David Gates - Jernigan

I thought about trying to find a saucepan and melting some snow on top of the woodstove, as if on an Everest expedition. Now there’s the real world for you, real factual information about what people do on Mount Everest. God damned good and tired around here listening to all this shit about how Jernigan only lives in his own head.

Thought, too, about trying to find some paper and writing to my son, asking his forgiveness. Oh, not for anything all that specific. It would be the thought that counted. Except what were you going to say after asking forgiveness? Pledge to do better? Right, I can see you now, doing better.

And then I thought about prostrating myself right that minute on the floor and just praying to be subsumed, if they were still subsuming people these days. The old Not my will but Thine, 0 Lord, be done . What I imagined I was hanging on to at that point I can’t imagine. Same shit probably that I’m hanging on to now. The people who run the program here say I have to give it up. But as a matter of fact, I already — though I haven’t told them this — I already made that surrender once, years ago. Sort of made it. The last time I found myself drinking a quart a day of whatever there was. Danny was two, screaming his head off about everything, and the walls of that apartment on Barrow Street were falling in on me, and an old friend of my father’s took me to his AA meeting. Sculptor. He’d once suggested, years before, taking my father to one. (You can imagine.) At any rate, I’d apparently broken into this guy’s studio and passed out on the floor. I was willing, at that point, to give anything a shot. Partly because it scared me that I really couldn’t remember how I’d gotten into his studio. And partly for Danny, who hadn’t fucking asked to be born. They said, Keep coming back; it works . I did. It did. So there I was holding hands with everybody standing in a circle and saying the Lord’s Prayer, which I’d never learned as a child because Francis Jernigan was enlightened and my mother was an old party-line lefty. Well so of course I immediately loved the Lord’s Prayer. But later it began to scare me what I was praying for. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us? I could hear an “insofar” in there, the catch calculated to keep me forever unforgiven. And was I really ready for God’s Kingdom to come? I kept imagining a nuclear shit-storm. And of course eventually I became less keen on being led not into temptation. I finally got the thing down to Our Father who art in heaven, give us this day our daily bread and deliver us from evil, amen . And then I suspected there might be a catch even in that , that God could take it literally and you’d get nothing but bread. Anyway, by this time I was already telling myself Fuck it, you’re on top of it again so so what’s the big problem? I started having a beer once in a while and nothing terrible happened. So why don’t you just keep your mouth shut, I told myself, and hope you squeak by.

They hate this kind of thinking here.

But who isn’t just hoping to squeak by? Uncle Fred? Fine: let me tell you about Uncle Fred. This is Midsummer Acid Idyll Part II, okay? We’re up all night tripping and so forth and so on and we get back to the trailer in the morning and so on, this part you know. So we go into Uncle Fred’s room. Starting to come down, but hours from being able to sleep. And as the birdies sing outside the window, Uncle Fred explains to me exactly how he’s going to kill himself. He’s going to come up here in the wintertime, walk into the woods far beyond human earshot, chain and padlock himself to a tree and then toss the key away into the snow. He’s got the chain and padlock there under his bed! He lifted a corner of the blanket and dragged them out to show me. So just remember that the next time Uncle Fred greets somebody by saying Stand and give the password . Or any of the rest of that hearty horseshit.

And in case you think that was just adolescence, here’s another Uncle Fred story. Two summers ago I was up at the camp for a weekend. Or three, I don’t know. I know it was when Judith was still alive, because I remember how quick Uncle Fred and Penny were to accept my bullshit explanation of why she’d decided at the last minute to stay home with Danny. At that time Uncle Fred had added a boombox to the amenities, and a bunch of Merle Haggard and George Jones tapes. Country music for the country: you’d have to know Uncle Fred to see that what he was doing was parodying the whole idea that things fit together. Except that he’d also started to like country music. Penny had gone to bed and we were sitting outside drinking Jack Daniel’s under the bug-zapper. No other light but its purple glow, and a crescent moon just above the hilltop. Stars. We’d brought the boombox out, and Merle Haggard was singing a song about how a shrink gives him a Rorschach test and the inkblots look like broken hearts — kind of strained, I thought — when Uncle Fred announced that he, Uncle Fred, was an apostrophe. I thought that what he meant was apostate and I asked for some clarification on that. “It’s like I’m what’s there to show that something’s missing,” he said. Then he leaned forward and vomited. When he sat up again, he wiped his mouth with his hand and begged me to get a shovel and cover over the vomit so Penny wouldn’t know in the morning. Which of course I did.

Well, the boombox didn’t seem to be here now. Either thieves had gotten it or Uncle Fred had taken it back to the city. But sitting down on the sofa again I felt something and I reached under me and found the empty plastic case for Serving 190 Proof . It made me want to hear Merle Haggard’s voice. I had my Walkman here somewhere, unless I’d left it back in the car. I thought about getting up and starting to lift sofa cushions and shit, looking for the tape itself. But the point is, here I was wanting one more fucking thing. And I could see that after that I was just going to keep wanting the next thing and the next thing and the next. Imagine thinking this was the end.

1

The Fourth of July had come around again. Even now, at eleven in the morning, you could hear firecrackers. Tonight, as dogs howled, they’d be setting off the big display over the lake.

Judith died a year ago today.

By way of commemoration I was going to mow the lawn and watch the Yankee game and try to figure out the evening from there. Oh, I know how bad this sounds: okay, fine. So what do you think would have been appropriate? There wasn’t even a grave to visit. Her brother, Rick, had remembered her saying once that when she died she wanted her ashes scattered off Montauk Point. She was probably half in the bag, assuming Rick hadn’t just dreamed the whole thing up. But once he’d said it, we obviously had to do it. Now there was a day, the day we drove out there to scatter the fucking ashes. Day after the funeral. We had to walk with this cardboard box for what must have been a mile of beach looking for someplace where there wouldn’t be a hundred people on blankets watching you do this thing, which I think was against the law to boot. Just me and Rick along on this one. I thought it was something Danny could skip: he’d been taking the whole thing so calmly that it was scaring the shit out of me. By the time we found a spot, we weren’t really that near Montauk Point anymore. Even getting the box open was more hassle than you’d expect — I ended up cutting through the tape with the Powerful Pete on my key ring — and then the ashes didn’t scatter much, since there were chunks of bone and stuff and neither of us wanted to touch it with his hands. So I just kind of threw it out toward the water and some of the ashier shit came back down in a gray heap on the wet part of the sand where the waves didn’t quite reach. We didn’t know whether the tide was coming in or going out; if it was going out, the stuff was going to have to sit there for another eleven hours. Or was it another twenty-three? So I took the edge of my hand and brushed from side to side and they sort of smeared and we got the hell out of there.