David Gates - Jernigan

I ran to the kitchen for the phone. Though I might as well have walked. Might as well have let a year go by.

“Look,” said Ward Bond, “now why don’t you be a good kid and we’ll take you in to a doctor. Everything’s going to be all right.”

I jabbed the O. Somebody better know what to do.

1

The people here are getting sick of my bullshit.

What is this document you’re writing? they want to know. Just a simple list , we told you: you write down the people you’ve harmed and what you did to them, period. Then you get started making your amends; that’s how the program works . But up to now they haven’t really been able to nail me. I’m still trying to sort this stuff out , I tell them. You know, what I did to people: is it really just this straightforward deal where, pow, you do something shitty and, thud, somebody feels shitty? I mean, take Judith. Please. (Little joke.) On the one hand, this is someone who actually died because, bottom line, I made her miserable, right? But then there’s all this stuff about how people are responsible for their own feelings — I mean, I’m responsible for my own feelings, right? — so therefore did I really make her miserable? They have a name for this kind of talk: the Retreat Into Confusion. Getting befuddled, they say, is one more strategy for avoiding the real issue. No, I tell them, it’s just the opposite . What I’m after, I tell them, is a little clarity here, about what happens in this world: is that not a real issue? They say writing all this stuff down is only a strategy to gain time. (Or lose time, if you want to think of it that way.) And that makes them feel smart, to think they’ve really got old Jernigan’s number. Which isn’t to say they haven’t. You have to bear with me a little on this, I tell them; I’ve got my own way of doing things. Right, they say, that’s what got you here.

Though of course I almost didn’t get here, which is a story outside this story really. More Uncle Fred’s story than mine, anyway: he was the one who called the police; I was only the mumbling thing carried out of his trailer. (I do remember at some point looking down at the bandaged hand and thinking the shape of it looked wrong. But that must’ve been later, in the hospital.) I gather from what Uncle Fred tells me that the hospital and this place have eaten up all the money from selling Heritage Circle and then some. I’d thought a couple of times about health insurance after I got shit-canned, but. At any rate, Uncle Fred says I’m not to worry about any of that now. He says that handling all this stuff has only taken him a couple of vacation days; I know that has to be bullshit. And he says it was really Danny who saved my life: by calling him when he did, to say I was headed for New Hampshire in bad shape. He’s the one you ought to be thanking, Uncle Fred says, not me. I tell him, Fuck it, let’s talk about fucking sports , man. How about those Islanders? How about the Pittsburgh fucking Penguins? But he’s lost his sense of irony or something.

All I remember of that story is what was supposed to be the end.

As the first stars came out over Studebaker Hill, I left the trailer and trudged back up to my car, taking the same roundabout way so as not to defile the open snow. I drove to the state store a couple of towns over — at New Hampshire prices, I had enough money left for a whole quart — and when I got back, I kept going on past the camp and parked by the frozen pond a mile farther up the road. I took the rubber hose out of the trunk, paid it out into the gas tank until it hit bottom, knelt and sucked until I got gasoline in the mouth, and then laid the end of the hose down so it would keep pissing into the snow. In fact, I thought about swallowing that mouthful of gasoline, but I didn’t know enough about what would happen. Staggering around in the snow, blind and puking, that was no way to go out. So I spat, then picked up handfuls of snow and sloshed them around in my mouth. The walk back to the camp was mostly downhill, but it still takes it out of you to walk in that kind of cold. Only one car passed by, and I saw the lights coming from far enough away so that I had time to crash through the snowbank and hide behind a tree. From the place where you left the plowed road and went down to the trailer I broke new trail, even deeper in the woods and farther from the open field. I could have saved energy by walking in my old footprints, but that wasn’t the idea. The idea was to get there on something like my last legs. Inside, in the dark, I didn’t bother with the stove anymore. I lit a match long enough to locate what blankets there were, blew it out, pulled the blankets over me and got going on that bottle. One of the last things I remember is getting up to go outside and piss, and being pleased to find I couldn’t walk straight. I’d been doubting that the gin was taking hold the way it should, half inclined to blame the bargain price. But now I was lurching in the heroic style, stumbling into one wall, bouncing off it and hitting something else, probably a different wall. I couldn’t really feel the impact. When I finally did get to the door I no longer saw the sense of all this hoo-ha and figured Fuck it, might as well just let ’er go in your pants. It felt warm (though only briefly) and oh such release.

2

But. As I say. Whole other story.

My immediate response to the Dustin business wasn’t to get pants-pissing drunk. Quite the reverse. I decided to consider it a sign, just as I had back when Danny was two and I woke up on somebody’s floor among marble obelisks, and it turned out to be the studio of a man who hadn’t had a drink in twenty years. But that was a self-generated sign, or so I assume: I must have wanted, deep down, to get to a place where I could be saved. Dustin’s killing himself was a sign from outside. I mean, it wasn’t anything I’ d done. It told me I’d been making a loveless hell here, and that to stop drinking was only one of a bunch of things I had to do. Why wasn’t I using my gifts, such as they were, to serve others? Okay, you’re not a doctor. But you could damn well work in a soup kitchen. Or volunteer in a nursing home. Go to some hospital and hold unwanted babies before they died of not being held. Simply physically held: you could do it with an IQ of twenty. If you were lucky enough to be able-bodied, you dropped your self-absorbed bullshit and you went out and got any job you could get to keep yourself alive so you could help those who weren’t able-bodied. I mean, anybody knows this.

But Jernigan is no life-changer. Though willing enough to lie back and let it happen. So I ended up simply resolving to limit things to maybe a beer once in a while but really just a beer, and to do better with the little daily stuff. A smile of greeting, a thank you after a meal — oh believe me, I know how Reader’s Digesty this all sounds — and really listening to what loved ones are saying instead of finding ways to let them know that you wish they’d leave you the fuck alone. I thought: Martin Sanders’s family is shot to shit, but you still have a family. Or what might yet be made to approximate a family. And you’ve been sinking down and down and down into yourself and taking no care of it. Now that was going to stop. I was going to be part of this household again: take my turn doing dishes and feeding the bunnies. Death-chamber duty too. Danny was going to have a mother and Clarissa was going to have a father and Martha and I were going to have a sex life again and we were going to get a set of friends and everybody was going to do things together. I was going to look into health insurance and so on, and sock away that money from the house in some kind of a good bank thing so it would be there for Danny. I was going to start wearing that fun cowboy jacket. Christmas was only two weeks away, and we were going to have a tree and people over and things in the windows.