Planes of Sunday - Chapter 53

this is the second to last chapter

53.
“I’m Nobody! Who are You?”
–Emily Dickinson

The rest of Mickey’s life, absolutely every aspect of it, without any tiny reprieves of tenderness or excitement, carried on in steady, quiet haplessness. He didn’t believe in the tigers of destiny, the way Shirley had, so his drive back to the West Coast, when he decided to leave Shirley and Christopher in the middle of the night a few weeks after the big car accident, cannot be explained by anything more purposeful than the fact that he’d remembered he’d left his only really nice pair of shoes at the house in Malibu. For a couple years in Santa Cruz he rented a guesthouse behind the home of a minister, his wife and their adult daughter, Anne. He rejected the family’s occasional dinner invitations, but often found himself engaged in conversations with Anne, when she’d appear in the driveway as he left for work. Both because she wanted to prove that she was less conservative than her parents and because she’d been raised in a predominately homosexual neighborhood in San Francisco, she had the habit of bringing up homosexuality frequently in her conversations with people. Mickey became more and more paranoid that the woman spoke that way to him because she thought he was gay.

He moved into a room of the Mark Twain Hotel in Hollywood. The day after Halloween, his first year there, Hollywood Boulevard was littered with the odd debris of a finished celebration: crinkled pink and yellow stripes of streamers, a broken plastic speculum, a gym sock with a face drawn on its toe, beer bottles, a tangle of red yarn with a barrette clipped in among the soiled red plumage, a bed sheet. In the corner of the parking lot across from the hotel he lived in sat the usual six Styrofoam bowls full of dry cat food and the two Styrofoam plates of wet cat food left there daily by a woman who imagined the cats lining up for the food like people in a cafeteria. But today there were little pellets of rat poison mixed in with the food, the handiwork from the night before of a pubescent boy from Glendale. Mickey was a custodian for the city, and this was his first time being assigned his own neighborhood to clean up. It was the first time he felt he had the right to touch the arrangement of cat food; he threw it into a large trash bag tied to one of his belt loops. When he lost sight of his two co-workers, he looked over his shoulder to see if he was being watched, and then he snuck across the street and up the stairs to his own room. He propped the dustbin he was carrying against the hallway wall before unlocking his door.

“Hey! Hey! Nikki, where you at?” someone hollered outside on the street. He lay back on his bare bed, and placed a little bit of pot in the cradle of an old corncob pipe his dad’d bought him one time as a gag gift. He watched as the thick smoke slithered from his mouth, like a long, sexy tendril of blonde hair. He just wanted it quiet.

“Hey! Nikki! Nikki! Niiiiiiki!!! Come downstairs, we gotta go!” Mickey walked over to the window and yelled, “Shut the fuck up.”
“Why don’t you come down here and make me?” replied the young man who’d been yelling for his girlfriend. He was a football star for UCLA, a thoughtful and funny young man whose only real flaw was that he was easily antagonized. Mickey buttoned his pants back up and ran downstairs with an urgency to shut another of the world’s loud people up; the older he’d gotten, the more it had aggravated him and made his stomach hurt to hear obnoxious laughter coming from the next room or to hear mothers yelling at their kids in horrible foreign languages, and teenagers snapping their gum with their mouth open on the public busses. He wished for a physical confrontation with every one of these noisy people.

The fight he got in with the football star gave him a broken wrist and a concussion, and his body ached so bad he had to crawl up the stairs back to his room, passing no neighbors on his way there. It was the middle of the day when Mickey crawled back into his bed, where he slept and slept. He’d had a father who had worn a wristwatch on each wrist, and who must have been long dead by now; Mickey hadn’t kept in touch. He tried to remember if he’d really had a son, or if they’d all been aborted, if he’d really once known so many young girls who had trusted him and then had to drown their kittens because of him. The pain in his head was unbearable now. He knew that babies weren’t kittens, but a kitten was the only image he could firmly hang on to. He napped again, briefly, then awoke to find that his eyes wouldn’t focus. The collar of his shirt was sticky. A kitten was the only object he could clearly conjure. That tiny, warm, furry little thing, you could palpably feel a kitten’s happiness when you pet it. Their paws were so tiny. Mickey moaned. He turned on his side, and fell asleep again. Then he stopped breathing, and was dead.