The Inevitable

I don't know what I was thinking buying this Tony Bahama shirt.  Holy shit.  I'll get to that.  But here is more Hillbilly Holiday.  This is my cousin's daughter.  She is petite, a pocket model as they say.  I was sitting with her cousin, her father's sister's boy, Thanksgiving night.  He picked up her phone and started looking through her pictures hoping (as we all do) to find something wonderfully hideous, something illicit and incriminating and fun.  He didn't, so he went to the text messages.  There he found all of that and more.  In true horror, he began to read them to me.

"Why are you reading that?  She's eighteen.  What do you think she's doing?"

Player is a dichotomy, a big, sweet kid who likes to run with criminals and felons.  It is in the blood, really.  Not his fault.  But his being shocked by his cousin's texting was unnerving.  He is too much like me in some ways.

Later, sitting in the kitchen, we saw his mother come in from the grocery store.  The first thing she pulled out of the bag was a pack of egg noodles.

"Uh-oh," he said.  "That doesn't look good.  I guess we're having turkey soup tomorrow night," he said with total resignation.  Player is old enough to be on his own, but his mother and father let him stay in the house, stay up all night, come home at dawn and sleep all day, and they feed him to boot.  He does a few lawns each week and gambles at the Indian casino about an hour away.  I'm pretty sure he sells drugs from time to time.  He is one of my favorites.  He is funny.  It goes a long way.  And he is street wise.  He knows everything that goes on below the radar.  He has friends that collectively can get you anything.  It is his AK in the pictures.  His glock, too.

Later, after smoking up plenty, he stood before the open refrigerator peering in for a long, long time.

"This place sucks," he said.  "There's nothing to eat."

I chuckled to myself.  "What do you want?" I asked him.

"I don't know."

"Hell, man, that's what's wrong with YOU.  YOU don't know what you want.  Close the fucking door and look at me.  LOOK-AT-ME.  What do you want?"

"I don't know.  Something sweet."

"What?"

"I don't know.  Peanut butter, maybe."

"??????"

"Maybe I want Reese's Peanut Butter Cups."

"There you go.  Now. . . go get them."

Shit.  He's twenty-four.  But I get it.

Now this fucking shirt. . . .

I drove my mother back this afternoon.  Traffic was bad, so it took about an hour longer than normal.  It was O.K., though, in my new ride.  We were fine.  And M.O.M. likes talking to me.  So we talked over all the things that we saw and heard and decided we were well situated as things go.  And I decided that for Christmas, I was going to buy her all the Premium channels the cable company offers.  For the year.  She was happy.

On the way home, I got a text.  It was from a girl who--I think--dissed me when I was in St. Pete a few weeks ago.  It is O.K.  I mean, she doesn't owe me anything.  She is young and beautiful, and I am very sensitive to how things appear.  And I don't want her to think that I am dogging her.  I don't know if I ever told you this (yes I do), but I have never asked a girl out in my life.  The reason for this is that I can't stand rejection and don't wish to be seen as someone desperate, sad, lonesome, pitiful, or blue.  O.K.  Blue I can take.  Not the other.

But Gorgeous texted and said she could meet up, so I rearranged a few things in order that I could, too, thinking all the while that at the last moment, the situation would change.  She was a champ, though, and we met late in the afternoon.  And so after showering all the hillbilly stink that I could off my body, I put on my new Tony Bahama shirt.  Hmm, I thought.  It doesn't look as good as it did in the store.  Fuck it, I thought.  I am going to wear it.

Gorgeous showed up and was just so.  And I. . . I was in a Tony Bahama contraption.  Truly, it is not hideous, but I looked like. . . like. . . like. . . an old guy trying to be comfortable.  I wanted to burn the fucking thing off my body.  I mean. . . I don't need any help being old.

We sat outside at a hip cafe in a funky part of town two blocks from my studio--and it was empty.  Dead.  I thought we were the only two around, but just before the food arrived, a fellow I have known vaguely for a long time walked up.

"How's it going."

He's not as old as I, but still, he was making me look. . . .

"Fine.  Fine."  I saw him looking at Gorgeous.

"You still selling?"

"Sure."

"You still living on the lake?"

"No. . . .  I just got divorced."

He had been married for a long time to a woman much too pretty for him, and he knew it.  They had two kids, but he was always trying to make her happy.  It was obvious.  And, of course, I told him.

"Well, I'm sorry.  That's terrible.  But that's been coming since you got married, hasn't it?"

He just grinned.

I freeze up in situations, and I swear to god I couldn't remember his name on a bet.  So I never introduced him to Gorgeous.  I just kept talking.

"Gorgeous, before I was married, my soon-to-be wife and I met up one Christmas Eve in front of this restaurant.  We had been in a bit of a tight spot, but when we met, we hugged and kissed like fire.  And when we looked up, the people inside were all standing and cheering.  We went in and ordered champagne, and soon, others did, too.  More people showed up, and though the bar was closing, it stayed open.  We knew the owner and everyone was happy.  The next year, we told people to meet us there, and after we were married, it became a tradition. And the celebration grew.  And for years, people would meet here at day's end on Christmas Eve t and order champagne and make the owner a lot of Christmas money.  And then we would all go back to our house where there was food and a fire in the fireplace and plenty to drink.  And later, drunk as skunks, we would pile into cars and drive through the streets of our fabulous neighborhood with its miles and miles and miles of street-lining luminaries at five or ten miles per hour.  It was hallucinatory and magical.

"But like my friend here," I said, jerking my thumb to my now divorced pal, "things went bad.  And the next year, full of Xanax, I started a new tradition of Christmas Eve orphans drinking late into the night.  And that celebration grew, too, over there on the Boulevard where only one bar remained open for such as us.  And the crowd there grew, too.  And that is where I'll be this Christmas Eve, with my buddy here," again jerking my thumb towards the fellow whose name I could not quite remember.  "And it will be a swell time."

My buddy said he had to go.  Where?  Why?  He couldn't really have had anywhere to go.  Ask me.  I know.

So it was just Gorgeous and me alone again, and just then the baked brie and fruit arrived.  It was a lovely night, one made for romance, but we were not romance and I was wearing a Tony Bahama shirt and somehow fell into the cadence of someone wizened by time giving life advice.  I heard myself, and I knew that when you hear yourself, you are in irrevocable trouble.  I was.

But she was lovely and polite, and she told me about her new boyfriend and how she had fallen for him, and I was happy for her.

"And you?"  she asked me.  "Are you happy?"

"Oh--well, I'm not unhappy.  I mean. . . I'm not happy. . . but I'm not unhappy."

And it was true.  Happy is for the young and the very young, I think.  Then it is something else.

"You are 'melancholy,'" she said to me.

"Yes, melancholy, that's true.  I've always been.  I'm melancholy and contemplative and introspective. . . "

She interrupted me.

"And observant."

That was good.  She was observant herself, I guessed.

"Yes. . . observant."

And then it was getting dark and she had much need to go.  She had to drive an hour and a half before she was home.  And so we walked back to the cars talking about this and about that.  And then we hugged, said the inevitable, and she was gone.

It was getting dark, the stars just beginning to twinkle in the sky.  And gazing up at them, all the resolutions of the holidays began to fade away.  What were they, I tried to remember?  What was it that seemed so important to do?  But as always, those certainties faded into obscurity never to be recalled again, or at least not until the next time.  And the heaviness of it all fell upon me with the sinking temperatures and the growing dampness and despair.  What was changing?  Oh, things were changing alright, I thought, feeling the stupid luxury of the expensive Tony Bahama shirt against my skin.  "How does that feel," I asked myself?  "How does that feel now?"