Tim Sandlin - Social Blunders

Of course, this nifty rationale blew to smithereens at the thought of Gus telling Gilia what Katrina and I had done on the climbing wall.

“What’d you come back so soon for?” I asked. “I thought you were gone for the afternoon.”

Gus straightened. “I got home and found your letter in my apron. Figured you better read it.”

“Someone sent me a letter?”

“Black woman. A black woman writes a letter it must be important. Black woman isn’t going to send you chitchat.”

“You opened my letter?”

“’Course not. I’ve got morals, unlike others in this room.”

What I needed was coffee. Unfinished blow jobs always make me crave coffee. For some reason I can’t explain, I’ve had a number of unfinished blow jobs in my life. It’s like the women get down there and start making lists of places they’d rather be.

“You need these grounds, Gus? I want to make a new pot.”

“Don’t you go throwing out my grounds.”

“That’s why I asked. I never throw out old coffee grounds without permission.” I spread a New York Times Book Review on the counter and dumped out this morning’s grounds.

“So, if you didn’t open my letter, how do you know it’s from a black woman?”

Gus went into her apron pocket and sailed the letter across the room. “Handwriting’s a black woman’s.”

The address was in blue ink—large letters with big loops and carefully dotted i ’s. There was no return address.

“You can tell a person’s race and gender by their handwriting?”

Gus slammed a pie onto the counter so hard the other pies jumped. “I should get paid extra for working with a handicapped boss.”

“Just wondering.”

“’Course I can tell black from white and man from woman. I’m not blind.”

I turned the letter over. A Christmas Seal picture of a tiny angel and star held down the back flap. “Is my handwriting black?”

“No.”

“Part black?”

“Your handwriting’s Chinese.”

Mr. Callahan,

I wish to speak with you regarding the matter you broached at my home Saturday afternoon last. If it is convenient, would you meet me after Sunday services at the Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Benbow Ave. I shall be on the front lawn around 11 a.m.

Mrs. Atalanta Williams

The trouble—besides guilt over Atalanta Williams, anxiety over Gilia, confusion over sex with Katrina, and the perpetual sorrow of being alive because my mother was group raped—was sleep. I couldn’t do it. Or, I couldn’t fall asleep until dawn, but once there, I couldn’t wake up until it was time to go to sleep again.

The entire week I stumbled around with swamp water on my brain; trance movements from home to Tex and Shirley’s to work to the Ramada to the Exercycle 6000, and then, more exhausted than I thought humanly survivable, I lay in my bed and zing—the swamp turned into a beehive. My skin itched. Someone else’s rock video lit up the backs of my eyelids and I thought of everything that had ever happened or would happen anywhere in the universe. I dickered with God.

Sunday morning, twenty minutes after I drifted into the blessed relief of sleep, Ivan Idervitch leaned on my front porch doorbell. Ivan Idervitch is the nine-year-old from across the street and down a couple, and when you first see Ivan what you notice is his horn-rimmed glasses. They make his eyes big as Ping-Pong balls, but for some reason I don’t notice the eyes, just the glasses. I always try to be nice to Ivan because his parents make him wear suspenders. My mother made me wear dickies in Wyoming when none of the other boys wore dickies, so I know how it can be.

Ivan Idervitch rang the doorbell for like ten minutes before I managed to pull on a bathrobe and stumble down the stairs. Shannon and Eugene were still doing whatever disgusting thing they did, and Gus was nowhere near. She only takes one day off a week and she chooses which day based on whenever she feels the urge.

“Here.” Ivan thrust a pink paper at me.

“What’s this?”

“Stuff about you. The man’s paying me two cents apiece to give them away to every house in the neighborhood.”

“Everyone in the neighborhood will see this?”

“All the neighborhoods. My whole Cub Scout pack signed up. It’s our weekend project.”

“I’ll give you a dime apiece for what you’ve got there.”

Twin lights went on behind the glasses. The boy was a born MBA. “Fifteen cents.”

“Twelve. And if you go back for more, I’ll buy those too.”

“How about the other kids?”

I wondered how many fliers had been printed compared to how much my reputation was worth. “Okay, twelve cents, but the man can’t find out where his fliers are going.”

Ivan blinked behind his glasses. “Ten cents for the other kids and I get a two-cent fee for bringing them in.”

“When you grow up, come see me and I’ll give you a job.”

“No, thanks, Mr. Callahan, I’m going into the insurance field.”

The flier was about what you’d expect. A Xeroxed photo of me sat in the upper right hand corner. I don’t know when Mike Newberry took my picture, but the graininess made me look like a man who robbed gas stations.

The left side had a big headline that read PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD PERVERT and under that, in slightly smaller letters: Sam Callahan on a rampage against God, decency, and Southern values .

Then it listed twelve major social blunders:

Impregnated a 13-year-old girl

Arrested for copulation on a carnival ride

Writer of pornographic children’s books

Had simultaneous sex with twins

Frequent drug user including LSD and Double Humpies

Contributor to left-wing radical organizations

Gambles on cockfights

Frequents Oriental brothels

Commits perversions involving oral sex and food

While married, carried on an adulterous relationship with his colored maid

Tells slanderous lies concerning his parentage

Spat on the Confederate flag

At the bottom of the page it said: If you love your family, you will rise up and drive this blasphemous sex fiend from your midst . Then it gave my address and phone number.

Gus wasn’t going to like number ten. Any problems Skip and Wanda thought they had with me were diddly compared to what would happen if they pissed off Gus.

And the sex with twins charge wasn’t true. I’d fed that one to Mike Newberry Friday night. I once had sex with a twin, but I didn’t know whether she was Melissa or Melinda. They were always switching clothes and personalities to fool people. I wanted sex with the other twin but I was afraid to give it a shot because I didn’t know which one I’d already been with.

The left-wing radical group and spitting on the Confederate flag incident happened at a Charlie Daniels concert in Georgia. I paid a girl wearing an Earth first! T-shirt five dollars for what she said was genuine Macon County moonshine but was actually Coleman fuel and mint leaves. I spewed on the biker in front of us, whose leather jacket had you-know-what sewed on the back. He would have beat the crap out of me if the Earth first! girl hadn’t lit a match and torched him. In the ensuing confusion, we ran and hid in her van.

Ivan brought in 3,500 fliers before ten-thirty. When I left to meet Atalanta Williams, Shannon was at the kitchen table, passing out money to a steady stream of Cub Scouts. Eugene sat on a stool, reading the flier over and over and asking questions that began with “Did you really…” I think I’d finally impressed the dork.

I waited in the park across from Atalanta’s church, watching the weather, the traffic, and squirrels. The weather was mixed, puffy clouds and cool. Traffic was light to none. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” wafted from the red brick church, across the neat lawn and juniper hedge, and past the Signs on Wheels sign that read Have God, will travel.