Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Little Jenny On The High Wire



“Jesus Fuck! What am I gonna do?!” I was in the mens room of the bar inside the Gallagher’s restaurant, fronting up a urinal. Leaning into it, actually. My joint was resting in my right hand, and my left forearm was resting against the wall above the urinal. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I needed $20, like, right away; and I had no fucking idea where I was going to get the money from. But I had to have it before I left that restroom, that was for sure.  And even though I was full of bourbon and really, really needed to go, there was no way I could whiz long enough to save myself from my fate. Unless I could somehow manage to piss out twenty bills, that is.

By then, I had been a clerk at one of the larger law firms in town for a couple of years. I had initially got the job through family connections, and I liked it because it was easy, and there was always a lot of gorgeous women around – legal secretaries, court reporters, all the babes working in the county clerk’s office, etc. Also, the law clerk job paid way better than the menial jobs most of my college friends had. I was able to go to school full time, pay rent and utilities for a small, austere apartment, and pay a new truck note and insurance, and still have enough left over to party a little bit, and wine and dine some of those attractive women I was always seeing, as I perambulated around in my job. All solely on the income from an after school job at the law firm.

I had even managed to get my employment classified as an internship; and since I was technically a pre-law major, it earned me three credit hours a semester, just for going to work. I had to write a 2-3 page paper at the end of each term about an interesting case I’d done work on, and I would get an A.  Sweet.

One summer, I think it was 1980 but I’m not sure, I had the assignment to get up early one morning and drive one of our partners, and an attorney co-consul from another local firm, and his assistant, to Houston Intercontinental so they could catch a plane to New York.  It was basically just a chauffeur’s job, but I did all kinds of shit like that for my firm. I figured it was a blow off day – drive our partner Paul’s LTD Brougham and everyone on board over to the airport, dump them off, then tool around Houston for awhile before heading back to Beaumont, taking the long, roundabout way back; down I-45 South through Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula, then back up FM 124 to I-10. I figured I’d stop along the way at one of the places along the seawall in Galveston, for fresh oysters on the half shell and a few beers, before catching the ferry across to Port Bolivar. Just an easy, pleasant day, and all on the law firm’s dime.

That is what I did, too. It was a nice, sunny, uneventful but fun day, mostly. The only thing that made it remarkable, and kept it in my memory, was the co-consul’s assistant. She was a year or two older than me, a not necessarily striking but really decent-looking blonde. Her name was Jennifer, and the other firm’s attorney I was chauffeuring, the one she worked for, was her dad. His name was Dave, and he was some big deal partner in the most prestigious firm in town, and he and Paul (and Jennifer) were off to New York take or sit in on depositions, in a deceptive trade practices suit I never really understood the details of.

It turns out what I had imagined would be a quiet, mundane trip over to Intercontinental that morning was anything but. For one thing, Dave turned out to be the loud, garrulous sort, used to holding the floor, and he jabbered non-stop from Beaumont to Humble, while meanwhile filling the passenger compartment of the LTD with thick cigar smoke, from the fat heater he kept jammed into one corner of his mouth. Also Paul, who was generally quiet as a monk around our offices, apparently had another side to him. The whole way over, he was in the front seat with me, telling me stories about his acid-taking days at Stanford in the late 1960s, and about how he and his wife Lettie – who was quite attractive in a middle-aged kind of way (and quite flirty with a certain law clerk at the firm’s occasional social get-togethers) – used to practice “free love” and all this shit, before they settled down to the straight-laced upwardly mobile genteel life, with three kids and a big fancy house in the tree-lined West End. Meanwhile, he was changing tapes in the 8-track player after every song.

The cacophony from Dave in the back and Paul in the front, the loud music, and the cigar smoke – sometimes so thick I could barely see out of the windshield – were distracting and a bit off-putting, actually.  Several times along the way I stole a glance in the rear-view mirror at Jennifer in the back seat, to see how she was taking it all. She seemed to be doing all right, and she caught me looking a few times, too. When she did, she would just roll her eyes in her dad’s direction. I felt like we formed sort of a silent bond that morning, drawn into kinship through our mutual suffering.

When we finally got to the airport and I let everyone off at the terminal, there was a minute or two while all the luggage was being taken care of, etc., and I went over to Jennifer and we laughed for a minute about Dave and Paul. Then she told me they’d be back from NYC by the end of the week, and would I call her then? And I told her that, yes, I surely would. As soon as she got back.

***************

We were naked on the sectional sofa in Jennifer’s living room, in each others arms and panting a bit; after having made love for quite awhile, it seemed like. Right there on the sectional. The thing was, Jennifer’s house was two stories, and the living room was in the middle. The upstairs was all bedrooms, and the upstairs hallway had a railing all around on the inside, where one could stand and look down on the living room, which was sort of a two-story atrium, I guess. When Jennifer had suggested we do it right there, in the living room, I had balked. I like sex as much as anyone, but I am not a sexual thrill-seeker, or risk-taker. I don’t need the chance of being caught in the act to get me off. Still, when she insisted … I found I was not really distracted by the risk factor once we got going, and I will admit the thought of her dad or mom or one of her siblings getting up in the middle of the night to take a piss and looking over the railing and seeing naked Jen and I down there, going at it hammer and tongs, so to speak … it may have actually added a little to the arousal factor for me. I am not saying it did, but I am not saying it did not.

That was on our first date, by the way, after Jen had got back from her New York trip.  I had picked her up from her house and we’d gone straight to a bar, and what I found out right away was that my date liked to drink. A lot. That only endeared her to me more, and before long we were both three sheets to the wind and headed back to her house, for some sloppy, high-risk sex on her parents’ living room sectional. Most of our dates that summer followed a pattern similar to this.

We lay there in each others arms that first night, post flagrante delicto I guess you could say, on that sectional; and as Jennifer buried her face into my shoulder, I gently traced my fingertips across her naked back, all along the lines of the multiple scars that were there, and my mind drifted back …

We had gone to the same elementary school, way back when, though Jen was a few grades ahead of me, and I don’t think we really knew each other then. One day I was sitting in class, maybe second grade, looking out the windows at the street that ran past the north side of our school, and I noticed there was a lot of commotion down at the corner, cars stopped and stuff. The next thing I knew there were a couple of ambulances screaming by down that street, and then they stopped at the corner, too. It turns out the fourth graders had been at recess or something, and Jennifer had wandered out into that street and had been run completely over by a car.

I didn’t remember everything about the accident, but I had heard that the girl who was hit had broken her back in several places and had lost a lot of blood, spilled right out onto that street in front of our school. I heard she nearly died – it was touch-and-go for several days. But she hung in there and, remarkably, endured a series of surgeries on her back that eventually made her whole again. If you didn’t know her history, you might not even realize what had happened to her. I knew, because I was there, as a barely-conscious-of-it 9 year old. And because 10 years later I held her naked in my arms, and traced the ridges of scars along her back (which she seemed to enjoy, by the way.) Other than that, she was left with an almost imperceptible limp, the result of one leg being slightly shorter than the other (after the accident.)

She was also left with, I thought, a bit of sadness in her. A bit of world-weariness. I cannot really explain it, and I never talked to Jennifer about it. I just felt like there was some darkness in her; and I was attuned to that, being the bearer of so much darkness, myself. And I guess it was a good thing in the long run that Jen and I were only together for part of one summer, while she was home from school (Vanderbilt, I think.)  Her darkness, and her serious devotion to John Barleycorn, fit perfectly into my fucked up view of the world at the time, and I was quickly enthralled by her, and I could easily see us falling in love; or more likely into a terminal embrace that might not have eventually killed one or the other of us, but surely would have left us both worse for the wear. As clueless and lost as I was back in those days, I still had the sense that someone dark and fucked up like me should not be seeking out a woman with the same traits; though I almost always did, anyway. I’ll admit, I still find that sort of thing attractive. Even though I know now and knew then that what I need is someone bright and good, to offset my darkness. But I guess part of me was always looking to do the worst thing for myself, to jump off into the deep end with someone like-minded, not caring one fucking bit where we ended up.

I still have some of that in me, too.

But all that is really too heavy to be putting off on Jennifer. I liked dating her that summer. It was so … easy. Go out somewhere, get loaded, then go home and make love, for hours.

Once during that time I had gone down to the beach for the day with friends. We sat down there all day drinking beer and getting seriously fucked up. We finally headed back to town at dark. On the way back it suddenly struck me that it was Jennifer’s birthday, and I hadn’t got her anything, even a card. What to do? What to do?

When I got home I took a quick shower and then, still smelling of the coconut oil that had apparently seeped down into my skin, I hauled ass for the liquor store. I got there about ten minutes before they closed, and bought a fifth of Jack Daniels Black Label. The liquor store guy fished around in the drawer behind the counter and found a slightly disheveled red stick-on bow for me, and I put it on top of the bottle of Jack. Then I headed for Jen’s house. When she opened the front door, I handed her the fifth without saying anything, except for a sheepish and mumbled, “Happy Birthday”. She took the bottle and looked at me, blinking; and then she started to cry, it looked like. She was so happy that I remembered her birthday, and gave her a fifth of a gallon of her most favorite thing in the whole world. I couldn’t believe how smoothly I managed it, how easy it was. Neither could I believe the supremely positive effect my perfunctory gesture had on Jen. That night, she started taking off her clothes almost as soon as we got in my Jeep, almost before I could get off of her street, even.

Jennifer was a Jack Daniels aficionado, for sure. She told me later, half-jokingly I think, that one of the main reasons she chose Vanderbilt was because it was only 70 miles or so from Lynchburg, where the Jack Daniels distillery was. When she first got up there, her and her friends made the pilgrimage every weekend, for the distillery tour, and especially for the hospitality room afterward. I mean, I loved whiskey and all, but she really, really loved it.

That’s how we ended up in the bar at Gallagher’s one night. Back then, Gallagher’s was a chain, some kind of franchise operation. It was supposed to be an Irish steak house or something, although I don’t recall ever having eaten there. And the bar in the restaurant was about what you’d expect. Not much, no décor or atmosphere or anything. No business to speak of. It was briefly popular only because they’d instituted a 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., 3-for-1 happy hour on Thursday nights. Instant atmosphere. Suddenly plenty of business.

We were meeting friends there that night, and I figured a 3-for-1 deal would save me some money, especially the way Jennifer put away the whiskey. Once we’d got there and settled in, I started ordering 3-for-1 call drinks, JD and water, and I was getting blitzed. What I didn’t realize was that Jen was bypassing the 3-for-1 deal, and ordering two fingers of Jack on the rocks, neat. Expensive drinks, and she was putting them away, too.

That night sort of went like most of them did back in those days – it started off fun and coherent, and then somewhere along the way it veered off into chaos. It ran off the road and got stuck in a mud hole full of craziness. And, I loved that so much. I loved chaos in my life back then. I think it was how I got away from some of the stuff going on that I didn’t really want to deal with.  There was a song on Ric Ocasek’s solo LP, which came out a few years later … “Keep It Out Of Control”. That was my modus operandi. The more fucked up and crazy and dissonant and chaotic my life was, the better.

Of course, even then, reality would pop up here and there. Like at the end of the night at Gallagher’s, when the waiter brought the tab for me to settle up, and I realized it was $15 more than what I had in my pocket. I excused myself for a moment to go to the men’s room to take a piss, and try to get myself together.

After having moped at the urinal for awhile, I was at the nadir of my despair, and I realized I would just have to go back out there and face the music, and admit to the waiter (and my date) that I could not cover my bar tab. I was about to gather myself up and go do it when a friend of mine named Gary came staggering into the restroom to take a piss. “Hey, man,” he said.

“Hey, Gary, do you want to save my life?” I said.

“Yeah, man. Sure.” he said. “What can I do?”

“Loan me twenty dollars.”

“Sure, no problem.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out $20 and handed it over.

“Dude, really. You just saved me, “ I said, and then I went on to thank him profusely.

Then I marched back out into the bar and settled up my tab and even left a smallish tip. My girl was impressed with me, I imagined; though in reality she was barely coherent by that point. No matter.



***************

I called Gary the next day and thanked him again, and promised to pay him back on my next payday. Twenty bucks was no small change to a poor college student back in those days.

But Gary said to forget it, that he owed me at least that much for the night I’d saved him. I could not recall what he might have been referring to, and so he reminded me.

One night a few years prior, when we were high school juniors, Gary had simultaneously got hold of the new Rush LP, 2112, and also a quarter-lid of Oaxacan that was supposed to be really kick-ass. His parents were out of town that weekend, so several of us gathered at Gary’s house, along with his little sister, who Gary was supposed to be baby-sitting, to smoke cheeba-cheeba and listen to this new album everybody thought was so great. (I thought it sucked; but I figured kick-ass weed could make almost any record sound good, even Rush; so … ) Then Gary realized he did not have any papers to roll with, and no pipe or anything else to employ as a smoking apparatus. Party plans ruined, except I had wandered out into his garage to his dad’s work bench, and found a piece of pipe, called the J-pipe I think, a pre-fab piece used for putting together a P-trap under a sink. I took that back into the house and got some aluminum foil out of the kitchen drawer to cover the opening on the short end of the “J”, and then I poked holes in the foil. Then we put a clump of weed onto our impromptu foil screen, and lit it. Sucked on the long end of the “J” and, voila!, we had a pipe to smoke weed with.

It worked pretty well, except for at first, when you would suck and get smoke from the Oaxacan mixed with dust that had accumulated inside the pipe over however long the time was it had sat on Gary’s dad’s work bench. After a few pulls, though, it was pretty much cleaned out, and everything was copacetic. It was agreed by all, in the easy hyperbole that often characterizes the conversations of dedicated pot-smokers, that my McGyver-like inventiveness had truly saved the day.

And Gary said it was easily worth $20 to him, what I had done; and that he had been waiting for the occasion to pay me back.

And, you know, God works in mysterious ways, I guess. He put Gary in that restroom to take a piss and give me the twenty dollars I so desperately needed to pay off my bar tab, while simultaneously giving Gary the opportunity to pay me back for piecing together a means to smoke ganja at a party at his house one night, several years before.

Yep, the Lord works in mysterious ways. And one day, when He has some time, I’d like to sit down with Him and talk about that a little.

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Keep them coming Mr. Inca Man. Fantastic!