David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

Used to, I said.

So why do you think you stopped having them?

Now you’re getting personal, I said. Okay, because I don’t need to have them anymore, how’s that? My every wish has come true.

You don’t have to be ugly, she said. She moved away from me, got back in the bed and pulled the comforter up to her neck. I went and got in with her. This is a lot different for you than it is for me, she said.

Okay, I said. But that’s, like, a universal truth, no?

I ventured a hand onto her coarse hairs. Sometimes you guess right: she did something with her hips to arch up against the hand. I ventured a finger down.

Mm, okay, she said. I’m going to pretend. Just do that. She writhed, then said, No. No, stop it, that was mean what you said. You still don’t get it that I’m smart. Would you do that some more?

You feel good there, I said. We lucked out, didn’t we?

Sssh, she said. Somebody will hear you.

Somebody’s always hearing me, I said. That’s the nature of my disease.

And you’re so unique, she said. That’s another selling point.

Fuck you, I said. I really do like you.

See, she said, I’m the same person as you. I’m only going to say that once.

This was our Friday night conversation, before our Saturday night conversation, the one where I asked her if we needed to be having this conversation. On Friday night she’d been drunk and travel weary—as opposed to Saturday night, when she was just drunk—and we’d sat up sipping the Jameson she’d bought, which diffused into your tongue like stinging honey. When I got back here, a month later, alone, in a walking cast, the bottle was still sitting on the night table, and the two snifters had penny-sized pools of amber.

—

At the time all this happened I’d hit the wall moneywise. In order to keep my job—at a men’s magazine, if that’s important—I’d rented a studio in the East Village, where I spent Tuesdays through Fridays and drove up here late Friday nights, sometimes getting in after daybreak. I’d taken over the entire mortgage on the cabin and was still covering the maintenance on the apartment where I’d lived with my ex-wife and my son. A six-hour drive, in the car with the sunroof, on which I was still making payments. But hitting the wall—what did that mean really? It was like one of my son’s computer games, where you’re about to hit a wall but then take an impossible left turn, the stones fly past on your right and now you’re in another space skimming over a field of green, then leaping a trench to land on a hillock where a monster attacks you but you biff the monster away —biff biff —and he vanishes howling and then you’re skirting another wall, in which a gate opens: you go through, everything drops away beneath you and you’re flying over an ocean where fishes are sporting. To translate: I’d send away for a new credit card, and on it went.

These days I’m out of debt, like wise old Ben Franklin but not so fat and femmy, having lost twenty pounds and shaved my head. Studio in the East Village long gone, maintenance on the apartment off my back, thanks to my ex-wife’s smart investing and, I have to say, her charity, and the cabin and its ten acres paid off in six more years. My son says he doesn’t want the place, but we’ll see about that. From this window, you can see his swing—or you could if it were daylight—still hanging from the big maple tree. I cut the seat from a pressure-treated two-by-six: it will outlast the ropes, already rotting, then me, then him. I used to push him and he’d fly out over the bed of daylilies, stretching to touch the toe of his sneaker to this one high branch. Blackberry brambles and tall grass now grow where I used to stand behind him, and the bare patch of earth is gone where his feet used to come down. The only thing worse would have been to keep clearing it all with the lawn mower every year—but we can’t have that tone taking over, it’s worse than the woo-woo. Let’s get back to something like Ben Franklin being fat and femmy, that was good. I’ve cut up my credit cards, like the people on The Dave Ramsey Show , though I wrote the American Express number down so at Christmas I can still send shit from Harry & David. Okay, we like the word “shit.”

The people on my Christmas list: now that would tell you something. My mother in the assisted-living place outside Washington. (Ah, but is there any other kind of living? I live assisted by whoever does those rotisserie chickens at the Price Chopper in St. Johnsbury.) The two editors who still give me work. My ex-wife and my son: gifts neither acknowledged nor returned. This is the year I crossed off my father, whom I ordered to be moved from the hospital in White Plains to the assisted-dying place, a mile from the Price Chopper. I visit on my shopping days, but he no longer knows me, and even if Royal Riviera pears could be mashed into the feeding tube, there’s a limit, is there not? But I still send gifts to his nurses: the fat one, the other one, and the one with the nose stud. And to the doctor who put the titanium screw in my leg, then removed it. And to Dan somebody in Barre, whose card I always sign off on as “A Friend.” He probably gets shit from his wife—looking down I saw moonlight glint off his wedding ring, although, as I say, it wasn’t me—who probably thinks she knows what “Friend” means.

—

When I got out of the hospital I emailed my ex-wife and asked if we could have lunch sometime. She was actually the one who said, No, no lunches, no can do—I attributed that line to my Friend as an in-joke, though who was there to be amused? I emailed the Friend too, but it bounced back. All I’d said was I hope you’re well and that your life is good . Now you’d swear that was harmless. I Googled her once—that “once” is another false note, but this late in the story we need a little hit of the elegiac—and didn’t even find a Facebook page. So I assume—well, I don’t know what to assume. The worst? The best? Her twentieth high school reunion was coming up, I found out that much, and they were looking for her and three other people. It would bring everything around nicely if I said I’ve had no Friends since, but there’s no end of Friends, though there is eventually. My latest just went home a couple of hours ago, because she has to be up at six thirty to get in and open her store. Another refugee from New York, except she’s been here since the eighties. She’s my age—strands of white, which I’ve decided to find fetching, in the single braid that goes down her back—but with a yoga body. Her store carries mystical books, herbal cosmetics, hoodoo powders she gets from a place in New Orleans. She will not stock crystals or dream catchers, which she calls wankery. If you know her, she’ll sell you weed, which is how I got to know her. That sounds circular, but what I mean is she sells weed to the nurse with the nose stud, who introduced us. The first night she and I got high together, I asked if she’d ever had an out-of-body experience—I was getting ready to start telling my story—and she said, Is there any other kind?

When I was nineteen years old, I dropped out of the Berklee College of Music, where I’d been studying guitar—the one thing I’d ever been halfway good at—to tour with a band that wanted a screaming lead player, and when that all got too stupid, I moved back in with my parents in Connecticut, stayed in my room trying to get scales and modes and arpeggios up to speed and coming to realize that never in a million years. My father was at me to go to work for him and start regular college in the fall; he owned a chain of furniture stores, and a salesman had quit at the one in Westport. Then Mike, my hippie older brother, called from the hill town in western Mass where he was living in a cabin on a dairy farm, doing chores in exchange for rent, and said I should come hang out; it was a cool place, with a small lake and a bar where maybe I could get a job playing. This was the summer of 1975. Mike picked me up at the bus in Greenfield, and I remember driving with him up along the river and the train tracks, through Martin’s Falls and Crowsfield, then taking the turn-off for Bozrah, over a concrete bridge built by the WPA, onto a narrow road up out of the valley, following a brook with whitewater tumbling over the boulders, then past the town hall and post office, the church with the square steeple, the general store and the white clapboard houses, and on to a farm at the top of a dirt road and getting out of his car into the quiet, looking off at the green humpbacked hills and smelling that good air. It made me think I’d had enough of the world, and I still think so.