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In a masterful letter to Testing Unlimited, I questioned the wisdom of state governments mandating standardized tests for first graders to show how smart their kids are, so that the state receives more federal money…for more testing. I also felt it was a waste of money to pay college-educated people $10 an hour to analyze the spelling of “cat.” At the nearly-illegible end, I wrote a filthy word and suggested that one of their $13-hour PhD test scoring supervisors read the word to the Board of Directors to see if they could spell it. I signed the letter with a scrawl, stuffed it into an envelope, addressed it, stuck three or four stamps on it, and went outside to the mailbox.
The trailer park had looked good when I moved there in 1989, but now the grass was sporadically mowed, the rocks along the drive were displaced, the dumpster was overflowing with garbage, and many of the residents had the haggard look of people who worked underpaid full-time jobs, then went directly to their underpaid part-time jobs so they could afford their $600-a-month lot rents and gas for their 15-year-old cars.
The mailbox was stuffed mostly with junk mail, on top of which was a letter from my folks. I pulled the glasses to the bottom of my nose to read the letter. It seemed that it cost Mom and Dad a few thousand dollars to convert the front yard from grass to gravel. But, it would save the cost in water many times over. It seemed that Los Angeles was in the midst of yet another drought.
Under my folks’ letter was a bill from Harry Morton, M.D. Usually, I would not even have opened the bill, but a perverse desire for undesirable stimulation—the gremlins hate boredom—prompted me to tear open the envelope. The first thing I saw was the figure $4,579.92, the cost of a CAT scan I had undergone six months before. My general practitioner had thought I needed a chest X-ray because of a chronic cough and had sent me to a cardiac specialist, who in turn remanded me to the CAT scanner because I had moderately high blood pressure, that was treated with an ACE inhibitor.
I tried to tell everyone that the cough was caused by the ace inhibitor, which I had stopped using. The cough had stopped, too. But my GP insisted that I needed the chest X-ray, and the cardiologist insisted that I also needed a CAT scan, even though the stress test electrocardiogram and the other tests all came out normal.
“You can’t put a price tag on your health,” the cardiologist admonished with a used car salesman’s smile.
“Relax, I just called your insurance company. They’re covering it!” the medical assistant chimed in.
My insurance paid $77.64.
The results? High blood pressure controlled by medication, which caused a $4,502.28 cough.
Clutching the mail to my chest, I walked up the jagged path to my front door and tossed everything on the floor with the rest of the debris. Craving the hair of the dog that bit me, I opened the pantry, shooed away the cockroaches, opened a fresh can of chicory-laced coffee, and made a pot, black as coal, just the way I liked it. Stay at home, hunker down, drink coffee, and avoid all nerve-provoking stimulation. That was the ticket.
But I kept looking through the mail anyway. Next in the pile was another unwelcome letter from Marta, a hippie I’d met years ago while at SIU. Out of the blue, after almost 40 years, a series of letters from Marta had started arriving that summer. I’d never replied to any of them. The letters absolutely baffled me, but I read them anyway because they were so…interesting. This one was absolutely fascinating:
Dear Peter,
I trust everything is cool with you. Hopefully you and the instrument have reached an epiphany, and your life is in the groove by now.
Do you remember what we talked about while at SIU; that science will solve your problems? Well, if not science, maybe magic!
Hah, Hah.
If life has changed for you, you’ll know what I mean. But if it hasn’t, then you won’t know what the f--- I’m talking about. In any event, write me. I’d love to hear from the sanest guy I‘ve ever met.
Your friend,
Marta
I didn’t remember talking with Marta for more than two seconds, only to say “Hi” and “Bye” in the cafeteria at college, forty years ago. For the first time, I looked at her return address, which was illegible except for “Carbondale” and the first letter of her last name, which was an M. I took her cryptic letter and threw it at my new mail drop: the floor. By then, I had lost patience with tearing open envelopes, and threw the rest of the unopened mail on the floor as well.
I checked the front door to make sure it was locked. Although I had little tolerance for routine, I had even less tolerance for surprises. I didn’t answer the door unless I was expecting someone, and made sure I was expecting no one. Ditto for answering the phone and returning emails. I figured that if I didn’t read, see, or hear bad news, then the gremlins would have no tools to torture me.
I also chose to do without making decisions, even small decisions, such as how to clean my trailer, which caused me to be “conflicted,” according to the head shrinkers. A dust mop had been leaning against the wall in the bedroom for more than a year because, for the life of me, I couldn’t decide where to start the cleaning project. Should I vacuum the carpet first? The carpet was covered with stains, coffee grounds, eggshells, dirt, paper and what looked like dried-out olives. But to get to the rug I’d have to pick up all of the clothes off the floor, and they needed to be washed, didn’t they? But if I threw them in the car they’d get mixed up with the clean clothes in the back seat. So to get around that, I decided to leave the clothes where they were, and wash them individually in the bathtub as necessary.
And what about the tub? I hadn’t cleaned that since before the water heater had broken that past winter. Maybe washing the clothes there would clean the tub, but that left the filthy sink and toilet. In what order should I clean them? Until I figured that one out, they’d have to stay dirty. On a positive note, I considered the oven and the stove to such messes that they would be impossible to clean, so I didn’t have to decide which to clean first. And the refrigerator really didn’t need to be cleaned, either, because it had died three years ago, and anything in there was safely out of my sight as long as I didn’t open the door.
Hiring someone to fix up the place for me was out of the question, not only because I couldn’t afford it, but because another human being walking into my squalor would pin the needle of my anxiety meter deep in the red.
It had taken five years for the parallel deterioration of my home and my mind to progress to this point: I was now living and thinking like a street person.
Nevertheless, through my mental malaise I dimly realized that human relationships keep a person sane. But that depends on the people one is interacting with. Other than Ronald, my “friends” were intimate with their own personal gremlins.
There was Bob, for instance, who I’d met at an AA meeting. From time to time over the years, we’d sit and drink coffee all night long, scheming to make money. In the summer of 2007, we’d planned to sell water filters to trailer parks. We figured that the filters would keep the trailers’ hot water tanks from corroding with minerals, so they wouldn’t have to be replaced so often. The plan was to divide up the territory, with Bob phoning twenty-five trailer parks in the northern half of Illinois during the week, while I made twenty-five nerve-racking calls to trailer parks in the southern half. We agreed to touch base by phone the following Friday.
When I asked Bob about his progress, he responded: “I’m just about finished.”
Which meant he hadn’t even started yet.
After making another heebie-jeebie-inducing twenty-five calls the next week, I called Bob again.
“Oh yah, I’ve almost finished,” he said.
This meant he had just gotten started.
A week later I called once more and left him a message, which was never returned. Several more calls and emails went unanswered as well. Six months went by with no Bob, until finally, he popped out of the ether like an electronic jack in the box.
“Hey, I’ve got a great way to make money. We can sell collapsible shields for laptops so people can work in the sun, and the screen won't be washed out...”
The water filter project was never mentioned again, because Bob was avoiding accountability by hiding in his home surrounded by an electronic moat teeming with unanswered emails and ignored voice messages. He was like a child who was playing blocks with one of his friends, saw another friend playing marbles, and ran over to play with him for a while, until he spotted a kid climbing a tree, and ran to join him. Bob had never grown up.
And then there was my former wife Tammy, who changed her name back from Tammy Federson to Tammy Allen. Once upon a time, she’d been really good-looking. She was also intelligent and her parents had money. I was head over heels in love with her when I was at SIU in the early 70’s. But Tammy was attending the University of Illinois 100 miles to the north, so it was a long distance relationship. When I flunked out of college and joined the Army, we stayed in touch, with letters and phone calls during those two years. We did everything but truly get to know one another. After I came home, we got married immediately, and finally, finally, we were together, and it was paradise…for about six weeks. We found out the hard way that we were indeed made for each other. In fact, Tammy and I were as interchangeable as two peas in a pod—two nervous people living together, which made our union about as happy as the marriage between a jackhammer and a buzzsaw. We divorced childless, I saved no photos from the marriage, and I never wanted to talk to her again. I still didn’t want to talk to her. Yet…
I went out to my car, retrieved my cell phone from under the clothes, and dialed Tammy’s number. Even a conversation with a jackhammer would be better than silence. I sat down on the kitchen chair, but felt my bottom touch the seat only after a long delay. I started to feel woozy, something like the sensation I got after a roller coaster ride at Riverview—a big amusement park on the Chicago River—when I was a kid. The heebie-jeebies ran up my spine as I greeted Tammy with:
“I lost my job yesterday, and I’m feeling as if I’m moving when I’m really standing still...”
“Oh that’s too bad. They’re threatening to foreclose on my house,” said Tammy.
“What, again?”
“Oops, hang on, I’ve got another ca—“
Two minutes later Tammy came back on.
“That was them, and this time, they mean it,” Tammy said. “They told me that unless I pay at least $600 of the $7000 I owe them from the past six months, they’ll start eviction proceedings.”
Tammy kept hopping from one crisis to another, with her cell phone in one hand and her computer’s mouse in the other, so that all of her “friends” would instantly get the play-by-play account. From Tammy’s stream of consciousness emails with no paragraphs, no capital letters, no spell check and only dots for punctuation, I’d learned that she was making $25,000 a year as a security guard, had her second ex-husband and her son cosign the loan for a $150,000 house, which depreciated by $50,000 because she couldn’t maintain it, and now she couldn’t pay the loan installments, either. She also owed another $80,000 on credit card balances, was driving around in her brother’s car, and frittering away her money by eating at fast food places, devouring chocolates, and enrolling in pricey weight loss programs.
“Tammy, I’ve told you again and again…” I was starting to get worked up.
“Hang on, Pete; I just got another ca—”
Five minutes later: “Back with you, Chet,” chirped Tammy.
“It’s Pete, goddamn it!”
“Don’t you talk to me like…”
“Listen, Tammy, you can’t possibly pay for that house on what you’re making. You need to get rid of—”
“I’m never going to sell it! No apartment will allow twelve cats, it’s worth less than it was when I bought it, and I don’t want to drag my son into bankruptcy and ruin my good credit, and shit, I got another call. I’ll text you—”
And Tammy was gone in a storm of text messages and call waiting. She wasn’t much different from Bob, except that Bob hid in cyberspace, while Tammy bombarded people with endless communications, so that she would have no time to listen to anyone. By the end of Tammy’s electronic monologue, my teeth were clenched and buzzing. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and suddenly, it was awfully quiet in the Federson household, and awfully boring.
I was sitting with the coffee mug resting on my knee, amidst the mail and books, in a nauseous funk on the floor of an eerily quiet kitchen. To quickly fill what I knew would be a lonely, unbearable silence, I turned on the radio to WFMT.
I gulped down the last of the coffee as Liszt’s 1st Piano Concerto began with Martha Argerich at the piano. When Martha punched out her first chords, they resonated in my solar plexus, displacing the gremlins and stimulating me to action. Soon, I was full of gremlin-resistant, heebie-jeebie-blocking positive energy.
I needed to move, to get something done, something tangible. I needed a project and that required a decision. I spotted the dust mop that had been leaning against the wall for so long that it had left a mark.
Decision made!
I poked the mop under the bed and pulled out bits of rotted food, dead insects, dust bunnies, dirty pens, napkins, wadded-up notebook paper… and a bottle of pills.
That’s where they went.
At one time, I had put all of my pills—uppers, downers, pills for depression, pills for lethargy, and pills for anxiety—into one big bottle. The rationale was that it would be harder to lose one container than five. Right? Then I lost the bottle by forgetting about it after I’d thrown it against the wall the year before.
Another swipe with the mop revealed the presence of The Excitement Of Algebra!, a library book due two years ago. A few years before, I’d had some ideas about going back to college to get my Bachelor’s degree, but I had to repair my miserable undergraduate GPA first. At the top of the academic list was algebra. I had failed it twice in high school and twice in college, and spent so much time obsessing over it that my other classes suffered, which was why I’d flunked out of the university at the end of my sophomore year. With a low draft number, I’d traded the dormitories of college for the barracks of Vietnam. Within 24-months, the Army and I parted company—with prejudice—because my captain was convinced that I didn’t have what it took to be a soldier.
So, the gremlins had made sure that my study of algebra was indelibly linked to my tour of Vietnam. I threw The Excitement of Algebra!, which I had never opened, on the kitchen floor.
Next, the manic dust mop dragged out a clanking plastic Kroger bag with a stylized sketch of the American flag, under which was printed: 1776-1976. In this patriotic bag was a half-full fifth of vodka with a price sticker on the cap: $1.50. There was also a pocket watch with a fisherman etched on its cover that I had bought in Europe while on a student tour in 1970. Next to the watch was an old, yellowed computer-punched photo ID of me, made four decades and fifty pounds ago, and clipped to the ID was a bright photo, taken in the super-realistic colors of Kodachrome, of an olive-skinned girl with high cheekbones, brown eyes and curly brown hair parted in the middle.
Catherine!
The shade of red in the booth in which she was sitting was brightly saturated, and the dark wood wall behind her seemed to glow: Catherine was sitting across from me in a booth at Pagliai’s Pizza in Carbondale, during my sophomore year of college. And for a moment, I was there again, sitting across from the girl I should have married.
In 1971, I’d plodded through my emotional life like a somnambulist. I’d dealt with my ever-present anxiety by ignoring all but the most superficial human interactions. Catherine Mancini was a girl of Italian descent who lived with her family a few miles down the road from SIU. She was pretty in a country way and had a cute way of talking, a combination of a Southern and Midwestern dialect. I loved the way she said “quit” (“kuh-wit”). She’d said “quit” to me a lot. But what set Catherine apart from the other girls I’d dated during college was that her personality was made up of a critical balance of empathy and assertiveness that could have awakened me from my emotional slumber, had I allowed her to.
I didn’t remember much about my college years or the drab intervening decades. Liberal doses of vodka and pills had darkened or blotted out most of the memories. But I did recall that Catherine had tried to lead me out of the haze, and I pretty much ignored her. And when we finally broke up I wasn’t even upset about it, because I was smitten with Tammy, and so I relegated the memory of Catherine—who I was much better suited for—to a Kroger bag.
And now I was kneeling at the side of the bed with the mop and staring at the photo of a pretty young girl whose image I hadn’t seen in nearly forty years.
The contents of that grocery bag condensed my life story into a Tweet: Opportunities offered me@frightened. Opportunities terrifying@scared. Opportunities rejected@misery
I thought about my Testing Unlimited! job with c-a-t and r-a-t, Bob with his water filters, Tammy with her house, and me who never mastered algebra or broadcasting or anything else.
I looked at that slim, clear-eyed teenager on the student ID; touched my face, and felt the nerves running beneath my exceedingly thin skin. Muscles corded around the nerves until they tightened into lines of tension on either side of my jaw, like strings on a violin. The strings were wound too tight, so my neck was bent by the pressure. This nervous energy sunk my cheeks until they were hollow cups, traced wrinkles down either side of my nose like gashes, and drew dark rings around my eye sockets, from which crow’s feet radiated like jagged scars.
God, I wish I could start over again!
I dropped my hand from my face and it landed on the pill bottle.
I took two pills, washed them down with a swig of vodka, wound my watch, and stared at Catherine’s face. Soon, voices speaking gibberish and noises that sounded like rushing water and leaky faucets filled my head. I felt a sudden acceleration...
…And found myself sitting upright with my head lolling against a train window. Sunlight was bouncing off the glass of skyscrapers, passing through the window, and refracting deep in my eyes.
What the hell?
I was on some train, passing the massive black column of the Willis Tower—formerly the Sears Tower—in downtown Chicago. The train rumbled over switches and crossed over jammed expressways with ramps twisting in all directions. Soon I could see glimpses of Lake Michigan.
“Theh lake looks a little chee-oppy.” said some guy behind me.
A girl answered, “I think it was the storm that passed through lee-ast night.” The couple had the top-heavy accent that had evolved in this city of big shoulders.
“Deh ya remember last New Year’s when we nearly froze walking across theh Michigan Avenue bridge to theh Hancock tower?”
“Oh God, yes,” said the girl.
“It must have been ten below; theh white caps on the lake had free-OZ-enn. Theh wind cut like a knife!”
“Well, I won’t be missing it. Where we’re going it’ll be like Floridah.”
They must be from the west side.
And, as if in rebuttal, I heard in front of me:
“Can I use your ink pin? I can’t fahnd mine.”
The guy answered, “Here…” And then, “…I figure, if we git into Carbondale ontime, we’ll make Cairo by about 11:00.”
Keh-row? These people are from Southern Illinois!
Above the lake, the sky was crisp and well-defined, and looked colder than I thought it should look in early fall. What was it—September, October? I wasn’t good with dates. A bright maroon leaf drifted past the slowly-moving train. Soon, manicured green lawns appeared, then tract houses, and finally the black loamy Northern Illinois soil, whose furrows passed like rapid little black waves that never seemed to end. Wave after wave, after wave...
I started when I heard: “MAHHHHHHHHH-TOOOON…Mattoon is the next stop.”
The train was in Central Illinois.
I looked at my wrist, but my watch was gone, and I wasn’t wearing my cell phone either. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pocket watch with the fisherman on the cover and snapped it open: 6:56. Somehow I had lost three hours and missed seeing most of the state of Illinois. My pill container was in my pocket, and since dusk was fading fast, I took what I thought were two uppers, and soon was grooving to the cadence of the train wheels skipping over the gaps in the track.
Dah-Dah-Dah-Daaaaaaaah!
It sounded like the beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Dah-Dah-Dah-Daaaaaaaah!
Stupid-assed people with their “Making Fun of the Classics” ringtones.
“Hello?” said a young, disembodied voice in front of me.
Pause.
“….Oh yah, we’re on the Saluki about an hour from Carbondale.”
Pause.
“Not again! OK, you…you’re cutting out. I’ll call you tomorrow and see if we can deal with the issue. Yah, bye.”
Issue?
