6.) "flip on your bank and mine on mine"

Nothing was real. My humanity was already drying up due to drink.

Hair of the dog that bit me. I'd postponed a hangover for almost 15 years already.
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The developers were burning down the woods next to our house, which had been on the market since my dad got sick. The ash floated down, grey snow flakes, but my dad could take it.

Then one day when there was a possible buyer on the way, a bulldozer showed up to shove it all around. Dad went out and asked the fellow to take an hour off , and so the machine stopped and the man went for a coffee break but there it stood. There where the woods. There where the dust and ash. The sun began to shine, pale like in a faded home movie.

We got in the Mercedes and drove away, leaving the house for the realtor to show. Then on the country roads I'd pull over so Dad could lean out sick.

It was a race from financial ruin. Ingram had let him go. Sony hired him to work in New York City, so for some weeks at a time he'd be absent.

His plan was to settle my mother back in Oakapalooka, where we hadn't lived in ten years, but where we all grew up, and then take a plot in the cemetery over-looking the pond with the swans. Forest Cemetery, where Admiral and Mrs. Winrick rested.

Eleanor's beau owned a house on some high ground near the Parthenon, and there was a guest house with two newly refurbished apartments. This was in the middle of a ghetto area, surrounded by a fence, with an electric gate and a pack of mutts, Eleanor had lovingly collected over the years. These could raise a great confusion if someone approached on foot. Cars were welcome, unnoticed or conceded.

It was cheap and the view was as if we were on the very hub of the Nashville City wheel. In every direction, we looked down over the sprawling lights. A century old prison stood like an ivory castle, two miles away across a river.

As Mariah and I became closer friends she'd been helping me find a place and we'd had several misadventures, culminating in a confrontation with a Civil War re-enactor. She'd also accompanied me to all my court dates for the D.U.I. We enjoyed long walks downtown, into the arcade, to her father's law office, to the dizzying heights of some high rise building's glass elevator.

I didn't have a TV for the living room, just a small set by my bed. Mariah called me at my parents' one night--- where ---She had a TV now, for the living room.

So, I went to get the TV and Mariah came along and we got it set up and without even thinking or planning it I took her hand. Then went to bed. In the middle of the night, while she slept, I had to go sit in the living room and absorb.

I hadn't been present. I was out of my mind. This. This wasn't even something to write about. Everything had always been to write about. What was this? I wasn't happy or sad or sated or hungry. Shallow drunkard.
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One night I was mugged. I had used the bus to get downtown three nights in a row and was walking in the low streets near where the bookie had his corner grocery shop, which closed at 8.

A black man called out, "I've been waiting for you."

I kept walking, toward a back entrance of Howard Groves, where the fence was out of repair. "Hey. I said I've been waiting."

"Not for me."

"Hey! You floating me a raft of shit dude."

I stopped. What. And out came the small silver gun, pointed at my belly.

"Give me your money or I'll blast a cap in you." (I'd never heard that expression, and I'm not sure I'm remembering it correctly. Is that right?)

All right. Don't take the wallet , here's the cash. I just saw a cop car a block away from here.

"The wallet! Empty your pockets."

I gave him the wallet and pulled the insides of my pockets out. Nothing more. But then suddenly I lost my nerve. The gun was too close to me. I backed away and started circling my hands like I could catch a bullet before it hit my stomach. I don't know what I said but it was turning into a plea.

He said, now run. And he turned away.

"Run!" His voice a little farther now.

The fear left, though, replaced by chagrin. I wouldn't run, I'd walk. Fuck you. Then there was a gunshot and still mindful of my lost dignity I began to jog, or trot into the darkness.

Nothing was real, not even a bullet flying over my head. But the next morning I was afraid about the mugger being a neighborhood hood and that he had my address from my wallet. Then , dark fantasies of revenge, or horrors about having the door busted down. I was ready to fight with my hickory walking stick.
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My parents came over to see and were very impressed. The view, the apartment. My kitchen was neat. Dad went to lie down in my bedroom and when it was time to go I picked up one of Mariah's hair pins from the bedside table and showed him. In all seriousness. This took me a year. Dream girl come true.

"Better stop drinking. Go back to school or you'll lose her, John."
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Eleanor saw Mariah's new car parked outside my little house and a few days later had me up to Howard's house to visit. On my way out she threw a beer bottle at me, which bounced off the wall, near my head. Then the next day she was OK except she wanted to go to bed with me.

In the first year, while I was too shy to talk, Mariah had dated a few of the booksellers. She said now she was glad I hadn't pursued her, because I might have ended up like "any other". It was a good relationship, but we had to keep it secret due to the work hierarchy.

The sheriff was happy. I remember the next day, we were, the three of us, having a beer and a smoke in the atrium outside the cafe, talking business, when she announced to him smiling that she had a surprise. A secret. "I stayed over at John's last night."

I couldn't believe my ears. It was like news to me too.
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We'd been together three months straight, then unsteadily for another couple of months. I stopped drinking for the first time in my life. The smell of beer on her was unpleasant. Mariah was indifferent. One of those nights, making love, I couldn't stand the beer on her breath.

We'd missed the Christmas banquet, where Ty had done a comic monologue which included a joke, what was the most frequent page over the intercom. "John call 377". Mariah's office. When she heard this she cried and for weeks I sat alone in my apartment waiting for the sound of her car, the sound of her footsteps on the wooden deck outside. We were over.

Her mother died the next Spring. Seven days Shiva, 23 days Shloshim---the slow, deliberated return to normal activities and a new life.

She wanted to go to Nepal. Her father refused.

We went to the stairwell from the parking garage, our unofficial Inventory Team Meeting place, and she cried and stamped her feet that she always wanted to go to Nepal. But her dad would only allow her to go to St. John's Island, to snorkel. Don't worry him now.

She told me then that she'd invited her housemate, Kromer, to come with her.

Kromer was new on the scene, working at the bookstore for a few months. I didn't like him living with her of course, but this. I could tell the pain would arrive in a second, like after a stubbed toe. (Shallow! Yes.) I waited. But nothing.

A few hours later we went to lunch and while I couldn't talk her out of taking another man to the Caribbean (not that I'd have been happy to go there, so much) she at least denied that she and Krow-Bart (burly fellow) were sleeping together. He'd helped her plan and got so involved in going through the brochures she invited him.

I led her behind the restaurant and pressed her against the wall and kissed her hard. Almost angrily but she allowed it. She let me hold her hand on the way back to the store.

"I'm not changing my mind, John." I knew.

And so for ten days I tried not to imagine them together.

The Sheriff invited me to go with him to Atlanta to join the Wharf Rats at a Grateful Dead show. There was a young couple with us, friends of his, who were engaged but the fellow was nervous about their spending three whole days together. He blew sighs of relief whenever she was out of the way and I began to detest him.
What am I trying to explain. Just this mystery of how Mariah Maye became iconic in my dreams for the rest of my life, and what does she represent?