Yesteryou Chapter 9

9.

George loved to buy drinks for Beth, he loved to be around her when she drank, because when she drank, she became so relaxed and so much kinder, and she almost never lost control by becoming too drunk, at least not for the first several years.  She just became happy, when normally she was guarded and dour.

It was a dark and stormy night.  There was something they'd been talking about that George couldn't stop turning over in his mind as he sat in his car in the bar's parking lot, watching the neon light of the sign catch on the rain drops and turn them red on his windshield, while he waited for the car's engine to warm up. He'd told Beth about driving Molly to Josie's house, not worrying about betraying Molly's whereabouts on a school night, because it never occurred to Beth to worry about her daughter.

"Josie's probably having more problems with this man she used to see.  I overheard the two of them talking about it," -- and Beth explained that an older man who'd been involved with Josie was following her around now, or so it seemed.

Things should matter more.  Bad guys should be brought to justice.  Men who say disturbing things to women who don't want to speak with them should be humiliated, the woman should scream at the top of her lungs, or cry, instead of holding it in, until everyone turns around to look at them and then sees, knows that the man has been doing something wrong.  Normal people, who don't like novels and cats, who are outwardly aggressive, deserved to be made to feel embarrassed in turn when they embarrassed a weird person by responding to a question in an exasperated tone, or feigning superiority in any way.  Human frailties should be protected, not teased out and diminished through crass, unrelenting humor.  These things George believed.  Sometimes it was truly unbelievable to him, the way things didn't seem to matter enough to other people, and he was unsure whether this was bravery or desensitization on the part of these people.  For instance, when Beth had been telling him about the man who was after Josie (and by proxy, Molly), she was speaking of a grown man taking advantage of a young woman, but the words she used were so vague, she could have been talking about anything as benign as the girls being in trouble for shoplifting, and George had to remind himself:  this man had fucked the child Josie and now wouldn't leave her alone -- this act was evil. 

Now, as he backed out of the parking lot, lamenting Beth's parental negligence, he decided it was necessary to check up on Molly, or else something awful might happen, some new cruel or perverse incident that wouldn't register as unacceptable to anyone but himself.  So he drove to Josie's family's house, mentally replaying the best parts of the evening he'd just spent with Beth, surprised when, pulling up to the house, he saw a man dressed in a bulky black parka and black pants standing with his back to the street, the binoculars he held to his eyes trained on the house.  The man turned to face George as George got out of the car, slamming the door behind him.  So this evil man really did exist.

"Hey old man, what do you want?"

The best George could compose himself was to reply, “This isn’t your house.  What are you doing here?”

"How do you know I don't live here?  I know you don’t live here.”  The man was obviously enjoying the confrontation.  “My wife is inside fucking our neighbor right now, old man.  I'm just spying on her, just wracking up evidence for the divorce."

"That’s a lie.  I know the people who live here."

“So do I.”

The man didn't smell like alcohol or weed, but there was something definitely wrong with him.  He smelled like sweat.  Pugnacious a moment ago, he became almost shy now.

“Are you Josie’s grandpa?”

George answered, “Yes, I’m Josie’s grandfather.  What are you doing here?  It’s not proper to be standing outside like this, no one knowing you’re out here.”  But at the moment, he could not recall even what Josie looked like, he was thinking only of Molly, his smart, funny little friend, who he'd driven over here to save, because she’d intended, somehow, to protect Josie from this disgusting man who stood before him.  George had a stooped posture and a slow gait caused by deformed toes on both his feet, and a lazy eye.  He looked vulnerable and years older than he was, but goddammit, he thought to himself, goddammit, he was still a man, and his anger drove his basically fragile hand to Calvin's Adam's Apple, hard.  Quickly, he punched the man next in the balls, and before the man could get more than one punch in, the punch that broke George's nose so that from now on his face would look different than it had the first 48 years of his life, George grabbed the man's ponytail and used it to pull him down to the mud.  "I'll kill you," Calvin said, doubled over and rocking on the trash-speckled, muddy gravel that filled in the walkway in front of the gate.  “No you won’t,” George said.  He remembered what Josie looked like, all of sudden; she was like a foal walking unsteadily on legs that were too long, and when she spoke, it was so painfully evident that she was afraid the things she was saying were incorrect.  And Molly, Molly meanwhile was a feminist; she prided herself on having hairy legs and hairy armpits, and arguing with grown men in a loud quivering voice whenever she spotted an injustice.  But, just like Josie, she was a child.  They needed protecting.  Molly would live forever, George would make it so that Molly lived forever.

George kneeled on the gravel and watched the man writhing.  He punched him again in the balls.  "Goddamn it, she should have just called the cops on you,” he said out loud to himself through half-hysterical, soundless tears.  “Stay away from them.”

The main thing that plagued him as he drove, first scared of himself, then exhilarated, sensing a rare clarity of action, to his apartment, was the fear that he'd somehow accidentally attacked the wrong man, that the lurker had not been Calvin.  He would consider his soul irreparably doomed to hell if he'd made such a mistake.

So he called Molly, though he felt guilty calling so late.

            "He's a kind of big guy with long brown hair and big eyebrows.  I think he has a moustache sometimes.  He's totally ugly and scary-looking, like with Charles Manson eyes, like, this gross, creepy stare," she told him.  "Why, George?  Did you see him?" 

            "Oh thank goodness, thank goodness," George said, never having felt more relieved in his life -- he'd done something right.  "Molly, please don't get upset.  I just beat him up.  I drove by because I got really worried after your mom told me about Josie's problems with him.  I really lost control when I drove by and saw standing outside the house.  It's okay now though, he’ll leave you girls alone.  But I, you know, I pulverized him, I think; I’m not very strong, but I played dirty.  I – you know I don't believe in violence, but -- what do you make of all this, Molly?  Are you mad at me?  Maybe you should call the cops and say there’s a strange man knocked out in front of your friends’ house, and they’ll take him away.  I didn’t stay to see if he was going to try to stand up…” George trailed off, and then he began another string of worried non-sequiturs.  She knew she should interrupt him, and she grasped for some sentence to say out loud that would make sense of what he’d done, but she couldn’t think of what to say; she felt so full of gratitude it made her dizzy, like a wave of fever.

The next morning, she’d go to school, though the night before, she'd been planning on playing hooky with Josie.  She called Josie as soon as she got home, and when she asked how Josie’s day had been, Josie responded, “Really amazing actually, but I did something that might upset you.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I – you know how I have caller ID, and how Calvin calls sometimes and I don’t pick up when I see his telephone number on the caller ID screen.”

“Of course.  You don’t want to talk to him.”

“Right.  But this morning the phone rang, and I saw that it was him calling, and I was planning on answering and just screaming at him to leave me alone, telling him I was going to call the police or that I have a stun gun I’m going to use on him if I ever see him again or something, but before I could say any of this, he begged me just to listen to him before I hang up.   He told me he only spies on me because he knows how vulnerable I am, and he wants to protect me.  When I brought up some of the gross things he did to me when we were dating, like by way of saying ‘How can you wanna protect me when you’ve done bad things to me yourself?,’ he started to cry, he begged me to forgive him, and promised he’d never bother me again.  He confessed to being outside the window last night, like we knew he was, and he said that he got beaten up really bad and mugged in front of the house.  I actually feel bad for him, his voice sounded awful, like all raggedy and weak, like he’d been choked.  I told him I forgive him, Molly, and I don’t think he’s going to stalk me anymore, I think he meant what he said.  But I feel bad, because I know I have you all riled up to hate him on my behalf, and I really don’t hate him anymore.  Are you mad at me?”

She would never tell her so, but Molly was mad at Josie; it seemed unforgivably wishy-washy of Josie to forgive Calvin, and she also felt foolish for having gotten so swept up in a melodrama that she’d thought had been a matter of life or death. 

Now, why would Josie want to forgive Calvin?  This, Molly couldn’t understand.  She’d been molested by a babysitter’s teenaged son when she was three, and now she believed in there being bad guys, bad guys like in movies, like the irredeemably evil Lex Luther, like the Joker in Batman.  She didn’t respect people who could maintain a position of ambivalence.  Ambivalence was borne of an acceptance of most people’s moral ambiguity. 

            Not that Molly was ever very normal, but she became that much more uncommon the day after the rainy night on which George beat up a bad guy for her benefit.  Vomit rising to her throat from a visceral sickness caused by what felt like Josie's betrayal, Josie who at different times had loved her maternally, sisterly and romantically, Molly ached to sink back into the comfort of her adults, her George and her Richard. 

            “Uh, I don’t really know what to say right now, Josie.  I feel like you’re letting him trick you, you know?  Or, I feel, like, bummed.  I don’t know.  Can I call you back later?”  She never did.

The Women of my Blood

Yesteryou Chapter 7

7.

It was it a night like any other.  No it wasn’t.  It was raining that night, I remember, and it doesn't often rain in Southern California.  I lived with Richard.  I lived with just Richard from the time I was two, when Beth and Richard got their divorce, until the time I was 6.  Then there was quiet and cynical Linda, my almost stepmother who lived with us for a few years, then just me and Richard again.

Anyway, it was a dark and stormy night.  It was around 8:30 and Richard was on a date when Josie called me, crying.  She was my best friend for three years, and I was a little in love with her, the way in books and movies sometimes and I’m guessing in real life too (with other girls besides me), teenaged girls become obsessed with each other when they become close friends.  It was hard not to; she understood me so perfectly, from all the many hours-long conversations we had the endurance and the enthusiasm for, at the zenith of our friendship, and I understood her so perfectly too, I thought, and we were always touching, always sleeping in the same bed when we had our almost weekly two-person slumber parties.  Sometimes her breasts looked so nice I couldn't stop myself from eyeing them covertly, it gave me butterflies in my stomach, but other nights, I got frustrated with her for taking too long to put on her makeup and her clothes – - I was anxious for us to be on our way to the party or concert we were going to on these nights because some boy I liked was supposed to be there, and on these nights, Josie wasn’t the beautiful girl who knew all my secrets, she was just the impediment to my fun night starting, and not the fun itself.  She did the same type of thing to me.  She was boy crazy, but sometimes, at a party, she’d push through the crowd to find me because she was bored with everyone else, and we’d spend the rest of the night connected at the hip, as they call it, holding hands and whispering insults about everyone else in the room, which is what friendship is, being able to relate to someone else, but the way we breathed on each other’s necks as we whispered our gossip, it felt romantic.

"Molly," she said to me over the phone on this rainy, rainy Monrovia night, "Calvin's been outside my room since I got home.  I'm so scared."

"Really?   You can see him?"

"No, not fully.  I just know he’s there.  I've just been sitting in bed pretending to read.  I can see the tip of his head when I sit up more.  He must be crouching under the window."  Then in a quick whisper, "I was hoping if he heard me tell you all this over the phone, that I know he's out there, he'd just leave.  But can you come over?  I'm so scared.  This feels unreal."

"You want me to spend the night?"

"If you can.  Is your dad home?"

"No, he's out.  I've never gone out on a school night before, I don’t think, but I’m sure it's fine.  I'll just leave him a note explaining that it's an emergency."  I actually wasn't sure it would be okay, because I was shy of dad, Richard, when I was younger, and he was of me, too.  I didn't have a handle on his personality or his motivations, though I knew he was kind.  But he was strict sometimes, and I didn't know whether or not he'd decide to get upset about me going out on a school night, even if it was under these special circumstances, to help Josie, mildly suicidal Josie whose demeanor was meek but who was always getting herself into bad situations she never let on about to her aloof parents or the authorities; she was always having to cope with some awful situation like the one she was in now, waiting for her stalker to leave for the night.  There is a whole world of masochism and danger that only teenaged girls offered sheltered lives know about.  Bored or just curious, these girls turn the shelters upside down and make canoes of them; then they sail to the least friendly island and dig in their heels there, welcoming storms and starvation.  There are reasons, when you are one of these girls, for cutting into your own tender upper arm, that seem inarguable, sometimes.  There are reasons for going to a man’s house that seem almost not like free will but like fate.  Sometimes, it is impossible not to become hypnotized by curiosity, or by the heady draught of pointless, youthful self hatred.

"I'll call George to give me a ride."

"Thank you, Molly, thank you.  Do you think you can get here soon?"

"Yeah, probably within a half hour.  Just hang in there, babe.  Just wait for me.  We'll figure it out."

"Okay.  Thank you.  My parents are asleep.  Just come in quietly."

Beth didn't used to know how to drive, and Richard used to always be too busy, so George was the one who took me places when I needed a ride.  Every Friday afternoon after school, he picked me up where I sat, waiting for him on a strange household's lawn a block parallel to my school building, and we went to the library, to wait for Beth to finish her shift.  Then he drove us to his bookstore, where mom and I either waited for him to get a chance to drive us home, or else waited for one of the buses to pick us up.  During all these years of this particular routine, the mood between George and me was always convivial, comfortable, but definitely not open.  We didn't talk to each other very much at all.  I could never tell him, "I love you, George," for example, even though it was the truth (I was only finally able to say those words to him the last time I saw him, in fact, when he was so bodily depleted from cancer that he was dead the next morning).  We spent entire hours on the freeway together without so much as a comment about the weather or the relief of an upcoming weekend passing between us, I guess because we weren't peers and we weren't family either.  But it was never an uncomfortable silence.  It was a silence full of our silent observations of the wild city around us co-mingling in the still air of the car, all silent, but our thoughts were in unison.  Oh, I miss you.

Anyway, when I called him to ask if he could give me I ride, I was relieved when he didn't ask where Richard was or if I had permission to go out on a school night.  George knew what was truly important.

Yesteryou Chapter 6

6.

On a Thursday night (a school night), when I was 15, a thing happened that has made me feel closer to George than to people my own age, ever since.

Richard and I lived in a small town about 30 miles east of Los Angeles proper, called Monrovia.  Monrovia nestles right up against the base of the San Gabriel mountains, like a dog curled up and napping at the foot of a master’s giant bed.  The flat, southerly part of Monrovia is mostly apartment buildings built in the 1950's.  One time I was walking around a neighborhood that had literally only pick-up trucks parked in the driveways and along the curb. 

As the land starts to noticeably elevate, in other words, when you start to notice you're walking uphill, that's where the nice houses are, little mansions some of them, Ranch-style houses, also built in the 1950's.  I don't know if it's from something I read or saw a photo of, but I imagine that Marilyn Monroe stayed in one of these houses.  There was a park at the end of one of the east-west streets in the fancy area that had something wonderful and abandoned on its grounds.  It was a huge old iron and wood apparatus with a ladder that went at least 50 feet up and led to a horizontal crossbeam laddered with iron bars.  I'm not quite sure how to describe it, I was always so confounded and amused whenever I made my walks there, but I think it was trapeze equipment for practicing circus acts.  I think it was the type of giant dinosaur that some circus worker could glance at only peremptorily and say, "Oh yeah, it's just a pedestal board and some fly bars, duh!  Big deal," but to me it was an absolute mystery.  Why was it there?  More than once, especially in the amount of time since I haven't been back to Monrovia, even for a drive through the streets, which happens to coincide with this current time we're living in where virtually anything can be found out about online, I have tried to look up information about the old circus equipment in that park, and have found absolutely no information about it.  When I used to live there, though, I didn't tell anyone local about it, except Richard, of course.  And then Josie.  The night I'm about to describe has mostly to do with Josie, and with George.

Yesteryou Chapter 5

5.

            The friendship of George and Richard was wrought with enough complicated feelings and nuances that I feel compelled to describe it in familial terms, but that does not provide the sort of shortcut I wish it would.  I want to say, “They loved each other like brothers, and like brothers, neither one could imagine life without the other, but, also like brothers, they did not always enjoy each others' company,” but this is not quite right, because, through Beth as well as Molly (me), George and Richard were connected to each other for over 20 years, but their connection had its lulls and eddies, and there were whole years where they only saw each other at holidays, when Richard would be dropping Molly off at Beth’s apartment and, like clockwork (because George was set in his ways) it would be George who answered the door, having arrived at Beth’s place a couple hours earlier to help clean up for Molly’s visit, and George and Richard would have a brief conversation, not bothering to fill each other in on recent significant events, assuming that Molly took care of relating important news to all the outposts that comprised their makeshift family, which she did.  However, these brief and apparently superficial doorway conversations were not insignificant to either man.  After kissing Molly on the crown of her head and saying, “Have fun, kiddo,” as Richard walked back to his car, invariably anticipating the date he almost always had with one of the girlfriends of his life on the nights Molly stayed with Beth, there was also a portion of his consciousness that was considering the conversation he’d just had with George.  George.  George.  George made funny quips referencing characters from contemporary British novels written by women, and Richard had never read any of these books.  It filled him with pity for George that George’s life was so limited to books and Beth.  But it filled him with gratitude that George had assumed Richard had read the books George spoke about.  Did he spend the night at Beth’s, or just get to her place early this morning?, Richard would wonder, and if he got there the night before, what did they do that night (not sex, of course, but what movie did they watch on TV, or did George take her out for drinks and dinner?), and did childishly selfish Beth make him sleep on the couch, or give him the bed (Richard never knew that Beth always preferred sleeping on couches to sleeping on beds, much as her own mother had)?   What does George think of me?, Richard asked himself.  Unlike the friends he made at work, who drifted out of his life and never drifted back in, and who were, ultimately, expendable, Richard knew, during the years he and George acted as mere acquaintances, that George would always be in his life.  Is that how brothers feel about each other?  Is that the rhythm of brotherhood?  I can only guess.

            Then, there is the first year of the friendship of Richard and George.  Before Richard and Beth’s brief marriage ended, before the afternoon a newly divorced Beth showed up at George’s bookstore, pushing Molly in a dark blue stroller, knowing instinctively that George would provide her lifelong safety the second he looked up from his book and smiled at her, it had been Richard who stopped by George’s bookstore all the time, sometimes as often as three evenings a week, after work.  He didn’t know, during these visits, how significant George would become to the woman he would marry, the child he would have.  He liked to spend a few hours in the bookstore almost the same way a celebrity likes to shop in a K-Mart unrecognized; in other words, to slum.  But what is at the heart of the enjoyment people find in “slumming” is something genuine, though the act of slumming hinges on falseness.  What is at the heart of slumming is the desire to experience another way of life.

Those are two stages of the friendship of George and Richard. 

Beth moved to Phoenix, Arizona, during the bewildering summer of 2001.  It was the most uncharacteristic act imaginable; she hated the heat, she hated even to leave her apartment sometimes for days at a time, and her survival depended on her proximity to George, who gave her money whenever he could and who even bought her groceries for her, often, knowing what she liked to eat, delivering the bags of food, Vodka and diet cola right to her doorstep.  Nonetheless, she moved to Phoenix, Arizona. 

            Once Beth left the state of California, with all its legendary goldenness, George was a changed man.  He became bewildered and wore a constant searching expression on his face.  At this point in their friendship, Richard, with Molly’s help, became providers for him.  They had him over for dinner every Tuesday, Thursday and any other night he seemed to want to linger at their house.  In 2002, he began to rapidly lose weight.  It was discovered he had renal cancer.  I think this might be a common way for poor people (which he was by this time, having lost his store long ago) to die:  the county hospital can perform surgery on a poor person, sometimes, when its budget allows for charity, but the patient might have to wait for months, and is sent back home as soon as possible.  George’s chemotherapy treatment was in the form of a pill.  He swallowed it and then retched and shivered, hardly able to move, for the next few days. 

During this first bout with cancer, he lived with Richard and Molly for two months.  Molly liked to behave particularly solicitously with him during this time, because she’d thought she would never get a chance to openly love him, that because of his reserve and shyness, she would have to permanently act like she took him for granted, as she used to when she was a young chile.

            Richard began to think of George as a paternal figure during this stay.  He noticed that when he told George about his day at work, George always asked follow up questions, and ended the conversations with an encouraging summary of the strong points of Richard’s character.  Maybe I matter in this world, Richard came away from their conversations musing.   Maybe I do.