“If you want me to be completely honest about it…I can't tell you how it happened.” I said. My voice felt like I was scraping the bottom of the ocean.
Someplace, far off it seemed, I could hear tires rubbing against something metal. The sound had a diminishing quality; the wheel was slowing down.
Meredeth, looking at me with a mote of disbelief, stubbed out her cigarette on the upside down leather arm rest of the Mark V, ruining it, and blew out a vortex of bullet colored smoke. It had recently occurred to me that she was sitting impossibly and entirely wrong in the chair, her pale face floated wrong way up in the darkness of the interior of the car, her wine-red dress adhered to her body, stuck there and ignoring the gravity of the situation. I tried to move in my seat a bit but found that trying any sort of maneuver resulted in my shoulder, crushed against the ceiling support, would shriek in agony.
This did not seem to perturb Meredeth in the least; she picked out yet another cigarette, used the dashboard lighter and lighted a fresh one. She saw my look of discomfort and seemed to relish it in a small, perhaps sarcastic bit. She pursed her lips, preparing to inhale the ever-burning cigarette once again, but stopped and looked at me thoughtfully. “You can tell me how it happened; don’t look so shocked at the predicament you are in. You know exactly how you got here.” As she said this, she casually looked towards her tinted window and finally drew in on the cigarette. Was she appreciating her fine looks, or inspecting the wickedly red lipstick staining her lips.
Outside the car, there was a turn signal blinking, it’s light throbbing into the night like an irritation. It was running out of juice, crushed out of its plastic housing. It’s flashes growing more feeble each time they shown forth. Inside the car, the soft plink-plunk of the turn signal sounded funny in the confined space.
My driver’s side door had been crushed inwards slightly, towards me, a bit. Where the door and the side of the car had once made a perfect fit, was now slightly askew, rainwater had been dripping in around the edges, dampening my clothes and hair, for the duration of the conversation. I could not move to escape the cold soggy accumulation that was growing around me. A brief, but very alarming shiver moved through my legs and trunk; alarming for the very fact that this had gone on long enough to get here…to this.
“I’m cold.” I said to nobody in particular. Meredeth would not be the slightest bit concerned; it was as if I were alone in the car.
“How fucking old are you?” she spat suddenly. “With your means and your responsibilities, you had no reason to be out tonight. Christ, if you had half a brain, you’d have had the driver take you.” She mashed yet another butt into the leather. “God, I hate this car…it looks like a pimp’s car.”
The tire, now only rubbing once every few seconds was not making the noise it once was, now it was a dull thump instead of the high whine it had once been. Trees surrounded the gully, leaves fell every so often in the post storm breeze that was blowing.
“What is wrong with you? Am I sitting here by myself and talking? I told you, I am fucking cold and I think I am really hurt…will you get some goddamned help?”
Meredeth ignored me as only she could. It was if she were not just in another room…she was on another goddamned continent. She used the sun visor’s mirror to inspect her teeth and picked absently at nothing with a perfect fingernail.
“Laurel and Vincent will be in the Springs next week; I really should send them a card. I can't really be bothered with going out there; it’s so damn hot this time of year.” She finished her inspection, slapped the visor closed and then rounded on me. “You on the other hand, I don’t think you’re going to be going anywhere.” She gave a curt smile.
We sat silent for some time. She was smoking continually while I was attempting to free myself from the seatbelt and the cramped front corner of the car into which I had been wedged. The tiny drops of water had become a small stream coming in around the door. My hair was matted and I noticed that the back of my head was actually beneath about a quarter of an inch of water. This notion and the sound of the streaming water was a rather harsh realization to me.
Suddenly, my situation struck me as far more dire than I had first believed it to be and I redoubled my efforts in trying to dislodge myself. Finally, after some futile attempts, I again twisted my neck and shoulder the wrong way and sent a bolt of bright, brilliant pain shooting up my whole right side. Meredeth made a small “ouch” face and lazily pointed at my legs, both hidden by the collapsed dashboard.
The gas pedal and the brake pedal had both been crushed inwards toward each other making a perfect steel and plastic shackle. My loafered foot was neatly trapped between both. I was going nowhere, but understanding this only made me wish to fight harder, even though I was beginning to realize that the interior of the Lincoln was going to be my tomb. I felt the first bits of water trickle into my ears and I raised my head a bit to keep them clear.
On its roof, the car rested in a ditch, storm water swirled around the vehicle and the clearing sky would give a glimpse of a moon or some stars every so often. Behind the spider-webbed windshield none of this could be seen.
“My god women go and get me some help!” my voice was a croak. Even though there was water all around me, my throat was still the dry patch it was when I had awoken. I had the sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t be that way for long.
Meredeth seemed to relish this in some small and mean way. Her eyebrows made a confused V that made her face resemble pity…as if she had ever had that emotion before. Perhaps she was being sarcastic in her compassion, or perhaps she was being the cynical and sarcastic bitch I had married.
“Didn’t you hear what I said, darling?” Was this false concern or real? “You aren’t going anywhere. Seems you weren’t cut out for the lady’s man playboy lifestyle you set up for yourself.”
This stilled my struggles for a moment. Little bits and pieces of the evening began to fall down on my brain and put themselves into a jagged and spotty memory of sorts. The first thing I recalled was the dim orange-ish light of the Italian restaurant I had dined and drank in for most of the evening. Moreletti’s? Yes, that was the place. Those bulbs, held in ornate and old fixtures painted with gold colored paint. The white tablecloths, here and there a spot of spaghetti sauce, covering cheap restaurant furniture. Mirrors all over the place, fake plastic plants-most of the ivy covering the walls and the cement statues of cherubs holding grapes, bows, arrows, water jugs. A large carafe full of red wine. My glass. My plate, covered in mussels and bits of garlic. The bar before and after the meal. And oh god what was that girls name? The tall brunette with the dress that looked like the tablecloths…the plunging v-line of the dress and her white neck. How was Meredeth here? How did she know?
“I know," she said, answering my mind. “Because you know.”
So she wasn’t here, she was just smoking and sitting at that impossible angle and telling me bad things all as some sort of punishment. Was I dying here, it seemed absurd, but it might just be possible. The water, now half way up my pressed down shoulders had a trace more cold to it, began to bite just a tiny bit more into my exposed neck. More memories began to seep into my consciousness as if brought by the frigid water.
The car groaned a bit, some pebbles and sand giving way beneath its weight.
Meredeth and I had been married on an august afternoon in 1958. I was a young man who worked at a bonded import house that specialized in foreign furniture. Of course it was a racket, but I had been hired on honestly as a fork truck driver and to help put some of the furniture pieces together for delivery. I quickly realized what was going on, that an imported teak dining table was not really worth four thousand dollars. Something was up, but being smart enough to act dumb, I kept myself out of trouble. Somebody upstairs, probably Nory the warehouse fore man, noticed my ability to keep my mouth shut and I was soon introduced to the owners of the import company.
Mr. Lombardi was a fat man and he had hands the size of rakes. He wandered around the warehouse in a three-piece suit of some gaudy and shiny dark material, his hands in his pockets. Finally, he walked down the aisle where I was backing a sofa into a staging area with a pallet jack. As I began cutting the plastic cover off the piece of furniture, I could feel his black eyes on my back, investigating me.
“Hearing some good things,” He grunted.
“Oh yeah?” I asked as I turned, holding a carpet knife.
The rest of the conversation was held in that staging area, most of it in hushed tones punctuated by small laughter and backslapping. The sentences were short and to the point. I was being wasted in the import warehouse; there were other jobs, more lucrative jobs, waiting for me outside away from the propane and dust and darkness. We agreed upon a wage and I handed my carpet knife over to Nory.
Left that day and never looked back.
Over the next ten years, life went up and down; mostly up because people liked to get high and because the cops were easy to push around in those days. I met Meredeth at a wedding where we seemed to fall in love overnight. If I recall correctly, we went on exactly three dates prior to being married. Two of those three dates were at Moreletti’s, the same place I had been this very night…only with a different kind of date.
Mr. Lombardi saw to it that our wedding was a grand affair. He treated me as if I were some long lost son, lavishing attention on the wedding like an old Italian mother…which he clearly was not, I had also seen this man beat another man to death with a golf club. The wedding was held at a rented ski lodge in Vail and the guests were ferried up the mountain to the ceremony in fancy gondolas decorated with white flowers and crepe paper. I never saw the bill for that wedding, but the bar tab alone was at least thirty grand.
Typically, Meredeth was beautiful. Her gown looked like the full moon on an autumn’s night. Her veil obscured her dark hair, but it still looked like glossy black oil from underneath the fabric. Her pale skin and brown eyes stood out like a beacon that day, she was so happy. That happiness was to be part of both of our lives for exactly six years to the day.
Our sixth anniversary was the day I took Meredeth out to Moreletti’s (of course) and where I met Dawn, the wine steward who was working her way through college at the restaurant. Dawn was slight, not tall like Meredeth, and she was blonde and tan, she smelled like a farm…not bad, but like sunlight on grass clippings. She paid us little attention during the meal, bringing out various wines for us to try and even pouring them as we needed. At the coat check, I was handed a note from by some flunky from the kitchen. I could smell that smell on the note; I quickly put it in my breast pocket and waited for the valet to bring the car around.
With my money and my business, it was an easy task to start up a secret relationship with Dawn. Most of my business peers had mistresses or the occasional fling. It was part of the mentality. You weren’t a man unless you were a lady-killer. I set Dawn up in a small condo owned by Mr. Lombardi and paid her regular visits. I think Meredeth finally realized things were up when the gifts I had normally brought home to her (a diamond necklace here, an expensive gown there) began to dry up and eventually were nonexistent. They weren’t. Those little baubles had just found a new person to be given too.
During all of that, Sam and Melody were born. Two children who would never want for anything, except perhaps love.
Things between Meredeth and I never really became openly hostile. We just grew apart. I am sure she took a lover, but that didn’t bother me. When you have incredible resources, cocaine, and an endless supply of fine bourbon, you tend to take life a bit less seriously than you ought to. I never fully left Meredeth anyways, I always kept my home address in our home, and I kept my clothes and office upstairs until the day I would die. We still went out, but we avoided our regular haunts, as if to say to one and another “let’s just keep that part of our life separate…you know, for the kids.”
The only time we ever openly made mention of our other lives, other lovers, she was in the bathtub and I was scrounging around in the bathroom closet, looking for my travel shaving kit.
“I swear to god, you move my stuff on purpose, so I have a fit trying to find anything,” I muttered at the cluttered shelves.
“It’s on the top shelf, behind the bag of cotton balls,” she said, and quickly added: “so, she likes close shaven men?” She swam her arms out before her, then back, collecting bubbles towards her breasts. With her hair tied up, but slightly wet, she looked like she was back ten years ago, and in that wedding dress again. Perhaps she did it because she thought it would protect her. We all feel far more vulnerable when we are naked. I felt naked too. I grunted and pulled out the shaving kit, left the bathroom without another sound. That was the extent of our discussion.
In a light breeze, a crushed and broken branch that rested against the upturned trunk of the car swayed a bit, then silently fell into the water and drifted with the wandering current.
Back in the car, I opened my eyes and realized that I had tears in my eyes. Meredeth was still there, perched in the impossible manner she had been, her nails clacking on the armrest. She looked fragile now, not the mocking and derisive harpy she had been before. I wondered if had something to do with the interior of the car, now quickly filling to completion, my completion.
The rolling tire had stopped. Now all was silent except for the fading turn signal. The thing looked like a dying lightning bug. Outside, nobody would see the black car in the ditch from the road. Not until it was far too late.
“The water is almost at your face.” She said. There was a mild hint of concern there, and I hunched my shoulders up again, stab of pain, to bring my ears above the waterline. I couldn’t quite make it, so my face looked as if it were surrounded by black. It looked like one of those wooden stands you find on a circus midway, holes cut away for you to put your head in, so you looked like a goofy clown. I stretched my arm out and gave a mighty tug on the seatbelt. Nothing.
On the highway, 30 feet from the ditch, an 18-wheeler thundered by, causing the wrecked car to tremble just a bit.
“I don’t think struggling is going to help, at this point anyways.” She said as I finished my exertions. Was she fading from my view, this trick, this phantasm? Was she leaving me? I knew that she had not really been there to begin with, but she had stuck by me, a trick of my mind, and kept me busy not worrying about the water that was going to rise and kill me. Even her sarcasm had been a comfort, but if she was gone now, I would truly be alone. Suddenly, a wild notion occurred to me. Meredeth was dead.
Something skittered under the chassis of the Lincoln. Something that sounded warm, wet, and hungry. It sounded like it had a tail.
It had to be. I had left her at home again to go out and do my thing. She had had enough. Now, in the end, she was visiting me…but that time was over. My head sank back down into the water. It no longer bothered me that it was freezing cold. Nothing bothered me. I knew I was dead and I knew that in my last moments, Meredeth had been there even as she had died separately at our home. My thoughts flew fleetingly to my children, but only lingered there for a brief second. They would be taken care of, and perhaps better off without us. The water was at my eyes and mouth now, my nose stuck up above the surface like an Irish iceberg.
Only the bottoms of the doors and the underside of the car were visible now. Silently, leaves and branches lazily floated nearby, some latching on to the car, others drifting on past it, towards the large cement tile that was filling up as well.
I could only hold my head above the water for so much longer, and finally I tired and just let it fall, allowing the water to do its work. The interior of the car smelled of cigarette smoke.
I was 16 when I qualified for the 1980 Olympic gymnastics team, and I was 16 when the tanks rolled into Afghanistan. I had just turned 17 when President Carter explained that the; continued aggressive actions would keep us out of the games that year, and that all my training and pain was for nothing.
I don’t blame anybody. It was just politics. By the time the Los Angeles games rolled around, I was far too gone for gymnastics, washed out at 21. I didn’t try out for the games anyways, during my training, I had hurt myself a few times and pretty much gave up on me. I watched them on the television and I was in Reno at the time.
Reno wasn’t where I wanted to be, but Reno was where I needed to be. By that time I was so far into junk, I could have been in Timbuktu for all that mattered. I had been living in Colorado, near the training center when the pain had started in my knees. Less than a year later, I was getting on a bus, headed for Vegas, and maybe Los Angeles.
One thing became another, and I wound up here. No big story, I went where I could go. I went where I could score.
Sometime during my first weeks in Vegas, I met and moved in with Stephanie. Back then, I thought I loved her, I still think I do. But love is a dirty symbiosis, at least in our case. We huddled together in our little one bedroom flat for months on end. I would find work at the local temporary agencies; she would wipe down cars at all-cloth car washes, enduring the catcalls from the Mexicans and the blacks she worked with. She couldn’t get any other sort of job. Restaurants wouldn’t hire a convicted felon, and we were too dirty for the blood banks.
I cherish those first days in Reno. We didn’t have to work every day, and the landlady was just as hooked as we were. She would let us slip on our rent for months at a time... as long as I brought her a gift now and then.
I would wake up in the late afternoons and go out to the kitchenette. It was almost like real life, I would call out if Steph wanted coffee, and I would make us some. Then we would sit down together on the couch, the evening news would be on, and we would fix. After that, the day was ours. We could sit in front of the television playing video games, go out to a bar, hang out with our friends, whatever we wanted... just as long as the beast was fed. But back in those days, it was easy to keep the hunger quiet. We had money, and we had a semblance that nothing was wrong. Yet.
Steph hated to shoot up. She would have me do it for her. Find the spot: right there above the jail tattoo of the dove, spike it. I don’t know how she managed to fix after we split up, but she told me that while she was in jail, her fear of the other inmates and her fear of needles had made her junk sick just about all the time.
So there we were, watching the United States Olympic team rack up the medals in Los Angeles. It was the summer of 1984. The Russians and their friends had paid a tit-for-tat and hadn’t made it to those games. The sports media considered it a gold rush for the Americans. I sat there and cheered on the athletes, some who I knew, and drank my cheap instant coffee.
Do you miss it? Steph said as she spooned sugar into her mug.
I suppose, I said. But I bet I can still do half of that stuff.
We giggled and watched more. Mary Lou stunned the world, and my team; the men's team won the gold. During the medal ceremony, I actually cried. Steph held me and told me that things were okay as I mouthed the national anthem. We went out. Steph had to shush me as we walked past the landlady’s room because I was still singing. I remember going to a taco stand someplace and the only conversations I heard that night were about the Olympics. Everybody was caught up. Even two drunks were arguing about them, about how they weren’t real Olympics because the Russians weren’t there.
I felt anger well up inside me, but then I let go. What did they know? Just a couple of old, broken down drunks? They couldn’t know the emotions. They couldn’t know the pride. Steph and I walked home, eating our tacos out of their foil wrappers. We gazed at shop windows and wondered what it would be like to own newer stuff. A new dress for her, a rowing machine for me. Heck, the old apartment needed a new refrigerator. We should spring for one of those too. What a wonderful place the world was when you had money.
When we got home, I watched the television for a couple more hours and then I got into bed with Steph. We always seemed cold. Our skins needed to be near each other to be warm. Our bare calves touched each other under that ratty old blanket and we drifted off. Maybe tomorrow I would head down to the Temp. Agency and get a job. Most of the jobs sucked. They were the kind of jobs that nobody else would take. Boring jobs. The kind where you would stand for hours at a table, doing the same work over and over again, your mind wandering. But those jobs were safe for me. Nothing too strenuous or physically demanding because if I managed to hurt myself I would soak up more than my share of the junk we were holding at the house. We didn’t want to go further in, but we sure as hell didn’t want to cheat each other. Steph kept track of the stash and kept us pretty much honest as to how much we were shooting.
So it was settled. I would get something tomorrow. Maybe I could make and save enough for a little extra. Maybe I would buy Steph that dress she had been greedily staring at. I set the alarm for eight and we both got warm.
The next morning, I felt like my bones were gone, but I stood in line at the agency. Everybody was still talking about the games, but I kept quiet. I knew most of the other junkies here; all of us silently nodded to each other, or gave a small hello. I got a job at a place I had worked at before. It was a small mechanical parts shop that did mailing to customers all over the states. It was simple work; all I had to do was make boxes by folding them together and then sealing the bottoms with packing tape. After that, I put the boxes on a conveyor belt and they went into the packing area of the plant. I guess they didn’t trust the junkies enough to let them get near the inventory.
So I worked as hard as I could and at the end of the day, one of the secretaries from the front office lined all of the temporary workers up to pay us. The last time I had worked here, a supervisor had paid us in cash, but this time the secretary walked down the line and handed us a check. As she stood in front of me, she paused. She said my name and then gave me a puzzled look.
You have the same name as a guy I dated in high school, she said as she handed me the check. I looked into her eyes and knew her, but I didn’t say anything. I was embarrassed and wondered how the hell she had wound up here, six hundred miles from the dirt town we had both grown up in. I didn’t say anything.
She stared at me for a brief second and then moved on down the line. I stared at the numbers on the check and remembered back to high school and kissing her at a party in some basement.
I got out of there and followed the other temp workers to a grocery store that would let us cash our checks. I had made forty-seven dollars for my eight hours and I thought that maybe I would stop by that little dress shop we had looked at the night before. I walked on as the evening heat finally went away. The shop was closing as I entered. A little bell tinkled as I entered the door. None of the girls who were busy closing up the shop even looked at me as I walked straight to the dress rack that was near the front display window. I found the dress that Steph had wanted and I fingered through the rack and found the size she wanted. Numbly, I groped for the price tag and saw that the dress cost fifty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. I couldn’t afford it. Oh well, no matter. I would just work another day at the mechanical shipping plant and make up the difference. With that extra paycheck, I would even have enough to buy a real dinner instead of tacos.
All those years ago, I realized I was in love. Steph was my love, not the junk. It’s unfortunate that her love of junk was stronger than her love of me. She’s been gone for about five years now, she died in prison, but back then, we had dreams. It could never occur to me that her dreams didn’t include me, or at least they didn’t include me to the extent I wanted to be included.
Getting burnt by Steph didn’t bother me. I would have forgiven her just about everything back then. What really stung was that she hadn’t been honest with me about the way she had been stealing from our landlady. During the days when I would go work, sometimes she would go down to the landlady’s apartment and fix her up. But while the old gal was in the bathroom with her gear, Steph would sift through her desk drawers, steal money orders, and rent money. Steph had finally been caught. The landlady had come out of the bathroom to ask Steph if she wanted a bump and she had walked up on Steph with both of her hands in the top desk drawer. That’s the part that had stung. It didn’t hurt as much as the secretary at the mechanical plant remembering, but it had still hurt.
As I walked passed my building, I could hear the cops searching through the house, looking for our stash. Steph was going to be going away for a long time. I kept walking, but I came back a week later and squared my bill up with the landlady, and told her I was sorry for everything. She gave me a smug look and took my money. She then led me down to the basement, where she had stored all of our stuff that hadn’t been either broken or taken by the cops. I grabbed some extra clothes and the jar of instant coffee. I told her to trash the rest.
By the time Steph was arraigned, I had a new place to live in a boarding house. There was no way I could afford to bail her out. The bail was five hundred dollars and the last time I had seen that kind of money, I had be 19. She didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t bail her out. She was getting methadone in the county lockup, and that seemed to keep her straight enough. She wasn’t embarrassed about stealing from the landlady either, but she was embarrassed by the almost shameful looks I was giving her. Her embarrassment came out in the form of anger and she leveled me with it. She told me of all the things she had done while we had supposedly been in love. I guess she figured that somebody else deserved to hurt like she was. She told me about the johns and the Mexicans at the car wash, she told me about the late nights where she would sneak out and bust car windows to get at the radios inside. Didn’t I understand? She asked me cruelly. She got three years, plus time served. She would be out in 18 months.
I waited for her. But things were never the same again. The first thing we did was fix up in a small celebration. Then we poured through the paper, looking for a place we could live together again. But after that, I always kept my suspicions of her in the front of my feelings. We tried for a while, and things almost started looking good, like they used to in the old days, but it only lasted for a little bit. We both knew we would be splitting up soon, but we desperately held on, trying to find something. Under the blankets, we didn’t feel warm anymore.
