There are three personal facts that led to my life of barely making it. The first: broad-sweeping mediocrity. The second: I am the devil. Or if I'm not the devil, evil inhabits me. Or if evil doesn't inhabit me, it did. Or if it never did I was convinced it did so spent years suffering the same damnable consequences of a sinner forced to face his wicked ways through the cross-eyed goodness of god. And the third: my heart is a plagiarist. It only pretends to know the way.
My first exercise in asserting free will was underage drinking. My first act of revolt was running away because I didn't want to obey. I ran to California the first time. After partying in Riverside I moved in with my grandpa. He was a head doctor in LA who redacted the Rorschach Inkblot Test into a machine-scored multiple choice instrument. He lived well and wanted to know why I – being the only child of okay parents who lived well – was such a multiple choice disappointment.
Rorschach's projective personality test is comprised of ten inkblots. Five are black and white. Three are multiple colors. Two are black and red on white. Grandpa's solution replaced a patient's visceral interpretation with a logical choice between this or that. Over the course of a month, grandpa subjected me to fourteen inkblot tests, twenty two-hour counseling sessions and an hour of quiet time every morning. He sat on one side of the dining room table and I sat on the other. He'd look at me. I'd stare back. He wouldn't quit so I'd squint. He'd shake his head and jot a few notes. Grandma served cinnamon toast and orange slices.
Then it was time to send me home because the tests were conclusive: I was perfectly mediocre. Wildly obtuse. Dumb, dull-witted and listless. I wasn't creative enough to be psychotic or intelligent enough to be problematic. A veritable vegetable with zero capacity for important things like thinking. My youthful dipsomania and decision to run away were entirely out of character – blatant contradictions of my enfeebled personality, which in Rorschach's terminology was too narrow even for the witless mindset that contradiction assumes.
Mediocrity is a thief of victory and failure. Prior to encountering inkblots I prided myself on being inferior and treasured dysfunction with stoic shame. Without shortcomings I owned nothing. Returning home, I made it a mission to debunk the blots. I sluffed school and denounced scripture. I drew thin lines in my arms with razors, doped up in biology, stole cars, lit garbage fires and slept between rows of potato buds with soft Goth chicks.
Until recently my life strategy has been to offend others and marginalize myself. Now that I'm a public relations professional I concentrate on the art of appearance. Qualities of shade. How mirrors bend. Deception.
My polite demeanor didn't come easy. Before I learned how to get along I was exorcised then stuck in a loony bin.
It was a bright day and mom arranged crackers on a silver tray and, excluding me, god was everywhere. The priest put a chair in the center of the room. Sick birds chirped to no avail. My parents bowed their heads. A laying on of ecclesiastical hands. The deep prayer. Dispossession. An exorcism. All these years later I think it worked because I love god very much, even though I believe in a malevolent one.
I delighted in tormenting my parents and looked for daily ways to abuse them. In addition to dying my hair, packing tarot cards, wearing skulls and pretending to study black magic, I mimicked insane behaviors. Like fluttering fingers in front of my crooked face and stemming on the lint in my belly button. All these touches combined sent me careening into the vortex of mental hospitals. No doubt you've read one of the plainly written books among the slew of boring memoirs published on the subject of treatment. The only point I care to corroborate is this: yes, the walls are white.
There were doctors who prescribed drugs and interns who made us take them. I didn't want to take their drugs because I had plenty of my own drugs to take so one day I wrapped my hands in a pair of socks and hucked a metal laundry hamper through a set of plate glass windows. The two-story jump jacked my leg. Some quack tackled me before I could limp clear of the parking lot.
*
It's been twenty-five years since I was released for good but I've been trying to escape ever since – trying to apply my lessons of being mastered to some form of personal mastery, trying to spring myself from havoc that seems to master me. Wife says it's booze that ruins my shot but I remember being ruined from the beginning. Still, I want a happy home so try to assuage her insecurities about my drinking. Sometimes I go an entire working week without a shot. Then I slip on the weekend. If I must slip, it's best to slip on Thursday. Or Friday at the latest. I hate making it to Saturday. If I must binge, it's better that I begin on Friday or I’m liable to waste the entire weekend.
During late afternoon the sun casts inkblots against the crumpling walls of my Athena, my Parthenon, my temenos. I pray to the doric god of ghetto graffiti. If my grandpa were alive I'd invite him over for cinnamon toast and orange jam. We'd play London Bridge Is Falling Down. I'd take his multiple choice test again and plead he reconsider my mediocrity.
Wilting petals. Forsaken love of self. I exist to besmirch history. I keep people at bay and pray they never discover me. Let them see who I want them to see. Hero, troubadour, champion, saint. Savior of larvae, insects, infants. We're all high black straight through to god's opal core. Let the machete flies on our faces flee. Let us live in harmony. Let us laugh with childhood glee and fall into that common middle. Let us stay together. Let us hold hands and romp around in the uncut grass of these, our final days.
dear god on high,
let us stay together forever. let those who
leave guzzle rotgut and bleed. let a bone
soak up that blood. let that bloody bone
poke through.
Amen again, I belch before ordering another.
*
The bar in my mind is open all the time. It looks a lot like this bar but the TV reception is crystal. Two window wells let light through patterns of dust in the air. There I am, hunched over a black stool with a drink at my side and pen in my hand. Me again? What the hell am I doing here? Wife's been vacuuming all day and I have a daughter who wants to play. Piles are stacking up at work and it won't be long before Tink figures out that he pays me to drink. If fatherhood and sobriety are the measures of a man, where does my boozing fit in? What a worthless dip in the pool I am. What a tawdry date I've become.
Self-loathing drives me to lash out. Sloan's an easy mark because we chew the same dirt. Like me, he owns a series of failures. Like mine, they expose his weakness to liquor. I lose my train of thought and doodle:
Sloan, Sloan, diarrhea face Sloan.
Sloan's mouth is a toilet.
Tell Sloan to shut it.
"You little crab ass," I holler to the end of the bar. I have such a tight death grip on my mug that my fingers are red and my knuckles are white. Better reserve my strength. I let up on the pressure.
"What the hell?" Sloan, who hasn't said a word, looks up from his drink.
"You come in here before three in the afternoon and prattle on like some old bitch gone sick in the mouth!"
Sloan bounces off his stool and rushes me. I stand to engage him. He lunges. I fall. He rips my top button, pulls my tie into a taut knot, musses my hair and challenges me to take it outside before the bartender separates us. I order a bag of chips instead. "Barbeque or sour cream and onion?" the bartender asks. "Sour cream and onion," I answer while Sloan stares at me and I stare at him. The bartender gives me the chips. Slowly, I raise the bag eye level and apply my death grip with a great show of unflinching force. The bag pops. Crumbs fall like a battalion of decapitations.
"Watch it or else," I warn.
Sloan bursts out laughing. Automatic defense mechanism, I think. What the hell do I care, anyway? Evening is coming on; rank and file losers squat up to the bar for their liquid fix before the short road home. Class act alchees in ties. Sots in tee shirts. Professional bums with nothing but a hangover to lose. Yeah, I was pie-eyed last night, too. Who wasn’t? Clobbered like a prize fighter. Soused like a sow. Plowed like a pioneer, tanked like a soldier, besotted like a beggar, cockeyed like a snake-eyed gambler. Yes sweet Delilah, daddy was crocked.
Now it's late again and I'm drunk. The back of my throat is puffy. After cleaning up in the bathroom I pay my tab, give Sloan the backward peace sign, which is way worse than the bird, and hop a bus. Who knows, maybe Wife really has been vacuuming all day.
"I've been vacuuming all day," she'll say.
"I'm sorry."
"Where have you been?"
"Work."
"Did you go to the bar?"
"No, I didn't go to the bar. I had to stay late and train a new hire."
Wife rarely believes me. I say “rarely” because she never does. Home, I unlock the door and peek. The vacuum is leaning against the wall. She's teaching Delilah ballet in the kitchen.
"Plié," Wife says.
Delilah turns her feet out and bends over in an awkward fashion.
"Sauté."
She leaps.
"Relevé."
Rise to demi-pointe, I mean the balls of her feet.
"Tendu."
A stretch to point with a scuttle across the floor.
"Battement."
Delilah looks up with her toothy smile. How I pity those who lack the love of a child. Come here, Delilah. Let the rest of them eat boiled crow. But you, you I'd gleefully kill or die for.
Hug me.
Love me.
Forgive.
Calvin Haul's writing has appeared in a number of journals. Some of his plays have hit the stage. He describes THE JUDAS HOLE as his first publishable novel. He's currently working on something else and looking for representation. You can read Part One of "Barely" here and Part Two here.
Archived at http://www.girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/excerpts/81-ch-0909-barely3
