'Times are hard everywhere'

"We'll just have to see how it goes."
-dylan (too much to ask)

Coltrane reminds me of my ornery Uncle Bill so much I want to ask him if he has a glass eye. Also, Uncle Bill was always good for a twenty, so my reasoning goes...Haywire, I mean. Whoever is handy now, that's how it is. Friends who saw me coming knew to ask first, and for more. Say John, you got a hundred bucks I could borrow?

No, I don't. Do you have five? What's a fiver to you who wants a hundred?

This day before payday. Casey O'Fallen, the former triple A baseball player here, was good for a twenty on Sunday, just before the church plate came around. THANK GOD!
___
Is it just me, or do you think last week went fast. Did today seem slow? Is it just me or do you think we've run into some hard times.

I remember when gas was only three bucks. Is this what they mean by a weak dollar? DON'T TELL ME. Your explanations are wasted.

Anyway. Here's something you may not have known: the tax rebate of 600 dollars is only half that for the poor (like me) who weren't really trying. I get $300.

It's fair. I know. Ok, ok , ok. All right all right all right, enough! I said it's fair. I even think it's amusing. To be poor just because you, well, haha, don't want to work. A surprise to get anything at all.

While Lovers Are Comets

Springing straight up from the occasional snapping traps laid before me in daily life. Test the will, and be sub-consciously ready with the saving reflex.

Leap in my new Proto Power shoes, hop bow-legged to save my balls. Jog at my steady pace while boxing my fists in the dark. And be careful not to catch a cop or robber on the chin. Or then it's trouble, Marlowe. Splints, maybe.

It's what they mean about getting your business straight. Then you can keep it straight, maybe, says a patron, and learn to relax. Re laaaax...
______
I believe the bible is right: it's your tongue that does your dirty work. Lungs for tone and inflection, as well. You can stab someone to their heart and not mean to. Say, when questions start popping. Hop. Scotch.

"That certainly calls into question everything you've ever told me about your intentions in this relationship."

In midair I say, "Wait. There's a misunderstanding here. I'm not sure what you think I just said. I'm consistent, sweet-heart. Now what is it again?"

"You just told me your basic intention in life is to avoid work not matter what. How do you expect to be in a relationship with an attitude like that."

"Did I say no matter what? No, no. I was talking about in my present condition. Being single and childless."

____
At work my boss expects me to think and sometimes I say I understand some apparent chop-logic when I don't. I plan to figure it out on my own, whatever it is, when he's away and not making me worry. But what if his next question is premised on that supposed understanding I have?

Then you spring up and turn around in mid-air and start walking, I suppose.

Bosses are a dime a dozen.

AA works

I've finished my first week working for Isleicom, the organization that tracks inter-library loans among all the state's college and university libraries. It's entirely computer work and much of the computer work is custodial (repairing errors in files, reporting programming bugs to programmers, etc.)

I may as well be tracking used auto parts among junk-yards. The difference is that my 15 co-workers have Library Science Degrees. My last job was working on an assembly line for a newspaper, in the bindery department. I haven't had a technical job since I was an 'analyst' for a financial information service, where I wrote in COBOL and produced financial reports that I couldn't possibly fathom. (I was successful for about a year, then the slow crack-up, or unmasking). I almost forget my eight weeks at the bookstore earlier this year. That is where I belong, but today's super-stores have few full-time positions, and pay starvation wages.

Here I am making more money than I need (sharing a sober house is cheap and I lack for nothing but usually I am anxious for the next paycheck and sometimes have to borrow money for smokes). It's all due to my sobriety of '98-2000, and the uncharacteristic discipline---mysterious grace, really--- I had to finish a two year degree in legacy programming. By god, what little use I've made of it, it's still there, that degree and those transcripts. What I am saying is that I'm surprised to find I can make grown up sums of money. People take me too seriously. They pay. It's stunning.

And I'm happy. May and June are the happy months and I am in the catbird seat. It's part-time and still the money is awesome to me. At my desk at 8, on my way home at noon, five days a week. It seems there are still 24 hours left to the day.
_____
I don't remember those three years sober. Not really. Just like a bender. Now I am about to celebrate another three years and I'm older---47, not 37! (I never knew 37 though I was high-functioning.) The spectre of becoming a toothless, sunken faced old Dead End Club Elder makes me truly afraid. I don't know or care if Alcoholism is a disease. All I know is that if I drink, I have no brakes. I will continue drinking.

And this time I'd surely be doomed. If not to jail, death or instituions, then to an eventual "truth"---another unmasking---where my appearence reveals everything. I don't want to lose control now.

Happily, with a sort of second-hand vigilence, I will stay sober the rest of my life, I believe. I have to behave as a cancer patient who knows damn well what would bring about another tumor. So I attend AA, do 12 step work, keep myself in prayerful spiritual condition, and keep close to the people who have succesfully overcome their obsession to self-destruct and drink. "Stay in the middle of the boat", they say. And stick with the winners.

8.) Mr. Life Advises Client

Twenty miles out of town,
and cold irons bound

-dylan (time out of mind)

The big key was in the lock of the sky blue iron door. What now, I've got a great movie on HBO here. I didn't ask for any cigarettes, I didn't push the red emergency button on the wall for a snack.

It was the Sheriff. He asked as usual how the accommodations were, and as usual he was more or less sincere, friendly.

"Your lawyers here, waiting in the library."

"Ah. Good god I was afraid it was that priest again." The library was twenty paces away but through three locked doors, then through the hallway where my big picture window was, so I could watch passers-by.

I got up and followed and he asked me, "You ever met him before?"

"No. His name is Life. I'm a little anxious."

"Ha, ha! I don't think they can give you more than 40 years, Mr. Jackson."

"Hm."

My lawyer looked like a cross between Mr Peepers and Bob Newhart. This was no movie and thank goodness he wore a tailored suit. But it shouldn't have mattered. Mr. Life's law office was off the town square, near the court-house and the coffee shop where all the town elders met each day to discuss the morning papers.

He stood up to shake my hand of course, and had his briefcase opened up on the metal picnic table.

"Greg Life," he said.

I began to tell him what "happened", then stopped and began anew, "This is what I did."

"Wait. First, are you the Rooftop Burglar too?"

"No. I'm the Drugstore Bandit. I don't know him."

"Ok. And did you hit the one in Des Moines too?"

"Yes."

"They're thinking you're the Rooftop Burglar. It's crazy." He scribbled something on his legal tablet. "People are so impressionable and that's not always good. Sometimes it is but not always.

"But listen! Let me tell you something interesting. You know that last pharmacist in Oakapalooka, the one who finally got your licence plate?

"His wife just got out of prison for stealing narcotics from him---yes!--- he caught her on a security camera, she used his keys. Her name is Barb and she is very sympathetic toward you.

"She's been in and out of drug rehabs for 20 years. Anyway, she knows your mom, she's a friend of Eby Flakner's. Hugh's wife.

"I was talking to your mom by the way, and she said that Barb had knocked on her door one rainy night and asked to use the bathroom! Well, that's an old trick, what she wanted was to check your mother's medicine cabinet."

"Oh... SAY! Do you know what!"

"Hold on. Barb stole a bottle of hydro-codeine from your mother and that's another reason she's come to us. Guilt I guess, to make amends. Here's the thing: Barb's husband, the pharmacist who chased after you, told her you were a pansy."

"So that's what happened. But that's incredible! I searched three days high and low for that bottle. There would have been enough of those pills left to last me to rehab."

I was missing Mr. Life's point.

"He said you were scared to death and you looked like hell and the only reason he didn't grab you was because he felt sort of embarrassed for you."

"So another pill head got into my mom's medicine cabinet. And it was the pharmacist's wife. That's...marvelous! A story-teller could..."

"Write nothing! The police have a hundred spiral notebooks already. This is important, John, because I have to establish that you were not threatening."

"I wasn't. I just said I was a hostage. My kidnapper wanted drugs."

"'Under duress', you wrote those words in one of the notes. The clerk didn't understand what 'duress' means, by the way. Yes, in each of the robberies you claimed you were being held hostage. This is very important to establish, and having Barb's testimony that he called you a pansy... "

"What a prick, that guy.Sent his wife to prison, eh?"

"He's been in trouble too. Exchanging drugs for sexual favors."

"From his wife?"
____
"Look. There will be a deposition eventually. I want to wait until every one of those drug store clerks has had time to calm down. I want the novelty of being robbed to pass."

I thought, well they'll have to be several more times, then.

"Now, Barb's husband is ornery. A town character. That's why I'm so glad we have Barb. He'll be under oath and I'll ask him if he called you a pansy and then he won't get started telling a tall tale or making himself out to be a hero."

"I see. He'll swear under oath that I'm a pussy." I started to laugh, "The front page headline will read ..."

"Don't worry about it."

"I'm already going to lose fans when they find out I'm not the Rooftop Burglar too."

"Now. You're still on the waiting list to get into the rehab. It's very good that you were already signed up to go in."

"Mr. Life, I want to sue the County Health Department. I was drinking a keg of beer a day, showed up at every psychologist appointment drunk, and they prescribed me Klonopin and Prozac."

"That's none of my business. Now, here are some letters your mother gave me..."

"New York. Thank you , Jesus." I put my forehead down to the cool table for a second.

"Please don't call me Jesus. Now. As soon as there's an opening, I'll get you out of here and up to rehab. Don't tell anyone! I'll send your mother to pick you up. Or, she'll know to come get you immediately once she gets the word that they have a room. And when you get out in a month, don't tell anyone. Stay in the capital city.

"Last thing..." he stood up now. "How are they treating you here?"

"I'll miss this place. Come back someday for a vacation. Got a stack of American Heritage bound volumes, got cable TV, blue walls very calming, a pretty girl bringing me food..."

"You're safe. You feel good now. But, yeah. Sharon wears a gun, did you notice? Ok, then. Good luck at re-hab."
____
Back in the cell I held the envelope--- her responding letter to my jail-house jotting---and savored her childish handwriting. There would be yelling inside but you couldn't tell looking.

"John,

Why are you apologizing to me? You've done this to your family. To yourself. No, I did not notice the dentist pills missing but you did steal my New York Yankees baseball cap and I want it back. And don't say well you live there. I want it back. John, at least now you are going to get some help. I talked to your mom, things sound good, considering (have you apologized to her???) I don't know what more to say, I hope you are out of jail and at detox or with that creep movie director, Roman whats his name, by now.

"I want to write a long letter because 'he's in jail!' but geez. It's not fair to me. That's not fair. This you can apologize for. All the drama. All the care-taking. TAKING. Never giving.

"You explain but I don't understand how any of this could have happened. I knew that you'd have to live with your mother if you went back to Iowa and I knew you wouldn't have the gumption to get out of there, not while still drinking and so depressed, you were also too comfortable. You know what, boredom is a good thing, John. It makes you get up and DO something. But you set off bombs! I don't understand. I never will but I guess according to your mother. Oh scratch that, see, don't apologize to me, you haven't brought shame on MY house or MY name. John, John, John. Doogie is back from Russia. The U.N. guy came over and tried to rape me by the way. I almost called the cops but he stopped, he left, he knows damn well not to show up here again. Doogie is starting his own business and has an office near my father. No surprise to you , I guess, he's always been so good to me, I do love him, my best friend since we were you know since forever except when I was being mean to him. I'm engaged! June wedding. I'm going to have babies and be a yenta. I'll send you an invitation but you will have to be sober to attend.

"love, Mariah"

7.) Verrazano Bridge

I don't remember anymore, maybe I never came out of denial. When I tell the story of winning and losing her and I complain, my bitterness is phony. I'm lying.

I'm more likely to smile in the dark, remembering her smiling into my eyes as I got my hands underneath her to pull her panties down her legs and off her feet.

The only problem still, if it's a problem, is her spending more than ten years in my dreams, being either happy or angry with me.

I never believed her leaving me any more than I believed her spending wakeful nights with me. Laughing out the bedroom window when in the middle of the night there were helicopters with spot-lights flying over the prison, then over my porch. Singing every John Prine song we knew by heart.

After I married one of the cafe girls, Laura, (a sprite she was, popping into Mariah's office one day and talking so fast we could hardly understand her, and when she left we looked at one another and laughed, that girl was for me, supposedly! For the writing about her!) Mariah moved to Brooklyn Heights, right across the Verrazano Bridge from Manhattan. She became a gardener of court-yards, and worked at some botanical gardens in the city.

She dated a school teacher who, one inevitable night for the Stupid, remarked with a grin, "You like sex , don't you?"

He sent presents everyday for a week before she convinced him to be gone forever..
___
I invited Laura to Iowa, where Mom was widowed and manic, (visiting her priest to ask "why can't I stop talking?").

I started school again, dropping out with "A"s in Latin this time. Then I invited Laura to return home to her parents, because I'd turned her into a shrew with my constant beer-drunkenness.

Couldn't step into certain rooms, missing Laura so much...

Dad's friend Dr. Fanning dropped dead at 55. He was a ruddy faced man and a drunk. His poor little wife had "agoraphobia", which I'd never heard of. But she was so much fun when she came over, I couldn't understand it.
________
I moved outside of the university town, near to a presidential library. I got to know the farmers at the "County Quart House", and the drunken proprietor. He hired me to man the bar three nights a week and I'd stay til 4 a.m. alone, watching TV and eating pizza. The place was dark with glom rot and it was past time to clean. It was time to burn to the ground (maybe it still stands now, 15 years later, I don't know or care).
_____________________
That autumn the Sheriff sent me a ticket to come visit him for two weeks on the Oregon coast. Mariah heard and sent me a check...money enough so I could spend the trip drinking on the observation car of the Amtrak. There was hulla and hella balloo in New York and Nashville when the Sheriff absently confirmed to people that I was off my rocker.

Then six days in Nashville. Three homeless.

I wasn't invited here, I wasn't lured here Fell in here without welcome.

It's strange how I packed, what I tossed into my bags the night I left. If I needed any reassurance my mind was disordered, why is my two ton dictionary in the night bag.

The hurry when there's no hurry, the driving to the store without an errand or any money. Three days she barely tolerated me but at least I could sleep there. While she worked at the bookstore, I had to be out of the house the first two days, and then she trusted me to stay. Now, though. After being caught actually drinking in her room. After her house-mate Chiu heard us yelling. Eleanor was nice but it was like ten years had passed, not one. At 10 a.m. I went in and had a memorably great time at the bar across the street from Tilly's.

I must have been very uptight, then very relaxed and therefore grateful to God.

Homeless and it's winter. Seems about right. I guess I expected someone at the bookstore to get me re-hired and put me up in the meanwhile. Is that what I've failed to do? But then that means I've nowhere to go but to live with my widowed mother who just broke her leg.

And Laura won't forgive me laughing at her secret that it was that Newsweek Cover-story on Lesbianism, that opened her mind, her heart, but not her legs yet (but soon). Funny how I'm ok with that. Another man, though. If there were another man, boy that'd hurt.

Her heart ---well, to me---so cold since I refused to board the plane. I refused three months before its departure. I refused in October, through November and December, right up past my finals which I skipped, to the crying in the airport as she was boarding.

We drove two hours here, I don't have luggage, and still you curse, beg and cry. Finally saying how would it look to her family, and the church people who saw her wed, that she'd be home for Christmas alone, a bride. Finally that got to me, inside me like an egg beater but I wasn't going to go even if I did have my luggage.

She was gone two weeks and I didn't take my finals and still got a "C" in Latin. Means an "A" if you'll listen. And for two weeks why didn't I ever want to shower or eat or drive to my mom's even for Christmas. Jesus I was lonely. She was coming back, I knew. Maybe to kill me.
_________
Most of the day here ---what's it like, there is Milwaukee's Best on tap. The women come in for their men and go. Dressed alike, like bikers. I crossed the street to Tillies once and a homeless man was at the mike in the corner. More upscale crowd there and three times as expensive, prohibitively expensive.

Johnny Cash sat here and here and here and here. Christ I'm losing my mind. Then when darkness falls I'm safe to drive the car to one of the big motels where I cand park and sleep behind the wheel. I won't freeze to death because after two hours the sobering up will wake me.

I ate White Castle. I knocked on Laura's door one sorry and timid evening and after showing me the Halloween mask of her fury she slammed the door in my face. Snow was falling in little shakes, not much. I went to Joe's of Happy Memories, and walked out on the tab. From there, directly to the sports bar where I did the same. Eleanor's for a shower and shave but I didn't stay, afraid to ask. She wasn't the same after her car crash and the intensive care.

A Monday night foolishly parked in the empty mall parking lot. In the morning a middle-aged woman arriving to work was kind enough to warn me to get away, since it was obvious I was living in my car.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Mariah calling Martha to give me money to drive to New York City. Martha telling her of course, and have him come over and get a good night's sleep first.

Holy Moses, one minute you're writing in your journal Wow, This Is It, the next thing you know there's a tug-boat.

Payphone that was like a block of ice held to my ear as Mariah laughed and chatter-boxed about what we'd do together. Maybe a play, eh?
......
To Martha's, family friend to the Maye's. Psychologically Sound, she is. So sound as to be mysterious to me.

Good timing, she said, my son was just home from college and I've been crying, there are Thanksgiving left-overs for you. John, Mariahs told me everything. You sure that car can make it?

Hot bath and a well-made bed with the covers actually turned down for me. Trophies and pennants and other signs of peace and sanity. We sat up a little while watching TV until she claimed exhaustion. When I got up at noon the next day she had the three boxes of her son's favorite cereals out on the counter. I ate AppleJacks while she worked out with a Jane Fonda video. Then she put her own money in the pot and gave me a triple A card as well, I'd mail back.
________________
Virginia was dark. I might have been in Maryland at some point. Was that the Potomac at 4 a.m.?

On the New Jersey Turnpike I was going ten miles over the speed limit and they still honked at me, so I knew it didn't matter. Not to let anything get to me.

When the city loomed I was well unctioned, when I saw the Verrazano I was relieved and unafraid. Mariah gave good directions but she didn't realize all the freeway signs were obliterated by graffiti. I missed by one exit and then found my way into Henry Miller's neighborhood. As she instructed me, I left my car doors unlocked and carried everything with me to the door of her brown-stone.

I got a hug and and she said "you weren't kidding, you look awful!" But that was soon remedied and by the time her girlfriend came over I was showered and powdered, smoking a cigarette and enjoying a special occasion glass of wine.
______-
Six weeks I stayed. Across the river, New York City wasn't a dream but instead, simply convincing.


We didn't sleep together, it didn't even cross my mind. I wonder now if it crossed hers. I wonder now if I was supposed be going into her room and fucking her all that time. But there was a man from the U.N. who came to court. She enjoyed giving the details ('we were leaning over one of my drawings') and I was neutral, amused. We laughed most of our time together.

In the mornings, Howard Stern was actually entertaining, trying to bait celebrities into ruining their careers by responding to his baiting insults. After breakfast we'd pick up our shovels and rakes and walk three stories down to the city streets and then several blocks to some magnificent house to work in the courtyard. Then back for lunch and she would sit at her drafting table designing gardens for a class and I would take my indefinite leave , first to my policeman's bar, then the HarperCollins hangout, where the men at the bar talked of David Foster Wallace "infinite jest all right"

Down the subway- way, three stops, four, what did I care, into Manhattan. Laughing along with the general embarrassment as some homeless black man sang "Stand By Me" all too well.

I came across the Sony corporate offices where my father had visited many times, and it was like falling into a hole. Really a very unhappy mystical experience I wouldn't want to relive.

To Greenwich Village, thinking, was Max Bodenheims' life the most embarrassing ever? The doomed writer should have toured with the Cherry Sisters and sang instead. He'd have benefited from Gertrude Steins work, "Replenishing Jessica" diminished the rest of us. He wasn't a name dropper he was more like a vague stylish idea dropper.

Baroque BoHo to the max, Max. Auto-immune problems no doubt.

And here it seemed these were thieves and fences selling their booty on the streets, just like it was on Ridiculous Day, back home.

Some good pot was offered and sold to me in Washington Square, I met an old friend who'd just received his Christmas bonus (he told me he was a "number cruncher" and I'd never heard of such a thing, it sounded hilarious). At the top of the Empire State Building I told him I was broke and he gave me two hundred dollar bills.

Was I here to stay, nobody knew. Barnes and Noble had my application, that was enough, I thought, I'd just bug them with phone calls. Then a dozen other shops and finally Dunkin' Donuts interviewed me and turned me down so I knew I was going back to Iowa, I'd invited my wife to move to and live away from.

Mariah said I could be a hat and coat-check man, if only I'd stay sober and not get the tags mixed up. Would I like to do some nude modeling, she asked. With my freakishly thin body, I thought well yes maybe they would have me. I didn't get around to it. By the time she was packing for Europe, her last suggestion was to write Laura such a love letter that would go down in history.
_____________________
Over Christmas; four weeks alone as she went on a trip to Europe with her aunt. I had Christmas dinner with her downstairs neighbors, a man and his elderly mother talking to me with a mannerly ease and in the holiday spirit.

Those four weeks alone I spent in the apartment, still sleeping on the couch for some reason. I discovered what a readers dictionary was and read and wrote letters. I bought cases of beer from a small warehouse six blocks away.

I found dentist pills in her medicine cabinet. They were nearly expired, she'd never miss them. But I felt guilty. Alarmed with guilt the next morning. Also, I'd started reading her personal papers, the majority of them letters I'd written. I couldn't stop.

I didn't learn anything about her, she'd always been truthful and up front and again, there was nothing to write, about her.
She wanted to get married.

For three years now, it'd been time for her to get married, which brings back my most treasured memory, at last.

It was 72 degrees, a beautiful, half cloudy Spring day. It was not too long before Mariah took over as Inventory Manager, and while I was still too smitten even to talk. Ten of us went to a Nashville Sounds baseball game, "to drink", as one of the Smith brothers always said.

We had good seats, and there was enough of a crowd to make it exciting but not so many that you felt you were at a show or in a theatre. Our group took four rows, and I was down in front with Carter while Martha and Mariah were two rows behind us. This was all so close, any conversation included us all.

Mariah was 24. People teased her now about her pre-occupation, this dread of being an old maid.

But there had only been one proposal, her entire life! The proposal was from the boy who'd had a crush on her since Junior High. Doug. Dougy. Dooogy.

"What does he do now?" Martha asked.

"He's in Russia. He got his Architecture degree and he's studying there now. He writes me all the time, how much he loves me but the one time we tried to sleep together it was just impossible, we're too ...We didn't want to see each other naked! We're children together! I can't marry him."

"Why don't you marry John Jackson, then?" Martha said so I could hear.

People laughed, giving their assent mostly. Or even remarking that they knew there was something between us, though we didn't speak.

I looked back up toward her and she said "Sure. Maybe..."

Our eyes met and mine confessed all. She seemed to allow her eyes to consent and for the second time, this maidenly approval, but now breaking my back and sending morphine all through me.
______________________________
I drove out of New York City at 3 a.m. the Monday morning after New Years. On my way out I helped myself to her NY Yankees hat.

The streets and highways were empty. The Verrazano bridge, I was the only one crossing. The New Jersey Turnpike: it's yours, BUB. At noon I was checking into a motel in a small town in PA. with a case of beer and the good news that a Nor'easter was about to hit and give me an excuse to be motionless for two days. Now it was the end, but I could occupy it, you see. And then Iowa would mean dying, or electric shock treatments, was how I figured it.

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.
_____
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.
_____
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.
_______
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."
____
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.
_____
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?

5)Just how crazy

Mariah's mother was doing the books at her gift shop at Cheekleaf when she realized she couldn't add or subtract. It was just like that.

The next day we all knew she was in the hospital for tests. Mariah came out of her office under the grand staircase and was putting on her hat and coat. She stopped at Information and said it was a brain tumor. Four or five of the booksellers leaned forward over the counter to reach her and touch, and then Mariah left for the day.

Six weeks later my dad was down on the floor again with another stomach ache. As I recall, we'd been stepping over him for days. You'd find him just about anywhere, holding his breath and he'd say, don't worry, just have to be still for awhile. This morning my mom was at school, my sister at work, and I was about to leave also.

Actually, this time he wasn't on the floor, but lying on the bottom steps of the stairway.

This is crazy,

I said to him, "This isn't right."

"I'm starting to think that too," he said in a voice like he was holding a bong hit.

I got him in the car. "Are you scared to die?"

"Not scared, John. More like being cheated." He was 57 years old. "Worried about your mom. I want you to grow up and not depend on her."

I dropped him off at Vanderbilt's E.R. and went to work. That night, there was still no one home and it was past nine o'clock. I'd forgotten him, and now I was so afraid I couldn't go upstairs to my room and drink. I knew what was coming.

Finally I heard two car doors shut and rapid footsteps up the back deck stairs and my mom and Jane came in shaking and crying. It was liver cancer. The surgery would be early tomorrow.
________
So it was for months. Chemo, radiation, surgery, no hope. Mariah's mother had the worst of it. She wanted someone to shoot her. My dad couldn't eat, he couldn't even stand the smell of food. He lived on malts and would knock on my door for marijuana, which helped his nausea. Mom and Jane insisted he stop smoking, like he was going to live, and he was good natured about it, sneaking around.

Once I came home and they'd discovered the cancer had spread to his colon. Everyone was in the dark living room watching TV. Dad was on the couch, which was in the middle of the room, and I got on my knees behind it and I wasn't crying or anything but he had his arm resting on top of the couch and I put my hand on his forearm and sort of rested my head a moment. He said he was all right. I asked if I could go to Missouri for a couple of days. He joked was that a northern couple, two days, or a Southern couple, like 'a few'. I said "a couple few".

He said sure and then I called Mariah at home and she said of course, go.

In Missouri, at the Zigzags, I slept too long, accidentally getting sober. I'd never had a panic before now. I went out the bedroom window and bought a 12-pack on the way out of town. I swore to myself I'd never travel to this side of the Mississippi again, and not only because of that damn bridge in St. Louis. Then the beer didn't calm me down until I was entering the St. Louis city limits.

So I made it home early, and back to work early, and Mariah wasn't expecting me. We spotted one another in some long narrow hall way of back stock and just naturally walked toward one another and hugged. Disengaging, she laughed and palmed away a tear and said the Sheriff hurt his back again so this was really good timing.

A few days later Ingram Books invited the owners and Mariah out to their warehouse, and then Mariah invited me along since the Sheriff was still out. It was a half hour drive, and I remember that it was fun, chatting with Miss Davis and Miss Kidd, hearing their stories of the early days of the great bookstore.

I mentioned that my dad was a vice president at Ingram Video. They asked about his health and I said his morale was fine and his doctors were great but he wanted to move back to Iowa and they were having trouble selling the house.

To have this in common. Autumn upon us now, night-time a black veil, my parents' house so far from the Nashville city lights.

Mariah asked me when was my court date, for the D.U.I. charge.

We'd meet at the top of the parking garage at work and then drive downtown in her new car.

4) Bail Boss

A week after my adoption I attended my first bookstore party. Mariah and the sheriff and I were having a beer out in the atrium after work when they presumed, with a heavy-handed, scrutinizing authority, that I would be there. Of course you'll be there , right John-John?

"Yes, sir. Just so long as I have time to get drunk ahead of time, fine."

The general manager, Diane, came over and joined us. For the first time I got to see her back-stage persona and I thought she was crass, smoking (as we were), one arm over an empty chair and talking out of the side of her mouth. She was so outrageously funny, though, with her exaggerated vindictiveness towards the man who ran the cafe, Mariah said afterwards:

"You're going to love Dianne. And of course you already hate Chuck."
____
The party was mostly outside around a fire-pit. Kay's parents' home was a hulking over-sized ranch-style house, with the back patio doors open and the house blazing a sharp golden light. I tried not to stick too close to my tutors. There was my friend Carter, there was Eleanor and Danny Briggs (who wanted me to help persuade Eleanor to stop drinking so much). The three Smith Brothers, post-coup, were present and unfazed in their usual sportsman-like good humor.
It was a good time, hearing old book-store stories and about bookseller legends who'd gone on to actually finish graduate school.

Near the end of the evening Eleanor was more tipsy than usual and I decided to leave my car and drive her home.

I'd spent many sexless nights there before, even sharing her bed, and wasn't expecting anything but her usual fidelity to Howard Groves. I only hoped there was some beer in the fridge and that I'd be able to hook up the cable TV, which she never watched. I felt wonderfully at home there nowadays, a measure of success to me. This made two, with my parents' house out in the Nashville sprawl somewhere by balloon.
_____
But then we were pulled over. It was a lady cop coming toward my driver's side door and I guessed that was a lucky break.
_________________
After being booked, I declined my phone call for help.

Eleanor, suddenly not completely wasted, was allowed to drive home, where she'd forget all about me I was sure.

Pleasantly drunk, a little curious, not afraid. They led me down several corridors, having me stop here and there for buzzers to buzz or for the heavy clank of keys and locks. There was a growing roar. I asked were we going to the coliseum?

"Big event tonight."
_____
This wasn't the drunk tank at all. It was the jail's overflow. A gymnasium, blacks only, with bunk beds three beds high, and you had to turn sideways to walk.

No one asleep at this hour or any hour. The blazing bright lights above cast shadows of metal meshing. The loudest voices were those crying for people to

shut. the. fuck. up.

Angry restless souls in hell waiting to stare me down. Here and there, I let my eyes rest long enough to show that I wasn't afeared. People began approaching me for cigarettes. One, in a not too friendly way, warned me that I'd better watch out for myself.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm your mama's boyfriend."

"Ha,ha!" I looked around so people could see I'd made a friend and he was cracking me up.

A good guy told me, "Don't take off your shoes, they'll steal them."

The stench of sweat, smoke and the broken toilets back-flow, the 200 decibels, the claustrophobia, it all started to become "Negro" to my mind. The cigarette economy, "Negro". That very word. Then I remembered I was down south in Nashville, too.

They weren't human anymore. Not here. When I am sober in a few hours I won't be human either.

The novelty of my situation lasted five minutes. Must trust someone. That this particular bunk has no owner.

I laid back and waited six hours until the store opened. My thoughts were always with Mariah. What was she doing now, sleeping alone I hope. Someday soon maybe I'd see her house. I loved thinking of Mariah.

At nine o'clock the Sheriff answered the phone and said well john john let me guess.
______
Next I remember was being in a hallway of cages and seeing Mariah and the Sheriff looking in a small dirty window, thirty yards away. Eyes wide, then eyes smiling.

When the men realized I was getting bail they all pressed against the bars yelling for my remaining cigarettes. It was a zoo. They were desperate. The hopeless ones were behind. I emptied my pack into my hands and stupidly threw all my smokes over their heads so they fell at the feet of those innocents who were just looking on. It was a generous impulse but I realized immediately, when the beggars turned, that it was cruel.
___
"I'll never be the same," was all I said. It was what I planned to say.

Mariah and Jerry laughing, of course. I could still play drunk, being drunk enough. They laughed and laughed , talking about me like I was a dog they'd rescued from the animal shelter. We walked the quiet downtown streets towards her car. I said I needed to shower. The sheriff said I could take the day off.

"Eleanor didn't call?"
"She will this afternoon," Mariah said, "when she wakes up and has a bloody mary. She'll remember you, John, don't worry."

I stopped and let them keep walking until they noticed.

"It was innocent, you know." Make this a bit of theater. "I mean, don't think. Not me and Eleanor. You know her, she's proper. Sure, she smooches with the nearest guy when she's drunk, I know. But we're just friends. Did you know she's related to Rachel Robarts Jackson?"

Mariah suggested we stop for breakfast.

"We're the bosses, right?" she asked the Sheriff.

"That's right."

"And every things ok at the store isn't it."

"Sure. It's slow."

"This will be down hominy cooking, John!" Mariah said, then as an aside to the Sheriff, "John is here to learn about the South."

Then she laughed, "You'll get to see the court house pretty soon!"

We Are Three

Eleanor Tippins' family may have been southern aristocrats, but she had to allow that one of her cousins---Ned---was the Tennessee Governor now.

An insouciant, faded, devil may care family, they'd been plundered now by her dissolute siblings. ("Easy Rider" and the 60's upset her generation, and they reformed to drug abuse, then sales). She was well-schooled, cheerful and alcoholic now. If mercurial, then usually within a range of acceptable unpredictability among her friends, and unacceptable predictability among estranged loved ones. Playing to type, perhaps, she was a paper-lantern party girl at night and a Blanch-ed out, suffering-in-silence woman in the morning.

Eleanor's dirty blond hair made an oval around her roundish, kind face. Her features were becoming slightly puffy now from the booze. 40 years old and a childless divorcee, she would laugh at the thought of changing anything about herself because---- couldn't you understand?--- she was old now. And what was the problem, besides a few wrecked cars? (When she laughed she laughed into her closed fist and hunched her shoulders, crazy cute.) She had her bookstore job, she had her Cheekleaf social circle and a reliable beau, Howard Groves of Howard Groves', whose large, multi-plex house she could inhabit as her own when she pleased.
____
Full of endearments, she knew all the small shop-keepers in Nashville and remembered the subject of every last joshing encounter with them. To be able to follow Eleanor Tippins was flattering to me (I knew that in some peoples' eyes it was no honor, but they'd understand the friendship if they knew it). This was a pleasant education. She wanted me to fathom the resentments, understand the mysteries, and feel the ghosts of the South who flew around in close rooms but not in shopping mall parking lots.

She adopted me when she heard about my pilgrimages to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, piping up one day that one of her family names was Robarts, which could make her a relative to Jackson's insulted wife, Rachel. Or rather, to Rachel's first husband who absently failed to finalize the Robarts' divorce before General Jackson and Rachel were married.

Capote, and Tennessee Williams were somewhat suspect to her. Harper Lee's name was spit: To Kill A Mocking Bird was a gift from Capote, it was so obvious! Faulkner, of course, was Grand-Daddy. She introduced me to the Southern Agrarians and had me read what I could stand of "I Take My Stand".

But her prize possession at home was a hundred year old, illustrated Dante's Inferno, which was always open on the low table where we sat on cushions reading to one another and admiring the illustrations. In the gold glowing semi-darkness from her ancient lampshades, this apartment of her's was crowded with overstuffed furniture and family heirlooms, including a hickory walking stick which she presented to me on my birthday.

Frequent nights, we'd agree to meet at one of the Music Row bars. One drink, Eleanor held your hand. Two, she held your hand to her bosom, because you'd said something that touched her deeply. Third drink, you were making out. But it would go no further. Six drinks, Eleanor began to cry about her mother, who had passed away five years earlier.
_____________
This lovely, warm, cloudy June day we took a walk on the tree lined street behind the store (the green waxy leaves of the trees so beautiful, breathing liveliness into the air of my new life). If it were a lunch hour, which we could extend to two hours if neither of us were scheduled for any customer service.

"I could just about died," she laughed. "When that beauty-school drop-out asked Mariah Maye if she'd ever read Toys In The Attic. How did she get hired!? Because she's beautiful?? Oh lord, that big hair."

"I think she was working at Park's deli and Mark Smith made friends with her. 'Big hair??' " I laughed, in 1990. Funny expression.

"What else do you call it? But why isn't she in the cafe, John?"

"She's smart."

"Do you think she's beautiful?"

"She's sweet, she's young. You'll like her. She's a good worker."

"She's too damned perky!"

"We need a perky character. But tell me, why do women love Horror and True Crime so much?"

She ignored my set up. "The Smith Brothers can pull strings and have any woman hired, they want. Women with beauty and brains. By the way, John. Danny Briggs is getting worried about you and me. He wants me to marry him you know."

"What about your boyfriend? Doesn't he worry about Howard?"

"I've told you. Howard and I don't even sleep together any more. We're like an old married couple. It's over, darling. Anyway, I told him you're in love with Mariah."

"Oh. Love. That's a short word."

"I meant your supercalifragilistic expialidosciousness."
____
Happy man, infatuated. Mariah only had to be in the building somewhere.
_______
We stopped at a novelty shop and bought two little green army-men with parachute packs. That afternoon, which was slow, we were on opposite sides of balcony, dropping the soldiers down from the second floor. The parachutes didn't deploy except surprisingly, and when they did, we'd shout.

But usually they fell right to the floor, in Fiction. A customer would look up and smile and I'd run down to pick them up.

I spotted the sheriff, who was hiding behind one of the green "mo-faux" columns, grinning at me. I laughed and pointed him out to Eleanor.

Then we all walked from our three corners and met at the rail. The conversation was like picking up on any other.

"How's Terry like the new clinic?" Eleanor asked.

"Oh," the Sheriff laughed and turned on his cowboy boots, "except for the bomb threats, you mean? No, she's doing great. Comes home a little tired but nothing like her residency."

"You give her a foot massage?" Eleanor giggled into her hand.

"Oh, yeah. And I generally have dinner ready unless I can talk her into coming down to Joe's." Joes was our bar, which was across the street from The Bluebird cafe.

"I was so afraid you two were going back to Oregon."

"Oh, the old Oregon Trail. Not for at least a year. Terry's younger brother is coming to visit, by the way. We'll have to show him a good time."

I don't remember if we stopped playing with the toy soldiers. The sheriff may have joined us. Other supervisors and managers would not have joined us, of course.

I was not known as a very good employee, though I was a good bookseller. My only initiative was social.

The "sheriff" was a Modern Southern Gentleman, a peaced-out Grateful Dead-head who trafficked in the bootleg tapes. He was the most pleasant, good humored,nd easy going drunkard. He was handsome and married to a beautiful young doctor. He was my avuncular bookseller hero.

Before that he'd been a small-town journalist and a boho-beat-nik- hobo.

He was oddly-read, lauding the work of obscure Canuks and Robert Heinlein's "Stranger In A Strange Land".

He sat on the mezzanine, where the grand stairway went right and left and watched the sales-floor, waiting to spot a befuddled customer or bookseller. Patient fisher of men, waiting until the distress required one of his approaches (Sidle along. Step right up. Pretend to be working near-by...) He seemed to know every title in the store, and could hand-sell. He knew every section like it was his own.

He may have joined us. Despite being a supervisor, his book selling skills made him worth his weight in gold. He was beyond reproach, the Sheriff. Two years later, when he and his doctor wife moved to Eugene, signs appeared in the back lunch room and stock areas reading "what would the sheriff do?"
______
September, still warm and lovely. Lunch with Eleanor at the Senior Citizens center where we could have "meat and three" everyday and Eleanor was always greeted warmly.

Eleanor told me my cowardice made Mariah livid.

"She says she hates you, John. She says 'I can't stand him'."

"What, now, say that again?"

"By the way, she also told me Carlos is a terrible lover. Ha,ha! And he is! Mariah and I had a blast talking about everyone last night."
_____
Sunday mornings, Mariah would see me on the floor before opening as I got the international newspapers out and together. She'd join me sometimes. Dropping to her knees beside me on the carpeted sales floor. I'd arranged my schedule to be as near to hers as possible.

"'Morning, John..."

"I don't know..."

"I know you don't know. This is still a strange place for you isn't it?" she said, referring either to the store or the South itself. "Oakapalooka..." her voice wondered and she giggled. "I don't know why that sounds so funny to me. I can't believe I can even remember it."

"She was a homely princess. Her father was Chief Manaska. His statue is on the town square, by the bandstand."

"Manaska. That's on your station wagon's license plate. Iowa. Manaska."

"That's right."

"Shouldn't you have Tennessee tags by now?"

I had an answer in my throat but my heart was pounding it down. Conversing with Mariah Maye was impossible. It'd been almost a year now since she arrived.

She smiled, "We both drive beat up old station wagons. My dad is going to make me get a new car but I love my junk heap."
____
In those days I always drank a beer for breakfast. I wondered if she smelled it. Much later, when I asked her about our early days, she said of course everyone always smelled alcohol on you but it was no big deal. We took you as alcoholic. Maybe like a college alcoholic, only you were so quiet we also couldn't believe you even smoked. And you wouldn't come to parties.
________________________________________________
A month later, after Mariah became inventory manager during someone else's angry coup, I was at an upstairs service desk after relieving a pal who had pointed out some paper work the back office needed done. Matching one list of missing books to a master list or something. I was bored with the book I was reading so I picked up the task. It was fun just to look over the unheard of book titles.

The sheriff sprang upon me and began to praise me to the hilt for my initiative. I stood for a moment like a man who is afraid. I began to object but he talked over me until I got the brilliant, life-saving idea to shut up.
He'd been waiting (and waiting) for me to do something right. I'd volunteered to do some inventory work, hadn't I?

He would knock a middle block from the totem of my personality, the fake rebelliousness that had no particular originality or intelligence to match.

He'd spotted the native obsequiousness in me, that part that wanted approval from the grown-ups. People were always spotting something in me that didn't add up.
________
The next day, I was invited to a meeting with Mariah and the sheriff.

Her face looked like she'd spent her morning laughing about something.

"Jerry and I agree, you've changed, John."

She might have believed this. It was the Sheriff's word, after all. Or, she knew it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It was simple. I'd do anything for these two because I loved them both.

Mariah because why. (And how, why, 15 years later!! Is she still iconic in my dreams, waking me up, happy or sad.)

Maybe they knew me.

"I'd like you to be my assistant. They're allowing me two. It will be you and Jerry if you accept. Since he's already a supervisor, we'll just call you his deputy or adjutant, " she laughed.

"I got an extra vest at home, John-John!"

"What? I get a vest?" I was serious in my surprise and enthusiasm.His vests were home-made, a denim embroidered in a rich colored psychedelic threads. The sheriff was a Southern Gentleman and a Grateful Dead fanatic. Wavy Gravy as Andy Taylor. And I was to be Barnie.

I did become a good worker. Eventually, even out of sight, I was good. Mariah and the sheriff had made me a stranger to myself.

2)More again, lost on a stranger

Something Southern was happening. An inauguration. Small bits of staging began to appear, in place for a show. Theatre in the round. Then full wall and ceiling enclosure, and gradually block the wings. Geek. What is expected of me. I'm a mule from The Music Man. It's all I know.
___________
There would be another new bookseller soon, after me. But her arrival would be an important social debut for "small town" Nashville---that is, the elite.

The older women in the back office, who kept the accounts, tracked and ordered books, and wrote our paychecks, had babysat the debutante a mere 15 or 20 years ago, had her to their own childrens' birthday parties, watched her grow. They all knew her family well and I gathered it was an important Nashville family.

Now Mariah was all grown up and like a friend to them, especially to Martha, the book-keeper, and Eleanor, who was about to be demoted from book-buyer to book-seller. Eleanor, my fellow inebriate.

They were talking to her on the phone every other day and reporting back to those of us who loitered at the information counter.
Mariah might take a job at the florists across busy Hillsboro Avenue.
She changed her mind.
Mariah is coming sooner, or she was coming later.

Mariah is coming for lunch, Martha told the claque at info. You'll get to see her.

Many of these booksellers were happy too. They'd heard of Mariah, or knew her older brothers. Maybe they thought their bookstore life was about to change importantly. It always can, when someone new is coming on board.

Why was this a debut? She was an enigma because she'd attended a private, experimental school at Vanderbilt from pre-school to her high-school graduation. She'd gone to synagogue instead of church. Her last name meant nothing to the youngest booksellers, until someone explained about the Maye Hosiery mill, which had been sold a decade earlier and was now out of business. For 80 years the mill had employed hundreds of people. It was fondly remembered , in spite of everything I suppose.

Mariah spent four years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor studying Creative Writing, Theatre, and German. Independently she'd become an expert horticulurist. (Her father made the corny, off-color joke, so she liked to repeat it: 'You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think'.) She had a large, waist high work table in the enclosed front porch of her house, where she dried flowers and made artful arrangements, reefs.

After her graduation, she'd spent two years working in a flower shop in the city-state of Hamburg.

Her Jewish parents, grandparents, and two older brothers all endured this bravely, even defiantly, never speaking to one another of their worries. Mariah called home once a week. That was her rule, and it was never to be on the same day of the week or at the same time of the day or night. Otherwise they might panic if she were delayed or forgot to call.

She let people think she was an Arab in Germany, where she worked in a flower shop. In Germany, at a bar, she and her friends joined some jovial group of young people and " after someone visited our table and then turned their back to leave, one of these strangers made like a pistol with his thumb and finger and sneered: "Jew. Pow pow!"

She moved to Turkey, where there was a hut-dwelling family that happily accepted her and let her stay for a month or two. Long enough to list off the names of their five children, cousins, in-laws...

One of the five children was studying in London, hence the primitive accommodations. On her way home she spent a week in London, and dreaded meeting this man, but then all went well and they spent all that time fucking at the Mayflower.

For years afterwards he sent her letters in beautiful hand-painted envelopes.
______

"Guess what?" Julie Yarborough announced a week ahead of time. "Mariah Maye was at my 5th birthday party."

"What, really? She was at mine too," Carter said.

"My parents got out some pictures last night and showed me. She was extraordinary, she looks like a doll. Kinda creepy, like. The cutest little girl I've ever seen, I am not exaggerating! She must have been like three or four, oh she looked so ethereal, so ...seraphic."

This was the way with Julie, the cello player. She had a way with words you never heard before. Seraphic?

Carter asked, "Was I at your party?"
"I don't think so."
He laughed his monster laugh. "No I wasn't"


Martha, one of the older women who had an office in back, overheard.

"Julie, you should bring that picture in next Wednesday. Try to remember to do that. Mariah will love that. I'd love to see that too. I remember her as a tot, you're right she was a doll. Don't forget to bring that in, ok?"

"Ok!" Julie had long red hair and blue eyes. She was slender and beautiful, kind, mannerly as a princess. You didn't even think of her unless she stood before you speaking.
____
Mrs. Davis, the owner of the store, teased that I wouldn't be "the kid" anymore. But that I'd continue my training with Mariah.

I received this as a jolt. Fitting in with the crowd was one thing, having a singular relationship with this Mariah Maye might require me to speak in small talk, in another language and in another culture.
________
She started at the bookstore two weeks after me, while I was still bewildered and afraid of everyone. It was summer in Nashville and for two months there hadn't been a cloud in the sky. People joined me now in longing for the sun to go out.

Martha ---who would save my life a few years later---brought her over to me, where I was shelving "You Might Be A Redneck If..." books.

I stood up and lo.
____
Mariah Maye's dark brown hair was thick and tossled, fallen down to her shoulders. She looked aggrieved and exhausted and afraid, like she'd just finished a night of belly dancing. Doped by endorphins, but still alert, like she'd been fending off groping hands.

Her brown eyes seemingly shy, but frankly shading me with the balm of maidenly approval.
___
Past where her eyes were just slightly crossed, I saw the shaky willfulness and uneven temperament.

She was imperfectly beautiful. The possibility that she considered herself unattractive made me wolfish for a second, then when she spoke in that quackish voice of hers my heart fell and my brain released an overwhelming chemical concoction that turned me into a yearning, speechless uber luft mensh.

She was very sexual, standing only five foot five with the a solid frame and good posture of a drum majorette. She was a swimmer in her family pool, once in the morning, half hour at night.

She looked up as she shook my hand, and it was a long instant but only an instant. My self-talk stopped for good. Gone like the hiccoughs.

And I was wounded. Immediately suffering due to this supreme, or penultimate, indifference of the merely acquainted. A form of "where have you been ...?" And I could already hear the Last Word, that waits on every woman's tongue...

In this long instant, then the white-veiled bride. There was the violinist. I was the floating bride-groom forever unable to get his feet back on the ground.

I knew I'd win and I knew I'd lose too. I seemed to know everything but the details of the next five years.

Her eyes, Jerome! Two dishes of light for the lapping, and two sparkling diamonds that would be the same if she lived to be one hundred years old.

There may have been a readiness to rule, still a secret to herself. Much later, during a foolish bookstore coup, this maid stepped in to be boss---inventory manager, actually---and became all the more worried that she was not married.

She'd seen it all. I couldn't tell at the time and would never have imagined, but this young woman was self-conscious at age 24, not to be married.

After our introduction I led her to "main service" and everyone was waiting. She was introduced and then Ty, one of the most at-home-in-the-world people I've ever met, asked if Mariah was an exchange student? Here at Vanderbilt?

Her temper flared but she kept it concealed and then chided herself for her impatience. This was the way in small town Nashville, after all. (But to ask a stranger that, right off the bat, she told me a year later,...well, who wouldn't know that was offensive!?)

People guessed she was from Morocco, Lebanon, perhaps "the south of Spain".

"Mariah? Is that a family name?" he asked.

"No. My middle name, Catherine, is a family name ," she said very softly. It was an old, practiced response to a question that vexed her.

"It's spelled 'M-a-r-i-a' on the schedule."

"It's pronounced Mariah, though."

"You look like a Maria, sort of."

She was gratified when someone sang the famous line, "They call the wind Mariah ..."

"My grandmother was Scottish," she said.

When she'd visit the store on her days off , dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, I'd watch her, rapt and heart-broken. The other fellows at Information...why weren't they weeping? Mariah Maye had breath-taking hips, magnificent curves, a full, heavy bosom. Days she wore her hair up were melancholy. She had hair I wanted to pile into my mouth, or wrap around my cock.

Va-Va-Voom! You guys ever read Archie Comics? No? Means hubba-hubba.

________
Her mother ran the gift shop at Cheekleaf, Nashville's botanical garden and museum. I knew the place because my sister was a waitress in the Pineapple Room. One day I drove over on the pretext of visiting Jane but it was my interest in seeing Mariah's mother. She turned out to be one of the top ten, most beautiful women I've ever seen. One day I would have a photograph of her holding a three year old Mariah in her lap and I would simply marvel, wondering at loves physical location, like how my soul is right here. Where it bothers me like a tooth.

1) Lost to a stranger

She's looking into my eyes, she's holding my hand
She says, "You can't repeat the past."

I say, "You can't? What do you mean, you can't? Of course you can."

--Dylan (Summer Days)
________



Nashville all new to me. There wasn't a cloud in the sky for eight weeks, my first summer there. Cloudy days are restful, you eventually realize. Indoors, a gauzy purple to me. Days squinting at my new surroundings, never adjusting my eyes.

My sister Jane guided me pay-phone to pay-phone to "Sunnybrook Lane", in the one of the outer wheels of sprawling Music City. To this new family domus on the outer rim. Am I visiting? We don't know. I might be moving in, I've got all my stuff.

I hear it is practically a mansion and there's a Jacuzzi. Not likely we'll ever be any richer than this. Come see this Amazing. What Dad can gather together these days of his prime.

All of us of us at peace with me now, somehow. I am a confirmed ne'er-do-well, Mom's friends have sons and daughters who are neurologists. I've been a lost cause for so long I'm circling back around again, close like a satellite, anticipated to crash within one hundred years.

Man on a downtown street corner, my eyes don't deceive me, he's actually holding a sign that reads "mendicant". That's some sense of humor and deserves a reward but not from me.

Mend-i-cant.
I can't... I won't!

______
Twice a week I drove Dad's white Mercedes (with Hollywood CA. plates) to Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. I wrote back home to friends, go south and east for Living History and Modern Times. Iowa was never meant as a destination for our ancestors.

They fucked up and stayed and grew bitter with secret self-reproach. Leave Iowa! Finally concede the 1800's trip west was a failure and return East, South-east.

Each day the sort of day you don't know what your favorite time of day is and first you put breakfast on the scales because it's first.

Driving down Granny White Pike with Talking Heads or The Traveling Wilburys on the stereo , on my way to nowhere special, was it having private tours of the Hermitage, was it late at night, popping pilfered dentist pills and listening in the dark to my OTR tapes of Fibber and Molly. The euphoria spread into the morning and there was never any edge. Cans of beer always kept me ahead of a hangover, and stinking but I didn't know.

My older brother visited and with my mother guided me in to apply for a job at one of the New Concept super bookstores... this one an independent.

Grand, wonderfully over-staffed, books tight on the shelves and a cafe specializing in muffins the size of melons. Beautiful young baristas, young women with southern accents and no thought to the future but that evening's night out.

___
My first month, I took my granddad's old alarm clock to work with me and left it in the car because at lunchtime I wanted to hear the ticking of my room, the ticking of last night's protected sleep and this nights promised peace.


Two weeks with a new tic, uncomfortable new shoes and I'm tugging at my collar. In charge of Humor as a specialist or expert, and if I don't like someone I can be as obsequious and diffident as Valentino selling $3,000 Newman suits to a lottery winner.

In the elevator alone , on a mission to find a book, I walk in circles as if I were climbing a narrow spiral staircase.

Start to my right on the way up, on my left on the way down. 20 seconds of isolation and peace.

I can see the humor shelves from here at Information, Please, and there's a problem with pests. They are waiting their turn or nudging one another aside to lift my Far Side and Calvin books up into upheaval. Or they buy the books and leave gaping holes where I had every one packed in and flush to the shelf, ready for a photograph.

I shelve Philosophy too (I could be taken as a pretty classy broad-minded fellow here! ) And no one so far to expose my ignorance of Spinoza.

Inventory put "Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" there---an accommodation since that's where the freaks naturally go to find it, apparently.

"I wore out so many copies of this, man."

"This is for my son."

Jesus? Lord. Am I the phony elitist.

Seething inside when I had to gift-wrap a copy this morning.

____
Can't get in on a conversation with most of these co-blings. Got to look up the TV schedule and find out when "Thirty Something" is on.

Cleavage! A young divorcee! You can spot them. She's coming my way, fresh and she's smiling, wait, she's no divorcee. Glance at the ring finger. Diamond ring, gold band, modest for Nashville. I'd like an adulterous hand-job if you wear that ring. Oh she's so lovely, sweet petite, my heart is Gee. Unseemly glee.

But I'm dressed like a clown. My last girlfriend took me clothes shopping one hour before she dumped me. What get-ups. It's like she vandalized me, swearing this was how guys dressed in the Hep neighborhood of Boston. "These slacks... fasten with Velcro, you're not pulling my leg are you? " NO, no , no. Hey I'm doing you a favor. These trousers make you look like you've got a butt, John. Then I've got the clothes my mother and my father. The clothes my monkey's uncle. Khakis and blue oxford shirts, with neck-ties.

"Hi there! Do you know if Mariah Maye is working today?" asks this lovely bride with the bobbed brown hair.

Carter looks up from his book. "She's starting Monday".

"Oh, do you know her?"

"Only biblically," he dead-panned.

"Well tell her that her friend Sarah stopped by and that I need to talk to her soon about her chivalrous co-workers." She grins but I sense trouble.

Stunning. Carter laughs, tells me, "I only know her brother. Think Mariah might have been at my 5th birthday party..."
____ _____ _______
Dreaded lunchtime soon. Scared of an invitation, so I duck out, hurt there's no invitation. Lunch time isn't long enough to use the car so I walk down to the only eatery I know, a fern place, and have an egg-salad sandwich with the decorative metal chairs killing my back. Worries me I'll run into a co-bling and have to make with the gab or be mute. This is my personality profile. Sucks. And I'm reading The Bear. The prose is opaque, not mysterious. I haven't any idea what's going on in the bookstore. But this book here . The pages are swabbed in black. I'm imagining I'm reading The Bear, maybe I'm asleep.

___
Who starts Monday? Mariah Maye.
Oh, Andy's sister?
Oh, from the University school? I think she went to the University school.
Oh. The Mayes, Mayes Hosiery Mill, right?
Oh her granddad invented the tube sock.

Invented the tube sock, ha! What's a tube sock, it's an artless sock. Peg leg sock.

I j.o. in tube socks you ever j.o. in a tube sock?

My brother dated a Chicago girl whose dad invented the Pringle Can.
There's a low level abstraction for you.

Tube socks may not have been invented but they sure were introduced to the public.

I like tube socks.

Yes, we know you do.

Harrassed

I wore a Nicoderm patch for ten days until I couldn't stand it.

There's a warning about "vivid dreams" which piqued my interest (and my enthusiasm for stopping smoking). So, I put the first one on at bedtime, hoping for some dinner theater at the Val-Aire in Des Moines or somewheres.

I'm usually in the audience in my dreams. There can be all manner of madness and mayhem and it doesn't matter to me at all, it's theatre.

But now, Jake, I was right in the middle of the action and I'm going to tell you. For ten days it was like Candide, getting set up again and once more, for fall after fall after fall. Terrible aimless caroming, accompanied by myself being very quiet.

Guilty dreams for the innocent man. Epic. False.

And given the treatment, Jake! ...by a roomfull of enemy dramaturgists, noir graphic novelists, rogue fictioneers with their scene shifting chop-logic. Love and Rockets red glare. Let me tell you. Old girlfriends turning up at AA meetings, pissed off at me and wanting to reconcile too.

---One was a bearded lady...

A week later, out of the blue, a hermaphrodite in green mini-skirt! I remember walking behind her up the church stairs (as I was always taught to lead women downstairs and follow them upstairs in case of a fall, you know). It was obscene. Horrible.

Finally, inevitably, a naked woman on roller-skates. Hugging her bosom to herself like a woman in a James Bond movie, begging, no, screaming at me to get her home and into some clothes.

Do something! She shrieked.

It was an emergency. I couldn't deny that.

"Can't you see you're witnessing someones real life nightmare? I'm naked on roller skates in the public square, you skinny, lying little FUCK, I HATE YOU! Help me!"

"i don't know what to do."

"You NEVER know what to do, you're RETARDED, you're a COWARD , you NEVER THINK OF ANYONE BUT YOURSELF!"

"please, please be quiet. Wait..."

"WAIT?! What am I waiting for? I'm waiting for you to get me some god damn clothes you son of a bitch, look what you've done to me, look!!!!..."

"please don't cry. so you're getting on the plane alone without luggage, everything will be all right "

All I cared about was making sure everyone else in my dreams didn't misunderstand. Or, you know, understand. Whatever the case may be.

But that was another thing. There was no love in these dreams, not a single friend ever appeared, there was mutual antipathy with everyone who'd come to get reacquainted.

At times I seethed, once or twice I popped off, like "Maybe people wouldn't be staring if you'd stop your bellowing. And HEY it just occurred to me you fucking left me. I mean, what did I do really?"

"N O T H I N G!" she squalled.
____

I'm not trying to get to the any truth about myself, I'm shoveling still, telling myself that dreams are radioactive. They can't possibly mean anything because they're nonsense.

Whatever they were trying to bury forever at the Great Pyramids, they got a monument instead.
___
____
_____
Finally, a dream as it should be. Pleasant as a day in May and simple wish-fulfillment. I was 30 again, she was 24. She was light in my arms. I picked her up and spun her around and said "Let's spend the day together, you want to?"

She laughed, "Sure, I'm not doing anything. It's been awhile."

"We'll go visit some friends of mine. And my brother."

And for hours it was just me and her again, in Nashville. We visited our families, friends. Everyone in that dream had a grand time. They were all impressed with her and impressed with me. Some mysteries about her father and her brothers were cleared up nicely, with a laugh.

I woke up in mid-air and floated down to a smothering bed. Mariah May tattooed my sub-conscious 15 years ago. This remains the central mystery of my life. Something about her made me a mystery to myself.

The one good nico-dream defeated me completely. I took the patch off and waited until the poison left my system so I could enjoy my first smoke in ten days.