Chinaberry Sidewalks (23 page)

Mr. McGuane was never more the proud patriarch than when piloting his customized boat and nitpicking about his children’s flawless ski technique. Under his watchful tutelage, all but Annie put on single-ski exhibitions the likes of which only the residents of pristine Lake Ouachita had ever seen. Had I been naked, with my hernia on full display, I couldn’t have felt more out of place. I knew why Annie was hesitant to exhibit her waterskiing skills, as did her father, and it galled him to no end to watch his pride and joy coddle a loser. I wanted to yell at her to go on and turn the freaking somersault if that would make her old man happy, but could muster only a few weak shouts of false encouragement for her to come on and show us her stuff.

Mr. McGuane made a big deal out of how he couldn’t wait to see what I could do on a ski. Before we left the dock, I’d lied about knowing how to ski slalom. Now I was hiding behind the hernia and blaming the strain of getting up on one ski for my nonparticipation. When he offered a lesson on standing takeoffs right off the dock, I mumbled some blurry excuse about the doctor advising me to go easy on the sports and tried to change the subject.

“How’d you get the hernia?” he asked.

“Climbing a ladder,” I lied, “with two seventy-five-pound bundles of roofing shingles on my shoulder.”

He seemed so impressed by my working knowledge of the roofing trade that, with this first inkling of approval, I saw a willingness to forgive and forget.
So what if this kid will never be a doctor or a lawyer? I see the makings of a man behind that muddled exterior
.

I was in the process of dredging up more evidence that I really was a man’s man when Annie’s youngest sister took a nasty spill. And before I could put images of ceiling joists and hundred-pound bags of crushed ice into any usable context, he was whipping the boat around and encouraging the kid to try it again.

Toward the end of the session, in spite of his concern that there wasn’t enough gas in the tank to pull a conventional skier once or twice around the lake, I got up on two skis. Mrs. McGuane made a small show of appreciation when I crossed the wake, but her enthusiasm smacked of too little, too late. A lowly bass player from East Houston or Crosby or wherever it was had no place in a family as fine as this.

By the way, I got up on one ski for the first time on my fiftieth birthday, and it was one of my most personally satisfying moments. After twenty-five failed attempts I stayed up for a glorious half hour as a friend pulled me across the glassy, late-afternoon waters of a lake in Tennessee. Toward the end of my run, I no longer could contain myself, and shouted: “James McGuane, wherever you are, check this shit out, pal!”

Begging Annie to sneak off for an out-of-doors quickie produced a half-winced, exasperated “Not now!” She was even ignoring the secret body language we’d perfected to get through occasions such as this—a nod-and-sigh foreplay that conveyed a longing so deep that our wrists might have been being slit. If this didn’t tell me that Cupid had dropped the anvil, nothing possibly could.

It rained all night and the next day as well. Unless you fancied lying about how you’d gotten drenched—which I did and Annie didn’t—the opportunity to get off by ourselves was nonexistent. And so I decided that stomping off in the deluge—à la my parents during Hurricane Carla—was a good way to get back at her for denying me the pleasures I’d driven so far, and so fast, to enjoy. After lunch, I faked remembering an early band rehearsal the following morning, thanked the McGuanes for their hospitality, and dashed for the car. The plan for Annie to run after me, begging me please not to go, didn’t materialize.

Once I was back in Nacogdoches, her letters started arriving from Hot Springs, the first of which I took the liberty of reading as an apology, the second as a reminiscence of our early courtship, and the third as an impassioned plea to stay strong until she worked a few things out in her head. That I turned these casual reports of fun in the sun and day trips to the flea market into remorse-filled accounts of lonely days and empty nights says more about my grip on reality than her inability to make a clean break.

Revived nonetheless, I wrote back, describing past triumphs and future fantasies in great detail, as well as smoking pot and skinny-dipping at the Blue Hole, a spring-fed quarry thirty miles off campus and a favorite destination for the drug-crazed and sex-starved. I also made the mistake of reliving on paper the night, not long after the Fourth, when Donivan and I each took a purple tab of LSD. By luck of the draw, only mine contained any hallucinogens. After he complained sorely about getting ripped off and went to bed, I spent a harrowing night touring the inner and outer galaxies all by myself. The next day, Donivan reckoned I’d gotten his dose on top of my own, but by then it didn’t matter. I’d found peace wandering through the pine thickets in back of the house, and that night I crawled inside my sleeping bag beside a singing little creek and slept for sixteen hours. Two years later I began to recognize my mind once again as my own.

The next communiqué came via pay phone from Dallas. “He read your letters,” Annie cried. “He knows everything about us. Everything! He says I can’t come back to Nacogdoches. He’s moving me to Fayetteville.”

“Hold it right there,” I cried back. “He can’t do that. I won’t allow it. I’m coming to get you.”

“No. No, you can’t. You don’t understand, he’s mad enough to kill you.”

“I don’t care. Pack a suitcase, I’m coming.”

By mid-afternoon I was knocking on the McGuanes’ front door, and Annie answered with her father standing a few steps behind her.

“You got your stuff?”

She tilted her head back and slightly to the left—a motion meant for me to acknowledge him, so I ignored it.

Thinking sweet talk would dissolve her reticence, I laid it on thick. “Come on, baby, grab your stuff and let’s get out of here. We’ve got everything we need. We’ve got each other. That’s all that counts. We’re meant to be together; you know that as well as me, so let’s go.”

“Please, don’t make this any harder than it is,” she pleaded quietly, painfully, with such a gut-wrenching sweetness that I could only surrender my will to the secrets of her heart. For the first time since chance brought us together, I knew Annie McGuane had strong feelings for me, and I knew, too, that I had to let her go.

Her father took two steps in my direction, the first a challenge, the second a dare. Which set me to thinking:
I’ll be damned if I’m giving in to some son of a bitch who thinks he can stick his nose in my business. Why doesn’t he leave us alone to kiss and cry and say good-bye? A couple of promises never to forget each other wouldn’t hurt anybody
,
and they sure would help me out. But he wants to get up in my face? Fuck him and the horse he rode in on
.

Strapping the gloves on was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d rather have held her hand for half an hour and died of natural causes or, at the very least, given her the satisfaction of knowing that I knew she’d made up her own mind about our future.

But no, this man was calling me out. Staring him dead in the eye, I asked his daughter the question to which we both knew the answer: “Who’s it gonna be, him or me?”

“It’s over,” she said, casting her almond eyes gently downward. “I hope you find somebody who can make you happy.”

Then James McGuane shut the door in my face.

Earlier that spring, I was standing next to the lounge singer when he told the Holiday Inn’s regional club manager, “You can kiss my west Texas ass adios, mu-fuckin’-chacho. I’ve sung my last song in this gin hole.”

I liked the guy but didn’t wait for the dust to settle before piping up to the boss that by hiring a trio with Donivan on bass, Joe Smith on drums, and myself on electric guitar, his worries would be over. And thus, at five hundred a week, plus half price on drinks, the Greenville Three was born.

All went well until our audience started drifting in. The clientele we attracted, mostly hippies and underage college kids, were more interested in our music than ordering drinks, and this sent the manager flying into fits of rage. Two Saturday nights a month he’d work himself into a hydrophobic frenzy after closing and stomp around yelling about profit margins and how hard it was to sell booze to traveling salesmen in a bar full of long-haired freaks. By his fourth or fifth Chivas Regal, we’d have gotten the axe. But come Tuesday, around lunchtime, lacking suitable replacement, he’d hire us back. This pattern went on well into the summer.

Donivan and I began scarfing amphetamines—he to get through playing “Joy to the World” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” at least ten times a night, I to get over losing Annie. At the end of a five-day stretch at the Longview Holiday Inn, we settled a hefty bar tab and announced a permanent hiatus. Donivan and I popped a couple of black mollies, bid Joe Smith the fondest of farewells, and roared off into the night, speed-rapping and chainsmoking, heading south. Stinking of nicotine and wired to the gills, we landed on the front porch of Donivan’s mother’s house in the southeast Texas oil community of Daisetta, and Mrs. Cowart made a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, biscuits, and gravy, but neither of us could take the first bite.

I left my friend in his mother’s care and made the thirty-five-mile drive to the house on Gum Gulley. En route, I stopped off to see an old doctor friend of Renata’s who I knew to prescribe downers.

That first week back at home, I slept. The second I spent moping around the house listening to Neil Young, never getting past “Cinnamon Girl” and “Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long),” listening to each song over and over. As soon as one finished, I’d drop the needle on the other. Just before my mother reached the point of yanking her hair out, she yelled, “Son, don’t you have anything else to do but listen to that alley cat in heat?” And, when I obligingly switched to Leonard Cohen: “I never thought I’d say this, but I like hearin’ the one that sings through his nose better than the one that sounds like the world’s comin’ to an end. Why don’t you get you some Chuck Wagon Gang or Tennessee Ernie Ford to listen to? That kind of music might bring you out of whatever it is that’s got you so far down in the dumps.” Somewhere in the latter part of the second week, I hit my father up for a job.

On the third Sunday, I dialed an old phone number from memory. As luck would have it, Renata answered the phone and I later found her exactly where she said she’d be: sunbathing in the park. She fussed that I looked terribly undernourished and pronounced the tuna-and-pasta salad back in her refrigerator the natural cure for all that ailed me.

“Where’s Monica?”

“Upstairs.”

“Is she gonna be all right with this?”

“Of course she’ll be.”

At first Monica eyed me no less suspiciously than when we were last in each other’s company. “Be nice,” Renata cooed. “Our old friend has returned. Nothing besides food and conversation is fit for the occasion.”

While the three of us polished off several bottles of sauvignon blanc, I recounted the story of Annie McGuane, hernia included. Monica so warmed to this account that she invited me to spend the night on their couch, but I begged off with thanks, blaming work in the morning and hugged her tight as she hugged me back.

“Come here, you,” Renata gushed, holding me close while I cried on her shoulder. “You gonna be all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

I drove on to the Dome Shadows nightclub on the west side of Houston, and from there it’s by providence alone that I made it back to Gum Gulley without riveting a vehicular manslaughter conviction to my permanent record. I don’t know how many downers I swallowed that night—I’d guess four, maybe five—but whatever the amount, my father couldn’t shake me awake at five-thirty the next morning. And in light of my recent despair, who could blame him for hauling me to the North Shore emergency room. The polite reason given for those three days in the hospital was observation.

On the second day, a shrink dropped by to discuss the incident, but until I sensed he was tiptoeing around the subject of suicide, I was in no mood to talk.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“How would
you
define the incident?”

“I don’t know. Too many reds on top of too much wine and vodka gimlets, I guess.”

“Is this something you’ve done before?”

“What, take too many downers? No.”

“But what if your parents found your prescription for secobarbital?”

“I’d say they’d probably be pretty upset.”

“Do you use other drugs?”

“Like grass and such?”

“I mean drugs of any kind.”

“I hate downers. I only got those to come down off too much speed. I hate speed, too.”

“Then why do you take these drugs?”

“Who knows? I only like grass. The rest of it messes with my head. I don’t even like beer.”

“Then let me put it to you this way. Can you think of any good reason you would take a dangerous amount of barbiturates with alcohol?”

“I just wanted the hurtin’ to stop.”

“What hurting is that?”

“My whole life.”

“And did it?”

“I don’t know.”

I broke down and told the Annie McGuane story for the second time in thirty-six hours, this time going back to Matty Jackson.

“Do you have feelings of remorse over how you treated this Matty?” he asked when I finished the story.

“Yes, sir.”

“And would it be safe to say you think you deserved what happened with the young woman from Dallas?”

“No, sir, I love her with all my heart. And I always will.”

I talked to this doctor for more than an hour and never knew his name. He said he was torn between reporting the incident as an accidental overdose due to depression or a lame attempt at suicide. I told him that if I’d really meant to kill myself, I would’ve put more into it. He then prescribed an antidepressant that I stopped taking the day I left the hospital. His parting advice? To forget about girls for a while.

My roommate during this incarceration was a burly guy who’d fallen off a second-story balcony. I never learned his name or the extent of his injuries, but I knew he planned to sue some dipshit motherfucker named Rafe Blanton the minute he got out of the friggin’ hospital. Somehow he’d gotten wind of my story, and on the last night of my recuperation he spoke directly to me for the first time.