in the front seat and asked, didn't I notice? She told me Mr. Winrick had a picture of himself over the mantle and there was a little light shining down on it. Everyone laughed some more and my Dad's bluish/gray eyes sort of shone but he tilted his head like maybe this wasn't fair.

"He was an admiral and spent a few years at the Pentagon."

Jerry asked, why is he called Mister?

"I think he thinks it would sound silly, to be called Admiral. Anyway Buford was a wheel."

"That's Air Force slang, Dad."

"Maybe started that way, Jerry. Anyway, he was already a submarine commander when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He was there."

Mom said, "I'm sure it was his wife or daughter who had his portrait put up like that. His daughter Janine is in one of my bridge clubs. And in P.E.O."

David sat up, alert. "Come on, Mom. What's P.E.O. stand for?"

Any mention of P.E.O. , he always demanded to know.

"I don't know, " she said quietly while looking at the houses we drove by.

Jerry, the oldest, quietly stated, "Yes you do." Dad straightened up and looked in the rear-view mirror at him.

David said, "Mom, I'm going to find out some day. So why not tell me. Hey if you don't, I'll say I learned it from you. Come on, Mom!"

Dad looked at my mom. She was smiling, looking ahead, shaking her head. She made a little cough and Dad said "David, don't blackmail your mother."

"Honestly," she said, "they whispered it to me on my first day but it was so loud there, just before the luncheon, I didn't hear quite right. But I nodded and then I had to whisper to the next pledge ---Oh, my Lord. Ed!--- I told her what I thought I heard. Oh, Lord!" Dad laughed so I laughed too because his laughter was always tickling "And now I'm embarrassed to ask again, ever since. So, David, you'll never find out from me.

"And Jerry, do you hear that? I do not know."

"You're the president. Yes you do."

"Jerry!" Dad warned.

"President!??" I scooted up to her shoulder from this middle area of the back seat and asked how could that be?

The whole damn family exclaimed and explained at once. When it was over I looked to David and he repeated it all to me slowly and calmly. There isn't just one "President". Lots of groups elect presidents.

Mom returned to the subject of the house. She wondered again at Mr. Winrick's half-hearted attempt to paint it and then started to dream aloud what all she would do with the kitchen and the living room and two baths. Everything there was comfortable but old and worn.

"Private Entrance Only!" David suddenly exclaimed.

"No!"

"How do you know? You said you didn't hear, Mom."

"I know it's not that."

Dad reminded us then, "If it wasn't for your mother I'd drop you all off in the country for some farmer to pick up."

"Parents Eat Out, " Jerry said. This was a sore point we had with our parents, they're eating out alone, though it only happened six times a year, if that.

"Yes, no, maybe so," my mother replied.
_____
But Mr. and Mrs. Winrick did not move to the hilly, forested area west of town after all; they moved next door to an upstairs apartment above Mr. Winricks aging sister.

She was Mrs Doosenbury, a widow. She looked ancient but was very tall and stood up straight.
I came to understand over the years that Mr. Winrick and his sister did not get along. Or rather, the day came I was finally old enough to have it casually mentioned in my company. The animosity was not on the surface. She hadn't spoken to her brother in twenty years, supposedly. It had something to do with money or it was due to some unfortunate off-hand remark about the late Mr. Doosenbury.

She was once the town librarian. You could see a picture of her framed at the library, taken in the 1940's. She looked elderly even then. Or, as David said, like she was prepared to be elderly. Then there was another picture I saw of her as a young woman with long brown hair, wearing a floor length black skirt and a blouse with a big bow. I was sometime in the Lusitania era.

Now Mrs. Winrick explained that the house was so big and with their children grown, there was no sense in all that work keeping it up, or moving to an even larger house.

They liked the neighborhood, so close to the downtown. Our street was the outer most ring for the town's holiday parades. It was a very wide street with pretty lawns, hedges, ever-greens and Dutch Elm trees.
___
Years passed. My sister Jane had turned five. On summer nights I was allowed out until eight or nine or ten, and I began to notice "Buford" (as we called him now) had a schedule of sorts. I'd see him at ten o'clock arriving home alone and fumbling with his key to the outside door that led to their upstairs apartment. The whole house was dark , then finally the kitchen light came on.

Jerry looked for chances to use new expressions he'd learned. Once he said Buford was "tipsy".

David, who was four years younger, said, "Yep. Never quite drunk."
____
If Dad was up and saw Buford he'd sometimes call across the drive-way to come join him on the screen-porch. The two men talked quietly and eventually my brothers sat at their feet while I weaved through everyone in circles until Dad reached out and pulled me to sit on his lap.

We knew Dad was in the Navy. It seems to me now we all heard it rather indifferently. The bigger question was how a small town hoodlum like him managed to marry a beauty queen like Mom.

Ask him what he did in the Navy and he'd say "I typed a lot". And once he'd kicked a rat off a dock into the Sea of Japan.

They talked Navy, now. The Admiral would say something like: "You watch it for awhile and you'll think it's a damn yaught!"

My oldest brother Jerry went and got a book with the words to "The Lucky Bag", and asked Dad and Mr. Winrick if they remembered.

Shoe of middy and waister’s sock,
Wing of soldier and idler’s frock,
Purser’s slops and topman’s hat,
Boatswain’s call and colt and cat,
Belt that on the berth-deck lay,
In the Lucky Bag find their way;
Gaiter, stock and red pompoonont,;;
Sailor’s pan, his pot and spoon,
Shirt of cook and trowsert's duck,
Kid and can and “doctor’s truck,
And all that’s lost, and found on board,
In the Lucky Bag is always stored.''

"Two hundred years before our time, Edward."

"Just nonsense to me."

"Same here," Buford said. "Sorry, Jerry!"

"You two don't know what the Lucky Bag is?"

"Sure," Dad said. "It's the Lost and Found on a ship."

Buford laughed. "It was the name of our school year book but I'll be damned. I never knew that's what it was. "
_________
I liked to visit Mrs. Doosenbury for candy, and then after a few years growing up, to look at her history books about all the Presidents. Harriet was usually there visiting in the daytime, drinking iced tea.

Mrs. Doosenbury produced a scrap-book of old newspaper articles and had me read this, from 1922.

Chased by a Mule


Dr. M.S McCreight reports a peculiar accident which happened on Wednesday to Buford Winrick, who lives in the vicinity of Liberty church, a few miles southwest of Oakapalohka.

Mr. Winrick was chasing a calf which had gotten out, and trying to get it by the halter strap, when a mule jumped out of its pasture alongside the road and chased the man and calf. It bumped right into Mr. Windrick and either bumped or kicked him on the forehead, also on the right leg, breaking the bone just above the knee and twisting the knee and jamming him up generally in pretty bad shape. He crawled, dragging the broken limb, for perhaps 150 to 200 yards to the house and managed to get up to the home and ask the operator to call Dr. McCreight. The operator also called Mr. Winrick's folks, who were attending a social affair in the neighorhood.

"That," she tapped at the photo of the young man, "is my brother as I remember him. He wanted to go to Chicago and be a gangster."

Harriet smiled, "Oh, Mary", and Miss Doosenbury said,"Oh, yes he did, Harriet. That mule knocked a little sense into him I guess."

Everything else in this scrap-book had to do with weddings, birth announcements, until it finally veered off wildly to modern times. There were stark color photos of Jackie Onassis. Glossy from Life Magazine, other-worldly from the check-out aisle magazines.

Harriet laughed and said "Wait a minute, we're not through with you, John. I have something more to show you."

She led me upstairs to see his medals and read about all of Mr. Winrick's war experiences. His framed photograph was there but without the little light shining down on it. The apartment was close and it was a still day. Loud electric fans hummed.

Oakapalohka knew her native son, Winrick, very well in 1943.

"For conspicious gallantry and intrepidity in action in the performance of his duties in the USS Amberjack during a war patrol of that vessel..." he has been awarded the Silver Star Medal. The citation further states: "As Assistant Approach Officer, his outstanding skill, excellent judgement and thorough knowledge of attack problems assisted his Commanding Officer considerably in conducting a series of successful torpedo attacks, which resulted in the sinking and damaging of enemy ships totalling more than 43,000-tons. In addition, he was of great assistance in conducting a successful reconnaissance of four enemy positions and completing a vital special mission, contributing immensely to the success of his vessel in evading extremely severe enemy countermeasures..."

___________________________________________________________________________________

One day Mr. and Mrs. Winrick took Jane and me to see the ducks and swans at the cemetary pond. The two of them made their way up the hill to the Wishing Well, so we followed.

Buford gave Jane a penny to throw in. "If I gave you a nickle would you throw it in the wishing well? Yes? What about a quarter? Ha, ha. I didn't think so."

Mrs. Winrick was quiet but seemed in a good mood. Jane went back down the hill to the swans and I followed the couple to a burial plot with a brand new stone and unbroken ground.

It had their names and their birth dates. Harriet Winrick. Buford Winrick. They explained to me in soft tones that people usually buy their own plots, to spare others the expense. They seemed proud and pleased. There was an inscription. "First, Love God". Harriet seemed dreamy.

They pointed to where Miss Doosenbury would rest. It was away over there, a couple of hills toward the grey, besmirched looking greenhouses adjacent to Forest Cemetary.

That autumn I overheard that Buford had bought his wife a fur coat. Then one day I was outside and the couple came out and I saw the coat. Harriet was holding Buford's arm and she looked small. She leaned into him. As they reached the cement stairs leading down to the walk and their car, Buford turned and gave me a smile and a friendly wave.

A week later my mother called for me to come in and told me to try to keep the neighborhood kids quiet, especially around the Doosenbury house.

A few weeks later my sister and I saw Buford coming home at dusk. Jane asked where was Harriet and I shushed her. Buford said "that's all right" as he worked the key in the door. He looked up, as if to heaven, and went inside without answering Jane.

Myself, I'd recently learned to the expression "passed on", and the sound and meaning of the phrase settled me. But Jane was five, too young for sideway glances at the eternal. I took her to the other side of the house, ready to say what happened to Harriet, but she'd either forgotten her question or kept it to herself, for Mom or for Dad.
__________________________________________________________________
One night Buford was charged with assault downtown. Dad read the paper and said only "Thursday afternoon?"

We learned Buford had broken a man's glasses. Later we heard that this man was a stranger and there had not been a fight at all.

I arrived home from school one day and David reached out and took my glasses. He put his palm on my forehead as I yelled in protest and he told me, "You're healed. You don't need these anymore, Johnny! Look at that clock on the mantle. Can't you see that the time is at hand?"

Mom intervened.

Dad traveled these years. Mom kept score and usually by Friday if any of us had got in trouble we'd bargained with her not to tell.
___
Mom and David in the kitchen. They both seemed to be laughing and arguing at the same time. Mom had been doing the dishes. Her hands were wet and sudsy, on her aproned hip now. "Who is this woman!"

"Mrs. Wormak. My English teacher."

"But she's not even in P.E.O. !! How would she know? And worse, why would she tell? Did she tell everyone or just you?"

"She told the whole class. She says it's a sorority for housewives."

"It's not 'Protect Everyone', anyway. If she's an English teacher she should know 'everyone' is one word. P.E.O. means "Protect Each Other". And it's not a 'sorority', that makes it sound silly, she means for it to sound silly.

"This is a very old organization, David, before most women got to go to college and it's mission is to help women get into college. The official meaning is "Philanthropic Educational Organization." P.E.O. Our little chapter is giving five scholarships at your school this year. FIVE. Go tell Miss or Mrs. Wormack to..."

"Go explain herself to your judicial committee?" These were Watergate days. He was kidding, as usual.

"That was a secret. It's just mean."

"Yeah, she seemed kind of proud, come to think of it."

"It's almost like that, you know. Trying to put people down."

"Do you wonder who told?"

"What? Do you know? Oh!" She waved him away. "That's just awful. Awful. I am so mad...Wait, I'm not finished with you, I have something more to say. Come back.

"I want you to ask her tomorrow what she thinks is the difference between 'protect everyone' and 'protect each other'. "
_______________________________
Admiral Winrick smoked outside in his undershirt now and paced the sidewalk, habitually opening and closing his fists over his head.

"Do you think he's trying to catch bugs flying out of his hair?" Jerry asked me.

For weeks, for a Spring and a Summer, Mr. Winrick was like this. He would also seem to be making a transparent but nervous attempt to look normal by gesturing with his hands and moving his lips. Like he could somehow fool us that he wasn't alone.

There were fairly loud denouements. For instance once I heard him exclaim, "As big as life!"

Finally, as I understood it, the Navy came to pick him up. We never saw him again.
_________________________
After his death I took my brothers to see the grave. They were in college and high school now.

On the stone there was that religious inscription. "First, Love God".

My brother David said, "Modest". My brother Jerry said "Frugal!" They had some game of matching one another synonym for synonym.

"Pious."

"Devout. Devoted."

David concluded, "Well. I liked them both."

"I wonder what Dad thought of Buford," Jerry said. "You know, he almost ruined Dad."

"Not to hear Dad tell it." David said.

Lilly Of Glaxo

I first became aware of Lilly's presence at the Dead End Club in June, the first week of the Twilight Festival, and the seventh week since I began taking the anti-depressant SNRI Cymbalta.

She was sitting far across the meeting room and I became transfixed, certain that I knew her from somewhere long ago. When I traced back for the memory, my mind returned with broken images, like I'd gone far afield recollecting a dream.

Her physical presence grabbed and scooped at my insides. It was like I'd been in love but forgotten all about it. She was dressed in an ankle length, light floral, pleated skirt and wore a plain black sleeveless blouse. She had the complexion of childhood poverty: too early smoking and drinking, too early rolling in the hay. Her slightly tan skin, while soft looking and appealing, seemed to have absorbed enough rural dust to give her the permanent aura of hard-times.

She was smallish, about 40 years old, with pretty locks of curly, light brown hair piling softly upon her freckled shoulders. She wore clear wire rim glasses, and her bluish-gray eyes were wide with wonder, but clouded with hurt and irritation , if met directly. She appeared to have swallowed heart-ache and I decided she was dry eyed from crying (but from long ago). She had a cute, small oval shaped mouth with kissable lips. She almost continuously rolled her head and massaged her neck, like someone just off work and on their way to a chiropractor (or a psychic healer with strong hands). She seemed at home in an A.A. meeting and, noting her ring-less finger, I hoped she might be a genuine kook, I might persuade to bed and blind, loving servitude.
__________________________________
Last March , Dr. Cooper, the young squirt who's been so interested in me, his first genuine hypochondriac, set up an appointment for me to meet his former teacher, the pre-, or perhaps post-eminent psychiatrist/neurologist, Dr. LeFevre.

The first appointment was not until late in April, which was a long wait and a long time for me to rebel. I hadn't so much been sold on this idea as accepted it politely, out of a feeling of obligation to the friendly Cooper. He'd just saved my job after I'd taken seven days off, devil may care, assuring my boss that I'd have a doctor's excuse, when in truth all I had was a crazy conviction that I could persuade Coop to write me one, ex post facto.

Now as I sat in an examination room waiting, upright and uptight with my arms crossed, I brooded, and felt angry and mean. I was ready to put this old paragon of 19th and 20th century European buncombe (or 21st century Paxilism) on the defensive, in hopes of provoking him into a nervous tic, stuttering, and finally an unprofessional display of choleric imbalance.

Coop surprised me, stepping in first.

"I wanted to stop by and remind him about you and why we wanted to see him. Now he wants me to ask you some questions while he's with another patient. Is that all right with you if we talk a little while?"

Every year or two it's as if I must meet my adversary, the Professional Human Being. The true Internist, the Sherlock Holmes or Rube Goldberg, able to explain the mechanisms of all my sins and mistakes by a logic of reverse engineering. Someone talks me into this misadventure and I am either charmed or gulled into trying new pills ('take this and in six weeks you'll feel like a million dollars') .

I always refuse counseling, though I'd probably change my mind if I knew the counselor would be female and attractive and not foreign born (with English as her second language, I mean. There is no fooling or charming them).

This unexpected appearance of my youthful, good natured, non-smoking, Mormonish G.P. made me feel foolish about my hopes of ambush.

Still, I thought of his generation being bewildered by Dr. LaFevre's. All the unreasonableness, and stubborn orthodoxies, which are the mirror opposite of the first generation immigrants of early last century, raising their children determined to carry on traditions and to excel in the new world of opportunity. Coop's generation, I imagine, must deal with so many rationalizations of evil they actually do correct their parents by age seventeen. As the boomers only imagined they could.

"Now that doesn't seem right, Dad."

Dr. Coop politely pretended to me that he was still very curious to discover something about my Hashimotos disease (hypothyroiditis) even though I was finally "stabilized".

We could do this , he'd explained in March, by ruling out any psychiatric illness. It was just after I'd asked him to invoke FMLA for my condition, which is about as common but less serious than gingivitis.

"Hashimotos", I secretly suspected all these years, was something laughable, like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

He said that maybe this "mental lethargy" was depression, maybe my free floating anxiety was due to the haphazard placement of the building blocks of personality in early childhood, maybe I kept asking him for job excuses/vacations all the time because of an allergy, or a mysterious "fear of success". That last actually made me smile. Maybe I even laughed out loud.

"Of course it's true Hashimotos can mimic mental illness in many ways, so let's sort this out," he said.
_________________________________________________________
Days and weeks passed until one beautiful evening, with the sky a sort of blue and orange sherbet color, I suddenly felt that it would be perfectly normal for me to take a spot at the picnic table directly across from Lilly.

I attributed this to Cymbalta. I still suspect that is so.

As usual, before meetings, she was holding a paperback open with the thumb of one hand while she smoked a long, menthol "100s" cigarette with the other. I'd heard her tell someone that she enjoyed reading "paranormal romance" novels, a genre I had never heard of in ten years of book selling. Something new that had been waiting all this time to be conceived.

"I hello," I said.
She looked up, her eyes friendly and surprised.
"I. i. ---" I affected a difficulty in speech, turning my head sideways then bringing my shoulder up to my right ear before the next syllable.

I had never tried this before. Turn inside out, be the stammerer!

"Huh!- huh!- huh- Hi, John!! You still don't have that right. "

"What, I've done that before? Listen, I can't place you, sweetheart. It's amnesia. I should know you right off. I'm sorry. "

"Wow! You really were drunk all that time. It's Lilly, John. LILLY. Come to think of it, I don't think you ever remembered my name from night to night, " she laughed.

Memories gathered up finally and there she was from four years ago. I almost recoiled, but not from her. I shrunk from that dissolute time in my life.

But her name was not "Lilly", I felt sure. And this could not be the woman of four years ago whose wardrobe of modern T-Shirts advertised Lucky Charms, Trix, and Fruit Loops. Today she looked like a school-teacher from the 1940's. Back then she was like a sprig of 21st century modernity and optimism.

How can time. So fast. And me, how old am I?

So we began prompting each other's memories.

"I spent all that time trying to persuade you to get on the Internet, didn't I?" And we had fun! I remember! People would come talk to you and you'd convince them you had a twin. That you weren't you. You were a great actress I ever saw, I thought. "

"What! I have a twin, I tell you!"

"Really?!"

She rolled her eyes and said in a pretending, plaintive tone, "You wanted me to be your partner and help you find a girlfriend. You thought it would help if I clung to your arm as we walked from bar to bar.

"I was flattered, you thought I was a prize. You must have thought so, didn't you?"

"Of course," I said. "And we'd end up at the Great Wall Of Buzz-saws, you called it."

"And you always flipped off the lead guitarist or the singer. Well, not every time. "

"Once," I said. "It was impossible to talk in there! What's the point in going out if you can't talk?"

We were laughing pretty merrily now. Yes, I remember that! Yes!

How could I forget?

It'd been four years now, since the time of my nightly, tipsy rounds downtown, where I had a crib.

To "The Sanguine", "Woot!" and "The Airliner". Lilly was reliably found at The Airliner. Our first conversation, I realized she'd been taken in by a phony writing contest. She showed me her verses printed in a thick expensive book sold "half-price" to all the "winners". The type was very small. It was a pretty book. I remembered that, and of course not saying anything.

She was talkative. Adventures in community theater. Life in a small, one-cop town (how everyone cat and moused with him); her no account brother she loved and she wished would move to Colobocomo; a dream she had of starting an old fashioned "rooming house".

And then of course long talks about books and philosophy and did-you-ever-read Freud's book about religion?

It was like this with most of the strangers who initiated conversation with me. They seemed assured that I was a befuddled Sartre devotee, stuck on page 31 of Being And Nothingness. They let the glasses and the knitted brow fool them. Like I was concentrating on the human condition instead of calculating how much money I needed from the ATM for the night.

And how to win Miss Kitty's heart this late in the game. Spend my life at her bar doing odd jobs and getting kissed each time she passed by on her way to a table to entertain guests. (Actually there were two Miss Kitty's. One owned this place but was only here two nights a week. The other was at my usual, second stop of the night.)

"Wow I thought all this time you were embarrassed to talk to me," she told me now.

I remembered how she sat alone at the bar writing in a spiral notebook until someone spoke to her, and it was always briefly and had nothing to do with making plans or anything. She was well-known but not popular, apparently. A fixture, tolerated and sometimes warned about something.

I remembered she seemed out of place on campus, not due to her age but something else. Had she been divorced, did she have kids, I tried to remember now. Maybe the people who stopped to say hello were her ex-husband's friends. People who had abandoned her during a divorce. I never found out.
____
Now she asked, "Do you know what happened? Did you read in the papers about these foster parents having a kid locked up in their attic nearly starved to death? That was my aunt! My mom's sister! You remember that my mom had cancer?"

I did remember. (Or was it like a trick of deja vu? And how many times in my life have I had someone confide sad news like that?)

"She died about a month later. My whole family is nuts now, I didn't know it before, maybe it wasn't true before, maybe it was only my aunt but now it's everybody. But no, we were always, all of us on drugs or at least pot and alcohol. I loved my aunt, and she was a lot younger than my mom. She loved me! But she made this little kid eat grass.

Since I was a little girl my Aunt Jo was ---I mean I'd flap my arms when I'd hear she was coming to visit and I'd run and jump into her arms even when I was too big for that. She's in prison! She duct-taped the girl to a toilet. She was missing two fingernails. She belongs in prison! But I can't get my mind around it, John."

I sat now wondering how close were we?

I never brought her home. Trying to remember. ...

"Neither of us ever seemed to be drunk..." she said, and then laughed. "We were smashed."

"Summer was ending, wasn't it?"

"Yes."
________________________________________
He would represent to me the demigod of amoral "self-actualization" and permissiveness. He would stand in as a sort of credentialed modern Philosopher, answerable only to his peers. If he wanted to give me pills, I brooded that he may accidentally cure me of my humanity as anything else.

(the humanity of the alcoholic?!)

Why...! Who can stop such men, if they are corrupt, from misquoting you and then locking you up for 72 hours? Or, more likely, who can stop a stupid man from misunderstanding me, with the same result?

Incredible, really, for me to resist, though. I see that now.

I mustn't let myself forget that old men nowadays are not from my grandfather's or even my father's generation. They can't help affecting the looks and the mannerisms, but they are , I usually suspect, the brash, stubborn, conformist "freaks" and 'niks' of the 1950's and 1960's.

_________________________________________________________________
Lilly and I met at the picnic table three or four times a week. We caught up, while discussing A.A. , Psychiatry, various characters of fiction, and characters who visited the A.A. club.

I told her, "Carl there, with the antennae? He gets a shot once a month, and then for a week or two he's lucid. He was an English/History major for years. You can tell. Then the shot wears off, and he either becomes an alien like today, or he cross-dresses. When the month is up and he needs another shot, he makes no sense. Everyone gets tired of him and he gets angry. We're relieved when he gets his shot. I don't know what medicine that is."

Why isn't addiction considered a personality disorder?

Lilly said our personalities simply are the characteristics we have, like the color of our eyes, the sound of our vocal chords, how we laugh and when we laugh. Who we like and who we don't. Was it just a desire to change, and then change back? To travel and then go home?

Lilly was on Lexapro.
I said, "Cymbalta".
"Hello, Cymbalta," she said.

"After my mother died ---not from cancer but from this Evil that came out of nowhere---my crazy aunt and uncle, god damn them---I decided I had to get sober. I can't even tell you why, but I'm glad I did.

"I wasn't in any trouble. Just with this upheaval, I could tell that if I kept drinking then everyday would be just like the last, and it would be like nothing happened, nothing was wrong. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to rocket above everything and see. What had happened to my family, how did we miss this about my Aunt Jo and my uncle?

"It was pretty easy after 21 days at Last Word. Well, I had an affair with my counselor." She laughed loudly, then leaned forward with her chin low and mischief in her eyes "with a woman! A woman, John! Ha, ha!!"

I gave my standard response. "Good judgment. Men are pigs."

"No! Stupid people with power are pigs. Aggressive, ignorant people are pigs. This woman was a pig, John." Lilly lit another menthol 100 and blew a thin, swift stream of smoke up in the air.

"She thought she was Oprah and Dion Warwick's love child. She'd tell me things about myself and look so proud I'd agree with her just to be nice, like I didn't want to see any disappointment on her face. She was handsome, a black lady with a German father. But then, in group sessions I saw how she seemed to really help people, all the women were totally convinced Nat could feel their pain and find the source. The more time went by, the more I thought I loved her, and I started to believe what she told me about myself. Then one day, I forget what she did but I was sort of angry at her, or tired or something. She just talked talked talked, like me now. And it really upset her, she couldn't stand the thought that I might not be enthralled with her so she focused on me all this erotic power."

"I've never been with a man who hit me or abused me. I've just never been stupid, I steer clear, and if one did ever hit me I'd probably kill him. Or no, have him killed. You know? Anyway I moved in with her and after three months she just turned into a monster because I could see through HER, not the other way around. For real, I could see through her and she was in a complete fantasy about herself. I should have known she'd be dangerous. Actually, for awhile I warned myself, don't reflect back to Nat. But eventually I couldn't help it, I couldn't stop myself laughing at her sometimes. Like, she'd be on the phone all the time , jabbering away and giving me a headache, and you couldn't see how the person on the other end was getting a word in edgewise but she'd suddenly make this pronouncement about them, just like the Psychic-Hotline!

"I'd hide my face in the pillow but finally one night she knew I was laughing at her and she said 'Hold the phone', and then ran over and jumped on me with her knees in my back and started hitting my face and my ears and like, using her knees to try and squash my kidneys."

"I went to stay with my dad. He was in bad shape, and expected me home after my treatment. I felt guilty for that. Three months. But then I relapsed for a week, taking Valium. I told my doctor and that's when I started Lexapro."

____________________________________________________________________
Dr. Cooper took good notes.

LaFevre, a plump, bearded old gent who looked like he'd stepped out of a Thurber cartoon, was direct.

"In 3rd grade did you start to miss school a lot?"

(I'd told Coop that it was in 3rd grade people and kids started remarking and wondering at how thin I was. And I'd become self-conscious and even freaking despairing.)

I said yes , at that time I had a lot of stomach aches made me double over. I wasn't faking. Then I got asthma and that was my free pass for years.

"Did you worry about returning to school after your absences? Because you would have work to make up."

"I don't remember. I suppose I did, yes. Not enough to stop. My older brothers got all A's and B's and finally in 6th grad I got a "D" in English and my parents were mad. I'd missed 45 days one semester.

"But no, it was later in life, when I was a drunkard and afraid of losing my bookstore job."

"Now," he slapped his hands to his knee, sat up, lowered his chin and looked over his glasses. "That is mental illness," he said. "This is what we can help you with."

"It is? But my fear was reasonable."

"Yes, but things were spiraling out of control, you see?"

"Then it was drunken or cowardly foolishness, but not mental illness. No. "

"Ah. See, you were self-medicating with alcohol and out of control. Don't you admit that to me? Isn't that the first step in A.A., admitting you were out of control?"

"I was an alcohol addict and had poor judgement. Over time it naturally became worse."

My dad denied that I was alcoholic, all his life. My older brothers laughed and challenged him. He said, "No. John's a ...habitual drunkard." He grinned at their laughter. "He drank himself into this."

But that sounded right to me. What the hell is 'Alcoholism'? Alcoholism is like what? It's like nothing else. Was my dad just saying that I'd remain out of the gutter somehow?

We came to my real complaint, which is my life-long lack of ambition, energy, and depression.

Dr. LaFevre said: "Have you heard of the Nike Maxim? No? Do you watch TV? Nike. The maxim is "Just do it". Yes. Or, 'go for it' or something...."

This was like my own "hold the phone" moment.

"No. This is why I come to a psychiatrist or psychologist, this is what's wrong with me, all my life. This is the psychological problem! This is what I want figured out, fixed with your meds, whatever you can do, this is the malady! I'm like Bartleby The Scrivener, 'I would prefer not to!' What you call a psychological problem seems reasonable, not mentally ill, even the destructive cycle of addiction and having secrets, that all makes sense, can be reasoned through. I've had parents and gym coaches, I have friends who try to shake some sense into me but all my life I'm like this.

" 'Just do it', you say.

"But it's this, I'd take electric shock treatments for this. I can be so listless sometimes I won't eat when I'm hungry. You can tell me it's character, all right, but you can understand why I've spent my life hoping maybe this isn't about my character. I'll take your pills if they can help with that! Yes!

"I still risk losing that job almost once a month. Ten times in my life, I dropped out of school. I just stopped going, knowing full well that the safety and security of home would turn into a teetering, fearful nightmare...

"What's not reasonable is that I could be rich a hundred times over but I stopped. I had moments, see , when this balking went away, that's what gives me hope that this is psychological or physical.

"In 1985 it went away, this fear of living, ("Fear of success?" Cooper smiled) only I became manic because I was so happy to be alive. They put me down with Haldol and it's never happened again. But I know I can put it over on the world. I know I can float! I can wake up and see the world as it is, as something to plunder for the rest of my life and be sated like normal people.

"But when life went away I got afraid and I shut down."

"Hoo! 'Normal' he says." LaFevre chuckled.

"You're a scientist. Of course there is "normal". There is a normal 'range', isn't there? In human behavior? In the levels of neuro-transmiters?"

"Wait. Back up to 1985. Are you telling me you were hospitalized and treated for 'mania', as they called it then."

"Yes." I turned to Coop and asked, "Did I just throw a tantrum?" He shook his head no, and grinned, embarrassed I think.

"Where were you hospitalized? Here? But I thought you were from ..."

"Yes but it happened here. "

"Was it...Think of right before, were you in some unusually sadness?"

"Yes. There was this red-head, Lisa, and her parrot, Oliver."

Then I hoped he would say 'tell me more about this parrot'.
___________________________________________________________________
Lilly said, "I always return to God. Only God can change my character, not psychiatry, not fluoxetine. But I'll be on Lexapro the rest of my life, I mean I want to be, it makes me stable, it helps me sleep and I have good dreams and I just feel better. "

I asked her twin sister's name. Jody, she said.

"Can I call you Jody?"

"No, of course not. It would be like you were making fun of her."
____________________________________________________________________
"My only concern now, " Dr. LaFevre told Coop and me, "is that the Cymbalta will make him elated. Yes. Too happy. I don't want you to be too happy. You are bi-polar, "bi-polar depressive" but with the SNRI there's too great a chance of another manic episode. Now, there are three choices. We could try Lithium."

"No, no," I said. "That seems to make people crazy."

"What? But they're crazy as june bugs to begin with!"

"Eh. Dr. Cooper will tell you I have complaints about my logic too. What else?"

"There's Depakote..."

"No. At my treatment center, that's the drug everyone complained about. You mentioned a third. What is that?"

"Lamotrigine. It's the latest treatment, approved as a mood stabalizer a few years ago. It has the least side effects."

"Is this the one that gives you a rash?"

"Oh, ho! " he exclaimed to my G.P. "Your patient knows his business! Yes, there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of getting a rash."

I turned to Coop. "He means a rash that would land me in the burn center at the I.C.U."

"He's talking about T.E.N. Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis. You didn't know that, did you?" , he teased Dr. Cooper.

"I'll take that," I said.
___
"Why?" asked Jody. "Why on earth did you choose Lamictal?"
"I puzzle over that myself. It's like for the comic suspense but it's not funny."
"No,---spontaneous human combustion--- yeah well it depends..."
"Or , I guess because it seems radical," I said.

"How crazy are you, John?"

Her question and her tone lent too much seriousness and put a lump in my throat. Tears surprised me, coming up but not to a level to wash my eyes. Jody (or Lilly's) voice and question were like some inner voice I'd put out of business long ago.
______
By the end of July, what was happening between Lilly and I might have been what happened the first time. We were summing everything up, three times, four times, continually, almost like we were repeating lines from a sketch.

It's sad to grow tired of someone. You feel shallow, no longer wanting to mine or be mined. It was as though we'd each come to represent a stereotype the other knew too well...even though there seemed to be no one before or after that would recall the stereotype or template.

One day she announced she was going back to school to be a substance abuse counselor, but then she landed a job at the local Border's Books. One evening she proudly presented me with our towns alternative paper and said "turn to page 11". There was her photo and long poem with her by-line (Jody Twirlinger) , titled "Just For Today: So You've Decided To Be Evil ".

The poem began,

"This isn't about anyone you know."

It was dragnet, an attack, a litany of accusations, "all too true for publication". It was about fallen angels and demonic posers, case after case beginning innocently about women who filled their houses with stray cats, then abruptly about charity workers who embezzled, psychologists counseling divorce, psychiatrists drugging children, priests molesting kids, doctors who murdered. Instead of gore it was dry, like an enourmous grass fire. Notably she'd struck out anything about foster parents.

"It was my favorite line, too. They tell you to always edit out your favorite line."

During the last Twilight Festival I spotted Lilly across the roped off avenue, through the miling crowds and the childrens' balloons. She was with friends and had their rapt attention, laughing and talking and stopping just a second to hear a response and then laughing again. She looked great, happy, more than happy, exalted. I feared for her but I envied her too. She seemed young again, in another one of her ironic, cartoony, brand-name t-shirts.

She was drinking from a sports fans' cup of beer, but just, shall I say, incidentally. Her friends were probably co-workers from the bookstore or the magazine. She saw me and raised her cup and spilled it out from that heigth and laughed. She'd get more.

I went along my way, smiling, but still mixed up, what success is.