My work-in-progress. Although, by this point, I’ve made up my mind that it isn’t entitled either Such Unfortunates or Akronites Autonomous. It’s actually only entitled Akronites Autonomous:
Akronites Autonomous
A hatred of commercials kept Lucia’s radio tastes left of the dial. She flipped through her presets while driving home after the Barberton Monday Night meeting. WKSU had set into all night classical music. WCPN aired their civic programming, some roundtable discussion on environmental regulatory reform, dry material reserved for odd hours on weekday nights. WSTB blared its usual mix of nu-metal and pop punk that passed as the “modern rock alternative,” by Northeast Ohio standards. She switched the radio off.
Sure, the drive-thrus sold other things: candy, condoms, potato chips, lottery tickets, newspapers, cigarettes. Some drive-thrus were bays annexed to the sides of Speedways and Circle Ks. Other drive-thrus were independent operators, thin buildings with open garage doors on opposite ends. A car could pull in through the back bay and stop inside. Shelves and cooler cases lined the walls. The main product, of course, was alcohol. Beer. Wine. Malt Liquor. Whiskey and vodka too, but it was the diluted stuff, the 40-proof kind that came in plastic bottles like the ones used for off-brand mouthwash. Drive-thrus, a phenomenon not unique to Akron, but something Lucia rarely saw replicated outside her hometown. She pulled through Rocky’s drive-thru for a pack of Camel Turkish Royals.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, it was often said a person’s best thinking brought them into the room. “My best thinking got me here.” It was not meant as the same preemptive common sense of dental check-ups or rotating tires. Alcoholics considered their own minds dangerous territory. “When I’m in my own head, I’m behind enemy lines,” alcoholics often said.
Joan Vollmer.
Stopped at a light and waiting to turn, Lucia held the fresh pack of smokes up to her face. During the marathon drives of years past, she’d become quite deft at tearing the cellophane, sliding open the top, pulling out the foil, spitting it to the side, finally extracting a cigarette between her lips, and doing it all with her mouth, while her dominant hand clutched the wheel and steered.
It’d been a deliberate detour made for sentimental reasons to get her Turkish Royals from Rocky’s. When she was 19, word got out that if Rocky – a pudgy 30-something who gelled his hair back in spikes and wore a thin necklace high over his collarbone – was working, he didn’t card girls “as long as you’d be cool about it.” He always brown-bagged her bottles of Barefoot Bay or Yellowtail, anticipating they’d be drunk under cover of night in soccer fields or playgrounds or other places where 19-year-old girls shouldn’t be caught with an open container. Once, he even tossed in a complimentary nugget of weed. It was dog shit, papery with lots of seeds, but she’d appreciated the gesture. Another time, he’d given her a free bump. She wasn’t as familiar with the White Lady then. Rocky’s fingers were curled as if holding a cup. His arm extended over the counter, and past the driver’s side rolled down window. “Go ahead and sniff.” He pressed his thumb against her upper lip. “Through your nostrils. A quick inhale.”
The traffic light turned green. Lucia lit her Turkish Royal and made a left onto Barber Road. The cigarette clamped between curled lips, she exhaled in slow leaks of smoke dripping from her nostrils. A rig hauling a tanker-trailer came up fast from behind. Its high beams bounced off the rearview mirror and reflected onto the passenger seatback.
In AA, some people claimed they’d been sicker sober than they ever were in the throes of addiction. “I was sicker sober than I ever was out there drinking and using.” One speaker, in his lead at the Fairlawn meeting, gave his version of hell as “when you feel all the pain you’ve ever caused others all at once, that’s hell.”
Zelda Fitzgerald.
Lucia flicked her cigarette butt out the window. It floated down in a corkscrew tumble and landed in the center of the lane. A stubborn cherry clung to the filter and trailed a comet of sparks as the butt bounced end over end. Suction from the approaching rig lifted it under the axel.
I do not believe in hell as the place of the hereafter where the wicked suffer eternal punishment. Hell is a state of being. Hell is a condition of heightened perceptions and acute awareness. I know all of this from first-hand experience. I am not hell. I am a masochistic voyeur. I experience hell because I’m doomed to watch it forever and ever.
Ada Lovelace.
Lucia didn’t know the rig behind her was hauling a tanker-trailer, but she knew it was some kind of semi. She also didn’t know the tanker it hauled was filled with petroleum. The tossed cigarette butt bobbed along under the length, and sizzled loose a tobacco shard that sailed through a wisp of vapor leaking from a defective valve.
The trailer exploded like a big pipe bomb, hatching bilious fire as its sides shot molten arrows over the shoulder. The driver, instantaneously set ablaze, hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, and the blast jettisoned him out of the upended rig. Acrid smoke engulfed Lucia’s car, receding as a black swirl over the hatchback as she accelerated. Torso and limbs blazing, the driver landed on her hood, rolled over the windshield, and slid off the passenger side. There was still time enough to make it home, take a quick shower, and be in bed by eleven o’clock. The driver, a phantom fireball, thrashed across the lane and finally collapsed in a ditch.
Lucia Joyce.
None of what just happened actually happened. I made it all up. Or, I mean, all of this actually happened. I saw it with my own eyes. Or. Maybe. Oh, I don’t know. Never mind. Don’t listen to me. I was drunk most of the time. Be patient if this comes out a little disjointed and hard to follow, but everything you need to know about Lucia Lovelace O’Malley can be summed up in her namesake and other namesakes her parents considered. So here it is. This is how it goes, but don’t let anyone tell you it just happens. It takes work, conditioning, endurance.
the Lost Project is entitled as such because its existence is meant to be experimental and impermanent. Some definitions of Lost: “having wandered from the way; uncertain as to one’s location.” Which is to say this narrative is meant to be wandering. Its story and plot points are uncertain. “Bewildered or ill at ease.” Which is to say that this is a story of bewilderment, meant to put both the writer and reader ill at ease. Project is defined as “a proposal of something to be done; plan; scheme.” Which is to say this work is little more than a proposal, a plan, a scheme.
I drove home from work while I listened to Marco Warman, host of National Public Radio’s afternoon news program The World. Marco Warman always opened his show by saying, “Hi, I’m Marco Warman, and this is The World.” This is the world.
The final story was about a graduate student who had studied abroad in some Eastern European Country. Maybe it was the Ukraine. His thesis was about government corruption. He disappeared. His body was never found. About the young graduate student, Marco Warman said, “Those close to the student describe him as being both a novice and a know-it-all. Which, we all know, can be a dangerous combination.”
A dangerous combination? Maybe. What about a serendipitous combination? I listened to Marco Warman’s The World every day. The program aired at the same time I drove home from work. I’m a graduate student. My writing that lampoons the long sacred Alcoholics Anonymous could be on par with investigating corruption. A novice and a know-it-all. Was Marco Warman trying to send me a message?
Gem was a beautiful young woman from the Philippines. Well, actually, when she came to work at the Comfort Hotel, the same hotel I worked at, she had come from New Orleans, but she wasn’t actually from New Orleans. She was from the Philippines. But, really, she had come from Saudi Arabia to New Orleans and then came to work at the same hotel as me. She was actually from the Philippines though. Here’s what I’m trying to say: Gem’s family was from the Philippines where she grew up, then for a while she lived in Saudi Arabia – for god only knows what reason – and then, after Saudi Arabia, she lived in New Orleans. She had extended family who lived in Rittman, Ohio. Her uncle worked at our hotel as the evening maintenance man. And then finally – again for god only knows what reasons – her family thought it would be in her best interest to marry an apostolic, quit her job at a five-star hotel on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and then move to Rittman and live with her new apostolic husband.
I liked Gem. Gem didn’t have a driver’s license. Her family had to bring her back and forth from work. It was either her in-laws or her extended Philippine family who picked her up and dropped her off.
I saw it once. Gem’s mother-in-law came to pick her up. The mother-in-law drove a blue minivan. Her white hair was pulled up in a bun and she wore a long black skirt and a sweater that matched the color of the minivan. Gem smiled and almost skipped out through the automatic doors.
I couldn’t help myself. Every day, while Gem was working, I was drawn to the front desk. She wore a magnificent watch.
“I like your watch,” I told her.
She smiled. “Thank you.”
The phone rang. Throughout our conversation, it seemed the phone was always ringing. In fact, if I were asked, I’d say the phone rang an unusual amount of times while I was talking to Gem. It also seemed that what made the phone ringing even more frightening and unusual, was that a majority of the time, whoever was on the other end of the line hung up without saying a word. I was sure of it.
The phone rang. “Thank you,” Gem said, “for calling the Comfort Hotel. How may I direct your call . . .?” Gem hung up.
“Who was it?”
“No one was there.” She smiled. Gem had a smile like blue beams of light.
“When will you get your driver’s license?”
“Soon. I have my – what do you call it – permit?”
“Temps, driver’s permit? Temporary license?”
“I have that.”
“Soon enough, you’ll be able to vote.”
She rolled her eyes. Gem had long raven black hair that grew down to her trim waist. “I don’t even want to think about it. I don’t even want to vote.”
I had a rag and a spray bottle of all-purpose cleaner. If anyone came by, I’d spray the granite counter of the front desk and wipe it down with the rag, so it looked like I was working. “Who are you going to vote for?”
She smiled at me, but didn’t answer my question. The phone rang again. She answered it. I wiped down the granite top of the front desk while she talked. She hung up.
“Who was that?”
“I don’t know. It was someone weird. I couldn’t understand.”
I didn’t like how the phone kept ringing. I also was somewhat frightened that the calls were inconclusive and suspicious. “Who are you going to vote for?” I asked. “Never mind. The election is months away. I was just curious what your choice would be, not just as an American citizen, but as a newcomer to the country.”
“I don’t even know if I am going to vote.”
“Ohio is a battleground state. Whoever wins Ohio wins the election, but things are usually evenly matched and a pretty close call between Democrats and Republicans here.”
The phone rang. I turned to walk away and do some other task, like vacuum the hallways. Gem had her conversation and then hung up the phone. I didn’t even bother to ask who it was on the other end of the line or what they wanted. Once Gem hung up, I turned back to her and asked, “Are you just going to vote for who your husband tells you to vote for? Never mind. That was a rude question. Forget I asked it. Just remember whatever your decision is, it’s between you and the ballot. Vote or die. Ohio is a battleground state, after all.”
The phone rang. Gem broke off our conversation to answer it.
That afternoon, while I was driving home from work and listening to my favorite radio station, 91.3, The Summit, the song “Girls Talk” came on. That was not part of The Summit’s usual playlist. I listened to The Summit all the time and I’d never heard them play that song. Either the song became louder or my ears became sharper. Noises of the wind coming through my car and the music playing on the radio were crisp and clear and amplified. My hands gripped firmly on the steering wheel and the music became louder during these lyrics: “I can’t tell you / the things you want to hear / so I guess you’ll have to learn / to play it by ear / GIRLS TALK!”
I’d managed to keep up with the biweekly packets of writing sent to the Mentor. Fifteen to twenty pages of my work-in-progress, Akronites Autonomous, about Lucia Lovelace O’Malley. Of course, I was sane. I was thriving in my schoolwork.