Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

To honor Shadrack in the Eastern sense, I went ahead one night with the subatomic anonymous sex. The woman and I were both quite drunk. We walked to her place. She pressed me deep into an easy chair, where my zipper parted like the jaws of life. She climbed aboard and impaled herself, pinning me odd-angled against the chair. Her face strained toward the ceiling, eyes shut, neck veins pulsing. Flush against me, her hips began vibrating like lunch trays in a tremor. Her sweat and spit dripped to my shirt. The chair rapped the windowpane in a frenzied rhythm. Everything hurt and I felt dizzy. Her body finally sagged, quaking and shuddering in a gradual meltdown. Our interface had ended with us more clothed than nude.

She peeled herself away, leaving my lingam hard as basalt, throbbing for release. She moved to the bed. I thought perhaps we were shifting to a more comfortable position, but when I lay beside her, she was crying. I was completely befuddled.

“Don’t look at me,” she said.

“It’s dark anyhow.”

“This isn’t right.”

“I know.”

“You know?” she said.

“It’s not easy to sleep with someone you don’t know.”

“It used to be.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“You’re not mad?” she asked.

“Why should I be mad?”

“The guy last week was mad.”

“I should go.”

She gently pulled me beside her. She wore a small golden ear of corn around her neck, a shibboleth. I moved to reap in silence. As Shadrack would say, our shared electrons produced a brief covalent bond and I snuck away early. Waking up hung over and intertwined with a stranger was worse than the hoosegow.

A few days later I mentioned the sordid mess to Shadrack, who suggested I upgrade my haunts. He’d begun ransacking tourist bars for a wealthy woman to raise a flock of blue-eyed athletic kids. His future wife’s earlobes must be attached to her head. He dated heiresses to old money and new money, the daughters of politicians and industrialists. He never quite learned that many women enjoy brief flings with artistic men. Legs opened like scissors at the chance to aggravate Daddy by introducing a scoundrel to the gene pool. No family wanted one of us in the woodpile, especially fresh-cut hardwood like myself.

Shadrack escorted me to a fancy tavern with a three-piece combo playing jazz in a corner. The musicians and waiters were wearing suits. Shadrack had lent me a tie, but I felt like a fugitive whose story everyone knew. He ordered a mixed drink of a strange hue and smell, saying it helped cover his halitosis, a product of his decaying teeth which chipped away like pearls. He was watching a woman with a perfectly nostriled nose. I suggested he introduce himself.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Every time I look at her, I think of my old girlfriend. That makes me remember the one before her and then I think of my mother. When I think of my mother, I think of the Virgin Mary and then I remember how Joseph never got laid. So maybe I’ll talk to her for Joseph’s sake.”

He strode away, a man no taller than a broomstick, with the sterling posture of a career officer. His natural walk crested with a toe bounce that gained him an extra inch of height. I scanned the gleaming row of bottles behind the bar and ordered a shot of triple sec. The bartender gave me a peculiar look which pleased me; only the truly privileged drank it straight. I ordered another and another.

A few hours passed before I lurched from the bar and began walking home. I woke lying on my back in a softness that reminded me of grass. Sea gulls gave their mournful call. My head hurt. I closed my eyes against what was certainly a dream, and later woke in the same place. Slowly I realized that the lovely blue was genuine sky and I was outside. My clothes were damp with dew. I turned my head and the grass continued to expand across a vast amount of treeless space. A panicked awareness burrowed into me that I had passed out on a rich man’s lawn. I rolled to my knees and swallowed to prevent gagging. My belly felt straight-wired to my brain. A low dirt mound rose in the distance. I was in Salem High’s outfield. I crawled toward the foul line and slept in the shade of a padlocked hot dog stand. I never drank triple sec again.

A few weeks later the mail brought a letter from my brother advising me in no uncertain terms that I was to be best man at his wedding. Twenty-nine years ago, my parents had moved very deep into the hills to drop a litter in private. They discouraged both family branches from visiting, violating the premise of Appalachian culture. Mom and Dad explained that it was for our own sake. I had no history behind my father, no love beyond my mother. As adults, none of us wrote or called. What had begun as a tight-knit cloister now functioned as a barricade. We had become the very people our parents sought to protect us from — distant family members.

I called Dane collect and said I’d thumb down, hoping he would withdraw his request. Instead, he offered to fetch me and I reluctantly agreed, terrified at having him bear witness to my circumstances. The terror turned to rage at my brother for getting married before me. As oldest, it was my right. The anger gave way to a bleak depression as I realized I’d never been to a wedding and didn’t know any married people. Getting married was something full-fledged adults did; I was still struggling through a prolonged adolescence, Columbus lost in the fog. As an only child, though, my namesake had been spared the perils of a brother. Dane probably felt the same way.

Dane and I were very close until my behavior veered to the illegal. Our break came when I stole an electric football game to clean the seeds from a quarter-pound of marijuana. The gentle vibration worked perfectly but Dane didn’t share my pride at ingenuity. He was outraged by the tiny seeds rolling into the end zone.

A few months later the county sheriff banged at the door with a warrant for Dane’s arrest. Mom cried and Dad’s face paled beneath the strain of incredulity. I watched from the bathroom, fully aware that the wrong name was on the warrant. I marched to the door and gave myself up in what remains my most heroic act to date. Dad was less angry at me than at the foolhardy notion of going to court at seven A.M.

Several years later, the night before I left Kentucky, Dane and I lay talking in our flanking beds. He said that he worried about me, and I asked why.

“You don’t have goals, Chris. You just want to go. You don’t check your progress and you can’t see where you’re heading. If you can’t prove the answer, it’s all messed up. Know what I mean?”

While I contemplated the truth of his words, he began to snore. Dane was a mathematician whose life moved along an advanced formula of direct lines, bracketed exponents, congruent functions, and the ultimate goal of symmetry. He had no room for my random patterns of oblique and gleeful entropy. Dane could prove the world was round without ever leaving his room. I needed wind, a flagship, and open water.

When I asked for time off work to attend the wedding, the manager of the restaurant said not to come back. I greeted Dane with the news that I’d been fired for his wedding, trapping him into complicity with my lifestyle. He couldn’t scold me, as he had in the past. I felt full of myself, like a hand puppet turned inside out.

Shadrack had recently learned the word “hodad” from a crossword puzzle, and we organized a hodad party. He and a friend with a green mohawk painted a beach mural on a wall.

“Are them boys all right?” Dane asked.

“Yup. They’re artists.”

“Ain’t queer, are they?”

“No. They’re friends of mine. It’ll be a great party, Dane.”

“What the heck’s a hodad?”