Self-Esteem
Authors: Preston David Bailey
Tags: #Mystery, #Dark Comedy, #Social Satire, #Fiction, #Self-help—Fiction, #Thriller
Table of Contents
Part I: Those Who Criticize You
Part III: What Any Other Person Has
SELF-ESTEEM
a novel
by Preston David Bailey
Copyright 2012 by Preston David Bailey. All rights reserved.
Edited by Martin Williams
Cover by De Waal Immelman
Self-Esteem: A Novel
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author. Portions of
Holy Bible
printed without permission.
Self-Esteem: A Novel / Preston David Bailey.
ISBN: 978-0-9859662-0-1
Published in the US by Preston David Bailey.
www.self-series.com
[email protected]
1. Thriller—Fiction
2. Dark Comedy—Fiction
3. Social Satire—Fiction
4. Mystery—Fiction
5. Self-help—Fiction
for Bill Hicks
The knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity.
— Cervantes
Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.
— Goethe
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
— T.S. Eliot
FIRST, AN EXCERPT FROM JAMES CRAWFORD’S UNFINISHED NOVEL, “TALK IS CHEAPER THAN THE PLAGUE.”
He was walking through the garden and it could have been any garden, but it wasn’t. It was a garden like no other, like
Part I:
Those Who Criticize You
CHAPTER 1
THE INCIDENT AT MOTHER GOOSE was the first thing he could remember. That’s what he told a crowd of people at a book signing, which is now considered the event that began his most serious descent into psychosis. Drunk on a flask of Scotch he had hidden in his suit jacket, he started by extending the wicked smile of a stand-up comedian about to tell his dirtiest joke, all just to sell
Self-Esteem
.
“Let me tell you about my first memory,” he said. “It’s my favorite story.” It was neither his first memory nor his favorite story, but every time he told it, a new element emerged, a detail regarding how he acted or what he thought. No matter. He was an expert on human behavior — at least
officially
so — and he knew that it is perfectly natural to tell a story the way the story
itself
wants to be told, especially when you’re messed up on liquor.
“Stories really have a remarkable authority all their own,” he once wrote in
Self-Confidence
. “It’s best just to let your stories go. Let them live the way they want to. It will help you live life the way you want to.”
As he most often described it, Mother Goose Land was a nursery school on a lonesome two-lane highway north of the small Texas town where he grew up. It was an old wooden house, probably built in the thirties or forties, that otherwise might have been a friendly place if it weren’t for that terrifying
Hansel and Gretel
story that his impetuous Uncle Jerry had told him. The dwelling was a cottage, more or less, with a large porch that had a giant gingerbread awning above it. It was at once creepy and hospitable, which is the scariest thing to a child — like a house made of sweets with a witch inside.
Dr. James Crawford was about to tell the Mother Goose story for the last time. He spoke as dramatically as an evangelist, even though he knew his wife Dorothy found it nauseating. “When I was a little boy, my mother worked during the day, so she had to take me to a nursery school called
Mother Goose Land
. And there was a boy there, a boy who always seemed to be there, an older boy. And for whatever reason, he harassed me. I don’t think he had it in for me in particular, you see. I just think he knew he could beat me up and get away with it. I was, well, very shy. And that little bastard kicked me, beat me, abused me.”
Dorothy rolled her eyes when she heard the word “abused.”
No more than you’re abusing your body right now
, she thought. Occasionally she would try to point out that we all get picked on as children and it’s a terrible part of life and all that, but Jim never listened. He never skipped a beat. She decided not to say anything this time. This was his gig. And besides, it was the nineties in America, and the most evolved people in the world no longer took human suffering lightly, however small.
“He would scratch me. Scream at me. Throw things at me. And it went on without end,” Crawford said. “Seemed that way at the time anyhow.”
The detail he could remember best was the toy radio: actually just a block of wood painted to look like a radio, with a small springy wire coming out of the top imitating an antenna, a toy that would now seem obsolete, but not completely useless in the right circumstance.
“As he was hitting me, calling me a sissy, I felt I wasn’t going to take it any more. I finally got tired of it. Yeah, and this radio was nearby. Nothing but wood, just a blunt object, right. You can’t tell me humans don’t have animal instincts,” he said with a nod.
A few people laughed.
Then Dorothy wagged her head from side to side, mentally lip-synching the sentence that always came next:
For some reason my animal instincts took over.
“Between punches he asked me how I liked it.” Then Crawford would nod, pausing for effect before releasing a verbal stream that rose to the act of liberating violence. “He was beating me. And I saw that toy radio. I saw it lying in the corner and I knew I could use it. And I grabbed it by the antenna and I swung that son of a…” His eyes always became tense, his breath shortened. “I swung that thing as hard as a baseball bat into the side of the little bastard’s head.”
His small audience became quiet. Crawford sat back and spoke more evenly, his face glowing with contentment. “The boy immediately started crying, screaming in pain. And for me, it felt good. It felt really good.”
Dorothy could see the flask peaking through Jim’s jacket like a gangster’s pistol, casually holstered.
Crawford’s tale plunged to a grave whisper. “Then something happened. Soon after, I don’t know how long it was, but soon after I came to realize that I didn’t feel so good. I thought I was going to throw up or something. And that afternoon when my mother came to pick me up, I was pale and weak. I felt terrible.” A dramatic pause, then “I had come down with the mumps, you see.”
Crawford described his mother and an older woman at the nursery school talking to each other as he waited in the foyer. From a distance he watched his mother nodding while the old woman told the story. The thought of his mother’s embarrassment frightened little Jimmy Crawford, but the thought of her anger frightened him even more.
“I was in trouble. I just knew I had done something terrible, something my mother would punish me for. And feeling terrible was just a confirmation of what I already knew. I had been bad, and I was going to be punished severely — not just by my mother but by God himself. It was Him, our Heavenly Father, that I thought was making me sick. Before we even left Mother Goose, God had already started punishing me. It was just a matter of time before my mother would cause me further pain. Then, perhaps, I would die.”
Crawford stared at the floor as he described his mother driving him home that evening, his ailing little body doubled over in the backseat. “But she got me to our house and didn’t punish me. She never punished me. She never rebuked me, which was even more torture than being confronted. Eventually, I forgot about it. I thought I did. But you know what?” he said raising a finger. “I didn’t forget it.
“Years later — far too long a time — my mother told me the woman at the nursery school was glad I had finally stood up for myself, that I had suffered too long at the hands of that aggressive bully. I didn’t realize until I got much older that getting sick that day had nothing to do with hitting the boy. God wasn’t punishing me at all. I was just sick because I had gotten sick that day. Just a bug going around the nursery school, that’s all.”
“I thought I knew God’s ways for many years, but I was wrong,” he concluded. “I was just punishing myself. And all that time my behavior was influenced by those feelings, by that defining moment. The way I thought of myself, the level of inhibition I experienced when confronted by other people — it took me years — and I mean years — to realize that that kid, that little bastard — he had it coming. He really had it coming,” he said.
Giving a thumbs-up he added, “At least that’s the way I remember it.”
His audience applauded.
Crawford picked up the freshly printed hardcover copy of
Self-Esteem
that sat in front of him. A woman rushed forward and started snapping pictures as Dorothy stepped to the side. Crawford didn’t mind the flash. He was thinking about how he couldn’t wait to get loaded and have sex with his mistress that night.
The glare of the TV screen was bright. That flickering image, that precise sequence, now a regular event in millions of households on weekday mornings, was scary to Crawford, something he turned away from. But there was more to this pattern of lights. It was a collaboration he was involved in. Something he made money from. Something he had created. Something he now dreamed of escaping.
The puppets started dancing.
Those damn animal puppets
.
And then the melody, that insidious melody, that clinking and clanking children’s song that rose from the silence like a sputtering jalopy begging to be repaired. Then the sing-song singing.
Happy Pappy. Happy Pappy. He’s so happy to be our pappy.
Then a close up of the eyes, those dark, empty doll eyes.
“Yesssssiiiiirrrrreeeee!” he screams, his distorted features coming into the frame, a drunk at a party trying to get your attention. “Hello kids!” he says, his head barking out the words in a bizarre staccato. “Welcome to the Happy Pappy Show! You know who I am, don’t you?”
All the puppets surround him.
“You’re Happy Pappy!” they say, their heads bobbing.
Crawford once had a nightmare that Happy Pappy was actually TV puppet legend Howdy Doody transformed into an ogre by the work of an evil scientist using a malicious concoction created by Crawford himself.
Happy Pappy wasn’t just Howdy Doody minus the puppet strings and Buffalo Bob. Yes, Happy was also a cowboy. He wore one of those big, rustic hats. He wore overalls. His yellow-gloved hands were as bright as the midday sun. And yes, he too was happy. But no, it wasn’t Howdy Doody Time. Happy Pappy was too strong for that. He had real confidence.
The backdrop was surreal, distorted but difficult to say how or where. It made Crawford think of some remote cartoon land where real people were devoured by their animated creations. A barn with painted knotholes. A fence leading from one side of the frame to the other. White clouds resting in front of a blue-lit backdrop. The entire setting formed from an incomprehensible emptiness — like the crossroads along the yellow brick road.
“And why do they call me Happy Pappy?” he says, his buckteeth wrapping around his corncob pipe like the legs of a spider around its prey.
And the puppets respond, “Because you’re soooooo happy!”