Chapter 35
It was already Friday the 21st of September. We would be leaving for London in three more days. I thought about how quickly this matter-of-fact journey of just setting out of Huntington Beach to take a huge risk and move to Europe, our crossing the map of America first in a mad zigzag stretch to visit all of the multiple acquaintances of life, had abruptly come to an end.
When I awoke in the morning, I was madly hungover. I hated feeling this way. I thought on how this addiction bred the bitter morning withdrawals like this. “It’ll get you when you aren’t looking,” Frank said. “A drink here, a drink there, and before you know it, you’re falling off the stage of life and wondering, ‘How did that happen?’ Just like that, you’re gone.”
But I still wanted to be the rock star in the night somehow. I needed to drink, I wanted to drink, I continued to convince myself. My head was pounding now though; it was crying out, hurting from the lack of hydration that the alcohol had usurped from every cell during the long hours of the night. I really had to find a way out of the pain of it all. Downstairs in my parents’ kitchen, I found some temporary solace by hitting the orange juice hard. I drank lots of it. Some of it fell out the sides of my mouth as I swigged from the bottle. I passed it to Decky and wiped my mouth with my sleeve as Decky began swigging lots of it too. We both finished the whole freaking gallon of it.
Later in the day, Luke and I ran seven miles into Kenwood, trying to shake off the rest of our demons, trying to sweat it all out. We absolutely had to feel good again, for my friend Billy and his fiancée Christina’s big wedding was this weekend. During our run, we promised ourselves not to drink for the whole day. We’d stick around the house, we said.
That evening when my father came home, we had a massive kitchen table discussion just like old times.
A big wooden antique bench with a mirror attached to it (just like the evil queen’s from Snow White) sat out in the back shed just beyond the opened paneled door in the kitchen. The bench was one of the pieces of furniture that had been left behind by Old Man Woodward. In fact, there were a lot of really cool antiques that he had left behind when we had moved there in 1960 ’cause there wasn’t any place for Woodward’s antiques where he was going. You see, Woodward died in that house.
From my seat at the kitchen table, I looked over as my mother closed the back shed door. A large, single sheet International Harvester calendar hung the length of the door. Frank worked for International Harvester and always hung that sheet so he could dream and wonder about the days ahead, to see a whole year laid out before his eyes. He always had his two-week vacation at Paradise Beach circled in July; that was what he lived for. And, of course, there were all of the three-day weekends and holidays circled too. As I sat there, I just looked at that whole door that was filled with 1984. The calendars from years before had come and gone, all of them with those two weeks circled, practically the only two weeks in the whole year that really mattered to Frank.
Schnopsie, the crazy gray miniature schnauzer, was penned behind a childproof gate that separated the kitchen from the pantry. He always barked at intruders; he barked at us and tried to get at us as we talked that night, turning his head sideways as he lunged over the top of the little gate. I talked on and ignored him, and this really pissed him off. He had drawn blood on me once before, so I dared not ever try to be his friend again. But my father loved him, understood him, and openly admitted that Schnopsie’s aggressive nature must have had something to do with how he had been bred. Something must have gone awry with the breed. Miniature Schnauzers were supposed to be gentle dogs. And what were they to do with him now anyway? Frank and Theresa surely couldn’t give him up, for no one would want him; he might end up at the pound.
“Imagine the three of you trying to retell the story of your trip in thirty years. I bet you that your stories will all be very different,” Frank said.
“Kind of, I guess,” I answered.
“Yeah, everybody is looking at the same experience from different angles,” Luke affirmed him.
“What about the New Testament, then?” Frank asked. He had to get that in.
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Peter wrote their own accounts of Jesus’ life in their own books thirty years after Jesus died. Isn’t it remarkable that their stories were so similar?”
Frank had said it before, endlessly. I remembered those kitchen table arguments over the years, and he would always end it with this, for he knew that this was the only thing that I couldn’t come up with a good argument against. How could a handful of people write the exact same story thirty years later?
“I want to bring attention to the fact that Mike has already cheated on his thirty-year story, Mr. Hogan, because he has been writing it ahead of time. He has been taking notes the whole way across country!” Decky said aloud. Frank laughed.
“Did you know that Jesus was the first nonviolent revolutionary?” Luke said, quoting to Frank something Stephen Stills had said on the 4 Way Street album.
With that, Schnopsie snapped; he lunged half of his body over the two-foot high child gate before falling backward onto his two hind legs in a convulsive spill in the slippery pantry. The dog bounced back up and turned his head sideways to chop again at all of us. He was bedeviled now, a feral animal that needed to be calmed. Luke tried to calm him by reaching his open-palmed hand over the top of the gate, but Schnopsie seized the moment and lashed at his outstretched hand, immediately drawing blood. Luke pulled his arm back over the gate in a snap while Frank jumped up from his seat at the table to run over to them.
“Bad dog! Bad, bad dog!” Frank snarled at Schnopsie, while my mother jumped the gate to grab a wet cloth from the pantry so she could treat Luke’s poor bleeding hand. From the ball of his hand, blood rolled off Luke’s wrist as he raised it perpendicular to his body. It dripped on the kitchen floor. My mother cleaned the wound quickly with the damp rag and then dressed it with some Neosporin-type ointment that was in the pantry first aid kit and finally bandaged it all up. Schnopsie cowered in the corner. Something must have gone awry with the breed, they said.
After a while when things calmed back down, Sully came to our back door to pick up my sister Kate. We had planned earlier that day to all head up to Sully’s mother’s house which was a mile away, up by the Christian Hill reservoir on the top of the hill. Frank and Theresa would go with us too. It was a tradition; we’d go up there for coffee and dessert on Christmas night and other special occasions. And on this last night of a calendar summer, we celebrated at Sully’s mother’s house with a great feast of Boston crème, lemon meringue, apple and cherry pies as we drank tea and coffee and talked about Luke’s bandaged hand and everything in the world.
After it all ended, we stuck to our promise and all went back to the house on Eighteenth, for there would be no partying for the three of us tonight. We desperately needed a full day of recovery, for Billy and Christina’s wedding warm-up was going to be Saturday morning up at Gage Field.
My apple crate of favorite albums that I had shipped from Ingrid’s in distant Newport Beach now rested by the old turntable in the parlor. Before bed, I leafed through the whole album collection slowly, contemplating what I should play. My fingers landed at first on Wings over America and then carefully lifted the cover of the turntable. I pulled the large vinyl disc out of its dust jacket. With the pushing of a button, the stylus jumped up and jerked over, then dropped down into place and slowly ran the groove of “Picasso’s Last Words” followed by Paul Simon’s classic interpretation of “Richard Cory.”
Edwin Arlington Robinson was one of my favorite American poets. As I listened to Simon’s lyrics, I marveled at how he had so cleverly taken the poetry of Robinson and put it to this music. Paul Simon changed the poem ever so slightly, adding his own verse, a crisper, modern picture of the magnate that Robinson had envisioned. And poor old Richard Cory . . . In the end, money didn’t have one blessed thing to do with the happiness that he sought. And just like that, he was gone.
Edwin Arlington Robinson told us:
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.