You want to swim like a porpoise?

The temptation had been so strong this time I was shook up. Then when I shook it off I went to my friend, to confront her.

"Do you know that in your life one bad turn is going to be fatal?"

"It's God and it's prayer when I'm alone," she said.

"Are you talking to your sponsor?" I demanded.

"She's learning to be a yogi. She's down in Mexico for six weeks learning to be a yogi!"

"Because listen, there's no slipping, god-dammit, there's only a long fall for you now. You won't be a bag lady, you'll be dead. Do you remember that you almost died?"

"Yes, I do."

"Do you know in two years you're still not OK? It's two years, you might forget. In a split second you might forget."

"It's God and prayer," she told me again.

"What if you forget to pray?"

"I don't know. I can't forget for very long I'm sure."

"You've been suffering. You're in bad shape!"


I didn't realize it at the time, but I know now that I went to the club to shoot Quilty a dirty look.

I'll tell you now. This is how he is.

A singular man of 45 ---singular in these Ozark parts anyhow---he is a former Shakespearean actor with a Master Of Fine Arts degree from Yale, and now owns a small auto repair business, where he works day and night to stay ahead.

He is not tall, but handsome, with thick brown hair just long enough to be uncombed and to obscure the reliable old sun-glasses that sit on top his head. He stands straight enough, with a sort of childhood slump I suppose, and wears a grease stained, decade old, whitish t-shirt advertising an Alfa Romeo. Then faded checkered shorts and his Working-Roman's sandals --- no socks, just hairy, cut up legs.

He arrives always late and on cue. He stands before us unconscious of any special attention, I believe, even though the show is his if he likes (and we hope).

Appraising the seating arrangements, stirring his cup with a thin black straw which he then stabs into his mouth to chew.

Sometimes he appears to be very sleepy, squinting near-sighted... maybe affecting the visage of some long ago actor-hero...some slack-jawed, lobotomized rebel, maybe himself, stoned. But it's eight years since he quit drinking and using heroin, eight years since he arrived here from Manhattan and Baltimore and New Haven, all these parts of him.

Girls giggle when his darting eyes land and probe, just that one half a moment longer than expected, teasing; the women grin or glower, unless they are missed.

"Giovani," he says, passing by with his eyes now focused on some spectacular beauty. John Wilkes Boothe, where is your cloak.

"Quilty," I'll say, not as a reply.

It's not that I overlooked that seat beside her. I don't think anyone could have overlooked it. But we are ordinary men and not pushing it. Some of us not even toeing the line.
____
I worry his worst nightmare might be to be accused of playing the sticks. I worry about Quilty having any nightmares at all, actually. His descriptions of hell and drugular horrors can almost lead him to jump up like Marley's ghost and shriek and shake his lifelong links of chains. But hell and horrors are not his usual focus. Quilty is a comedian. He laughs much too loud and notably off-beat.

His acting is too fine to be dismissed as false or "phony". We regard it as a performance and that is different, not only forgiveable but praise-worthy.

"Do you know who we are, as a people?

You do know we are a people? I mean here we are meeting in secret after all, we are set apart.

Set aside? Set Asides.

Do you know who we always were, as a people?
We were the last to know.

This is what I mean.

Myself, I was always the last to know that the hosts were tired and the party was over and it was time to go home. That's one for-instance, and an early sign. I became the last to know about a lot of things.

I was the last to know she left me for someone else.

I was the last to know that I was not a charming, entertaining inebriate but a boorish, loud, drunken fool who repeated himself over and over.

I was the last person to know my father was sick and dying.

No.

No! They wouldn't tell me. My family.

You see, I would have been the emotional one. No, wait again...not the emotional one, not really the emotional one but the weeping, wailing, lamenting , helpless, demanding ...burden on everyone else who was actually feeling what people , normal, sober people feel, when there is tragedy.

We are The Last To Know. And you know it's because we're stupid, in ways. Or if you like, insane. Aren't we? Didn't we cry, didn't we mourn having to give up something that was killing us, one absurd humiliating experience at a time? I don't know, maybe we're not the last to know but the last to confess. Anyway that's all I got.

_
Nicole is enterprisingly young, happy at high volume, crazy-making until he arrives.

She studies at the univeristy for a degree as a "personal trainer" and hopes to live in Hollywood. Her bare caramel shoulders---her skin is, how did my lucid friend Jo say, "Rio dey-oh". A summer dress...She dresses for men, and I feel I'm beleaguering her if I allow my eyes to pass over her just one more time, after our initial eye contact and her eye bulging helll-oH, quiet man.

Yesterday she said, "This is my last year as a teenager!"

"what are you doing?"
nothing
"well, what do you think you're doing?"
let's have a smoke
"sure."
__

Everything is preliminary, I'm going preliminary my whole life.

Ah, you should have took up acting or become a musician. Or a cook! Quilty told me.

Talk is the preliminary so really, and I don't talk, so not even preliminary.

I was mumbling and not even getting my words in the right order.

You talk very well, Giovani.

It's a logic thing, I can't translate my yes-no questions into open ended...

It can be a yes or no question. Say, 'you love this town, don't you?' and she'll say yes or no but she'll keep talking then.

**

***
Baxter relapsed, just short of two years, but he was back now after a week.

Nicole spoke of the importance of loving yourself.

"My problem is scherzo effective mental illness." Baxter said. "I have a messianic complex."

I waited for him to add: ' I love myself plenty', for the laugh. But no, he'd now fallen flat, hungover and remorseful. Late one night he called me all jovial and surprised sounding, "Hello John, How Are you??" as if I'd called him. "Me, I've had a pretty rough day!"

I asked how, or why --- like that, short.

He said he was having thoughts he was certain were not his own.

"Even though I've been off the internet for two years. Now I guess it's Wi-fi, John, and I'm pretty sure that...Well I just have to accept that some people can be cruel. I think these are some old girlfriends of mine."

I asked where they lived. He said, oh, in another state. He wasn't sure where they lived anymore, I was glad to hear.

I asked what he could do about it. He said , accept what he couldn't change.
___
I am going swimming. I like the weightlessness, I enjoy doing somersaults and then springing to the surface and finding the people in the light have moved around or changed. There is a bathing beauty, now I come back up and she has a friend. There are kids running around, I come back up and they're taking a nap. It's refreshing to me. I could go on.