I had a date with my wife Saturday afternoon. The sun shone hot so we blew off a movie and settled on an afternoon at the dog park. Our two hounds, Joey and Harley, don't get out much in the winter and we love to take them out and let them stretch their legs while we stretch ours.
I had one more errand to run, a trip to the bank, before we would leave. We have to make sure to book some time together, otherwise the marriage gets to be all work and no play. Sometimes our "date" is a trip together to the store, rather than "You go to the store and get groceries, while I go to the hardware store, rent a steamer and clean the carpets and hopefully we will have time to rent a movie and order a pizza before we fall asleep."
A few hours is all we ask. Just a few hours to hold hands and be ourselves, together. As I headed out to the car, I noticed my daughter's car had a flat. Damn! Screw the bank. I borrowed a neighbor's air compressor and filled the flat. I had only a few hours before the tire store closed. I jumped into the car and called Adele to tell her of the change in plans. I had just put a new set of tires on the Ford a year ago. It needed to be fixed today. My daughter would drive the thing flat until it fell off.
I know the Tire Shop is busy late in the afternoon on weekends. I've gotten all my tires there for several cars, and if there is a small matter of a nail removal, the boss is pretty good about getting me in and out same day.
I went inside and explained the problem and dropped off the keys. I noticed on the way in the tire was still full, a good sign.
I saw the boss in the repair area, riding herd on the crew. Lots of cars in the lot. He couldn't see me.
"Should get to it in an hour and a half," said the guy behind the counter.
How do I approach this delicately?
"Wow," I said. "That long."
He leaned over the counter and motioned me closer.
"I'm telling everyone else to leave the keys," he whispered. "I know you've bought two full sets here in the last year, and we appreciate your business. But this is the best I can do. We're swamped."
I thanked him and called Adele. Maybe she could run the dogs to the park herself. My afternoon just got shot in the ass.
"It's fine," she said, putting another smiley face on another disappointment. "I'm kinda up for pizza and a movie tonight anyway."
I walked across the street to the bookstore. I wonder if I give this guy my business because he tries to do the best he can for his customers, or because he is located across the street from a Barnes and Noble. Probably both.
I haven't read much lately, not since I returned to work a month ago. I often enjoy spending an hour or two browsing, drinking coffee. Bookstores have often served as our dates. We really don't need much, as I said earlier. Just some casual downtime.
I found a chair at the end of an aisle and sat, hiding my bitterness at the day's turn of events. I scanned the shelf haphazardly. I wasn't interested in reading. I just wanted to hide. So pissed. I really thought I could find another job last year. Anything that didn't suck the life out of me so much. I had been injured and as a result of the free time that brought, I had started writing again.
I was in heaven for six months. Up all night for days on end trying to make my stories perfect. Reading endlessly. Re-writing forever. All the while, knowing what was coming, the reason for it all. The moment when I figured it all out, saw exactly how to put the story together and charged forward with eureka!-fueled energy, knowing I had nailed it, had done it right, had found just the angle I wanted. I had brought together a few shadings, plot lines and characters exactly as I had hoped. I was born for this, and had finally gotten the chance to do it.
Then the money ran out, the injury healed and I returned to my old job exactly one month before the company would have terminated me for my absence. Since then it's been a bad dream. Twelve-hour days and damn little of me to share with my wife and high school daughter when I get home. Weekends are cooking, cleaning, shopping. Maybe one night of extra sleep and some lazy love before strapping on the work belt and returning to the maw to get chewed up for a few more years before I drop like a rock and wake to find my teenage daughter changing my catheter bag. She was high honors all through high school, but Mom's gotta support us by herself now and someone's gotta take care of Dad, but she squeezes in a couple of classes at the local junior college and maybe she'll go for real someday...
I've been snoozing. And dreaming. I decide the only way to take a nap in a bookstore is with a book, so I reach behind me and grab something to make it look like I'm reading. It's Ken Kesey. "One Flew Over the Kukoo's Nest."
"They're out there.
"Black boys in white suits up before me commit sex acts in the hallway and get it mopped up before I can catch them. They're mopping when I come out the dorm, all three of them sulky and hating everything, the time of day, the place they're at here, the people they got to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don't see me. I creep along the wall quiet as dust in my canvas shoes..."
Guys like Kesey made me want to be a writer. They grabbed you from the first line, grabbed you by the throat and made you read their stories. I read them in college, a few lifetimes ago, when it was all in front of me like a Montana skyline. No hurry on this, let's have another drink. Where the girls at tonight? Then the newspaper mill. I'll get up at 4 a.m. every day and write my novel. Starting tomorrow.
Then the drunken washout, the waiter's aprons, the painting crew calluses on the hands and finally the hospital for rehab and the years wasted in anger and self-pity. Poor me, poor me, pour me another until I did pour me a few 'nothers and then the whole thing again, only older now, more time wasted and the Montana sky looking more like the opening in a tunnel miles away and getting smaller as I lurch forward.
So much time wasted. I can't even read great writing anymore without falling asleep. My cell jars me from my drowsy meloncholy. It was just a nail in the tire. You're all good to go.
Go where? I want to ask.
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Comments
Thanks for sharing this, excellently written.
Great post jimmy.
Your talent is so evident when you write your blogs; You are wasting nothing my friend! You give so many of us such reading pleasure. Your time is coming, trust me, it is very close
Rated
"End of the day, factory whistle cries; men walk through these gates with death in their eyes".
Just never give up on your writing, Jimmy. It is a gift to you and the world.
You're one of them. And it's never too late.
Thumbed.
With your little head, down in your hands....
Waste. Regret. I'm fighting fighting things like that. I so understand.
Beautifully, somnolently, lyrically written. Thank you.
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Monte
I understand the good wishes and positive hopes others have for you – recognizing as they do your remarkable talent. And while your sober realization that becoming a successful (whatever that is) published writer may not happen might be realistic, I’m not sure it’s fair to who you are to qualify your earlier life as ‘so much time wasted’. We all know what you mean in the literal sense, of course. Would that there was no waste in any of our lives. But I’m fairly certain the voice we’ve come to admire and look forward to from you would not be the one we’d have were it not for the years you spent ‘wasted’. So as for your tags, ‘what might have been’ and ‘too late’...? What might have been is a writer who doesn’t speak from an undeniably authentic and soulful place. That guy might have had a similar dispassionate point-of-view, and his style might have been efficient as all get-out, but he probably wouldn’t have been you. And I’d take you every day of the week and twice on Sundays over someone who didn’t have your life experience. Makes all the difference in the world to me. Probably to others, too. (And that includes agents, managers and publishers).
Thanks for this--great piece.
Take care--
You know the story of Ray Carver, right? Spent 30 years drunk, sobered up, and then had a stellar career as a writer for 10 years before he died of a brain tumour. His poems sometimes talk about that wasted time, but he mostly writes about the ten years he spent writing. He's got one poem called "gravy," in which he says that he could have been dead by 40 if he had kept on drinking, but instead, in the 10 years he got, he got to write and have the love of a good woman, and he called that "gravy." I think that poem is in "A New Path to the Waterfall" .
Oh wait. I found it:
Gravy
Raymond Carver
No other word will do. For that's what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don't forget it."
Great to hear from you.
"They grabbed you from the first line, grabbed you by the throat and made you read their stories."
EXACTLY - that's exactly how I want to be ......one day
"Poor me, poor me, pour me another until I did pour me a few 'nothers and then the whole thing again, only older now, more time wasted"
It wasn't wasted, Jimmy, it was needed. You couldn't have written what you will write about, in the same wizened frame of mind, back then. You needed to experience a certain amount of life, certain flavors of joy and a certain amount of pain to make the beauty in your writing shine like a star in the sky. Poor me poor me - me too till I got to the pour me. That's when I decided to really do it. Fearless - I began to pour me into the pages. Those pages are the ones you said you liked the best, but only small sections. The rest will come in hardback or soft cover.
Remember this: We'll make it to the moon if we have to crawl. Your path has been laid before you and you shall climb it. Mine is before me also and I too struggle as I climb. We are taking our own individual paths but I feel confident that we will run into each other on the moon.
You are an awesome writer and the world needs to hear from you.
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