“THEY’VE BEEN HERE SINCE APRIL,” MEMBER OF GROUNDS-KEEPING STAFF TELLS THE HERALD
This was stale, sound news disguised as hot gossip, confirmed the headline’s operative word. Everyone in town knew Jonboat was back. His compound was lit, had been lit since spring, his armored fastback ’65 Mustang (aka “The Boatmobile”) photographed approaching the ramparts at Pellmore Place, hulking men in immaculate livery spotted on corners speaking into their collars, and at least one Wheelatine-area merchant (Main Street Sloga Nero’s, according to the pricetag ($20.98) stapled to the hem) was carrying bootlegged JONBOAT SAY shirts with the catchphrase replaced by I’M BACK IN ’TINE GAYLORD—this last fact one I was, admittedly, only just discovering there in the kitchen amidst the ripped newsprint. I looked at the label. The shirt was a medium. At least Clyde had gotten the size right, I thought.
The phone started ringing.
Owing only to its timing (the possibility would never have otherwise occurred to me), I wondered if maybe Jonboat was calling, which wondering then triggered a number of thoughts to overcome me at once, all gooed up and twisty as an orgy of tree snails. Unpacked and organized, their images grammarized, they would have, these thoughts, gone something like this:
Maybe, since returning to Wheelatine, Jonboat’s been wanting to get back in contact but, given all of the time that’s passed, has waited til today because opening the dialogue with a “Happy Birthday” would, by virtue of explaining why he’s calling now, lower the pressure he’s probably feeling to explain some other whys, e.g. why he never called before, why he never wrote you back, and perhaps why he might owe you some kind of apology.
That you’d even imagine he’d feel such pressure means you’re not as much at peace with the end of your friendship (or whatever it was) as you like to tell yourself, and that the pride you’ve taken in not having reached out to him for all these years was a dishonest kind, a loser’s pride akin to the sort would-be suicides who fail to pull the trigger from fear of what’s next exhibit with pronouncements on the sanctity of life and nobility of suffering when in fact they’re only cowards.
Though not necessarily. You might just be too good at empathy. You’re a fiction writer, after all. Your tendency to imagine how others might feel given who they are and what they’ve experienced, might have, by now, become knee-jerk, unwitting. It might even have been that way before you wrote fiction. Like after that time on the bus, in fourth grade, when Blackie Buxman pantsed you and punched you in the asshole, and then later that night, while you were trying to fall asleep, you imagined a chubbier, toddling Blackie getting pantsed and punched in the asshole by his dad (who you’d never met, but who, in your mind’s eye, resembled Bill Sikes from Hollywood’s take on the musical Oliver!), and you went downstairs in tears to your parents, tears for toddling Blackie, and explained how you felt, and your mom said, “Oh, baby,” and squeezed your shoulders, and your father told your mom that she shouldn’t do that, that it encouraged weakness. “What he’s doing…” he said to her. “What you’re doing,” he said to you. “It’s like suffering from Stockholm syndrome in Auschwitz.”
If only you were as gay for Jonboat as you seem right now! That would probably mean you could be gay for other men, i.e. that you could be gay, in which case you might have better luck in love, since gay men are notoriously curious and open-minded, and might find your quirks not only acceptable, but even attractive.
How can your father think this T-shirt is an okay gift? It’s hostile, isn’t it? Not just because it’s plainly cheap and joke-gifty, nor even because he must know it’s the only birthday gift you’ll get, but because of that day in the car, after the game, when he was all full of pride about the family catchphrase appearing on the T-shirt, and you were upset about “pissing through a boner,” and he told you relax and stop kicking the glovebox. Ever since, things have been tense between you, especially around the subject of Jonboat. Do you even really care if it’s Jonboat calling? Maybe you don’t. Did you ever really have a friendship with Jonboat? Maybe you didn’t. And maybe you only think about Jonboat in order to avoid thinking about your dad.
Unless maybe it’s the reverse. Or maybe neither. After all, you’re thinking about the both of them right now, aren’t you?
You’re such a whiner. You’re such a weenie. You’re such an introspective ham. What seems to be insensitivity on your father’s part is just as likely oversensitivity on yours. He’s a good guy, your father. His life has not exactly been easy, and yet he’s put up with you, his useless, freeloading failure of a son, so grow a sense of humor. You could just as easily understand the shirt as a kind of malformed olive branch, a message to the effect of, “Hey, Belt, we’re different you and I, but you’re my son, and the way I’ve learned to deal with this terrifying world that took your mother away is to approach emotionally complicated matters with levity—a type of levity that, at times, resembles cruelty, sure, but for that reason is more effective, engenders bigger laughs. I’d like you to learn to do the same, and am only trying to teach by example. I’m your father after all. Can’t we get past that time in the car? Can’t we get over our bullshit, already? Can’t you just laugh about the shirt with me a little?”
Your father doesn’t remember that time in the car. He’s never made a big deal out of birthdays, yet he felt a little bad for leaving town on your birthday, felt bad enough to want to buy you a gift, and the shirt’s the gift he chose because he thinks it’s funny in the first degree.
This mess of thoughts, despite its intensity, receded just as quickly as it had emerged once I caught sight of the clock on the stove. It read 9:43, which meant the caller was Grandmother. She’d call me every birthday, with birthday wishes, just after 9:40, the minute of my birth. “Happy birth-hour,” she’d say.
I didn’t want to hear her.
* * *
—
Our telephone’s handset was sleek and ultralight, though. Earlier that morning, if not before then, my father had left it keypad-side-up on the topmost step of the three-step stairway outside the kitchen’s sliding glass door. Its ringer volume had been dialed to maximum, and the vibrations from the ringing of my grandmother’s call caused it to shake, which shaking soon caused it to rock on its fulcrum til, a few chirps into the second ring, it lost its purchase and dropped to the middle step. The stairway was concrete, like the patio it led from (or to, depending), and I feared the impact might have been sufficient to roughen a patch of the phone’s plastic finish, perhaps in the shape of an asterisk or plus sign—maybe even sufficient to injure its circuitry.