Thorazine Beach (5 page)

“Evening, Jack,” called a couple of the girls exiting Red Line. “Have a good one.” I glanced. Waved and smiled—rather idiotically, I thought, my shirt front dirtied, now, and shirttail out, wiping my brow with that old towel from the back seat floor. What
was
that stain?

“Jack,” the voice said. Startled. I hadn’t heard Eileen come up behind me. I stood, turned.

She looked my disheveled figure up and down. Reached up, adjusted my tie. As if that helped. “Um, Jack?” she said quietly, looked away, looked me in the eye. “Will we, um, see you at church Sunday?”

“I guess,” I said, breathing heavily.

“Good. Good,” she said.

“Well. Sunday, then.”

“Sunday,” she said.

“Sunday it is. Guess I better…”

“You still going to the eight o’clock, Jack?”

Back when, Lynette and I had always gone to the ten-thirty service at Grace St. Luke’s Episcopal. Choir. Kettle drums. A cornet, flute, maybe a French horn. Toney. Church for the well-heeled, the ten-thirty was. You could hear Paul’s epistles read by a lector who just happened to be the city’s number one neurosurgeon. Hear the week’s announcements from a professor of opera. Take communion bread handed you by a real estate developer who owned half of Midtown. Lynette knew everyone. Everyone knew Lynette. Everyone
loved
Lynette. Everyone said hello to me.

I could let go of the people. It was the
place
I couldn’t let go of. I hadn’t met God in years, not since I’d got sober in AA. But I met him again, soon as we started going to Grace St. Luke’s. Not in the music, mind you. Jesus, I hated those people who prattled on about the fricking music at the ten-thirty.
Oh, it’s so LOVEly
…
It’s the MUSIC I really come for, you know
…As if
that
wouldn’t piss God off. And he and I got closer when I started coming earlier. No, in the quieter, stiffer eight o’clock service, I heard him in the spaces
between
people,
between
talking. In the space between a cough and a shuffling of feet. In the space between the rector’s amen and the creaking of an oak pew-back. At the eight o’clock, they give you a dirty look if all you put in the collection is a couple of crumpled ones or, like Doreen, desperate and
believing
, hands held high in the front row, your tithe rattles in the brass plate. Communion is thinly populated at the eight o’clock. Near-silent. Solemn. I could hear my knees crack as I knelt. Whisper:
Body of Christ
…
bread of heaven
. I could
hear
the bread torn from the loaf,
hear
the saliva working in my own mouth as I took it. Whisper:
Blood of Christ
…
cup of salvation
. Drink, wipe, drink, wipe. And when the cup came to me, I would cross my arms—the sign of the cross of St. Andrew, I fancied—decline to drink, and rise to my feet. I wondered: Did the acolytes think this was rejection? Insubordination? Who were
they
to think such a thing? Each week, I resented that, just a little.

Hi, my name is Jack. I’m an alcoholic
. Resentment is an art form, for us. We grow it, water it, cultivate it, like herbs on a kitchen windowsill. They had gluten-free wafers, for Christ’s sake, if you wanted. But no grape juice for the alkies. Perhaps, they’d have me believe, I was the only one of
those
people among the saints—they’d go marching in, I’d go staggering by. No—couldn’t be. Could I be the only alkie here? As others in the eight o’clock prayed about foreclosure and dead grandsons in Afghanistan and cancer and legs that no longer worked and brains unable to remember their own mothers and brothers, I prayed, sometimes, about that tiny, stupid resentment. Some day, some day. Jesus, please, some day.

“The eight o’clock,” I answered Eileen. “Yes. The eight.”

“Good. Good,” she said again.

“Well…” Cough. “Eileen, I…”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“Was there…”

“…something…?” she filled in.

“Else?” I said.

A silence between.

“Jack?”

I simply looked at her.

“Jack, do you remember, um…?”

“Remember whom, Eileen?”

“‘Whom’.” She chuckled. “Always the English major, Jack.”

I kept looking at her.

She glanced away, as if unsure, then looked me square in the eye. “Um…Barbara Jean McCorkle?”

Memory flooded in. Lynette and I had known her during the earlier time we’d been going to Belleau Wood Baptist, out on Gee Town Parkway. You couldn’t
not
know Barbara Jean McCorkle.
Twenty-six thousand
, that congregation. Yet I swear you could hear her voice, see her face, right through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds around the foyer coffee stands between Sunday school and service. Endless committees. Our dining room, furniture stacked high, stuffing envelopes. Party decorations. Box lunches for the homeless. And that
voice
. Toxic. Christ, the woman had a voice that could strip paint.

“Um, yeah. Sure. Nice woman.”

“
Lovely
person.”

“Yeah.”

“She goes to your church now, Jack. Grace St. Luke’s. The five o’clock, mind you.”

“Belleau Wood’s loss,” I said, “is our—”

“Jack,” she said, and let that hang a moment. So did I. “Jack, I’ve asked her to…”

“To what, Eileen?”

“Well…just to look you up. Look you up…is all.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Just give me her e-mail, she and I’ll have coffee sometime. Ooh! Look at the time, I—”

“Jack.” Her head was cocked to one side. I knew that look.

“Jack what,” I said flatly.

“Jack, we’re…we’re all…worried about you.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, Eileen.”

“The weight you’ve put on, Jack. You’re
sixty
, now.”

“Thank you for remembering.”

“It’s not just that, it’s…”

“Look, Eileen, it’s nothing I can’t…” I couldn’t finish that sentence. And she didn’t.

Eileen reached into the pocket of her jacket. Held out her fist, opened it, palm up. A prescription pill bottle. “You must have dropped it on my office floor.”

“Oh, thanks, Eileen. My blood pressure medicine. Appreciate your rescuing that,” I said, taking the bottle and tossing it through my car’s open back door onto the front passenger seat. The tone of its rattle reminded me there were only a few pills left. “I’ve got to get a new prescription Monday. Visit good old Doctor Nigeria. Good guy, you know, he—”

“Jack, I know my medications pretty well. Les used to take more than a few.”

“I take a few myself,” I said, cranking out a chuckle that couldn’t have sounded anything but hollow.

“Jack, it’s Thorazine. It’s not for blood pressure, it’s—”

“Well, Doc Nigeria’s got me on a complex of medications, actually. I’ve started a better diet—”

“Peanut brittle and Coca-Cola?” she intruded.

“You don’t miss much, Eileen, do you?”

“Private investigator,” she said. She smiled a little, this time.

“I know you’ll be okay with the diet thing. You’ve done it before. Lynette told me you’d made it last
years
, once. And I know you’ll like MacDonald’s birthday present.”

“Jesus, Eileen, you
know
what this thing is?”

She shrugged. “He stopped by this morning. We, um…talked.”

“Am I the
only
one on the outside, here?” I said.

“You might be,” she said. “For now. MacDonald said your best bet might be to cut the cardboard with your crate still right in the car, take it inside in pieces, one by one.”

“Why don’t you just tell me, Eileen?”

“Oh, no. Couldn’t possibly,” she said, tossing in a little cheer. “MacDonald told me he wanted to drive you mental.”

She blushed a bit when she heard what she’d said.

“Jack,” she said. “Thorazine. I know what it’s for.”

My mind wandered to her office. Her and Les—a wedding picture. Her and Les—in a patrol cop’s uniform. Her and Les—Grand Canyon. The Liberty Bell. Monument Valley. Point Reyes. With grandchildren, dogs. Arm in arm, on the beach at Destin, Florida. Six years, and those dozen or more pictures had never moved, except for dusting. Her eyes told me she did know what Thorazine was for.

I felt tears somewhere behind my eyes. I fumbled for words. “The Desipramine,” I said. “It just never worked, whatever the dose they tried. Everything was so…so
grey
. Sunny day, and it felt like rain. I cried. I couldn’t…I drank. I
drank
, for Christ’s sake, Eileen. Eighteen years sober and I…I drank. Just one, just that one time, but—”

“Shhhh,” she said, and she held me, just held me, for the longest time. We stood there in the parking lot, in mid-whatever, my car door open, my shirttail out, her purse dropped to the ground. I knew better than to speak, better than to
do
anything. I just let her hold me. And in between the car horns and the eighteen-wheelers’ air brakes on Summer Avenue, I could hear her breathing.

Treasure Fricking Island. 4720 Summer Avenue, right between the Imperial Lanes, west side (bowling, video games, light lunches, beer), and on the east, past a wild kudzu hedge that had grown up through a rusted chain-link fence, one of the most frequently robbed Bank of America branches in the country. Handy to the Mapco that carried my brand of cigarettes and the cheapest gas on Summer Avenue, a block along from a shabby little nameless beer joint with terry cloth tabletops where I’d made myself a regular in about three visits, over-tipping for endless refills of Diet Coke and occasional bags of Cheezies as I half-read a book, half-heard the bar-talk.

The Admiral Benbow Inn was the last local bastion of a fast-fading motel franchise chain that still hung on here and there in Alabama, Georgia, maybe northwest Florida. The Summer Avenue edition still looked a bit like a “family” motel, in a sixties kind of sense that had never been updated. Big-paned glass-windowed lobby. Stone-work walls, now much patched with the wrong kind of concrete. Cracked walks. Peeling paint over peeled paint. You could see a whole lot of used-to, at the Benbow. The restaurant that used to serve steak sandwiches to State Farm insurance and Ace Hardware store guys from the neighbourhood, bacon & eggs and bottomless cheery coffees to morning travelers about to get back on the road, whipped-cream pancakes for the kiddies. The restaurant still ran. Some days. Coffee and continental breakfast in the lobby, for overnight guests: Yesterday’s urn, still plugged in, and a box of day-olds from Donald’s Donuts down the street. The back room—a now-paintless wooden sign, over the door: The Admiral’s Quarters—where the Rotary and the Lions used to meet. Now, a black church rented the room Sunday mornings, bass drum and a B-3 organ banging and raging, an over-wrought, sweaty preacher intoning from nine in the morning till noon, when Mrs. Patel would hammer loudly and shout, waving the paper contract, and say they had to get out. Once in a while you’d see some lost bunch slouching about of a weekend evening, guests at a forlorn wedding reception, standing around with cigarettes and rum-and-Cokes, wondering how in hell
their
friends could have seen fit to rent
this
dump. And about once a week, thanks to internet reservations and relaxed standards of truth in website photography, you’d see them arrive in the slanted sun and shadow of a late afternoon: Minivan, often as not. They could afford the Hampton Inn, but Dad, perhaps, had felt an urge to economize. Ward, June, and the Beav. Could hear them, too.
Come on, honey, it’s just for one night
…
But, dear, the pictures, it’s not at all like—
…
Hey, son, let’s check out the pool
…
Good Lord, Howard, I don’t like that green tinge
…

A hundred and sixteen-fifty a week. Cheaper if I’d pay ahead—five weeks for four. Mrs. Patel liked cash. Mrs. Patel liked inventing charges, too. For towels. Pillowcases, even. Toilet paper—dollar a roll if you didn’t bring in your own. A surcharge for guests who wished to use the pool, which Mrs. Patel thought should be everyone. I escaped that, noting I, too, didn’t like the green tinge. “It will be rectified, it will be rectified with utmost speed,” Mrs. Patel assured. “I can’t swim,” I said. And then there was the “key fee.” That I couldn’t escape, but eventually the fee just disappeared—simply forgotten, I think. I presumed the absentee owners of this last-gasp franchise never knew about the extras.

Mine was a big room, no doubt. “Family,” indeed. Two queen-size beds, and they came nowhere close to filling the place. Night tables, dresser, desk, all in a 1978-ish round-cornered, oak veneer, commercial grade style, all having seen their share of spilled drinks, kicks, and dragging things across the very outdoor looking indoor-outdoor carpet. A chair I had to ask to be replaced three times before getting one that didn’t wobble precariously.

I’m not sure Mrs. Patel ever liked me, exactly. But over time, Mrs. Patel came to watch out for me, watch for whoever might slow or hesitate as they passed my door. I was, after all, as close to ‘class’ as the Benbow usually saw. “Thieves,” Mrs. Patel said. “They are all thieves, I am telling you.”

One afternoon, some guy knocked on my door. Through the peephole, I vaguely recognized him from a few doors down the wing. I answered, bare feet and jammy pants and T-shirt. “You use this?” he said. Sleepy, I said
Sure
, and he and his friend schlepped in an upholstered couch, somewhere in length between a loveseat and a full-size sofa, set it against the wall. “Um …thank you,” I said, vaguely. “No problem,” they said, and left. A few days later, I found some crumpled papers lodged between the two cushions. An Aaron’s Rental contract and a bill for a bunch of weeks unpaid. Great—I could now add receiving stolen property to my list of moral misdemeanors.
They are all thieves, I am telling you
.

Home. Four years. I knew no one by name, they didn’t know me. Not, at least, past nodding mumbles in passing.
‘Sup. Hot-nuff foyah. Awright awright
.

There was that fifty-something guy in 103 who said he was running his eBay business out of the room. He might have been. There were boxes of
stuff
all over the place—you could see them, daytimes, through his always-open drapes. A computer. And he did take a small armload of packages to the post office every day. But he also watched an awful lot of daytime girl-TV, and rarely left the place, and he looked a lot to me like a guy in denial about a divorce, or a death. Till the day the maid screamed, the ambulance came, people stood around the door, gurney in, gurney out, and the ambulance drove away in silence—no speed, no siren, no pomp to mark the passing of that life.