1

October is the time of year when you most feel yourself being pushed over the edge. This is home. After dinner, you hear her in the kitchen, and you reach for the TV Guide. It is your life now, the end of the week, and you feel safe, and it is as though this is what the end of your life is supposed to be like. 60 Minutes is on and the ticking clock reminds you of the century in which you live. The New Orleans Saints lost their game again today, a Sunday ritual of sorts.

You sit there, on the wheelbarrow-patterned couch that is missing a front leg. An encyclopedia bought from a traveling salesman years ago is placed beneath it, leveling it off, making it seem like nothing is missing at all. The TV Guides are stacked high in the corner, as nobody in the house wants to throw them away. It’s like they’ve been stacked for you to measure time, instead of remembering it. As they stand by the fish tank, you know one of these days they’ll just come tumbling down, and that lonely goldfish in that oversized tank will finally see some action.

You stare at the pine clock shaped like Mississippi. This is how things are in this house around six o’clock. Gina is in the kitchen, baking an apple cobbler. Lula, your daughter, in her self-jailed room, is reading a mystery novel.

This gives you the opportunity to reach into your pocket and take some pills. Two Somas and two Valium, each for a different form of pain. Thank God for mad doctors with prescription pads.

You hear Gina turn on the dishwasher. Except for that and Mike Wallace’s voice, the house trailer is quiet. Once in a while you hear Lula moving around her room. She’s big like that. Too big to be your own daughter, but you love her as if she is actually your own. You wonder how she stood the summer in the heat. It’s hard enough on thin people like you.

You reach behind you and stick out a hand, noticing how the hairs on it are growing less brown and more gray. You raise the window and feel the cool air blowing in from behind, then turn for a moment and stare out the window. Maybe this trailer isn’t so bad after all, one of the biggest on the market. Between your job as a carpenter and Gina’s small amount from working part-time at the Tastee-Freez, you have enough money to survive. But still, it is a trailer, and growing up you always promised yourself that you would not end up in the same type of place in which you grew up.

A police car with its lights on passes swiftly on the road outside, then turns away. You think about jumping out the window. It wouldn’t be a far fall or anything. You would just find yourself outside for no reason, maybe even landing on your feet. Gina would think that it was time for another trip to the hospital though. So instead you turn and stare at the room again, wishing Gina hadn’t put out those cheap candles that are white and triangle-shaped and smell the way you hope that your clothes don’t. You are wearing a T-shirt and khakis, that’s all, and it’s about fifty-five degrees outside with a slight wind. But you don’t feel cold. Even though it was stifling over there, feeling cold is one of those things that you left behind in the jungle.

Gina walks into the room, and you look at the television. There are now lines running across it. As she comes closer to you, the television becomes fuzzy. She is standing there wearing a red-and-white checkered apron, like the one she has always worn. The tinfoil on the antenna is just hanging there. You know that you can get up and fix it, but you don’t really care what’s on. The picture is all fuzzy now. Petulia must be the only place in America without cable television.

“What’s going on?” you ask, knowing that nothing is.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

“You can turn the TV off,” you tell her. She seems to think about it for a moment, but leaves it on. Then she sits down beside you, smelling like decent perfume and Cajun spices. You wonder what you smell like to her. You think you smell like sweat, but hope that you smell like the basic white soap you showered with a little earlier.

You pull her close, because this is what husbands do. Her hair is still blonde. She is nearly fifty, and you know that she’ll never go gray. Even when she was a cheerleader and you were both students at LSU, you knew she’d never grow old. Even with a few lines in her face, she still seems like she will live forever. And while you want her to go on living, you wonder if time has been as kind to you. During the first ten years of your marriage, she kept telling you that you looked like Paul Newman. You should have believed her then, because even though mirrors are not part of your daily life, you know your days of being handsome are behind you. Drinking and confusion have stolen your youth, while calmness has preserved hers. Sometimes you want to ask her what you look like, but you know what an honest person she is and you refrain.

“It’s freezing in here,” she says. Lately, the way she pulls away from you is like she never loved you. Maybe she’s having an affair. You can’t blame her.

She shuts the window.

“I have to go to bed,” she says. “I just wanted to tell you that there is a cobbler on the stove, if you want some.”

The television is beyond fuzzy and strangely lined now. It almost looks like gray grass. “Thanks,” you say, kissing her on the cheek, knowing that a kiss on the lips would be a lie.

“Maybe Lula will want some. I’m worried about her. She’s always in that room reading. Maybe it’s a phase.”

“She’s twenty-two, too old for phases.” You say this, knowing personally that this is not true.

“Even her little friends at the community college don’t come around anymore. Fine with me, though. Half of them were queer as a three-dollar bill, I think.”

“Why do you think that?”

“You could tell, by the way they acted and everything. Like the way I’d walk in on them dancing and all of them sitting real close. The way their voices were so high and soft, like they were supposed to be in the women’s choir or something. You know the type.” She is staring at you intensely, obviously waiting for you to say something, but you have nothing to say, so you wait for her to continue. “But I guess it was better for her to have them around than nobody at all.”

“I guess so.” It’s getting hot again.

“You know what I heard? That some of them even moved to the French Quarter.”

“Imagine that,” you say, actually imagining it.

You feel her staring at you, waiting for a response you refuse to give her, so she changes the subject. “Do you like the way that plant is growing?” she asks, referring to that giant green thing her mother brought for the two of you last year. You’ve heard her, but you don’t respond.

You haven’t been to New Orleans enough. And when you were there, you were always on edge. As though Gina was going to walk into that pub on the corner of Bourbon and St. Anne to remind you of who you said you were. That old bar, walled with open windowed doors that stayed open, was where you would spend all day drinking Midori Sours and watching Tennessee Williams characters walking by in the rain.

“Gary?”

New Orleans for you was like a nightclub in the streets. A place where things could not only happen to you, but where they were supposed to.

“What?”

“The plant. Do you see how big it’s getting? Remember when Mama give it to us last year before the holiday? It was nothing but a tiny thing.”

In New Orleans, up on a balcony, on Bourbon Street, someone took your dick slowly into his mouth and sucked gently. He was so much younger. That’s all you remember, then you ran away. Like the rest of your memories, this one ends without an end. But still, you do recall, standing against a wrought-iron fence, feeling him welcoming you into his mouth like it was a church where everyone prayed the same prayer. Before it was over, before the Amen, you ran away. Blackness had set in.

“I hate it,” you finally say, more loudly than you expected. “I hate that big plant.” It is a tall green palmy thing standing beside a bookcase full of Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins novels. “It’s too big. It’s too, too big...” The pills have finally kicked in. You know you’ve gone too far. She really loves that tree. So you out to reach for her; you say, “But if you like it...”

But she is gone. You hear the bedroom door shut. And you sit there staring at the television which is now clear with a Cher infomercial, muted. Then you hear noises, almost a thumping. It’s Lula.

She comes from the opposite end of the trailer and is clutching a book close to her Garth Brooks T-shirt. She looks like she hasn’t combed her hair in days and probably hasn’t. Her glasses are hanging so close to the edge of her nose that they could fall off at any moment.

“What are you reading?”

“The new Carole Stein mystery. I can’t wait to see what happens next.” This is her favorite statement.

“What’s happening to you?” you ask, trying to be polite. “Since last spring at the community college, you’ve just sat around reading.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“No, but you never leave. You used to have so many friends and you just, I don’t know, lived.”

She walks over and kisses you on the cheek and puts her hand on your thick brown hair. “I’m fine, Dad. I’m just thinking a lot lately about things that only I can. I gave you my financial aid refund check to pay for that new old jalopy of a truck you’re driving. I’m not doing nothing. It might look that way, but I’m not.”

“So there’s nothing wrong with you?”

“No, not really, except for the same thing that’s wrong with you,” she says wisely, walking away. “And someday, it’ll all work itself out.” She heads toward the kitchen.

“There’s some cobbler.”

“No, thanks. Just need my Diet Coke,” she says, using only the refrigerator light as a guide. “Do you want anything while I’m here?”

You shake your head, but realize she can’t see you. “No.”

“Are you fucked up again?” she asks, gazing into your eyes. As if she can tell if you’re high or not.

You nod and she smiles. “Gotta get back to this book.”

She moves heavily down the hallway carrying two liters of Diet Coke, leaving you alone with plants and a single goldfish.

Then you open the window.

2

You are in your denim jacket, pulling a way-too-small bottle out of the left pocket. You take another Valium and wash it down with Jägermeister. You have to be careful. This combination, it can kill.

You sit down on the yellow carpet that was once shaggy and watch the television, growing more fucked up. Beside the light from the television, the only other light is coming from the cheap lamp Gina bought in Mexico. You lie there, staring up, wondering why the roof of this place hasn’t caved in. While the rest of the trailer is deteriorating, the ceiling has remained fine. You wait, wondering if this will be the night it crumbles. Even a small chunk of plaster would be a start.

Floors are good things, it’s just getting up from them that you find to be the problem. And you realize you have forgotten about the aquarium. Maybe it even has more light than anything else in the house. This is what drives you to get up and turn off that covered-wagon lamp and the television. The light is right now, coming only from the aquarium.

You can’t believe that you have lived here so long. You had dreamed of a mansion on the edge of New Orleans or Malibu, not a trailer in Mississippi. You take another sip of the Jägermeister and stretch a little. Restlessness, you have discovered, is not a virtue.

Spread out on the floor near the couch, you think about Gina in that room past the kitchen, waiting for her life to suddenly become good. Now that you barely speak to each other, staying married is just one of those things that you do. Gina was like that even in college. You knew that she would be. You were the leaver. You’d be the one to break her heart. But instead of doing it in one fell swoop, years ago, you have turned it into a lifetime departure. You wonder what it must be like for her, watching someone slowly burn away.

Now that all of the pills and drink have kicked in, you find yourself able to breathe. Things in the living room become strange in the light, larger than they actually are. Everything is doubling and tripling in size. But you’re not so fucked up that you don’t realize that it’s all in your head. In fact, you’re only halfway to where you want to be tonight.

More than anything else, the light from the fish tank illuminates the other side of the room, across from the sofa. The shadows of the bubbles dance along the wall. Still you can see the encyclopedia, which goes from A to AC, and realize that it isn’t balancing the couch as well as you thought it was. That’s when you turn and look at the trees and realize that they are not just big, but that they’ve overtaken the room. And that’s why you freeze.

You know the best thing to do is to go to sleep, but you’re too wired, even considering everything that’s in you. You have to stay awake, just in case. Just in case of whatever.

When you came back from the war, you said that you’d never end up like this. But during these moments, when you’re high, you slip back in time. It seems like only ten minutes have passed since you were shot, since you were young. At this moment, it could be 1969 or 1970, or later and later, or earlier and earlier. These are the things that you think about when you are perfectly fucked up and perfectly alone.

In the kitchen you find a butcher knife in the drain board. You don’t want to open and close any drawers or cabinet doors and awaken Gina or Lula.

In the living room, you begin to cut the large plant you hate so much. And then cut a little more and then you stop about halfway, leaving bits of strong green against a dying yellow. Definitely enough for Gina to notice in the morning. Everything is small again, or at least back to its normal size. Even the front door. You take your flannel shirt even though you want to feel the air at night. When you open the front door, you realize that your tolerance is increasing again. You feel no pain, but you’re not as fucked up as you could be. Still, you hold back from taking anything else. Tonight, you are determined to stop before being stopped.

You walk down the steps and it is like doing some sort of weird dance that you feel completely in control of, knowing it is graceful in its own strange way. Knowing that if you keep doing it long enough, one of these nights it is going to lead to your resurrection.

3

You push the button on the front door of Jack’s Place and wait to be buzzed in. This is how it works here in this place that looks like a small brick house with crepe paper and a disco ball. It’s on the same highway where you had both of your wrecks. A curvy road which could send even a sober person into a deep ditch if they weren’t aware of the turns. You stand staring for quite a while at the cheap year-round Christmas lights which line the window. Part of you wants to turn around and leave, but finally the bartender recognizes you from beyond the glass door and buzzes you in.

You immediately take a seat at the corner of the main bar as Max, the bald bartender, dances your way. Something from Rocky Horror is on, and though you’ve always hated it, right now such things you can overlook. You know it will get better. It’s this hope that’s gotten you into trouble in the past.

“Whiskey.” That’s all that you say to him. He is all pierced and you wonder what it must be like for him to walk through the aisles of the stores in town, or even to go to the bank with his shaved head and thrice-pierced right ear. He is older than you and owns the place. You wonder if he’s making any money. Even though there are quite a few people here for a Sunday night, you know that most people are still scared to park their pickup trucks outside and come in.

The place smells only a little like a bar, not like the ones in New Orleans. This is more like a brick house with jukebox and dime-store decorations. It’s a retreat. But a place like this, in a town like this, is a little scary. It’s like camping outdoors, in a place where bears can come ravage your tent at any moment. Buy the whiskey, and the feeling of not being alone makes you feel braver.

You look around and see that there are many people here your age, none of whom you recognize. It just feels good to be here. Breathing is still difficult, but easier than at home.

The windows of the place are all covered with fake velvet curtains. There are even bars on them, to keep certain dangerous animals out. Each time somebody is buzzed in, you like the way the breeze feels from outside.

“You can handle this?” Max asks.

“Oh, yeah...”

“You know what, Gary, I was thinking. I will definitely know when you and your wife break up.”

“How?”

“You’ll start drinking beer.”

This isn’t funny to you at first, then you get it, so you laugh. And you think that he is laughing, too, but when you look up, he is at the other end of the bar, tending to others. Your laughter turns to a proud smile as you take a drink.

After a while, you feel ridiculous and lonely sitting at the bar. So you get up and begin to move around the place. It’s just big and tacky and open and poorly lit, like a Bingo Palace. In fact, you are sure that your mother dragged you and Gina here to play Bingo in the late seventies. None of you won.

There are booths against the back wall. That’s where you want to be. While everyone is checking specific people out, you sit in your corner booth and watch them all do what they do to get what they want. It’s embarrassing for you that at forty-five, you don’t entirely understand the whole scene. Not feeling comfortable in a gay bar is almost like going to a high-school prom alone.

There is a pool table nearby, electronic lottery machines; and despite that huge disco ball, nobody’s dancing. You can’t understand why there’s no one beneath the ball, flickering beneath its rotation.

The booth you have taken has an air conditioner next to it. Just one of those little window units. And you know it’s chilly outside, but you’re getting hot, so you reach over and turn it on low. There are paper streamers that blow from the sides of the vent. You sink into that ripped, red booth. In this place, especially in this booth, it is okay to be alone. Home.

Somebody plays something from a musical, and you hate musicals, so you have no choice but to get up and move to the jukebox. There are actually some people dancing now, but too near the booth that you feel is your own. You’re afraid that they’ll sit. If they do, you’ll have no choice but to take a seat on the floor beside one of the electronic slot machines. Home, indeed.

You motion to Max, dancing behind the bar in his way-too-tight black leather. He looks out for you because you talked your boss into giving him a discount on his carpentry work. He usually drives around Petulia in his convertible. Not to show off; just as a reminder to the town, and probably to himself, that he exists. “Remembering you have a voice in the South is important,” he once said to you, one of the few full quotations you have ever remembered. As you flip through the jukebox, you hope that one of those cute brave hearts out there dancing hasn’t played the whole soundtrack to this musical.

You go the bar and there is a group of younger people there, all dressed the same. Khakis and button-down shirts. They’re drinking wine. They are all good-looking, and while they don’t look exactly the same, it’s still like they are each the same person. Their hair is so short. They seem so dressed up to be out in a place like this on a Sunday night. You wonder why they aren’t in the French Quarter. These days, people must always feel the need to dress up. Each party is always potentially the last.

As you drink the enormous shot Max pours, you wonder if you’ll ever lose your hair, if you’ll ever look like him, if you’ll ever be him.

“You are beautiful!” Beauty? A hand is on your arm. It’s one of the khakied boys and since they are all so alike, you can’t tell which one has said it. Finally you realize it’s the one with the longish hair.

You pull away and nod and say “thank you” so softly that you are sure none of them hear you. You want to fuck one of them, just not enough to go through with it at the moment. It is sort of like with Gina, except this time you really want it.

You go to the bathroom for a Valium snack. On your way there, you hear someone begging for some Madonna to be played. You smile because you know that your selection will beat theirs to the air. You played Traffic. This is the wonderful thing about jukeboxes, finding a song that doesn’t belong in a particular setting.

In that small bathroom, there are things written all over the wall like “Call me, I’m fully broken in...” and dozens of phone numbers.

And there is a mirror. You grab both sides of the dingy sink and look into the mirror. Beauty? You wonder if it is possible for someone to think that you are as good-looking as Gina did at LSU. Though your hair is still thick and your body feels thin, you’re not sure if what you see is what exists. You know that the grayness will spread from your fingers and overtake your last youthful image. Since you know that’s what’s coming, you see an old man in the mirror, sure that’s what everyone else sees, too. At this moment, your eyes grow smaller, then big again, animated, as though someone is drawing them, then changing their minds about how they should be.

And you can’t stop going deeper into your own eyes. You see yourself, but don’t feel your body. You have stunned yourself with the way your image can change forms. Many people you’ve been appear in that mirror. First, you as a blood-stained soldier with the grimy wall behind you becoming a forest. Then, as a lost man in the French Quarter with your dick hanging out, a confused look enveloping your face. At one point, your image in the mirror has closed eyes, but you can still see yourself, passed out in a ditch somewhere along a deserted highway.

People come in and out of the bathroom. They look at you strangely, bump into you, try to strike up conversations, or yell at your for blocking the sink. But you are so taken with the dark images of yourself that you don’t completely hear or understand them. And you’ve lost all track of time, which is passing quickly. You don’t realize how urgently the night is moving, propelling you forward without your even knowing it. Though two hours pass, blacking out has never been so fast or colorful.

As you stand, gripping the sink, the door suddenly opens and makes a loud noise, shaking you from this state of awakened sleep. It happens so fast that you jump, coming to and recognizing who has entered. A safe animal has come into the tent. You are afraid at first. Then your eyes meet in the mirror and finally Will, a sheriff’s deputy, speaks. “I’ve always told you, Gary, that if I looked like you,” he says, “I wouldn’t worry about a thing.”

You turn around to this man who is holding out a hand. He is pretty handsome, maybe even more so than in high school, where he’d dropped out early after getting the cheerleading captain pregnant. “I won’t tell if you don’t,” he says, still holding out his hand.

When you shake his hand, you expect it to be stronger. On the right hand, the one you shake, there is this thing. Not just a sore, it goes beyond that. You know what it is. Purple lesions, purple hearts.

“Your secret is safe with me,” you say. Then you both pull away awkwardly and suddenly have the urge to hide your own hands. But you stop when you realize that he’s watching you do this. “I feel like we’re supposed to ask each other about our wives,” you joke, hoping it’s funny.

He shrugs. “What’s the point?”

You join him at the urinal to pee, neither one of you even looking below the other’s bellybutton. “I’m glad I ran into somebody I know. It’s very lonely out there.”

“Shucks, man,” he begins, “I was at the bar for the longest time. I gotta get goin’ though. Got work to do.”

“Are you on duty now?”

“Naw, in about an hour I go on.”

And your eyes hit again and you know he is a different kind of animal, not one that rips tents down. “I guess not,” you say.

You shake hands again, both of you too fucked up to worry about washing them.

“See ya.”

Before you can catch the door, it shuts, leaving you alone with a poster of a shirtless man in tight black pants. If he would step out of the poster, something sexual could happen. You’re not sure exactly of what, but something could occur.

You know that you are holding up well tonight because when you get back to the bar, Max pours you another drink. “Don’t fall too far off the wagon,” he teases.

The place is clearing out. No one is dancing and you see that the booth is still yours. All of your songs have ended. You missed them by losing yourself in the bathroom. Donna Summer is on. You hated disco in 1979, but somehow now it sounds all right. Almost good.

Sitting there, you watch the Budweiser clock tick away. This you find is so much better than watching infomercials all night long. So much better than sleep. Then a song comes on the jukebox that you were too sick of to play yourself. But you’re glad someone else did. “Just yesterday mornin’,” you hum along hoping nobody can hear you. This song takes you back, past Jackson Browne, past LSU, Gina, and American life in the summertime. Vietnam, 1969.

You are freezing by the air conditioner. The place is virtually empty now. Even the preppie kids are going away. They are so good to look at, and one of them has even played Janis Joplin. And the one that did, wants to stay. He is yelling at his friends. “I want to hear the rest of my fucking songs!” But you can see how he thinks that he is going to be left, so he goes with them. They leave like triplets, with Janis Joplin’s “Cry Baby” following them into the Southern night.

Someone over there in Vietnam had first turned you onto Janis Joplin’s music. And you used to disco dance to it before there was such a thing.

The only people in the bar at this point are the real alcoholics, five altogether. You are hunched over the table in your familiar way. Gina once said that when you sit like this you look like you are protecting yourself and letting your guard down at the same time. Always waiting for the attack. Even in the army, standing up straight was something you always fought.

In the darkness of the bar with your John Deere cap pulled low, you wonder if the other people in the place can hear your thoughts. Maybe they can’t see through the cap, maybe sliding further down in the booth helps. You’re glad that you’ve worn your flannel shirt. It is thick, hopefully nobody can penetrate it.

The disco ball is still spinning as you take your last two pills for the night. When you first came in, the ball was silver, now it is every color. The place is smelling more like a Bingo Hall now, with a ton of whiskey thrown in for all of the ladies who years ago sat around waiting for G-56. You wash the pills down with whiskey.

You’d first discovered whiskey, like Janis Joplin, in the army with your buddy Kevin. He was from New York of all places, and sometimes after you’d sucked each other off, you’d find ways to press your boots together in a way that only the two of you understood. Since he was from the city, you felt like a real hick around him sometimes. It was like he was so much stronger. That’s why you were surprised when he got hit.

People were yelling and dropping and firing, and you just stopped and knelt down beside him, not worrying about being hit. You know a person is dead when everything inside is sticking out and all over the ground. Like when your father first took you to skin a deer. You just watched as his beauty left him and turned to that fiery end-of-life stench that had become the incense of a day in the jungle. From his chest, you saw his ribs and you reached down and touched one. Bones. You wanted to touch his ribs some more.

Years later, when you told Gina, she thought that it was disgusting. But it was all that you had left of him. When blood gets on you, it stays, even after you wash it off. His feet were the only thing unscathed. Toe-tags.

You are still sitting there, hovering over your empty glass. Looking around, you see everything in the room become three. You are almost there. It is the only way to push yesterday further back. Gunned down.

In the corner booth, you are choking on all of this. Especially the memories and drugs and drink and the way the place keeps changing shapes. You want to stand, but either you grow smaller or the booth grows bigger. So you stay there.

The floor becomes closer. Darkness, as you know all too well, rises. The tile is cold. Home?

“Just yesterday mornin’,” you think you say again and again.

 

© 2006 Martin Hyatt - Contributor's Bio

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