Craig Lancaster - 600 Hours of Edward

I don’t have it in me to wait for you to show up…and that you never commented or supported me on anything that I said about my life was very revealing that you thought you were the only one nervous or needing to feel put at ease. I gave you that, you didn’t. It made me sad and angry a bit because I thought more of you.

I retrieve the green office folder yet again.

Annette:

I do not know why you insist on continuing to write to me. Your complaints are heading into bizarre territory now. Dr. Buckley says that when I start to feel overwhelmed or out of control, I should take a deep breath and focus on a path out of the chaos. I rather think you should take that advice now.

Annette, or Joy, or whoever she is, writes three more times, and my green office folder begins to fill up.

Edward:

I was going to write and see if we could work something out but I think that it is better to let it go. I think that at this point, any making up would just lead to more of the same kind of misunderstanding and “drama.” I think your substantial, kind-hearted, sweet, beautiful in your own way, and so much more you will never know. But I cant go into something this emotional. My last boyfriend, whom I dearly loved and completely supported through so much stuff, took it and then he slammed another girl just a few short months ago. Therefore, I am looking for a less dramatic deal right now.

Annette:

My head is swimming. You’re looking for a less dramatic deal? Somehow, I find that hard to believe.

Edward:

I wish you would write back. I need to know what your thinking about all of this. Maybe there’s a way we could start over. I don’t know. Write me back and lets talk about it.

Annette:

I think it’s funny—not funny “ha-ha,” but just funny—that I’m the one with a mental illness.

Edward:

Your an asshole. I pour out my heart to you and you say nothing. Good-bye, looser.

Annette:

Good-bye. And it’s “loser.”

I put the green office folder called “Joy—aka, Annette” away for the last time. It’s nearly noon, and I’m headed back to bed.

I stir at 6:03 p.m. and pad into the kitchen for dinner. In addition to all the other ways in which this thing with Joy-Annette went sideways, my meal schedule is fouled up. I didn’t have lunch, and now it’s dinnertime. Consequently, I will have one extra meal in the house when I return to the grocery store next week. These are complications I do not need.

I cook my Banquet fried chicken dinner in the microwave and try to, as Dr. Buckley says, find a route back to normalcy.

I can’t see that road.

At 10:00, I play tonight’s episode of Dragnet .

I am irritated that I have missed the fourth episode of the first season, “The Interrogation,” as it is my favorite of all ninety-eight color episodes. But I decide that sticking to my schedule is more important than making up the lost ground. As it turns out, I will see “The Interrogation” again on January 4, 2009, as I reset from the beginning of these series on the first day of every year. That is not so far away now.

The fifth episode of the first season is called “The Masked Bandits,” and it is one of my favorites. It originally aired on February 16, 1967, and involves a gang of young punks who wear red masks and hold up cocktail lounges.

One of the punks is a seventeen-year-old kid named Larry Hubbert (played by Ron Russell, in his only Dragnet appearance). Larry is married to an older woman named Edna (played by Virginia Vincent, who made six Dragnet appearances). Edna took Larry in when his parents left town, and she wants what is best for him, even though he wants to rob cocktail joints.

At one point in the episode, Edna tells Sergeant Joe Friday that she’s as entitled to love as anybody is. Sergeant Joe Friday doesn’t disagree.

I don’t, either, but I have news for Edna Hubbert: love isn’t easy to find.

Do you know that gauzy feeling that comes from having not too little sleep but too much? Everything seems a little fuzzy, there is a faint headache, and things seem to move in slow motion but still too fast. That’s how I feel today at 7:37 a.m., when I wake up. It’s the eighteenth time in 300 days this year (because it’s a leap year) and the second morning in a row for that time. Of the range of my four most common wake-up times—7:37, 7:38, 7:39, and 7:40—7:37 is the least frequent of the bunch. Maybe 7:37 is staging a rally.

I record my waking time, and my data is complete.

I’m still agitated and flummoxed by Joy-Annette’s behavior yesterday. She seemed nice in our initial e-mails, if a bit sloppy and unfamiliar with proper punctuation. She even seemed nice at our abbreviated dinner, until the misunderstanding about sex. When she left so abruptly, I thought that it was my fault, even though she had asked me what I was nervous about and I answered her honestly, which I thought is what I should do.

But yesterday, she was not nice. I will tell Dr. Buckley about it, and I will bet that she will agree with my assessment. After yesterday, I am no longer even sure that it was my fault that our dinner ended so quickly. Joy-Annette’s messages to me were erratic. First, she said that I was selfish when I burped. Then she said I wasn’t supportive. Then she said she can’t invest in something so emotional. Then she said maybe if I wrote back, we could try again. Then she called me an asshole.

That hurt my feelings.

Now I’m quite sure that I don’t know what Joy-Annette wants, and I wonder if it’s a woman thing or just a Joy-Annette thing. Dr. Buckley is a woman, and I don’t think she would treat someone this way. It must be a Joy-Annette thing.

As I’m considering all of this, I find that my thoughts are drifting back to something that happened a long time ago.

When I was at Billings West High School—class of 1987—I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t have any friends, unless you count Mr. Withers, but he was a teacher. I kept to myself and did well in most of my classes, though I liked wood shop the best, partly because of Mr. Withers and partly because I was exceptional at it. “Exceptional” is Mr. Withers’s word. I love that word.

One day during my junior year, a really pretty girl in my English class, Lisa Edgington, started talking to me. I didn’t really know what to say back. She asked me if I thought she was pretty, and I said that I did. That kind of embarrassed me. She told me that she thought I was cute, and that really embarrassed me.

She told me that she wanted me to meet her after school, over near the football field. I said that I would.

A few hours later, I was at the football field. She was there, too. She asked me if I wanted to kiss her. I felt blood rush to my face, and I asked her not to tease me. She said, “No, really, do you want to kiss me?” I said I did. And she let me. Then I heard laughing. A bunch of kids from school were under the bleachers, pointing at us.

“Let’s get out of here,” Lisa Edgington said to them, and she ran off with them, laughing. They went to the parking lot and climbed into a car and left.

The next day at school, a lot of people were pointing and laughing at me. When I passed by her locker, Lisa Edgington wouldn’t even look at me. In English class, she didn’t talk to me.

The laughing went on for a week, at least. Lisa Edgington’s silence went on longer than that, until graduation, and then I never saw her again. One day, a boy asked me in wood shop, “Hey, Edward, are you going to hump Lisa Edgington?” Mr. Withers overheard it and pulled that boy into his office and yelled at him. That boy came back to his seat red faced, and he never said another word to me.