 HALFTIME
Mark Winegardner
The day my wife leaves, I fall asleep en route to
the station—the first time in twenty-seven months, since I began taking Provigil and
Effexor together. I’d had plenty of sleep, I’d gotten a workout helping her load
the truck, but, bam: four in the afternoon, and I drive maybe ten miles of the
Florida-Georgia Parkway without remembering a thing. At the I-10 on-ramp, I jerk awake,
and it’s only then that I go off the road. The ditch is flooded. I barely avoid the
water, kicking up this big plume of mud. My heart’s beating so hard it hurts. I get
out. Above me are these massive power lines, humming and crackling. A semi roars by. For
no reason, I wave. It’s December but hot. I’m shivering. The trucker honks. He
could just as easily be calling 911 for someone to come fish my fat corpse out of the
ditch; people would have their simple way with cause/effect and blame it on the Stephanie
situation. I slap my face. I have a game. I get back in. The rest of the drive I’m so
rattled, I turn on my own radio station and try not to think about what people will say
about Stephanie. But I get there, and instead everyone’s talking about some kid Duke
McKibbon hired.
His name is Jason Truax, and he’s a senior in high
school, no experience whatsoever. Marsha Marsh, our receptionist, who despite her name
is Cuban, says Duke showed the kid around, then bugged out and didn’t tell anyone,
Jason included, what his responsibilities were. People are afraid he’s there to take
their job. It’s her cousin that Stephanie’s leaving me for, so I know Marsha
knows. She doesn’t let on. She hands me my paycheck and keeps yammering. Jason,
Jason, Jason.
He’s still there, a big blond yutz, hunched over
a console in the editing room, marking up press releases and wire copy. I stick my head
in. He jumps up like I caught him jacking off. "You need to use this?" He points
at a cart machine, but must mean the room. "I can move."
"Later," I say, which is a pointless lie.
"So long as you’re done in ten minutes."
Dietz sees me, hangs up the phone, and rushes over.
The kid’s father owns Truax Mobile World, Inc., Dietz says, and his grandfather is
Billy Ray Truax, who played football at FSU not long after they stopped being a
women’s college. "The trailer sales is a smallish account," Dietz says.
"This is about Billy Ray."
"They don’t make ’em like that
anymore," I say, though I’m unfamiliar with Billy Ray Truax. I started out
twenty years ago doing news, spent time as a deejay, and drifted into sports. Dietz
breathes sports. He used to produce my call-in show and do color. More than once, he shook
me awake on the air. Then he got married, had kids, and got promoted to sales director. My
meds started working better and I got by fine solo.
Lassiter, the program director, is finishing up his
show: Today’s Country. This involves flavorless pop music that arbitrarily
qualifies as country. His Arbitrons are double anyone else’s.
"That Jason’s a swimmer," he says.
"Duke’s been talking about him for months, remember?"
I make a who-can-make-sense-of-what-Duke-says face.
"This summer," says Lassiter, "the kid
won some race by a zillionth of a second. Duke got so excited he spoke in tongues."
Lassiter tries speaking in tongues. "That’s why he hired him."
Lassiter’s lying. No one, not even him, listens
to us when we do swimming. Duke’s grandkids swim. Duke does play-by-play (I begged
off, pleading ignorance), snagging older kids from the team, weak swimmers with only an
event or two, to do color. I’d guess that’s where he found Jason.
"Are we sure," I say, "that he’s
not just an intern?"
"Marsha did the paperwork. He’s getting
eleven smacks an hour, dude."
Dude. Lassiter is in his forties. The other day
I heard him say word to indicate accord.
I go out the back door. No one’s around. On my
cell, I call my shrink. She’s not there. It’s the service. "Tell her Bob
Deldermuth needs new meds—stat."
"‘Stat’?" the operator says.
"Don’t you watch TV?"
"Religiously," she says.
"I don’t even have a TV," I blurt.
"Yesterday I had three, but my wife took ’em. I have DishNetwork, and nothing to
watch it on."
"How does that make you feel?"
I’m sweating like it’s August. "Why
don’t you just give her the message, okay?"
"I’m telling you, anyone could do that job.
Talk into a tape recorder, play it back, listen to yourself, really listen.
You’ll save tons of money. You’ll have yourself some new TVs in no time."
I’m not rich, but money isn’t my most
pressing problem. "I have an HMO," I say. "It only costs me the ten-buck
co-pay."
"Even that," she says, "adds up."
The door opens and of course it’s Jason. He
mouths the word sorry. I frown. I’m done, he mouths. I wave him off.
His shoulders sag, and he goes back inside. I feel a blast of A/C. "Are you
new?" I ask the woman. "Do you have a name?"
"Everyone has a name," she says. "You
have my number. Call any time, hon."
She hangs up, and I hold my cell in front of my face
and look at it. I slap my face. I’m awake. I’ve been awake. This all happened.
#
The new night guy comes in as I’m loading up the van and Marsha Marsh
is leaving. He’s a pale young man anyway, but when she stops to tell him about Jason
Truax, he takes off his gigantic sunglasses—the kind old people wear—and goes
practically translucent. He mutters something: I’m toast or maybe I’m
a ghost. Whatever he says, Marsha doesn’t refute it.
"I knew it," he says, loud enough that
I’m sure that’s what he says. He puts the shades back on. Marsha pats him on the
arm, calls the world a crazy place, makes eye contact with me but gets in her car without
mentioning Stephanie. The night guy slams the front door behind him.
All the office people leave. No one says anything to
me but good night. By now everything’s loaded and I’m sitting on the bumper of
the van, waiting for Dietz. I consider going to get him.
Jason Truax walks out like someone who’s spent
the day breaking rocks. He apologizes for inconveniencing me. I tell him to forget it.
"Hey, are there manuals?" he says. "For
all that equipment?"
"I’m sure there are," I say.
"Somewhere."
"Right," he says. "Thanks." He
sounds sincere. I don’t introduce myself, and he drives away, rap music blaring, in a
battered pickup with Truax Mobile World painted on the side.
When Dietz finally comes out, I ask him if he’d
like to do color tonight. For old time’s sake. "It’d be a nice change of
pace from the solo act."
He raises an eyebrow when I say solo act.
"I wouldn’t get paid any extra for it."
I grin. "That’s what it’s about, is it?
What it all comes down to? Money?"
"Yep." He’s studying me like he’s
afraid I’m going to cry.
"Fine," I say. Whatever else I do,
crying’s not in the cards. Various shrinks have tried to pinpoint when this started
(I’m not sure) and make something of it (off-task). Of all Stephanie’s
grievances—my weight, my lack of ambition, the porn (her idea, originally)—my
not being able to cry seems like the one that should have provoked mercy.
"I should go," Dietz says. "My turn to
cook. Some meal-in-a-bag thing, but still."
Though we are friends, I’ve been to his house
once since he got married. He’s had to do games for me on days I called in sick, for
which his wife I’m sure dislikes me. He starts to go. Then he sees all the red mud on
my car. "Word of advice," he calls, pointing. "Get a Jeep."
I drive a six-year-old Toyota Camry. "I had a,
you know," I say. "A thing."
"A sleep thing?" Dietz says. He comes over
to me. "The game’s in Tallahassee, right? Oh, man." Meaning that I have an
hour’s drive on my hands. "Have you been ..."
"No," I say. "It’s been
twenty-seven months. It’s probably a fluke. I’m fine."
Dietz snaps into action. He calls his wife and before
I know it, he’s driving me to the game.
We talk about sports—in other words, nothing at
all—all the way there.
The game is so lopsided I can’t imagine who
wouldn’t have tuned out after the first quarter. Dietz and I still work well
together, though. I pause, and he’s just there: a quick stat, a comment,
something I’m talking too much and caring too little to think to say. One of the
schools has a world-class cheerleading squad, and all game we’re pestered by their
parents, who want us to broadcast the halftime routine. I lack the strength to fend them
off. Dietz points out that we’re radio. More than one parent brings up
swimming. They’re relentless. Dietz breaks down and agrees to watch the routine and,
afterward, interview the squad’s captain and the coach.
I watch some of it myself—these girls and the
boys who throw them. Am I cheered? No. I’m old enough to be their father. I look upon
these flying, newly muscled bodies, the hoisting, hands on hands, feet, shoulders, asses,
and imagine cheap beer, fogged car windows, college rejections, disappointing jobs, doomed
marriages. If I were their father, I’d handle it badly, that my kids—good
kids!—are no longer children.
I walk the perimeter of the grounds of the school,
stirring up endorphins. A precaution. It’s dark but still absurdly hot. Marriages
end. Fact of life. The night’s full of revving cars and muffled pep bands. I stop on
the empty bleachers behind the baseball field. I dial Stephanie’s cell. It’s
call-forwarded; on the voicemail, Vic Santiago promises to attend to all my insurance and
investment needs if I will just leave my name and number. I do.
Then I fall asleep. I may not even have gotten the
whole number out. Happily, in one of the dugouts is a couple, presumably doing what
teenagers in dark dugouts do. They see me keel over. They tell me they thought I had a
heart attack or something. "Or something," I say. "My heart’s black
with poison and remorse," I say, tapping my chest, "but it’s fine."
They’re spooked. Youth. They’ll eventually see enough to join the unsurprised.
The girl hands me my phone, which is still going. I hand her a dollar and Lassiter’s
business card. She accepts. I hang up. I was asleep for six minutes. I can’t say why
I gave her those things, why she took them, or why I even had Lassiter’s card. Me,
I’ve put away childish things. Bob Deldermuth sees through a glass, darkly.
I make it behind the mike in time. No one’s the
wiser. I ask Dietz how the thing with the cheerleaders went. "Just what you’d
think," he says.
#
The next morning, I pack up what’s left: what’s mine. Our house
is a rental, and our lease is up Tuesday. When we moved in, the house was on a lake. The
lake has a sinkhole in it that every seventy years or so sucks all the water out. This
happened a few days after we moved in, and now the lake is a marshy prairie. Experts swear
it will fill up again. Even lakeless, it’s been nice, way out in the country. When
the bugs weren’t too bad, we’d take a boombox and some CDs out to the end of the
dock—Lucinda Williams, Wilco, Emmylou Harris, that sort of thing—and have
non-alcoholic cocktails. Yes, we fought, but no worse than most couples. Stephanie fell in
love with someone else. To listen to her, it was more or less an accident. Vic Santiago is
her AA sponsor, and so probably helped save her life, then things no one planned on
happening happened. Maybe she’s right. The heart wants what it wants. She and I were
happier here than a lot of other places we lived. I can’t even say Shreveport
without getting a little sick.
I’m thirty-nine years old. I have a job, a
paid-for car, and, yesterday aside, good control over my condition. My family, most of
whom are still in Cleveland or its exurbs (a brother in Chagrin Falls, a sister in
Oberlin, cousins in Akron), loves me. I had a happy childhood. I can start over, lose
weight, get a dog, find someone else, build a deck, have kids. In this part of Florida,
unless you get too close to Tallahassee or the beach, land is cheap. I can get a lot, put
a trailer on it, and build later.
One moment I’m sitting down to tape a box full of
stadium cups and melamine dishes, thinking about all this. The next I’m packing up
the rest of the kitchen, still mulling, but deploying a care I’d never use and
bubblewrap I never bothered to purchase, because it’s all a dream. What wakes me up
is the phone, though I somehow think that that’s the dream, and don’t
pick up as Stephanie says she appreciates how adult I’ve been and is just calling to
make sure I’m doing okay.
When I realize I’m awake now and that I’ve been
sleeping, I’d been asleep for hours. The phone had even rung before—Dietz,
saying his wife would be happy to come take me to work. He’d followed me home from
the station last night, without incident. I check my watch. No game today, and my show
doesn’t start until seven, but I have a phoner with a NASCAR flack in an hour. I
don’t have enough time for Dietz’s wife to come get me. I pop an expired
Dexedrine spansule, wash it down with a Red Bull Energy Drink, shave, shower, and hope for
the best.
On the way in, I call my shrink. It’s the service
again. My shrink’s out of the office today, and the receptionist is sick. "Are
you the same woman as yesterday?"
"I am," she says. "It was an uneventful
night."
I’m in radio; I know that sexy voices are
inevitably disappointing. Case in point: me. If it was all about voice, Stephanie would
have driven away down a road flanked with eager supermodels. "Yesterday I drove ten
miles sound asleep."
"Hypnagogic hallucination," she says.
"Ten miles? C’mon. You’d be dead."
"Are you a doctor?" I’m running the A/C
full-tilt, but it’s nowhere near as hot as yesterday.
"Just a student."
"Pre-med?"
"Pre-law," she says.
"Same difference," I say.
"Animal House," she says, catching
the reference.
"I think I love you," I say.
"So what are you so afraid of?"
"David Cassidy," I say, catching her
reference. "Nice. No, really."
"You don’t love me." It’s a voice
three degrees shy of husky, a voice too womanly to giggle. It’s a voice you can crawl
inside of and order out for the best pizza you ever had.
"How do you know?" I ask. "You’ve
never met me."
"That," she says, "is what they all
say."
"There’s a they?"
"There’s a world of they."
"My wife just left me."
"Women," she says. "You’re driving
now, aren’t you?"
"I’m on my mobile, but no. I’m
not." For you, it might be dangerous, talking and driving. For me, it’s a
lifesaver. I’m right where I ran off the road yesterday. My ruts are full of water
and look like they were made by Truckogsaurus. "It definitely wasn’t a
hypnagogic hallucination," I say, merging onto I-10. "It was sleep. I
didn’t remember a thing."
"Ten miles is a lot."
"It’s not my record," I say.
"Listen, isn’t there another doctor On-call? For emergencies?"
"If it was really an emergency," she says,
"you wouldn’t be driving."
"I’m not driving," I say, relieved she
didn’t ask about my record.
"You’re making me hot," she says.
"Ooh, baby, ooh."
"Mockery will get you everywhere," I say.
"I really may love you."
"I know," she says, and hangs up. I know
it’s crazy, but she sounded like she meant it.
#
Everyone’s pretending to be too busy to show Jason Truax how to use
anything. Several of us give him the evil eye so he won’t even ask. He busies himself
circling stories in the Atlanta and Jacksonville papers. He asks Lassiter if he can use
the production-room PC to add a news-headline scroll to our web page. When Jason gets it
set up and asks for the password, Lassiter says only Duke has it. Duke, who can barely
turn a computer on, hasn’t shown his face all day.
I boot Jason out of production to tape my interview.
It’s December, but my demographic can’t get enough NASCAR. I’ll say this:
no sport gives the speciously credentialed more free food and gear. Back in the day,
Stephanie and I made lost-weekends of it. Daytona, Atlanta, Darlington, etc. Suddenly I
feel a presence. Paranoia, I think, from that Effexor/Provigil/Dexedrine/Red Bull
cocktail. Then out of the corner of my eye, I see something move. I shout the Lord’s
name in vain. The flack keeps right on debunking Dale Earnhardt Jr. conspiracy theories.
From behind the computer table, Jason Truax rises. He makes a yikes grimace.
Paranoia, hell. Deldermuth’s Razor: the simplest explanation is just the simplest
explanation.
The flack asks if I’m okay. Never better, I say.
We wrap it up.
"I’m so sorry," Jason says.
"I just wanted to ..."
"Forget it." My heart won’t slow down.
"Next time, ask if you can watch, okay?"
He nods. "You’re Bob Deldermuth, right?
I’ve been listening to you all my life."
"I’ve only been here four years."
"Really? It seems a lot longer."
"That’s a compliment?"
He frowns. "Yeah," he says. "Hey,
I’m sorry to hear about, you know. Mrs. Deldermuth. My mom left once. She came back.
It was rough."
If this kid knows, everyone knows. "I’m sure
it was," I say.
"I want to be a journalist," he says.
"News. But maybe sports."
"I want to be a dentist," I say, in the
manner of that elf from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which Stephanie and I
watched together last week in an otherwise dark and silent room. Then she went to bed and
I watched a porno. I pop the cart. I say it again: "I want to be a dentist."
Jason stands there, blank. My heart begins to slow
down. "It’s not you," I say, mopping my face with a paper napkin.
"It’s me."
He cocks his head the way a big blond dog would.
What the hell. I show him how to work the board.
Marsha is the first to peek through the little square
window and notice. Moments later everyone in the station is filing by. Dietz shoots me a
palms-up what-gives look. The night guy flips me off. "You want to learn radio,
Jason?" Lassiter says, clamping a hand on my shoulder, "my man Bob’s the
one to teach you."
I’m feeling better. It’s nearly time for me
to get ready for my show when I hear Duke’s booming voice, calling Jason’s name.
Duke spent the day scouring memorabilia stores. He’s holding a plastic bag with a
program in it. On the cover, Billy Ray Truax strikes a vintage 1950s knee-up stiff-arm
pose. Duke is an excitable man, but I’ve rarely seen him more excited.
"Granddad’s in Key West," Jason says.
"We’ll be there for Christmas. If you want, I’ll get him to sign it for
you."
"Could you?" Duke says. "My god,
it’d mean a lot." He thumps the program. "I was at this game, you
know."
He launches into a blow-by-blow version of it. I
escape. A half-hour later, Jason stops in the studio to thank me for the lesson.
"Is that why a big kid like you doesn’t play
football?"
"If what’s why?"
"Getting compared to your granddad. Not wanting
to be."
"Ten seconds," the night guy says.
"No," Jason says. "It’s because I
suck at football."
That cracks me up. He looks grateful. "Maybe I
can teach you to be my color guy." I say this on a whim, but, realistically, Dietz
can’t keep doing it. He’s already working twelve-hour days on the sales side.
"You drive, right?"
"What’s driving have to do with it?"
"Everything and nothing," I say. "You
want to do it or not?"
"Five," says the night guy. "Four.
Three."
Jason gives me a thumb’s up and leaves.
It’s a long night. The night guy—who, as my
producer (his Legends of Country show follows), is supposed to be screening
calls—lets everything through. I get people speculating about who in pro football
might be gay, people who think we should do winter swimming too, and countless conspiracy
theorists who want to talk about Dale Earnhardt Jr.
After the first hour I ask the night guy what his
problem is.
"If someone’s getting fired," he says,
"it’s not going to be me."
If taking calls from cretins was going to get me
fired, it would have happened years ago. "C’mon. He’s a kid. It’s just
an after-school job."
"Watch your back. Word to the wise."
"My back? You’re all talking about Stephanie
behind my back, every one of you jerks, and Jason, who’s been here two days,
is the only person who’s said anything to my face."
"Who’s Stephanie?" he says.
He has those sunglasses on. It’s hard to tell if
he’s serious. I give him a look.
The next caller, according to my screen, is
"Brian." His topic: "FSU kicking game."
"Brian, in Monroeville, you’re on the
air."
"Hey, Bob. You okay to drive home?"
It’s Dietz, patched through from the private
line.
"We’re on the air," I say. "Brian."
On the other side of the glass, the night guy laughs like hell.
Dietz is flawless. Wide right this, hangtime that. At
the next break I call him back and tell him I’m fine. What am I going to do, ask him
to come follow me home? Then I screw up my courage and tell him about Jason. Not only
isn’t Dietz mad, he’s thrilled. His wife is teaching yoga classes. He’ll be
a hero when he tells her he can watch the kids.
#
I have the next day off. I get through to Dr. Jacoby’s office first
thing in the morning. The receptionist says she got the message from the service and was
about to call to see if I could make it at one. "Today?" I say.
"You’re kidding. Don’t you people have a Christmas rush?"
All she says is yes, today, in a North Florida accent
so thick and bovine I have to play a Dusty Springfield CD all the way through just to
regain the will to live.
I hose the mud off the car. I finish packing. I call
the realtor who sold Dietz his house and make an appointment to look at lots.
On the way to Tallahassee, I call Vic Santiago’s
office. He’s not in. I ask for his voicemail. I tell it I’m serious about
getting my insurance needs squared away.
Dr. Jacoby asks if I think it’s ironic, the
condition flaring up the same day Stephanie left.
"That’s one of my pet peeves," I say.
Her office is freezing. I’m in Dockers and a Hawaiian shirt. She’s wearing a
wool suit covered with cat hair. "Misusing ironic. You mean
coincidental."
She doesn’t apologize. "Do you think
it’s coincidental?"
"You mean the opposite, I think," I say.
"You mean, do I think there’s a connection?"
She sighs, exasperated. The woman at the service was
right; I make a mental note to run tape on tomorrow’s game. Which I should do anyway,
so Jason can learn from his mistakes.
I tell Dr. Jacoby I have a theory. When I was
repainting the nursery, I didn’t have a mask. The hydocarbons from the paint affected
my hydrocretin-sensitive cells. Yesterday, the effects of that faded. After the thing in
the morning I was fine.
"The nursery." She might have at least said,
I see someone’s been on the internet. She just sits there. We’ve covered
this territory. To sum up: my record is thirty-some miles of I-75, coming back from the
Firecracker 400. I totaled Stephanie’s Mazda. She, too, was asleep. She was eight
months pregnant. We weren’t otherwise hurt. Afterward, we avoided that room. Careful
with the cause/effect assumptions. This was a while ago. Other things happened.
"We’d painted it really bright colors. It
needed to be redone. To get our deposit back."
"You could have hired it done. Or forfeited the
deposit."
"That’s what Stephanie said. She had a
girlfriend pack the room." Marsha Marsh, in fact, who’s expecting, again, and
took everything. "Look, this is no time for me to throw away money."
"That’s not what I meant. You took the
initiative. Why do you think you were motivated to paint that room," she says,
"and unmotivated to do other things?"
I just shake my head. If I tell Dr. Jacoby that I
haven’t called in sick for weeks, that I’m re-racking my life just fine,
I’m afraid she’ll dial down my meds. I avoid eye contact and stammer. She
prescribes Ritalin and ups the dosage on the Provigil. She tells me to exercise daily. I
tell her I am. She looks at me over the top of her chunky glasses.
A relationship is simply what two people choose to
believe.
"By the way," I say as I’m leaving,
"the new woman at your service is terrific." Because I’m sure there have
been complaints.
"I never meet those people," she says.
"But I’ll be sure to convey the compliment."
Those people for a moment sounds like a racial
slur. "Other patients have said things, right? About this new woman. I can
tell." Probably it’s not, of course. A slur.
Dr. Jacoby says no, no one’s said anything.
"What’s terrific about her?"
This stops me short. "Her phone manner," I
finally say. "It’s amazing."
I wait for a moment for her to say amazing how?
She doesn’t.
Across from the drugstore where I get my prescription
filled is a Play It Again Sports. On a whim, I buy a used treadmill. They don’t
deliver and I tell them that’s okay, I don’t have any place for them to deliver
it to, yet. On another whim, I stop and buy a TV— huge thing, picture-in-picture, the
works. Two scrawny kids lash it to the roof. I’m out of there before I realize I have
no way of getting it down alone. Truax Mobile World is on the way home. The man who waits
on me is an older, more rabbity version of Jason. I don’t want any favors. I
don’t mention Jason. I ask Jason’s father how business is. He curses both the
month of December and the American president. I tell him I voted for the other guy. He
frowns and looks at me as if he’s trying to place me. I get this all the time.
It’s my voice. I keep waiting for him to say something—he advertises at my
station, his son works there—but he doesn’t. I get what seems like a good deal
on a used trailer that smells like tar. I write a check for the whole thing. He’s got
connections, he says, both for lots and in a mobile home park. I tell him I’m set.
Even as we’re finishing up the paperwork, with my name right in front of him, he acts
like he’s never heard of me. We just talk about my TV and what all it does.
The store takes the TV back, no questions asked. I buy
something I can handle myself. After that, I swing by the Don Pablo’s on Capital
Circle that Stephanie used to manage, before they refused to pay for rehab stay #2 and
fired her. The store’s vacant. Whole chain, out of business. I pull around back and
despite being in full view of the Office Max a hundred yards away piss on the wall. Feels
great. A cop even sees me pissing but just shakes his head. I wave. The heat has broken,
and it looks like rain. By now it’s after business hours, so I call my shrink’s
office. It’s not her. I ask the woman if she’s the only one there. She says she
knows what I want. I say I have no idea about that. She snorts and says that Kelly will be
back tomorrow.
I call my bank’s Anytime Line and punch in the
numbers I need to stop payment on the checks for the treadmill and the trailer. It keeps
me focused all the way home. I lug the TV in but don’t unpack it. I should. This is
my last day with satellite. Instead, even though Stephanie left the bed, I go into the
empty nursery, now blister-white, open all the windows, spread out on the floor, and
listen to the rain. In no time, I’m out. All night, I sleep, and while I have no
memory of tossing and turning, when I wake up it’s like I’ve just run a
marathon.
#
Stephanie’s mascara is smeared, and so is Marsha Marsh’s. Could
be the rain. Lassiter has a hand on each of their backs, and they’re all hunched over
the reception desk. They see me and stop whatever they’ve been saying. Lassiter
smiles insipidly. "Alrighty then," he says, and rushes off.
Stephanie stands. She’s wearing a sundress. This
is the Vic Santiago influence. With me it was big shirts, the kind of thing a woman with
large breasts wears when she thinks large breasts are ugly. The heat has broken. It’s
seasonably cold. I took a Dexedrine along with double the Ritalin and am starting to feel
it. We exchange pleasantries. Marsha pretends to be writing something.
"Your boss says he got a call from some high
school girl’s mother," Stephanie says, "who told him her daughter saw him
have a heart attack or something, only he recovered and gave the girl his business card.
The mother thought it might be serious."
"Lassiter has no heart," I say.
"He’s also not my boss. Just the p.d."
Stephanie never met Duke. This isn’t the kind of
workplace that has a lot of dinner parties. Stephanie and I haven’t invited a lot of
people over. Dietz and his wife were there once. "Obviously, it was you," she
says. "And it wasn’t a heart attack, was it, Bobby?"
Marsha has dropped the pretense and is watching us.
I’d move, but a private conversation could go on and on. Here is best.
"It’s under control," I say.
Everyone at the station is finding an excuse to walk
down the corridor behind Marsha’s desk, slowly. Even Jason and Duke, who walk by
abreast, theoretically immersed in conversation.
"You’ve got to stop harassing Vic," she
says.
"What are you talking about?"
"Vic has lawyers, okay?"
"Lawyers plural?" I say. "This Vic is
some catch."
"Don’t be this way. You had a girlfriend all
along. She called me, Bobby. Okay? She called me. Don’t give me that look. She
told me you drove ten miles sound asleep and claimed it was a hypnotic hallucination. The
bitch blamed it on me." She uses an ugly word to modify bitch. I wonder if
this, too, is the Vic Santiago influence.
"Hypnagogic," I say. "When did she
call?"
Stephanie shakes her head. "Does it matter?
Here." She lifts a Xerox box from the floor and thrusts it into my solar plexus. I
hold on. "I took these for what I told myself was your own good. It was mean.
I’m sorry, okay?"
I don’t have to look inside. A percentage of male
users of Effexor experience abnormal ejaculation (I’ll spare you the specifics). One
day Stephanie came home from work with two tapes —bought, not rented. For a while we
incorporated porn into what we did. It helped. She’s an addictive personality, and
might well have empathized when my interest took on a life of its own.
"Thanks," I say. "Is that all you
need?" I am so, so tired. "I have a game, right, Dietz?"
Dietz is standing in the corridor, trying to look
transfixed by a plaque the Seminole Boosters gave Duke McKibbon. "Excuse me," he
says. "What?"
Stephanie walks into the downpour, no umbrella and not
bothering to hurry. Her wet sundress adheres to her shoulders and wondrous hips, like
shrink-wrap. She’s not wearing panties. She doesn’t look back or hurry.
She’s technically still my wife. For now, I know this woman better than anyone on
earth. Someday, I may not even know where she lives.
"Careful working up such a sweat, dude,"
says Lassiter. "With your heart problem and all."
#
All of which brings me to the tape. In real time, the game was throttle
and blur. But I ran tape on the clean feed, so this next part is reconstructed from that.
At first I’m talking at auctioneer velocity.
Jason—who’d gotten a broadcasting textbook from the library and on the drive
there peppered me with questions—keeps score and keeps quiet. How I answered those
questions I have no clue. We go to commercial. There’s a pause and then the night guy
asks what I’m on. At the time I thought the jig was up. Listening to it, I’d say
he was kidding. I don’t answer. Then Jason, in a whisper, asks if he’s doing
okay.
"Chimeindon’tbeafraidsaywhat’sonyourmindit’sjustagame,
talk! say! do! be!"
I remember Jason looking like the guy in that
commercial, listening to Wagner, his hair blown back from the death-angel force of it.
Probably I’m exaggerating. The night guy mimics me.
Jason loosens up and, despite me, gets heard.
He’s watched several million hours of ESPN. He actually, with conviction, says both
"this guy must be buttah, because he’s on a roll" and
"boo-yeah!" He also calls me Bobby D. I let this go on until the end of the
first quarter. "You’re doing high school basketball in Monroeville,
Florida," I finally say. "No boo-yeah. No more Bobby D."
"I didn’t know I said that. Did I say
that?"
I announce that I need to pee. You hear me taking off
my headset. Moments later, the night guy says, "Primo performance by the Bobster.
Damn."
"He is on something, I think," Jason says.
"My mom was on a lot of stuff at one point. Prescription stuff. That’s why Mr.
Dietz called in last night, right? About Bob driving home?"
The night guy just laughs. "Keep saying
boo-yeah," he says. Jason takes his headset off, too. Then some fumbling as we put
our headsets back on. Jason’s explaining that a job gets you out of school in the
afternoons. I ask why he doesn’t work for his dad.
"You ever work for your dad?"
"I did. He was a foreman at a steel mill. I
worked there Christmas breaks. Loved it."
"I’m not cut out to sell trailers,"
Jason says.
"I actually bought one today," I say.
"From your dad."
"My dad? My dad’s in Key West with my
granddad."
"It looked like your dad."
Jason doesn’t answer. I mumble stuff about the
first-quarter stats. I’m talking a little slower. Right before we go back on, you can
hear me tell someone I’ll think about it. Cheerleading parents. They heard the thing
two days ago and want equal coverage for their kids. I’ve played this part of
the tape a lot. I can’t believe I left the door open. I can’t believe I
didn’t give them a polite no.
Jason starts making comments about different
players’ weaknesses that would be more appropriate if we were talking about NBA
millionaires rather than teenagers from North Florida. I just let it go. I don’t even
remember him doing this.
"Why do you drive the truck," I say during
the next break, "if you don’t work there?"
"It’s the old truck. It’s for
sale."
At the next break, you can hear a Britney Spears song.
Cheerleaders are doing something. Different parents come up and tell me this is nothing
compared to what their kids will do at halftime. Again, I say I’ll think about it.
"So why aren’t you swimming?" I ask
Jason. Wanting to know why is junk food the soul stupidly craves. "You know, I
didn’t know until last night that there was winter swimming."
"What happened last night?" he says.
"Someone called and said we should broadcast
it."
"God," he says. "That’s even worse
than cheerleading."
I shush him, apparently because I’m afraid the
parents are within earshot. "What’s wrong with cheerleading?" I say, in a
venomous near-whisper. " Your first time on the air and you think you know what makes
good radio and what doesn’t?"
The night guy tells me to let the kid have it.
"You know why everyone at the station’s so
cold to you, right? They think you’re going to take their job."
Jason laughs.
"Why did Duke hire you?"
I remember Jason shrugging. The night guy asks what
Jason said. "To take your job," I say. Jason starts to say something, and I talk
over him. Basketball stuff. The night guy cusses us out.
And so, we come to halftime.
Again I say I have to go pee. For the next few
minutes, I’m in a stall in the Monroeville High boys room, fighting hyperventilation.
There’s nothing on the tape but ambient whatnot. A school band plays a medley from
"The Lion King." A contest is conducted; someone fails and the crowd groans.
Jason tells the night guy that I’m really going to broadcast the cheerleading
exhibition.
"Perfect," he says. "Look, don’t
bullshit me. Seriously, why did Duke hire you?"
I get back right then. "What are you going to
say?" Jason says.
"The secret’s not having something to say
—" I say
" —it’s saying something," says
the night guy. "You fucking blowhard."
I don’t say anything. You can hear Jason take off
his headset. Moments later, the night guy throws it back to us. And so I do it. I
don’t know how I did it, but I do: describing their every vault, their every sad,
wobbly pyramid, with terminology I didn’t know I had. For maybe thirty seconds,
it’s dull but fine. Then I hold out a microphone to capture the clapping and the
boy-band music. "It’s a truly gorgeous display, ladies and gentlemen," I
say, "and I wish you were here to see it. These girls are beyond the shadow of a
doubt the most stunning and wonderful and lively and lovely cheerleaders this reporter has
yet seen. Bob Deldermuth would not pull your leg. These are girls you’d be proud to
have as daughters, nieces, neighbors, lovers, or friends. These are girls that make you
proud to be drawing breath. Their skin is perfect. Their skin is perfect and you could see
that if you were here? Jason Truax, did you notice that their skin was perfect?"
I don’t know at what point in all that I fell
asleep. Oh, hell. That line is so blurred for me, I’m not even sure it’s right
to call it sleep.
There’s some dead air, then Jason, out of breath,
puts on his headphones. "What do you think it will take," he says, "for
Monroeville to get back in the game?"
"You’re the color man," I say.
"What’s your precious book say?" By now I must be awake.
Jason starts to talk about certain players and their
defensive shortcomings.
"My lord, but those girls were wonderful," I
say. "Do you know what?"
"Um, no." Jason says. "What?" The
fear in his voice is just awful.
"It made me want to cry," I say.
Jason pulls the plug on me, which I didn’t know
he knew how to do.
There’s seventy-four seconds of dead air, then
the night guy is swearing like a hothead in a mob movie. When I come back on, I’m
furious at first. Then I try to reconstruct what happened and can’t, then I beg Jason
and the night guy to let me do the second half as if nothing happened. I’ll be fine.
Given my ratings, I say, it’s possible no one was listening, or listening all that
closely.
We do the second half as if nothing happened. During
commercial breaks, no one says more than the bare minimum.
#
Jason drives the van back to the station. The rain is ridiculous, and he
has to pull over several times. Still, we don’t say a word to each other. There are
three cars in the lot, mine, the night guy’s, Jason’s truck, and Duke
McKibbon’s Cadillac. "Whatever you do," I say as Jason pulls in,
"don’t apologize. Don’t accept any blame for anything. And I know
you’re about to say something about the time your mom left, but here." I hand
him ten bucks. "Don’t."
He shoves the money in my mouth. For whatever reason I
accept this. I chew it. I swallow.
I am the only one fired, of course.
It’s Dietz who talks me most of the way home. But
right near my ruts, I tell him I’ve arrived. I mean to call the service, but it takes
me the rest of the way home to summon the nerve. When I do, hosanna, it’s her. Kelly.
"It’s me," I say. "Bob Deldermuth."
"I’ve been thinking about you," she
says.
"Same here."
"I think you need a creative outlet. There are
studies that show that’s a help."
"I’m a man of few skills," I say.
"Though I did just eat ten dollars."
"You know how to sweep a girl off her feet,"
she says. "You’re in your car, aren’t you?"
What she hears is the rain as I get out and run from
the car to my empty house. I get in and stamp my feet and apologize. "I can’t
sing," I say. "Can’t dance, can’t draw. I hate gardening. Anything
handy: no."
"Cooking?"
"Don’t ask. I did take acting lessons
once."
"You’re kidding," she says. "I
have an agent."
"I thought you said you were a law student."
"I was on one of those reality TV shows."
She says which one. I never heard of it. "I thought it might lead to other things. It
led to this. Hah."
"My teacher described himself, in his own
brochure, as ‘a Suncoast dinner-theater legend.’ The lessons were pricy to work
with a guy like that. Also I was self-conscious about how I moved."
"How do you move?"
"I’m in the process." I am sitting on a
stack of boxes by my back door. I know, now, that I’m not going to ask her about
calling Stephanie.
"Me, too. When did you live in Tampa?"
"Bradenton. My wife got transferred there to open
a restaurant." Which made me think of Stephanie, which made me think about being
alone for Christmas, and I flashed on the Christmas she was first in rehab, when I went
home and saw my brother do a birthday party for our sister’s twin daughters. "I
could be a clown," I say. "My brother is a clown. He lives in Chagrin Falls and
his clown name is Cousin Blammo."
"C’mon. Chagrin Falls?"
"It’s true," I say. Swear to God.
"He’s good: juggling, magic, jokes, pratfalls, the works. He’s a math
teacher, but he makes a lot of money on the side, clowning."
"I’ve always wanted to, you know," she
says. "Be with a clown."
"That’s common," I say.
"Never call me common," she says, and
hangs up.
I walk to the back door. It’s dark as hell, but
then lightning flashes. The lake is filling up. Cleveland, here I come.
|
Fiction