Bigger Fish

Baby…

Like I was saying on the phone, I am a goddamn genius, you know. Little story… have you even read this far?…Little story, Date: 1973, Martin’s Landing, Roswell Georgia.  My parents had sold their home on Mt.Vernon Road in Sandy Springs, and moved from the Golden Ghetto to the “New South,” Martin’s Landing, an attached town home community overlooking the Chattahoochee River. I, an eager young respiratory therapist, having just lost, for the third or fourth time, the love of my life, took the advice of a favorite patient who befriended the dashing and handsome Lothario. The man’s name was Joe David Brown, a southern writer of some repute, Google him, best known as author of  the novel “Addie Pray,”  later a film starring an old acquaintance of mine, Ryan O’Neal, and his daughter, Tatum, who of course was the youngest actress to win a “grown up” best supporting actress academy award for he role in the movie adaptation, titled “Paper Moon.”

But back to this story, Joe David and I became friends during his three or four extended stays in CCU at Atlanta’s Crawford Long Hospital (he later died there, or on the way there) and he came to admire my way with the nurses, my courtly southern manners, I was a southerion gentleman as was he, and I, in an effort to impress him, brought, with no little misgivings, a folio of typed pages of my poetry for him to read. Well, I don’t mind saying, he was impressed, and offered his assistance should I care to publish, but I had bigger fish to fry, for I knew that poetry as I understood it to be, was a dying art, even then being replaced by scrawny drug addicts with Gibson guitars, and rhyming lyrics which reeked of the bourgeois self indulgence of a drug laced generation of utter losers, like Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues, or that jew boy Bob Dylan or the monastic Arlo Guthrie…never mind, the point was I wanted to be a novelist, like Faulkner or Hemingway or even Steinbeck, and I knew I could write, I just knew it, I’d been doing it all my life, I was even editor of my school’s literary magazine, so I’ve been told.

You still with me?  Well, I went to see my daddy, living in Martins Landing with brother Bart, and I asked him if I could take up residence for a month or so to write a great American novel, and as my momma lived in Palm Beach at the time, and things around the house were fairly quiet, he said, “alright.”  Now I needed a leave of absence from the hospital, and to get it,  I scratched myself with a syringe that looked like a pen and had been used to test for a TB reaction on a TB patient, and with positive test results in hand, actually, false positive, in no time at all I got a paid leave of absence.  See, TB is a respiratory disease, and I was a Respiratory Therapist, it just made made good sense for the hospital to err on the side of caution.

Well, with a brand new silver Parker Ink Pen, you know, the one with the cross hatching on the barrel, a bottle of royal blue ink with the well, and a sheaf of lined paper, I pretty much wrote that damn novel in a month.  I still have the pen. The novel wasn’t war and peace, it ran a little over a 100,000 words. Now when Joe David read the hand written draft, he was ecstatic; it seemed to him he had discovered a protege, a new  southern literary voice,  and well, I was on my way to fame and fortune… and then it happened.

See, the woman on whom I based the heroine of the novel, the reason for my heart even beating, and it beating hard at that, the woman whose character I featured as nearly as important as the protagonist, a male character named Garth, well, that woman got angry with me and stopped speaking to me and to this day she still has never again spoken a single word to me, not that I even know where she lives now. Jesus, all because, well some say it was because I married Sam,  nee Linda Shoor Raiford, a crippled nurse, impulsively, after work one day. BJ and Mark (you don’t need to know them) drove us up to the marriage mill in Ringgold Ga and we tied one on and tied the knot; but in my defense, I did divorce her pretty quickly.  No, that wasn’t it, and it wasn’t cause she didn’t love me, ‘cause no one could hold a grudge that long if they didn’t really love you. No, I always said it was because we were always fighting over my ostensible lack of ambition.

Truth is,  she was a terrific nurse who would have liked the opportunity to go to med school, and I had that opportunity but thought little of it.  She had a daughter, Trisha, dear little child, who wasn’t nearly as bright or beautiful as my daughter, but I mostly kept that to myself.  No, the reason she never saw me or spoke to me again was that I tried to sleep with her best friend, a piece of work named Dirle Kirk, of the Kirks down in Columbus and across the river, in Phoenix City, Alabama. Tough people those Kirks, into lots of mischief, and well, Dirle became a nurse to help out her family; you know, sometimes its best not to go to the hospital with gunshot wounds.

Now that last night we spoke, not Dirle, but Carol, the love of my life, we had just finished a 3-11 shift. Carol was charge nurse in CCU and like me, was good friends with Joe David Brown. She even liked his pretty daughter, of course  she had no thought of my intentions toward his pretty daughter. Well Dirle came out of the nursery with her son, he was four or five months old, and she was looking a little ragged,  Now, down south here we have a saying about the foolish, impulsive acts of men, we say they “have a wild hair up their ass.”  Its a saying that supposed to make up for a lot, supposed to protect you from the consequences of acting like a fool. I looked at Dirle, turned and told Carol I’d ride home with Dirle. Nothing else was said, just that I’d ride home with Dirle.  Now usually I’d ride home with Carol, because I normally stayed at her apartment. We didn’t have any “agreement” and I suspect now, forty years later, that she had me on probation, after that snap marriage thing,

As I later thought about it, she did have a peculiar look on her face, kind of tight lipped and drawn-up, and she turned away and got in that damn little Toyota, the little yellow one we’d had such good times in, and off she drove. Now I got in the pilots seat of Dirle’s Impala, and drove her home down to Main Street, East Point, Georgia;  down past  southeast Atlanta.  When we got to Dirle’s apartment, I walked with her to the door, and she asked, and I remember this clear as day, she asked, ‘How are you getting home?”

“Why Dirle I want to stay,” I said.  “Your man’s in Reidsville, you’re alone and I think you are beautiful.” She hesitated. “Flattery will get you a drink before you call a taxi.”  As Sherlock Holmes would say,  I knew then “the game’s afoot.”   I entered the apartment with her, and she put down that baby it its crib, and she said, “I’m gonna change,” and slid off into her room. She was gone a while, then she called out “the liquor’s over the fridge” My heart was pumpin, my…, well it was hard pumping, and I got down the bottle of Evan Williams, the one with the red wax seal and set it and two jelly glasses smack down on the table, as if to call her to me. Here she came, wearing a just a little something, and tattooed on her left upper arm, “Jimmy,” and a floral heart above her right bosom, and and another real low ’round her back, and she sat cross from me at that little breakfast table, and we drank a pretty good amount.

Now then, it got time for bed, and we’d had some pretty racy, could have even called it raunchy, talk most about how I wanted to kiss and  squeeze and nurse those bosoms. Ok I didn’t say I wasn’t a little bent, and then, well you know what I wanted. She pushed away from the table, and we embraced, not kissed, and as she gathered up her little boy, she said “wait here, big man.”  I assume she was referring to the unmentioned member of my anatomy I spoke of as hard and thick and long,  and I puffed up in anticipation, and was tearing off my uniform when I heard her say “Big boy meet bigger boy”, and I wheeled about to see her standing bare breasted, naked in her bedroom door, and in my haze, such as a drinking bottle of liquor will do, I vaguely saw the outline of what she held tight in her hands.

“You aren’t nothing but a snot nosed preppy boy; my man Jimmy would cut you in two. This here’s a 44 magnum. You come through this door and I’ll  blow a hole in you.” I stood there somewhat stunned,  open gapping mouth, staring at her nakedness and the weapon. “Now look at what you’ve been wantin to see.”   Dirle began to turn this way and that, like a circus side show contortionist, revealing all, and boy, she had some pretty graphic tats on her pretty graphic parts, and she showed everyone to me. I stood there and looked dumb, nor dumbfounded, I was past finding dumb, I was in dumb. “Why, why,why?” I stammered. “Why not me?”  At that moment, glistening and slick with sweat, she spoke profound words to me that taught me more about how women love, about the nature of  love and friendship than anyone ever since, when she said: “Carol is my best friend” and turned and shut her door.

I stood there, before her closed door and considered my options. Of course, it didn’t help that I was drunk, but I did consider that she was a Kirk, and probably would kill me dead.

It was about three in the morning when I walked out her front door, I in my wrinkled white clinic coat, and bulging blue slacks. Well I was young then…and I walked through niggertown up the black belly of Atlanta, 7 or 8 miles and while many denizens looked on, no one touched. I reckon it was the way I walked; men know when a man walks like that he’s had a disappointing night and shouldn’t be troubled for his wallet.

Now I’ve done it twice, as you well know, gone after a true love’s best friend, and still no nookie. Not that its even near the same this time. I didn’t even want to fuck your friend. Hell, I’m a mess. If I knew why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing, I’d trade on the stock market. Its like I’ve been buying lottery tickets, thinkin’ I’d find a winner. You know, those scratch off ones, where you scratch the surface, and underneath, might find treasure. And here you are, solid gold!  I am so sorry, no, I am a sorry SOB, and that’s the truth.

Oh yes, Carol didn’t come to work the next day, nor Dirle, and the day after, I got fired; seems some nurses had complained about what they had seen going on in the linen closet.  Carol left Crawford Long soon thereafter, and I never saw her again. Tried to many times, so many different ways, but she never saw or spoke to me ever again. Later heard she married a Christian school football coach and had five more kids. As for Dirle Kirk, I never saw her again,  well,  except in my dreams. Didn’t know you could do that with a 44 magnum.

And to the point of this sadly true story, well really two points. First, I never finished that great novel, despite Joe David Brown introducing me to his New York agent, and his offering to stake me to a job in the Big Apple with Time Magazine, he’d been Editor in Chief there, while we waited to get “Richland Ridge” published and in print. If only he had offered me his pretty daughter!  I never finished it because I wrote…  because I loved Carol and wrote my novel because I wanted to give her a present. I wanted to give her a version of me that could do something good in the world, that could offer her and Trisha a safe secure corner in a chaotic world. I wrote it because she really was crazy about me, loved me so well, so much, put up with so much crap, so much horrible hurt and pain. I wrote it to write myself a new life;  but hell, I couldn’t leave the old one, it was too damn much fun, too damn much pain, speeding along, a life in the excess lane. So you see, Dirle was my “I ain’t playing with you no more” card, a chicken shit way of ending badly what began so well.

The second point is, I’m writing now for you. No expectations, nothing else to offer, I never will be enough for you. You deserve a wonderful life.  I’m just another man who abused you, but the difference is, this time, I really am sorry.  You remember that movie “Big Fish” how the son, played by Billy Crudup, thought everything his father, played by Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney, told him about his life was a lie, a fantasy?.  How when he died, all the characters who he befriended, all of them the stuff of myth, came to his funeral? You remember that?  How wonderful it was, what a good man he was?

Believe it, few men have survived the life I led, a life that really lasted but a decade, but what a decade, 1965 to 1975! For me, everything I believed about my life was a lie, I can’t find truth anywhere. For me, there will be an “After the Funeral” party, the one on the other side of life where all the women I’ve hurt, all the children those women aborted, all the people I’ve destroyed, all the children I fathered unknown, all the hippies I sent to jail and to hell, every one of them will be there. It will be one hell’va party, with much drinking jubilation as they lower me into the second grave, into that endless pit of fire. What did that old fella John Milton say? “I’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.”  That’s bullshit. What I want is both!

I can only say this, those who I have hurt have been the better for it.  Some learned painful lessons from the it; some saw themselves in me and changed; others were already to0 good, and stayed that way. You are the too good kind, so I guess I’ll say goodbye. Talk me out of it, please…