I Shall Forever Remain an Amateur

A few readers have requested I post some more of my entry for National Novel Writing Month.  I definitely won’t be sharing the whole thing on here, but since there’s interest, I don’t see the harm in putting up a little more.

A caveat: I’m roughly 7,000 words (25 pages) into the novel, and I’m still not confident that it’s worth much of anything.  This isn’t false modesty.  I’m still figuring it out as I go, and whatever you read on here is, in every way, first draft material, scratched out in fits and starts over a couple hours each evening.  So keep that in mind as you read.  The first few pages can be found here, and this excerpt picks up straightaway.  Hope you enjoy.

*****

The street was as he remembered it, huge oaks on either side whose branches, in the summer, would meet overhead, causing the sun to tessellate on the pavement below, a shifting checkerboard of burnished light.  Even though Russell had never been to France, it reminded him for some reason of a Parisian boulevard.  In high school – to cultivate a sense of sophistication he thought was missing from the neighborhood – he took to lounging around outside his house in a beret, sipping Dr. Pepper from an espresso cup he’d stolen from K-Mart, and biting huge chunks off the end of a baguette.  His dad tolerated this with the resigned air of a parent much used to disappointment.  Cassie, his mom bought the baguettes.

Now, though, the bare branches reached toward one another, their spindly ends stretching and failing to make contact.  As Russell turned the corner at his parents’ – scratch that, parent’s – house, he noticed that the grass was long dead – killed off by the first frost that had surely struck weeks ago – but it was also long.  Like it hadn’t been mown at the end of summer.  It was a yearly tradition, that final mowing in late September or early October, a certain sign that the seasons were changing, the calendar ticking over from summer to fall.  It hadn’t happened this year.  The grass – brittle and brown – stood nearly knee-high.  Russell could picture it blowing in the late summer breeze, forgotten and supplanted by what was happening inside the house.

He turned into the driveway, feeling that old, familiar thud as the tires whacked up and then down over the uneven seam that separated driveway from sidewalk.  He had no sooner thrown the vehicle into park than his sister bounded out the back door.  Russell supposed it was possible that she had coincidentally been doing dishes at the kitchen sink and gazing out the window, but it was more likely that she had been waiting for him to arrive.  Sarah had always been the anxious one of the siblings.  Even as kids, she was the homework-doer, the checklist-maker, the one who insisted on being at band practice fifteen minutes early rather than run the risk of getting there two minutes late.  It was as though watching all of Russell’s mistakes growing up had granted his sister an unusual degree of paranoia.  She never smoked pot as a teen because she was confident it would cause her head to implode like a dying star.

But here she was, smiling at him as she shuffle-skipped toward the pickup, trying to constrain her excitement but only partially succeeding.  In the years that Russell had been in California Sarah had put on weight.  Where she had been too thin as a teen – neurotic about her weight and appearance like most teenage girls are, only amplified in Sarah’s hyper-sensitive case – she now looked, Russell observed, normal.  There was no other word for it.  She looked healthy, looked well-adjusted, looked like he’d hoped she would. [more here] And he could only imagine how he looked in her eyes.  He felt the same as when he’d left home at 26, but he could only imagine how he might look to her.  A little paunchy, a little gray, a little tired.  He wore glasses now, had grown out his beard, and, especially in the last year that he’d been without work, had taken an unhealthy liking to Gardetto’s snack food and beer.  He still felt 26 but imagined he looked like every one of his 34 years.

He swept all that away, though, as Sarah seized him in a hug.

“Assface!” she muttered into his shoulder.

“Hey, Dipshit,” he replied into the top of her head, the old pet name coming to him easily.

She broke the embrace but held onto him by the elbows, appraising him, soaking in the years of absence, the years of silence.

“What took you so long?” she asked, and of course there were multiple layers of meaning to that single question.

Russell didn’t know which layer to excavate first – the seven years in California with only a handful of phone calls, the missed birthdays, the fact that Mom had been sort of sick for three years and then really sick for one year and Russell still hadn’t visited – so he went with the easiest.

“Fucking Indiana cops,” he growled.  “2,500 hundred miles and I get a ticket a hundred from home.”

Sarah held his eyes for a moment longer, deciding whether or not to accept the boundary implied by his answer.  Then, a nod and another smile:

“Pigs,” she swore. “N.W.A. had it right.”

Russell broke away and turned to the bed of his truck, grabbing a navy blue duffel bag by the handle.  His breath plumed in the November air as he hoisted it.

“No no no no,” Sarah said, grabbing his wrist. “Trust me when I say you’re not ready for what’s inside.”

“What’s inside?” Russell asked.

Sarah moved around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. “Just … let’s go.”

 **

 “She’s gone.”

“Dad … what?”

“She’s gone, Russ.  She’s gone.”

Brain wheeling, trying to get the synapses to fire.

“Who, Dad?”

“Your mom, Russ.  Who do you think?”

Connection made.

“What do I … what do you need me to do?”

“Come home, Russ.  Now.”

           **

In the late 90’s the town had been taken over by sports bars.  They were in strip malls next to Fashion Bug or TJ Maxx or Payless Shoes. They all bore single-word, two-syllable names like Hummer’s and Joker’s and Cheater’s, and these names were illuminated in neon along with a “clever” logo: a bumblebee for Hummer’s; a harlequin dressed in motley for Joker’s; and – apparently displaying a faulty understanding of the English language – a cheetah for Cheater’s.   But the name on the outside didn’t matter, not really.  Inside, the bars were relentlessly anonymous in their uniformity: wall-mounted TV’s and sports memorabilia and waitresses dressed like referees.  Perhaps not coincidentally, these interchangeable drinking holes became hugely popular with Midwestern sports fans, and the bars’ similarity to each other was comfortable in the same way it’s comfortable that every Wal-Mart is set up on an identical floorplan.

Despite the town’s preference for homogenization, there was still room for the Brass Rail.  Nestled snugly between a jeweler’s and a men’s clothing store on the main drag, the bar was an Edgewood mainstay, and it was here that Sarah directed Russell.  It was, improbably for a small Midwestern town, tastefully decorated: dim lighting, dark wood, photos of pub scenes hanging on the walls.  Even though smoking had been banned in Ohio bars since 2006, the air still smelled strongly of tobacco, as though it had embedded itself in the grain of the mahogany bar that spanned the length of the main room.

Russell had spent many nights here in his early 20’s, drinking alone most of the time.  He would tuck himself away in a corner and try to write, putting away beer after beer until his pen seemed loaded with lead shot and the words on the page shimmered as though in a heat haze.  Sarah, who went away to college at 18 and never really returned, was less familiar with the Rail, but she still knew it was the only decent place in town to grab a drink.  Anyway, it beat trying to talk at Hummer’s while the next table noisily slurped their nuclear-orange buffalo wings and some drunken toolbox slurred his way through a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

It wasn’t quite 5:00 when Russell and Sarah arrived, and the bar was nearly empty.  They grabbed drinks and settled in at a table away from the action, if any action were eventually to transpire.  Russell took a sip of his Newcastle and cleared his throat.

“So, what’s –“

And Sarah’s face began to melt.  It started with a twitch of the lips, a moistness in the eyes, and suddenly it was as though her features were caught in a landslide, collapsing inward and downward, picked up and carried along in a wave of anguish.  Her shoulders rocked with sobs, but she made no sound.  Sarah had always been the considerate one, too, careful not to make anyone else feel uncomfortable.  Russell pulled his chair around to her side of the table, wincing as it squealed on the floorboards.  He put his arm around her quivering shoulders, unsure what to say.  Comforting people wasn’t his specialty.

“Hey,” he began, awkwardly patting at her shoulder with the palm of his hands.

“Russell, where have you been?” Sarah moaned.  She pulled away from his arm and turned to him, her face blotchy even in the dim light of the bar. “Do you have any idea what it’s been like?”

“I know.  I know I fucked up,” Russell stammered.

“That’s not even it, Russ.”  Sarah leaned in, her voice suddenly intense, grief vanished with the snap of a finger to be replaced by simmering anger. “It goes beyond fucking up.  Fucking up is forgetting Mom’s birthday or dropping your pants in the middle of a job interview.  You’re the older brother and you just walked away.”

“I had a job, Sair,” Russell protested, fighting the urge to put his hands up in defense. “I had to go, and once I was there it was hell to get away.  I wanted to come, especially –“ He faltered, dropping his voice. “Especially when she got sick.”

“So where were you in the last year? You lost your job months ago.  Why didn’t you come sooner?  Why did you leave it up to Dad?”

“How is he?” Russell asked quietly – concerned, but also anxious to change the topic.

“Oh, Russ,” Sarah said, and Russell was mildly concerned to see yet another mood shift: grief to anger to despair. “It’s terrible.  I’ve been helping to coordinate all the funeral arrangements, and he just watches TV.  Court shows, mostly.  I ask him a question and he just tells me I know best.  Like he can’t be bothered.”

Russell took a pull of his beer, digesting the information.  Jerry, their father, had never been a sentimental man.  He had always been involved in his children’s lives, but he was never a hugger, and Russell could scarcely recall any instances when his father had expressed love for him.  As Russell got older and his interests gradually moved toward art and music and film and other pastimes that didn’t involve balls or tackling people, he always had the sense that Jerry wished he could call a mulligan on his oldest son.  He never voiced it out loud, but it was this general feeling of dissatisfaction that had partially driven Russell from Ohio in the first place.  Jerry was the kind to suffer in silence, grimacing instead of shouting, so to hear that his mourning was taking place from a sedentary position was, frankly, not surprising.

“He’s grieving, Sarah,” Russell said.  “It takes different forms.  It’s the, you know, the whatsit.  The stages of loss.”

“Kubler-Ross,” Sarah finished for him, and shook her head.  “I know grieving, Russ.  But this is different.  It’s like he’s just running out the clock.  He sleeps in the chair, and sometimes he forgets to eat.”

“Does he talk about her?  Ever?”

“Mom?  No.  At least not that I’ve heard.  Dan and Spencer – you remember them?  From the office? – they drop by sometimes, so maybe he talks about her with them.  But not with me.  And you know the worst part?”

Russell shook his head, afraid of what would come next.

“I haven’t seen him cry.  Not once.  He just sits there in front of that fucking TV, and it’s like it’s all slipping away from him.”

Russell watched as Sarah slid her rum and Coke across the tabletop, hand to hand to hand to hand.  It left a trail of moisture on the polished wood surface, and Russell suddenly remembered how his mom had always made him use a coaster.  The strength of the memory was a punch to the gut and he swallowed hard.

“So … what?” he asked.  “What can I do?”

Sarah smiled ruefully. “I don’t know, brother.  It’s not like –“ She bit off her words and quickly looked up at Russell through squinted eyes.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.  “It’s cool.  It’s not like he and I were ever really on speaking terms.”

“Shit,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s cool,” Russell repeated.  Then: “When’s the funeral?”

“Day after tomorrow.  Viewing’s tomorrow night.”

“So what do we do in the next 24 hours?  Shake him from his stupor?  Stage an intervention?  Let him work it out on his own?”

Sarah knocked back the rest of her drink, ice knocking against her teeth.  She looked at Russell evenly. “How much help can I expect?”

“Jesus, Sarah – “

“It’s a fair question, Russ.” The anger was simmering again, just below the surface.  Sarah was stronger than Russell remembered her. “You split seven years ago.  Mom’s been – was – sick for most of that time.  Who do you think helped Dad take care of her in that time?  It sure as shit wasn’t you, big brother.  When Dad was at work I took her to chemo.  I fixed her meals when she was too weak to do it herself.  I was there at the end.  And you –“ She jabbed Russell in the chest with a finger, “weren’t.”

“Okay, okay,” Russell said, and this time he did raise his hands to ward off Sarah’s vitriol. “I’ll make up for lost time.  I will.” A pause.  “I’ll try.”

 **

“Come home, Russ.  Now.”

Fumble the handset back to the table.

Try to sleep, stare at the ceiling instead. A restless, rest-less, night.

Russell up at 6:00. No alarm, no need.

Coffee, toast, juice.  Drawers ransacked, closet raided, clothes haphazardly tossed in a duffel bag.  Time for folding later.

Armloads of CD’s swept into a larger duffel bag.

Downstairs to the pickup.  Palm trees nearly invisible against the mountains.  A faint band of pink just tingeing the black velvet scrim of the sky.

Clothes duffel in truck bed, CD duffel on the seat beside him.

Gun the engine, hit the road.

The 101, south to L.A.  Leg 1.

*****

Current listening:

The Go! Team – Rolling Blackouts (2011)