Kevin Sampsell - Portland Noir

Then one day in early October, when we’d stopped having sex altogether, I did it. I goosed her horoscope. Virgo was supposed to have three stars and I changed it to five.

So sue me. It didn’t even work.

Obviously, though, that’s where the idea came from. And yet I might have simply moved on and not launched my horoscope warfare had Tanya not fired the first shot at me by filing a no-contact order a mere two weeks after throwing me out. A no-contact order! Based on what, I wanted to know.

“Well, you do drive over there every night after work and park outside her place,” my dad said as he nursed a tumbler of rum.

“Yeah, but eight hundred feet? What kind of arbitrary number is that? Shall I carry a tape measure? How do you know if you’re eight hundred feet away from someone? There’s a tapas place around the corner from her condo. Am I just supposed to stop eating tapas?”

“There’s a Taco Bell over on M.L. King.”

“Tapas, Dad. Not tacos.”

Dad poured us a drink, then turned on the TV. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you, Trent. You make people uncomfortable. When you were a kid I thought something was wrong with your eyelids, the way you never blinked. I used to ask your mom if maybe there wasn’t some surgery we could try.”

This was my father. A woman breaks my heart and his answer is to sew my eyelids shut. But I suppose he tried. I suppose we all try.

“Life just isn’t fair,” I said as the old widower hobbled away on his prosthetic leg to get another drink.

“Yeah, well,” he replied, “I hope I’m not the asshole who told you it would be.”

The very next day, November 17, Virgo got the first of thirteen straight one-star days. “ Four stars: your creativity surges. Keep an eye on the big picture,” Virgo was supposed to read that day. I changed it to: “One star: watch your back. ” It was glorious, imagining her read that.

Horoscopes are cryptic and open-ended: “You’ll encounter an obstacle but you are up to the task. A Capricorn may help.” In fact, I could argue that what clearly began as a way to spoil my girlfriend’s day became a campaign to make horoscopes more useful. And I won’t pretend that I didn’t like the voice, the power that changing horoscopes gave me. In the office, I kept my own counsel, going days without speaking sometimes, but with these horoscopes I could finally say the things I’d been holding inside all those years. For our new drama critic Sharon Gleason, I wrote, “Libra. Three stars: those pants make you look fat.” For the arrogant sports columnist Mike Dunne, “Taurus. Two stars: I hope your wife’s cheating on you.” For the icy young records clerk Laura: “Cancer. Four stars: would it kill you to smile at your coworkers?”

Of course, there were complaints about the late-November horoscopes (thankfully, they were all routed to the “Inside Living” page editor… me.) In my defense, some people actually preferred the new horoscopes. Not Virgos, of course, since they were treated to day after day of stunning disappointment-“ One star: you should try to be less vindictive and disloyal… One star: hope your new boyfriend doesn’t mind your bad breath… One star: you’re not even good at sex.”

I’m the first to admit that I went a little far on November 24, the day I read in the crossword puzzle that the clue to 9-Across was a Jamaican spice, saw that the answer was Jerk and changed the clue to Mark Aikins, e.g. Yes, it was petty, but I was being forced to wage a war without getting within eight hundred feet of my enemy.

Yet, despite my constant barrage of single-star Virgo days and crossword puzzle salvos, I got no response from either of them. Tanya knew this was my page. She had to know I was behind her run of bad horoscopes. But I heard nothing. Some days I thought she was taunting me by not responding; other days I imagined she was so deeply mired in one-star hassles (traffic snarls and Internet outages) that she was incapable of responding.

Another possibility arose on the last day of November. I had just called in another phony customer complaint to Il Pat-tio (“The chicken breast was woefully undercooked, having symptoms consistent with salmonella.”) and driven back to the house I now shared with my dad. That’s when I found him on the kitchen floor, slumped in a corner, his artificial leg at an odd angle, fake foot still flat on the floor.

He was in what doctors called a diabetic coma-an obvious result of his nonstop drinking. “You need to take better care of him,” the ER nurse said. But it wasn’t until I filled out the insurance paperwork that I understood exactly how I’d failed my dad. I copied his date of birth from his driver’s license: August 28, 1947. I knew his birthday, naturally, but it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

My father was a Virgo.

In their glee to portray me as a bad employee, the suits failed to mention that on the very day my dad was fighting for his life in a hospital bed, I still reported to work. Of course, it was also that day, November 30, that my section editor responded to a complaint from the features syndicate, investigated, and called me into her office.

In the frenzy of meetings and recriminations that followed, I somehow got one last altered horoscope into the paper. Again, I don’t mean to portray myself as some kind of primitive, moon-worshipping kook, but the next day, Virgos across Portland read the heartfelt plea, “ Five stars: you’ll get better. I’m sorry. ”

Dad pulled out of his hypoglycemic coma and returned home to live dryly, me at his side. I have purged his little house of alcohol. Dad drinks a lot of tomato juice now. Since I’m not working, we play game after game of cribbage, so much that I have begun to dream of myself as one of those pegs, making my way up and down the little board. I recently shared this dream with my court-ordered therapist. She wondered aloud if the dream had to do with my father’s peg leg. So I told Dad about my dream and he said that he sometimes dreams his missing leg is living in a trailer in Livingston, Montana. I’m thinking of asking him to come to counseling with me.

And Tanya? Even after the story in the Oregonian -from which I hoped she’d at least glean the depth of my feelings for her-I never heard a word. My probation officer and therapist have insisted, rightly I suppose, that I leave Tanya alone, but this afternoon I went to the store to get more tomato juice for Dad and I found myself down the block from her building again.

This time, however, it was different. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d begun to worry that my little prank had somehow caused her to become sick. And I take it as a positive sign that I didn’t want that for her. I really didn’t. I sat in my car down the street and gazed up to our third-floor corner window, just hoping to get a glimpse of her. It’s winter now and the early night sky was bruised and dusky. Our old condo was dark. It crossed my mind that maybe she had moved, and I have to say, I was okay with that. I had just reached down to start my car when I saw them walking up the sidewalk, a block from the condo. Tanya looked not only healthy, but beautiful. Happy. The big, dumb, sensitive, cheating chef was holding her hand. And I was happy for her. I really was. She laughed, and above them a streetlight winked at me and slowly came on.

There was a line in the newspaper’s apology that stunned me, describing what I’d done as “ a kind of public stalking .” I shook when I read that. I suppose it’s what Tanya thinks of me too. Maybe everyone. That I’m crazy. And maybe I am.

But if you really want my side of the story, here it is: