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Barnaby kept finding me dates, friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends—those kinds of connections, which is how I discovered that he needed better friends, and better friends of friends.
Audra asked me to dance as soon as we got to the bar. “But I don’t know how to line dance,” I protested, and she insisted I could pick it up quickly. I did. I picked it up very quickly, but not as quickly as she was picked up by a man in hand-tooled boots.
“I think I was a slave-girl in a former life,” Martha solemnly told me on the second and last date, abstaining from alcohol due to its “corrosive” effects. I am not sure she knew what she was talking about on either count, and I didn’t bother to talk her out of her long-lasting (multiple lifetimes, apparently) submissive impulses.
Jenna said she was circumspect, reluctant to meet at the bar. “I don’t know that word,” I said and instead of a date with Jenna, I spent my evening with the Webster’s Dictionary, learning that the word circumspect means risk-averse and wondering why she didn’t say that instead.
Each morning after, Barnaby would pester me, “I heard she was a looker. How’d it go?”
“She was, but she had a thing for cowboys.”
Or
“It was okay, but I couldn’t find my bull whip.”
Or
“It was dry reading, but I learned a new word.”
He’d say, “Well, if at first you don’t succeed...” with his earnest smile and dopey-hopey eyebrow raise. And within a few days, he gives me a new name and number.
“You’re so cute! I can’t believe you aren’t married,” Hayley giggled, slightly tipsy, as in tipsy-ing her glass slightly and spilling her mojito down my arm.
But I had been married once. I’m still technically married. It was a short marriage that ended like this:
We were standing in the kitchen of the house we had recently purchased, the kitchen that she had decided to “redecorate” by knocking out the wall between it and the dining room. We were arguing about weight bearing walls and structural damage, as I’m sure all couples do, when she tossed her head, dismissed me with a wave of her hand, and threw out a line that derailed us: “Anyway, if you don’t have a long list of regrets and mistakes, have you really ever lived?”
I decided I’d rather be in her regret column now, or maybe be in the “regret I lost him” column someday, than to have my own regrets later, so I left her.
And I wasn’t certain I wanted to go down this path again, not because I was traumatized by. spending close to four years with someone . And not because I was living and loving the bachelor’s lifestyle what with how I could leave my dirty clothes on the floor. It wasn’t that I enjoyed my mom pressuring me for grandchildren. It wasn’t a deep-seated hatred for all things feminine. It was none of those things.
I don’t want to get married again because I am wrapped up with my own secret project, one that has taken on a life of its own and also has taken most of my living room. And I am not about to give that up.
I’m building a time machine.
Aha, you say, you didn’t share that tidbit with Barnaby because there is no way he’d try to find dates with you then. But I was honest with Barnaby. As I told you already, he needs better friends.
Aha, you say, you are building a time machine in order to avoid a relationship. But no, that would not be accurate. Bachelorhood is simply a by-product of my proud hobby.
Aha, you say, you have 1600 screws loose. This is an exaggeration, both literally and metaphorically. There are many loose screws in the project, and I suppose also in my thinking, but not that many.
Go ahead, I know you want to ask tedious questions, so let’s get them out of the way first.
- 1. How would it work?
I don’t know yet. Still figuring it out, and of course, there is a fair amount of structural damage to it now, as you can probably imagine.
- 2. Is there a time you want to visit most?
I have given this a lot of thought, and there really isn’t just one time that grabs me. I am curious about the future but would rather go back in time first. I like the idea of seeing Paris in the 1920s, which might allow me to meet T.S. Eliot when he was writing The Waste Land (1922, for those of you unfamiliar with this brilliant work of literary genius), or 1968 to see the Olympics in Mexico City. I guess I’d go a couple years earlier so I could buy a house and settle in, learn some Spanish and find my way around before the actual games began. Food for thought. Also, first I’d probably have to just to turn the clock back a few years, start small, you know. Practice makes perfect and all.
- 3. Will you do sports betting, since you’d be in 1960s and 1970s and all? Also, is it ethical to play the stock market?
Yes, of course, and yes, it’s as ethical as betting ever is, at the track or at the stock market.
- 4. What if you can’t get back?
That’d be okay. I don’t have that much going on for me here and now anyway. For one thing, my marriage fell apart.
Doctor Doctor
Let’s give you a quick back story. I didn’t just appear on this planet in a time machine, though I certainly did appear quite suddenly, I was told. Bear with me, my memory on this subject is quite poor and I will be sketchy with the details.
I have been told I started out small and blotchy and loud. I slept badly and made sure others did as well. As I grew taller and developed more rigid bones, I experimented with things such as putting peas in my nostrils, humiliating myself at clarinet lessons, and trying but failing to skateboard, all prior to developing the ability to smell bad without trying and shaving without a need to do so.
Once the shaving and smelling bad began, life got more memorable for me, and now will be more memorable for you as well as I can add more details. You see, what happened to me in adolescence served to form me into the man I have become—a man who is dedicating his most fertile years to finding a method to revisit interesting cultural times that have come before.
If one moment sticks out as being especially pivotal in my early adolescence, it was the time Clyde Nicholby stole a lighter from his parents and brought it to middle school. Let me back up a little further thought to explain some not-so-important history. Clyde and I had both attended Oak Grove Elementary, which was situated in a place that had neither groves nor oaks, from Kindergarten through fifth grade. We went on to middle school together, and as only about six kids from the elementary went to our middle school, we were sort of thrown together. That didn’t make us friends exactly—more than POWs trying to survive together.
Our school was called Pete Tucker Middle School, named after a local celebrity who sold the first cars in the tri-county area. It is an unfortunate name for a middle school.
And since I’m sure you’ve been wondering, the answer is yes. All the kids in middle school referred to it as Meat Fucker.
So, Clyde stole a lighter from his parents, and Alex stole a pack of cigarettes from a nearby shop and we were going to learn to smoke. At thirteen, we were getting worried we had missed the chance to be cool (we had). Clyde claimed it was an accident when he set my hair on fire and I tend to believe him. He was messing around with his dark blue Bic lighter, and I leaned my heavily gelled Duran Duran styled haircut too close to him. Those things happened in the 1980s. No matter the intent though, I lost a lot of hair that day and will forever have a burn scar on the side of my face shaped like a crescent. Of course, I call it my sideburn. Being able to make that pun is the only positive that came out of the situation. But I won’t return to that time once my time machine is complete, at least not to stop it. I am who I am today because of that incident and the month I spent in the hospital.
My mom brought me books from the library. My dad, long gone from their marriage, sent a card with $100 in it. My cousin Kevin, one year older, 100% more cool, slunk into the room with bad posture and one earring. He wore eyeliner, which accented the eye rolls he gave to the adults who told him to stand up straight. Five years later, he would have had a Gameboy in his hands. Twenty years later, it would have been a phone, but in 1985, he held two fists full of teen attitude. I admired him so much.
“Bitchin scar,” he told me with what sounded like great respect to my lovestruck ears, until he added, with a snicker, “Guess you’ll never grow a beard, Scorchy.”
“Beards are gross,” I snapped back, “and my name is Scooter.”
He shrugged and slouched off to the chair in the corner of the room so his mother, my Aunt Dot, could hover over and pity me.
Oh, and since I’m sure you’ve been wondering, the answer is yes. Clyde Nicholby was expelled.
The point I’m trying to make here, in a wandering way, is that the month I spent in convalescing made it possible for me to start learning about things that weren’t taught in 8th grade. Specifically, I began to read the great writer, T.S. Eliot, which led me to study philosophy which led me to using "The Waste Land" as the basis for my college applications, which led me to a great scholarship at a tiny liberal arts college in the midwest where I learned nothing about science but met someone who later found me a job at Pizza Palace, which is where someone with a recently obtained degree in Acquired Erudition finds work.
Also, I began the self-taught study of geometry, which led to a love of math which led to a high school senior course in engineering, which led me to rethink why I had chosen a small midwestern liberal arts school instead of Rutgers or MIT, which led me to a minor life crisis on my 18th birthday, which led me to getting a tattoo of the pi symbol on my abdomen, which led me to tell the few women who have seen me naked that it was because I like pi, and one of them baked me a pie, and so I married her.
And in case you’ve been asking yourself, the answer is yes. My degree in Acquired Erudition was, indeed, a total B.S.
On the downside, being uncomfortably confined to a bed, with the bandages catching the constant seepage from my wound having to be changed every two hours by a nurse with bad breath, is that I have a near paralyzing fear of hospitals, and everything related to them. Relatives of hospitals include doctors and dentists, pharmacies and ambulances. Until quite recently, I hadn’t had a check-up for over five years. I have to take tranquilizers before having my teeth cleaned.
Is that enough of a backstory for me? I don’t usually talk about myself so much. Just to err on the side of caution, I will tell you another vignette about how I shunned Scorchy, and how Scooter became Skookum.
Radio, Radio
At my small Midwestern liberal arts college, I took a course in Communications, during which the professor pronounced communication to be the most important thing in life. Seriously, more important than anything else.
He challenged us to challenge him, and I suggested that oxygen was important for existence. He glared at me and did not call on me again. However, my flippant response was well received by some other students, including Agraria, a sophomore from the West Coast who was majoring in Comparative Literature. She had a campus radio show, the midnight to 3:00 a.m. slot, when she called herself Rare Earth and played world music. She invited me onto her show for a “man in the street” interview, which went like this:
Agraria: Joining us today is Scooter, a first-year student who boldly took on Professor Davidson and his, like, totally insane priorities. Scooter, tell us something about yourself?
Scooter: Well, I live in West Haring.
Agraria: For sure! That’s the best dorm on campus, excluding all the other ones.
Scooter: Ummmm...
Agraria: Oh, I’m just shitting ya. All dorms are bad. Next year, you should think about moving into one of the co-ops.
Scooter: Okay, but, like, all first-year students have to live on campus.
Agraria: Yeah, duh, I know. Who’s your favorite artist?
Scooter: I don’t know anything about art.
Agraria: You’re funny! I’m talking about musicians.
Scooter: Oh, I guess I like a lot of kinds of music, but ska is my fave these days.
Agraria: So cool! Hey, have you heard that new Polecats song?
Scooter: No.
Agraria: Want to go back to my house after the show?
Scooter: Yes, oh my god, yes.
And then we had sex. She didn’t shave her legs or armpits, and that was sexy to me because it was different. Or more likely, because she was naked, and I had never seen a naked woman and I didn’t even notice her armpits or shins because I was focussed on other parts of her compact, athletic body. She was a weight lifter, she said, as I ran my finger along the backs of her shoulders, sliding them along the lines and valleys of her anterior deltoids. She was a Gemini. She was a pescatarian. I believe she returned to her hippie parents at some point, and probably became a teacher or social worker, but we didn’t keep in touch after graduation. Before graduation though, we had sex on a regular basis, and even better (okay, not better, but more time consuming) was that she helped me get a slot at the station for my own radio show, from 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. on weekends.
Agraria said I needed my own handle, a nickname to call myself on air. Scooter was too, well, you know.
“No, I don’t know,” even though I kind of did. “What is Scooter too...?”
“Well, it’s kind of dweeby.”
“You’re calling me dweeby?”
“Just your name and just for the radio.” Agraria was flustered, but she didn’t back down, and I admired her for that. We were lying side by side on the lawn outside of the library, watching the shadows the oak tree cast on the unseasonably warm winter day. She intertwined our fingers and started making suggestions.
“How about Lariat?”
“Only if it’s a country station.”
“Fyodor?”
“Why?”
“Because I’m in a Russian Lit class and it sounds totally badass.”
“No.”
“Rory.”
“Isn’t there a Rory on Tuesday mornings?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s probably why I thought about it. Oh, I know, Skookum!”
“What?” I laughed at the ridiculous word she had said.
“Skookum. It’s a Chinook word meaning impressive or brave.”
“Oh, well, that’s okay.” I turned the sound over and over in my mouth, “Skookum Skookum” until the syllables became their own song, and I claimed it as my own.
The radio station became my favorite place on campus. The signal was strong enough that listeners could live as far as two miles away and usually not miss too much. It was housed in the basement of the communications building. It was quite dingy (the station, not the building), (I take that back, the building was also dingy) and dark, a state that we, the disc jockeys, preferred. It lent to an atmosphere appropriate for The Grateful Dead, The Clash, The Supremes, Donna Summer, U2, Boz Skaggs, Peter Tosh, Run DMC, Rosemary Clooney, and my favorite, The Specials.
Skookum Hour (which was really a two-hour show) developed a loyal following of at least six people over the next three years. Maybe even more people listened in, but they didn’t call in as often to complain or ask for requests. I always played requests, even when a friend dared me to play Captain and Tennille (I did) and the soundtrack for Dragnet (the studio didn’t have it). Agraria would always request the same song: “Party at Ground Zero” by Fishbone, so it became the song to start my shows.
And I was happy to play whatever was her favorite song because I was so in love with her. I let her pierce my ears. She let me get high and drum on her head with chopsticks. I let her cook shrimp in the house (for the record, I hate shrimp, the look of shrimp, the smell of shrimp and all things related to shrimp). She let me talk about ska. She was the first of two women I’ve loved, the second being my ex-wife. Agraria wanted to travel the world, so she spent a semester in Australia and returned home with a pretend accent (which I pretend loved), and an STD she picked up from a rocker in Perth (her words), which led to a break up for us (my words). And I picked up the tiny pieces of my heart and my pride and moved out of the house we shared with two other people, and into the vegetarian co-op, mostly because no one there would ever cook shrimp, and they didn’t care if I ate meat outside the house. I spent the rest of my junior year starting my show with “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division.
One day at the station, oh wait—I have to explain that with seniority, my show was moved from the middle of the night to late at night to mid-morning and back to late night again, which was where it stayed for my final year of being a DJ, which was also, my final year in college. So, let’s see where was I...
One day at the station, I got a visitor, which wasn’t that common. First of all, the dingy, smelly basement in the communications building wasn’t centrally located, and though it was not technically unmarked, the name above the door said, “Doobie’s Barf and Gorilla.” Still, there was a window in the studio, and we piped the music outside. As I was loading an LP onto the turntable, cueing up the song to follow “Da Da Da,” a very tall kid walked in unannounced. I blinked at him in surprise.“Hey.” Back then, I was a man of few words if I didn’t have a bigger audience. I dropped the needle on the new record.
“Hey, I heard you from outside and totally dude, I am Trio’s fan numero uno. So, I thought I’d mosey in here and see who was spinning the Germans.” While that sentence may sound strange to some, it made sense to me and to others who followed 1980s German industrial minimalist pop rock.
And this is how I met Pete, my longest-lasting friend. Also, my tallest friend and my friend with the most German-music-ophile tendencies. And the one who taught me how to play backgammon and chess.
Pete and I got into the same tennis class and spent a semester aiming at each other’s junk. We learned some rules, but mostly just evasive maneuvers.
Pete and I got sick once from a habanero eating contest. So you have some context, we each ate about half of one pepper. And then we got sick.
Pete and I got an apartment together for our senior year. It was a 45-minute walk, or a 10-minute bus ride, when the bus came, and it often didn’t, so I walked a lot.
Pete and I got a futon couch that was soon covered in Doritos dust and beer stains.
Pete and I got matching toothbrushes and that was a bad idea.
Pete and I got really drunk one night on what we called sangria but was really just Boone’s Farm strawberry wine mixed with 7-Up, and we called Agraria to insult her, but she didn’t answer the phone. Terrible hangovers followed.
Pete and I got to sit next to each other at graduation and cheer for our shiny new diplomas. I met his parents. They were reserved and short. I hadn’t been expecting that. He met my mom. Later my mom asked if he was my boyfriend, and I was surprised she wasn’t even weird about it. Maybe even a little disappointed when I said no, because they hit it off really well. He was quite personable and able to talk to middle-aged people without pity or condescension. Also, his gangliness brought out the nurturing instinct in my mom who must have thought he was a teenager with growing pains. She bought us groceries and offered to stock the freezer with casseroles.
But Pete didn’t have eyes for me. He fell hard for a girl with long red hair and doleful eyes, who spoke rarely and was loyal to a fault. She loved to play catch and eat hot dogs with him. I’ll admit, she was the best-looking Irish setter of the two or so I had seen. He named her after Andie MacDowell, who was all the rage in Sex, Lies and Videotape. But honestly, Andie MacHowl was even better looking, and almost certainly better at catching frisbees than the actress was.
Now that we were adults, we did what recent college grads did in the 1990s and got low skill, low-wage jobs that would barely put a dent in our student loans. Pete got a job at Pizza Palace, and then he helped me to get a job at Pizza Palace. And see? That never would have happened if Clyde hadn’t lit my hair on fire. Instead of slinging pizzas, I may have been a barista at that new start-up that was everywhere. Starbucks. So, I guess I dodged a bullet.
Here are the things I learned from making pizza:
- 1. not everyone gets to throw the dough
- 2. Pizza Palace puts exactly 36 slices of pepperoni on a medium pizza
- 3. most people order large, which makes sense as an economic choice but less sense if you feel you have to eat the whole thing in one sitting
- 4. I ate a whole large pizza in one sitting
- 5. A whole large pizza will make me throw up
So, I guess we could say my job was educational. I also saw families at dinnertime a lot. As an only child, I didn’t get to experience the organized chaos that can be large families. I gained total respect for the parents who made it through an evening out with their broods and everyone lived to tell the tale. Overall, though, it was a slow, mindless job, and I spent the hours thinking about my life choices and wondering if I was too late to get into that new field, software engineering (hint: I wasn’t. I just came to the game in the second inning).
And then one night at Pizza Palace, magic happened.
Mary Mary
Magic can be a lot of different things. You think there are a few kinds of magic—black magic and stage magic, of course, and also magic mushrooms and carpets and Johnson and beans. There is also magic that comes in the shape of curves and the color of the sky in the early morning. It walks through the door of a family pizza parlor on a Wednesday and turns heads, like a magnet. It brings light to those around it, like a lantern. Air gets warmer and the smell of lilacs muddles the mind of the hard-working cashier standing nearby.
Mary.
I clearly remember the first time I saw my future wife and futurer ex-wife. On that Wednesday, she wore jeans, sandals, a low-backed silky pink T-shirt. Her hair was in a ponytail low at the nape of her neck, tied up in a bow made of what I thought was aluminum foil, but a co-worker told me was lamé. Her dangly silver earrings caught the lights from the restaurant’s fake Tiffany lamps and sparkled on her cheeks.
I clearly remember what she ordered—four pies for a party she was going to; one pepperoni, one cheese, one vegetarian and one Hawaiian (the kind everyone says is disgusting but secretly hopes will be one of the options at every pizza party). She didn’t tell me then, though I learned later, that the party was for an eight-year-old cousin. I wish she had because I felt like a dork unworthy of attending a party given by this magical creature while simultaneously hoping to get her address so I could crash. I wished the restaurant had delivery service. I thought about slipping my phone number into one of the boxes.
I clearly remember what her laugh sounded like—fresh and free, a flute being played at the top of a tree. Light enough to lift balloons in the air. Bright enough to reflect on all around her. I don’t remember at all what I said to make her laugh, but it was funny enough to entice her back to the Pizza Palace two nights later. I handed her a slice. Mary handed me her phone number.
On our first date, we played miniature golf. I still have the miniature pencil (orange). We got burritos. I still have the receipt. ($6.88 plus tip.) We waltzed through the hours with riotous laughter and endless talking. No conversation had ever been more natural. No laughter more buoyant. I learned the unimportant things about her: she had three siblings, she worked as a bookkeeper at a nursing home, she borrowed the dress she was wearing from a friend; and I learned some important things too: one of her canine teeth was snaggly, she kept candy bars in her purse because of her hypoglycemia, she owned a computer. This last point was big news in 1993. I had one as well, and she was one of the few people I could talk tech with back then. Now it’s not that big a deal, but it was then, only a few years ago.
On our second date, I realized I was in love. Her eyes had a glow that made the greens and grays in them dance. How is that even possible? She bit her nails, how cool was that? She wanted to try parasailing even though the closest body of water was hours away. She told me that once upon a time, she had shaved her head just to see how it would look. She said it wasn’t as good as Sinead O’Connor’s, so she never did it again.
She ran her finger gently down the scar on my face, almost a tickle. She was the first, and so far, only person to ask about how Clyde’s story ended. I have no idea. We lost touch when he was expelled. She told me she was jealous of my good friend Andie, until she met her and realized she was a dog.
On the fourth date, she saw my tattoo. And on the fifth date, she brought me a pie, which was the nicest thing anyone had done in a very long time.
She was an older woman by one month, and we joked about that. I met her parents and decided they were awesome since after all, they were magicians, and at least magician-producers. My mom met her and adored her.
My dad never met her.
It was very sudden, I was told, his heart just...stopped. Several people told me the news that day and all of them said it the same way, with a long pause between just and stopped. Why emphasize this? I didn’t know. I knew only that I no longer had a father and that felt strange. But only a little bit strange, and that was even stranger. And he had been a stranger. We were estranged. Strange. No one had ever told me, “Oh, you look just like David did at this age.” Or, “Maybe your dad would have some advice/connections/help with tuition.” Or almost anything else.
He had sent me money and flowers when I got burned. He came to my high school graduation. I spent one weekend with him the summer before my junior year in college. I met his second wife, his step-kids. I remember that Phoenix in July is just stupid hot. I remember that I had limeade for the first time. I remember that my dad and I didn’t have much to say to each other.
And now, whatever we didn’t have to say and whatever we did have to say will never be said. Like I mentioned before, that was strange. But only a little bit. Because I just didn’t know the man.
My father’s ghost had a shape to it. I suppose all ghosts do. It was shaped exactly like my memory of him, and it was tiny, probably because my memories of him would fill only a tiny space. I could keep his ghost in a pocket. I had to be careful not to step on it.
When Mary and I broke up, her ghost was enormous, the size of New Hampshire, of despair, of poverty. It had shape and color and density. I had to be careful not to let it step on me.
So, I went to Arizona for his funeral. Phoenix is a lot less horrible in February. I met my mom at the airport, and we rented a car together, shared a hotel room, got lost on the way to the church. The funeral was stilted and preachy and no one knew what to say to us, which was fine, because then we didn’t have to make small talk. There was weeping around us, and that’s when I realized that people actually liked this guy. He meant something to them. You probably think that sounds idiotic, but it’s true. I hadn’t thought of him as a person with friends and hobbies and values. He got more interesting after his death, which now that I think about it, is pretty much what happens to everyone.
Once I returned to the dingy apartment I shared with Pete, in the dreary cold of winter in the city in which I lived, I found myself untethered and confused, a little depressed I suppose. When the doorbell rang, it was Mary. She stepped into the dark apartment, ignored my wrinkled and saggy person and wrapped me in her arms. I was home.
Sometimes Mary and I would lie on our backs in bed and talk about our childhoods. They were such different experiences we wondered at times if we were even the same species. We marveled at the way we both turned out okay despite everything. I was the only child of a loveless un-marriage, and a semi-neglected center of my mom’s universe. She didn’t have a lot of time for me, working full time and all. I was independent at a young age. But when she was home, I got all her attention and never once did I doubt her love for me. She supported me in every stupid choice I made. She threatened to send me to my dad’s exactly once, and honestly, I deserved that. What I got from her wasn’t material goods. It was the firm belief that the world should cater to me.
Mary’s parents had kept a checklist for each of the four children with what skills they had to learn before they moved out, so she was really good at a lot of random things. She showed it to me once, and it was the perfect combination of gym-teacher-writing-report-cards and hardware-store-shopping-list, which apparently is the sweet spot some parents strive for.
Mary Age at Mastery
Sew on a button 8
Change a lightbulb 9
Use hammer, drill, saw 13
Drive a stick shift 18
Use the washer and dryer 11
and so on.
It wasn’t an entirely bad idea, though it was oddly clinical, as if being a successful parent was to be able to check all the right boxes. She joked that the youngest sibling, who was still living at home, hadn’t learned to back up a trailer yet so she couldn’t leave. At least it might have been a joke. I’m not really sure.
So, Mary could build a birdhouse! And roast a chicken! And change the tires and the oil in her car! She wasn’t as good at communication or commitment. Those things weren’t on the checklist.
We both laughed, a bit uncomfortably, about how our deficiencies—communication from her, cooperation from me—didn’t dovetail that well. Of course, she had to explain the word “dovetail” which she learned while making a birdhouse at age thirteen. And after we laughed, we ignored it, because if there is one thing I do well, it’s ignoring the things in life I don’t like, such as doctor appointments, paying my bills and thinking about the ghost of my father.
But things were great overall. There was this one night we went out to a pub on the river. We got a table on the patio and could theoretically see herons and turtles and otters, though in reality, saw only geese. We shared a bottle of wine, because grown-ups do that. Leaning forward, I took one of her hands in mine, and I blurted it out, “Will you marry me?”
“What?” she was genuinely shocked. She placed her free hand over her heart and stared at me with a half smile, open mouth look of surprise. “For real?”
“For real!”
“Yes! I do!” And she started to laugh and kind of cry, and then I was laughing and crying too, and the restaurant comped our dinner and life was good.
We went ring shopping together, so that worked out okay. We set a date and started to plan. Okay, she mostly did the planning, or rather her mother did the planning and Mary was enthusiastic and I was willing. Isn’t that enough? I wish I could show you our wedding invitation. It was pretty cool. It had a rocket ship on it that Mary drew. Somehow her mother approved the unconventional card. I still have a few in a shoebox at home. Well, I probably still do. I’m not sure how much damage was done to the apartment in the explosion.
Speaking of explosions, the wedding was a blast too! We were able to sneak off at the reception and have a little fun in the hall outside the rented ballroom. I don’t think anyone saw us, but we would have stood out, what with the giant white dress and all. You probably don’t want to hear the details, do you? Okay, we’ll move on.
Somehow, I got a job as a software developer for a local dot-com start-up that will almost certainly go bust when the market eventually adjusts. I mean, it’s great and I like the perks, but the hours are brutal. I wonder sometimes if that was part of the problem with my marriage. I mean, to be fair, I wasn’t home as often as I should have been, and when I was home, I was pretty tired. Still, that’s where I met my second-best friend Barnaby, and he introduced me to my second home, The Alibi, a corner bar in one of the oldest buildings in downtown. It was close to work, had a well burnished mahogany bar, and didn’t allow smoking inside, even before that became a law. After college, I grew to hate the smell of cigarettes, so that was a big plus for me. Though now I have to navigate through crowds of smokers right outside the door, which is not ideal. But I was talking about the job, right?
It’s really interesting. We’re creating whole new worlds and ways of communicating and it’s like the wild west but with better weather and fewer bullet wounds. You’ve heard of the World Wide Web, right? Well, just wait, it’s going to be a big deal.
Barnaby was cool. There was no other way to describe him. He had lived in New York, dressed in elegant dress shirts paired in black stovepipe jeans, coded like a genius and had successful pick-up lines. He wore cologne. He knew ballroom dancing. He could golf. He could talk football. He had a fondness for French food. I’m quoting him there. He said he had a fondness. That’s the way he talked. His laugh was low and warm, his smirk was high and sideways. He carried a briefcase with him, and one time I saw it was filled with boxes of chocolate, which he’d hand out to the women he knew.
On my second day at the new job, he leaned over the partial wall that divided our cubicles. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back.
“Wanna get a drink after work? There’s a bar you should meet nearby.”
“Ummm, sure. I have to tell my wife I’ll be late though.”
His smirk appeared for the first time, making me wonder if he disapproved of wives or curfews. “Wanna get a drink before the after work?”
“What?” I was confused now trying to follow his grammatically serpentine sentence.
“You’ll be home on time if we leave now.”
“Won’t we get fired?”
“Hell no. They all get it. We put in the hours, we do the work, we have some latitude on when we play.”
And though I was pretty sure I was throwing away my first real job, I went with him to the bar, at 3:46 on a Tuesday.
And since I’m sure you’ve been wondering, the answer is yes. I got home in time.
My first home life—which was my home with my wife, a word I couldn’t hear enough no matter how much my co-worker smirked, was my favorite place in the world. When I got home, Mary thought it was great I made a friend, and she bit back her worry about pissing off my boss on the second day on the job.
She was doing okay with work. She got promoted at the nursing home to be one of the managers in the finance department, so we were feeling like adults, even though we had conversations like this:
Mary: I was talking to my mom the other day and she told me that she gets these long hairs, like in her eyebrow, and they just appear overnight. And I told her that was gross, and she said it would happen to me someday. Do you think it will?
Scooter: No way. You’ll never get long hairs popping out of your eyebrow.
Mary: Why not?
Scooter: Because you are way too gorgeous.
Mary: So, if I get long hairs, I won’t be gorgeous anymore?
Scooter: I didn’t say that.
Mary: Maybe you’ll get long hairs out of your eyebrows.
Scooter: That’d be awesome.
Mary: It would?
Scooter: Yeah, totally. I could braid them together and make awnings for my eyelids.
I didn’t tell her this part, but after this conversation, I started searching her face for hairs when she was asleep. And we did unadult-like things such as:
We went as Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos to a Hallowe’en party. She was Ferdinand. I was Imelda.
When we ran out of clean dishes, we once ate dinner directly off the table.
Mary received a notice for jury duty, and we returned it saying she didn’t speak English.
So, we weren’t entirely adult. But we did a few adult kinds of things, such as:
See Carmen at the opera house. Neither of us really liked it and we were sad it didn’t have any songs we recognized from Looney Toons.
Start a retirement account and set up monthly deposits.
Buy a couch. It was white with gray stripes.
Get dental care. Again, I had to get doped up to go, but knowing the importance of teeth for activities such as chewing and baring them at predatory cougars, I went. Besides, Mary threatened to stop kissing me if I had rotten teeth.
Every day coming home was a joy for me. If Mary was already there, and she usually was, the lights would be on and she’d have something fun for me—a green cocktail once, with a caramel candy on the toothpick. “Sorry, we’re out of olives and onions and paper umbrellas,” she shrugged. More than once, she was naked. One time, she hid behind the door and pummeled me with a pillow. When I got home first, I’d practice making dinner and go through the mail as though I intended to do something with it other than put it back down. Once, I had a cocktail ready for her—it was a shot of tequila because I was feeling less creative than I was hungry for tacos.
This routine, the happiest I’ve ever been, lasted for months.
“What would you think about buying a house?” Mary asked one night over dinner. Maybe because she had to pass a cooking test as a kid, she was not eager to cook as an adult. Dinner that night was Lucky Charms with a side of broccoli. To be more specific, she took a stalk of broccoli and put it on the table to make it a side dish.
“I wouldn’t.”
“You wouldn’t what?”
“I wouldn’t think about buying a house.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve never bought one, so I assume I never would.”
The look Mary gave showed that she thought me adorable, or maybe that she was restraining herself from slapping me. “Now that it’s brought up and you’re thinking about the concept of housebuying from a purely philosophical stand, do you think you’d be interested in someday buying a house?” She asked in a slower than natural voice. I said I’d be willing to think about it. Then I stopped thinking about it.
But the topic came up again and again and again. With our new jobs and more money, apparently it was time to buy a house. That’s the ultimate adult thing to do, right? Don’t say have a baby. Teenagers have babies. That’s biology, not adulthood.
In retrospect, buying the house might not have been a great idea. We liked the apartment just fine, which was big enough, cheap enough and easy to clean. Mary wanted a big flower garden. I wanted a corner for a big TV so I could play Nintendo. Other than that, we were satisfied with where we were. But adults are supposed to do adult things.
I agreed we’d start looking and almost right away, we found one we liked for a great price, in a neighborhood that was about to be gentrified. We just needed to have some basic homeowner skills (Mary did, I did not) and be comfortable with displacing the families who had lived there for generations (we were not, but rationalized that they had to leave anyway, so why not us?). It had two bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper floor, and a big kitchen with a butler’s pantry on the main floor. The wall that Mary started to knock out was between the kitchen and the pantry, to make it one enormous room. I can see the appeal to that, I guess. But I liked the separate storage area, and there was a cool swinging door that made me think of a 1950s sitcom. And also, it might have been a weight-bearing wall. Before that construction fiasco though, we had to become responsible homeowners.
We adjusted well to painting and gardening and Lucky Charms meals. We adjusted less well to using Round-Up. And most of all, we disagreed on house maintenance.
Remember, Mary was raised to be able to change the batteries in the smoke detectors, use tools, raise vegetables and so on, and I was raised to play whenever possible. It quickly became a point of contention because I couldn’t do anything. But that didn’t stop me from telling her how to do things.
For instance:
Scooter: Be sure to turn off the electricity before you replace those wires.
Mary: No shit, Sherlock. I’ve been doing this since I was eleven, and I have the test results to prove it.
And:
Mary: Would you change the lightbulb in the front hallway? It went out again.
Scooter: Ummmm, yes. Do I need a screwdriver to change it?
Mary: Never mind. I’ll do it.
And:
Scooter: Can’t we just put on extra paint all at one time so we don’t have to do it in layers?
Mary: It’s too heavy and it will drip and ruin the baseboards and look bad on the walls.
Scooter: Are you sure?
Mary: Yes.
Scooter: Have you tried it?
Mary: Why don’t you paint the second bedroom and see how it works.
Scooter, two days later: I hate how the paint looks in the second bedroom. Can you fix it?
I think I missed filling in some crucial information about my earlier life. Even before the burn, but especially afterwards, I was allowed to do nothing. I don’t mean, I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I mean, I could do nothing, if that’s what I wanted. I could watch videos or play Atari or eat all the pudding straight out of the container. I was simultaneously spoiled and neglected by a super-caring, guilt-ridden single mom. She took care of everything. I had to be taught how to use a washer by the R.A. when I moved to college. I could have used that as a cautionary tale and become determined to be more self-sufficient, but instead, I chose to withdraw and do even less housework. Pete and I lived in squalor, and it wasn’t entirely due to his hoarding. I admit this now. I really didn’t know how to do most things.
By the time Mary and I bought the house, I wanted to know how to do things, but I was really embarrassed about the things I didn’t know. So instead, I just acted bratty. Just like a spoiled, neglected child.
Mary didn’t handle it well. As I said earlier, her very practical childhood hadn’t prepared her for the realities of relationships. When there was conflict, she got loud and I got quiet. I would pick at her. She would swat me away. The typical human versus no-see-em relationship. Our way to solve our problems, and I must say this seems pretty common for my generation, was to spend all our energy on activities that weren’t each other. Mary threw herself into climbing the ladder at the nursing home. When she was home, she dove into house repairs without me. I spent longer and longer hours at the office, where I battled the internet and bent it to my will. Also, I played ping-pong with Barnaby and invented new drinks at the ground level coffee shop. I will save you from having to learn on your own—bubblegum syrup does not mix well with any espresso drink. You’re welcome.
Before you start preaching about couples counseling and good communication, you can save your breath. I already know about these things. And I knew then, too. What I didn’t know was when it was too late to bring up counseling. Really, by the time I thought about it wasn’t it too late?
I imagine you’re curious about the wall incident. It’s an important link to what follows and how I’ve ended up here.
As I mentioned, Mary was handy with any number of household tools and had some ambitious projects in her mind for what we’d do with the house. I followed her lead, mostly, but also challenged her on what and why and how she did want she did. I recognize this might have been obnoxious, and I regret some of them. It seems there should be a term for a man who feels he has to explain things to a woman, even when she knows better. Well, maybe in a few years someone will think of a good one.
Anyway, I came home from work really late one night. And I was tired. And I was hungry. And I was whiny. And the house was cold. And there was no dinner. And the radio was up loud. And Mary was fully dressed. And she held a maul with her leather gloved hands. And she grinned at me when I walked in, and she pointed to the hole she had made in the wall. And I could see from the kitchen to the dining room now. And there was dust everywhere. And I turned off the radio. And her smile faltered a little. And uncharacteristically, I raised my voice at her.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
And her smile faltered a lot. “Excuse me?”
I didn’t yell, not really, but I’m guessing my facial expression gave away the yell in my thoughts. “What are you doing to the house?” I asked, dropping my book bag onto the dusty kitchen floor.
“We talked about this, Scooter. We talked about making a bigger kitchen, connecting the two rooms.”
“Well, yeah...” I vaguely remembered, “but that’s not the same thing as you just knocking walls down. I thought it meant someday we’d get a contractor to look at it. Now that you’d do it yourself. Today.”
“Why would we pay for demolition when I could borrow tools from Pete?”
Damn that Pete.
“Why would we ruin our one investment on a whim?“ By this time, she had put down the maul, it’s handle leaning against the now-partial wall, and turned to face me full on.
“Why would you think I’m ruining the house? Since when have you known anything about buildings?”
“I know that the insurance probably won’t pay for a collapsed house if you broke it.”
“It’s not load bearing!” she looked exasperated now.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, even though I kind of understood from the context.
“It means that this one wall isn’t supporting the weight of the roof. We can take it down to just a couple of beams and have one big room without damaging the integrity of the house. We talked about this already. For fuck’s sake, Stuart, why do you have to challenge me on every goddamn thing I do around here!”
She had used my real name, which threw me off a little. Like she was my mom. I didn’t have a good response. So, I gave a bad one. “I don’t want to have any regrets. I don’t want to make any mistakes.”
She shook her head slowly, and I saw the effort she was making to keep her voice calm, before she waved her hand towards the new construction (destruction?) and asked,“ Sometimes, to get what you want, you have to take a risk. If you don’t have a long list of regrets and mistakes, have you really ever lived?”
And then I left.
Talk Talk
I thought Mary was my friend. I also thought gin was my friend. Neither of these things turned out to be true. Pete, who inadvertently helped me meet the former, was a good friend. Barnaby, who introduced me to the latter, was a good friend.
About a month after I moved out of our house, Barnaby invited me out to The Alibi, just a block away from work, a block from the apartment whose lease I had signed earlier that day, and yes, the same apartment I eventually blew up. This was before he started trying to find me a date. I figured it could be a good evening, and I really needed a good evening.
And it was. He was one of the most interesting people I had ever met—able to converse on subjects including the history of porn, how Jello was made, Siegfried Sassoon poetry, how to fish for speckled bullhead catfish using paperclips, outboard motors, Kyrgyzstan after the fall of the Soviet Union, and science fiction, among things. I taught him about ska and German pop music, skydiving, T.S. Eliot poetry and proper pizza making techniques.
It was early enough we got seats at the end of the bar. No one sat near us, so we took advantage of happy hour prices, free bowls of peanuts, and a slightly neglectful bartender to order cocktails and get philosophical. He ordered a whisky sour. I ordered a martini, because I liked the glass. That is a stupid reason to order any drink. But it ends up I liked it, and it was an excellent conversational lubricant.
I watched as the bartender, whose name I learned was Caroline, a very old-fashioned name it seemed, for a woman my age, clouded the gin with the haze of vermouth, gently placed an olive on a toothpick along the edge. It was the most beautiful work of art I had ever seen.
Drink #1 convo:
We clinked our glasses together in a toast, causing the bartender to look back with a frown. She put our tab next to the cash register and walked away. I took a drink.
“Hey, this is really good!”
“This is really sour,” Barnaby made a face, took another drink and changed his mind, “but it’s good too.”
“What did you think of Man in the Iron Mask?” Barnaby asked.
“Haven’t seen it yet. But I like most Musketeer movies, except for The Ring of the Musketeers with David Hasselhoff, who totally sucked.”
“Totally sucked. Always does.”
“But I’ll bet you watched Knight Rider when you were a kid.”
“Of course! Didn’t you?”
“I spent a month in the hospital when I was in middle school. I watched everything.” Then I had to tell him the story about Clyde Nicholby and the burn, so he told me his medical story, which for some reason is a common response.
“I broke my leg jumping out of a car. I got run over by my dad.”
“That sucks. Did you guilt him into better Christmas presents?”
“No, you’d think it would have worked, but it didn’t. I got a big cast and Linda Lockman signed it, so that was okay, but then I got a pen cap stuck in it when I was trying to scratch, and I had to get it sawn off and replaced and she didn’t sign the second one.”
“Bummer.”
“Yep.”
Ultimately, we agreed that middle school sucked, and that Run, Lola, Run was the best movie of 1998, and that even though there were three more weeks in the year, it was unlikely there’d be a better one released. Did you see that movie? You should.
Drink #2 convo:
We very gently clinked our glasses together. Barnaby had switched from whiskey to a vodka and grapefruit juice. The bartender was confused. “Usually that’s a woman’s drink.”
“Usually I’m a woman,” Barnaby replied. I can’t remember if we tipped her well, but I hope so.
“What are your plans for Christmas?” I asked.
“I’m going to start my own alphabet.”
“Wait...what? I was expecting something different, something about you spending time with your family in....where’s your family?”
“They’re normally in Evansville, but my parents are going on a holiday cruise, and I don’t do boats. And honestly, I don’t do family at the holidays when I can avoid it. Too much pressure.”
“Pressure to do what?”
“Have manners, eat together, go to church, go on cruises, that kind of thing.” He lifted his glass again, “To family.”
“To family.”
“What are you doing for the holidays?”
“Oh no,” I wasn’t going to let him get away without more details, “you have to tell me about your new language.”
“Oh right! It isn’t a new language, but I got the idea from Esperanto—you know that universal language that was invented about 100 years ago. Think about it—there could be a universal alphabet system so that all languages have the same phonetic system, well, at least every non-tonal language.”
“What?”
“If we took all the sounds in all the languages and gave them the same symbol for the sound, like how the letter B always sounds like B, then you and I could read words in Portuguese or Russian or Tagalog. We wouldn’t know what they mean, but we could pronounce them. So far, I’ve identified 62 distinct sounds.”
“Like B?”
“B doesn’t always sound like B.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dumb.”
“No, I’m not!” I insisted.
Barnaby shook his head at me. “No, I mean dumb has a silent B in it.”
I was struck dumb at that.
Barnaby grinned at me. “We’ll have no more silent letters in the new alphabet. And we’ll get rid of the weird, misspelled rhymes. Look, I can show you why it makes sense.” He reached into the briefcase he carried with him to and from work and pulled out a yellow spiral notebook and a handful of pens that he plopped down on the bar.
“So, take a word like ‘own’,” he picked up one of the many pens and wrote down the word own and the top left of the page, “and now tell me words that rhyme.”
I started at the beginning of the alphabet.
“Bone.”
He wrote bone down to the right of own.
“Blown.”
He wrote that underneath own. Clone and crone went under bone and so did drone. Pretty soon, the page looked like this:
OWN BONE LOAN
BLOWN CLONE MOAN
FLOWN CRONE ROAN
GROWN DRONE
MOWN LONE
THROWN ZONE
“See?” he pointed. “All these words that sound the same should be spelled the same.”
“OK,” I conceded, “English is crazy.”
“Yeah, but it gets worse,” he said, taking up the pen and continuing the list.
BROWN DONE
CROWN GONE
GOWN
“Done and gone should both be Doan and goan, but not only are they not like the rest of the o-n-e words, they don’t even rhyme with each other. And o-n-e is pronounced even differently. Now think about a foreigner trying to learn English. So, there’s a reason to make English phonetic, so why not make all of them work together?”
I liked the idea even if I didn’t fully understand him, but I wanted to change the subject no matter what. “Okay, I can get behind that idea. Tolkien made his own alphabet and his own language too.”
“Yeah, he did! Also, do you know Tolkein’s books parallel World War II?”
“Ummm, not. He wrote the Trilogy of the Rings years before World War II.”
“Yeah, well there is a whole theory on how he developed his world to represent the different European ethnic groups, so maybe World War II copied him.”
Barnaby crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it into his empty glass, gesturing for Caroline the bartender to come back our way.
Drink #3 convo:
“I have to pee,” I jumped off the barstool and stretched out my leg.
“If you take more than five minutes, I got dibs on your drink.”
I returned in record time, prompting him to ask me if I washed my hands. I know you’ll think less of me, but no, I hadn’t washed them. I almost never do.
“I only drank half of it,” Barnaby joked, though I looked closely at my glass to be sure. He had ordered a 7&7 in order to continue confusing Marilyn the bartender. I was sticking with gin, which seemed safer somehow than switching out kinds of alcohol.
“You know what would be awesome?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Stopping World War II from ever happening.”
“How’d you do that?”
“I’d have to go back in time.” I let out a tiny olive flavored hiccup.
“Obviously.”
“I think I’d go to 1920 Paris, meet up with all the writers and intellectuals, find some communists.”
“Yeah? And then what?”
“Guess I’d have to go to Munich and kill Hitler.”
“Sounds like a good plan. I have a question for you, you rebel. Would you go back in time if you knew you couldn’t get back to the present?”
“Sure, to kill Hitler I would.”
“OK, but let’s say you overshot and ended up in 1600 Siberia.”
“That’d suck.”
“What if you could only go into the future and not the past?”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing by living?”
“Fair point. How about this one—what if you could only go back in time in your own life? Like you could relive your childhood but that’s it. Your brain would be in your child’s body.”
The gin was starting to cloud my thoughts. Maybe it was the vermouth though. Gin is clear. “Hmmmm, seems that would be okay.” I hiccuped slightly, thinking about my childhood. “I think I’d be nicer to my dad.”
“That’s very noble of you. I’d be much meaner to my dad.”
“Really?” I tried to turn to look at him, but I couldn’t quite focus on just one of him.
“Nah, he’s a good guy.” Barnaby modified the hypothetical again. “What if you could go back to your childhood with your adult brain but you couldn’t change anything at all? You’d have to relive all your mistakes and know that all the bad things were going to happen, and you couldn’t change them?”
I downed the martini and held up a finger for another.
Drink #4 convo:
My fourth martini made a pool on the bar napkin in front of me, and try as I might, I couldn’t fish out the olive, which I had removed from the toothpick and subsequently dropped in the drink, with the toothpick that had once impaled it. Maybe the olive recognized its former bully and preferred to drink in its sorrows, like the human who had bought it.
I hiccuped into the martini and kept stabbing.
“You are the besht,” I slurred in his direction.
“Nah, man, you’re the best.”
“We’re (hic) both the besht.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he agreed, as he took a drink of the clear drink in a tall glass, which I later learned was water.
“I jusht misser, thazzall,” I muttered into my martini. Barnaby seemed to understand me, proving his worth as a friend.
“I know you do, buddy. I know you miss her. Maybe you could go back in time and get her back.”
And that was the birth of Scooter the Rebel. Well, I guess that was the evening before the first hangover of the birth of Scooter the Rebel.
Rebel Rebel
Pete, ever supportive of me even when I drunk dial him at midnight, knew the best way to cure a hangover was The Pancakery where a three-egg omelet with home fries would set you back $2.99 and a year or two of heart health. I ordered black coffee on the side to rinse out the sour green taste of stale, undigested Tanqueray. With shaking hands, I lifted the cup to my mouth. Pete poured about a pound of sugar into his cup, and when he stirred, the clinking of the spoon on the mug reverberated in my head.
“Jesus Fuck. I feel like I’ve been to the dark side,” I mumbled into my cup.
“Best stick with beer,” he said, slurping his coffee flavored cup of sugar.
“Don’t talk about beer,” I responded, “Or any other liquor.”
“Okey dokey,” replied my amenable friend, “what should we talk about?”
I cleared my throat as gently as I could, checked to see if I was actually sweating or just imagining it, and averted my eyes from the glaring winter gloom outside the window. “What do you know about time travel?”
“Oooh that’s exciting!” He clapped his hands together like an excited preschooler. “I was expecting something more mundane, maybe about your headache or your ex. Let’s see...what do I know about time travel. Well, from a theoretical viewpoint, it would be awesome if you were an assassin who went back in time and killed bad guys. You might die every time you went, but then be reborn repeatedly. That’d be awesome.”
I grudgingly agreed that was a cool idea, but I needed different help from him. “I was asking more about how to go back. Do you know any theoretical physicists? Or engineers? I want to build a time machine.”
He asked the now predictable question, “When do you want to go?”
“I’m going to go back and kill Hitler.”
“Very noble of you,” he said, “though rather cliché.”
“Yeah, well, first I’ll go to Paris and hang out with Gertrude Stein. And when I’m there, I need to learn to read German.”
“Well, I can teach you that.”
“I’ll need more than the liner notes.”
“I can read more than liner notes,” he seemed a little bit insulted. “I took two years of German when you were busy being a DJ. Guess you didn’t hear me conversing with the viele Deustche Leute at our school.” The waiter arrived with plates of food, and we paused in the conversation and took up our forks. One bite was enough to perk me up slightly but not enough to take away the throb in my forehead.
“Whatever you say. I’ll take you up on your offer.”
“What offer?” He slurped his coffee again.
“To teach me German, dipshit.” He was starting to really annoy me, and I recommitted to drinking less. This wasn’t his fault.
“Oh, right. Want to start now?”
“God no. I want to cautiously shovel some grease into my mouth and hope it absorbs all the...olives I ate last night.”
“Right, those olives can do a lot of damage.”
“Damn, these eggs are a lifesaver.”
“Totally. Like you’ll be—once you kill Hitler.”
I nodded and spoke with my mouth so full of food that the sentence came out garbled. Luckily, he knows me well and understood. “So, can you help me build it? I’ll give you credit in my autobiography.”
“In addition to German lessons?”
“Right. But first we build the machine, then we have lessons.”
Slurp. “That makes sense. Have to test it out first. Well, I’ve got scrap metal that might work, both steel and some sheets of tin, but that’s probably not good enough. That depends of course on what kind of heat resistance you need.”
“Of course,” I replied, with no idea of what that sentence meant. Slurp. Suddenly, the sound bothered me less. Not a lot less, but a little bit. He was trying to be a friend, and I was a pissy, cranky, hungover bastard who was asking the impossible of him.
After my belly was full and the alcohol in my bloodstream had been thinned to a less lethal level and my brain started to warm up for the day, I was ready to get started in earnest. He told me he’d inventory his quonset hut for appropriate materials. I told him I’d find out what those materials needed to be. We left the restaurant together and I headed to the library to look up plans for a time machine. As you might expect, these are very rare. In fact, the public library did not have a single book of plans for time machines, so I had to satisfy myself with the following:
- 1. Personal Airship Construction for the Absolute Beginner by Rory Randalls
- 2. The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of UFOs and Paranormal Events by Claire McNamera
- 3. A Science Now magazine article on theories of gravitational reversal
- 4. Basic Welding Techniques, Part I by several local shop teachers. It looked like the high school textbook for metal shop.
- 5. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I always liked that book and decided to read it again.
Loaded down with reading material, I headed home, which for 24 hours now was a one-bedroom apartment, with little furniture and one cat, who really did follow me home. She’s a little orange thing with a stumpy tail and she likes tuna. I call her Cat. She doesn’t answer to it, but from what I know of cats, she wouldn’t answer to any other name either, so why would I stress out about finding the right one. I carried in the pile of books and lay down on the single mattress on the floor of the bedroom, or more literally, the “mattress-room,” and started from the top of the pile.
Personal Airship Construction for the Absolute Beginner was written in 1966 and provided blueprints for building blimps, hang gliders and small airplanes. There was an addendum in the back which had FREE PLANS for a bomb shelter, and I read them as well. You never know. The glider instructions were easy to read but seemed inadequate. The ultralight kit plane seemed closer to adequate, and the instructions were easy enough. The welding handbook told me to buy a wire feed welder. I didn’t get around to the Bradbury book. I think it’s here somewhere, maybe on the nightstand. Now that I’m thinking about it, I must owe a lot of overdue fines.
And since I’m sure you’ve been wondering, the answer is yes, people who write encyclopedias on UFOs are simply not right in the mind.
To be clear, I’m good at recognizing my faults. I’m even better at avoiding eye contact with them when I see them coming towards me. I know I never want to have a conversation with them. My faults are, at best, annoying. So, I knew that I was going down a path that could lead to disaster, and I knew that I should probably talk to someone other than Pete and Barnaby, someone like, a therapist, but I saw those faults out of my peripheral vision and decided they could stay where they were as I proceeded to dismantle my life.
One of my faults was my lack of engineering and physics skills. Another was my reluctance to address issues with the person I needed to. Instead, I spoke only to my guy friends.
Between Barnaby and Pete, I could get all the supplies I needed, including a welder and helmet, misplaced encouragement, and advice on quantum physics, and none of the common-sense advice that frankly, I needed even more.
With a wire feed welder, some pieces of sheet metal, a rotor, a fan, a socket set, a six-pack of Dos Equis that was left on my doorstep (probably supposed to go to a neighbor, but who am I to turn down an anonymous gift?), I got to work.
Three months later, I had made excellent progress with the time machine and a little bit of progress with the divorce. Honestly, I was avoiding the latter by pouring all my free time into the former, saving an evening per week to date Barnaby’s weird friends. Every few days, I’d get a call from my lawyer or from Mary. One wanted to talk to me and so did the other.
At first, Mary didn’t know where I lived, so she showed up at my office to find that I had snuck off The Alibi with Barnaby. She left a message for me, but though my instincts fought to respond to her with gifts or begging, I overrode them and ignored her. Eventually, she got my new number and left messages for me on the machine.
“Scooter, it’s me. Could you call me please?”
“Scooter, it’s me. Could you call me please?”
“Scooter, it’s me. Why are you ignoring me? We need to talk about this.”
“Scooter, it’s me. Could you call me please?”
“Hey, it’s me, Mary. I heard that you signed a lease at your new place. What are you thinking? Would you call me please?”
“Jesus Fuck, Scooter, I got your attorney’s letter. You want a divorce? Can’t we even have a conversation?”
“Scooter, I don’t know what went wrong. Would you be open to sharing your thoughts? I’ll buy you a coffee. Or a beer. Or...whatever...I want to make this right.”
“Scooter, it’s me. Could you call me please?”
“Goddammit, Scooter, you’re so fucking immature."
My attorney said to keep all of the messages to use against her in court. I told him I had erased them, even though I had not.
It isn’t as tough as you’d think to build homemade machines in your tiny, rented apartment. I supposed a rocket or car might have needed more space, but a time machine only needs to fit one person. I started with sheets of aluminum siding to build a form, then layered them with a heavier, bulkier steel. I thought the double coating would be good protection against gamma rays or whatever else might be floating around in the space-time continuum. It was a blocky, somewhat hexagonal contraption, about six feet in diameter and almost eight feet tall with a conical top. I installed a firm floor to stand on and a latch to shut both the aluminum and steel doors.
One of the more difficult parts, as you might expect, was devising a way for the machine to know what time I wanted to visit. I needed a navigation system. A calendar wouldn’t work—that’s just paper. Sheer will power had potential, but I worried it wasn’t enough. I bought an old wind-up alarm clock, with the two bells on top and a hammer that knocked between them to make noise. I liked the idea of not having to rely on batteries. It was easy to attach wires to the clock, which connected to the power source. Oh, I guess I should explain that as well. It is more difficult to get uranium than the movies lead you to think. I decided to go with what I could get at the camping supply store—propane. I thought five gallons would be enough, and the tank was attached on the lower backside of the machine, with the motor on the bottom. I would light the propane before stepping into the machine. I could then turn the clock hand backwards, and each rotation should be one hour. I’d practice with this, taking only small journeys to the past.
A few nights ago, I knew it was ready, and I invited Pete and Barnaby over to see it.
Pete patted the sides of the time machine with appreciation and reminded me to crack a window to vent the room before I lit the propane. Barnaby nodded at it slowly, more analytical. Pete pointed out the panel on the underside. “It’s a little loose. You’ll need to tighten these screws up.” Barnaby jumped when the cat rubbed against his leg and fell into it, slightly denting the side panel. “Careful!” I admonished. “It can’t get any structural damage, or it won’t work.” Pete asked if I fit inside it comfortably since it looked small, and I explained that I’d only be standing in for very short stints, so that wasn’t so important. Barnaby questioned if the power source (propane) was powerful enough to skip back decades of time. Pete wondered if the underside panel whose screws I had recently tightened needed to be reinforced with a line of solder. He said he could loan me a blowtorch.
I had learned a lot during this project, mostly that soldering and welding were my favorites. There is something very Zen about melting metal and joining two things together. When I got the equipment from Pete, I gently laid the machine on its side and balanced it against the only chair in the apartment so I could get access to the underside panel. This was the most delicate part of the machine, since the power source and motor were connected at the bottom edge of the machine. I lit the blowtorch and began running it over the lead, coaxing it to melt onto the seam on the panel edge.
Just minutes into work, the phone rang. It was bad timing. I tried to keep my attention firmly on the blowtorch, and I let the answering machine pick up the message. I heard the first words of the message, and it sounded like my lawyer, so I was glad I hadn’t stopped my work. There was nothing I needed to hear from him. That’s when I realized I had been kneeling on the socket wrench, and it was digging into my leg, and I shifted my balance a little to the right.
And the blowtorch ignited the glue, which ignited the propane, which blew up the time machine.
And now, here I am. I’ll wrap this up for you now.
Doctor, Doctor, reprise
“You probably already know the real answer to the question of when I want to visit. I want to go back to her, to a time before the wall incident. That’s the time I want. I want my marriage back. And since I’m sure you’ve been wondering, the answer is yes, I do still love her. I really, really do.”
The woman who had been listening patiently to me cut in, but gently and with a nice smile. “I appreciate all the detail, I really do. You have led an interesting life, but—“
“You know, we aren’t officially divorced yet. The paperwork is all still with the attorneys.”
She seemed a bit desperate to interject. “Mr. Anderson, I really just need a quick medical history for your discharge plan.”
I looked up at the social worker perched on a chair at the end of the hospital bed, who was waiting patiently, as social workers do, pen and clipboard in hand, expectant look on her face.
We both looked up at the gentle knock-on wall next to the open door and saw a striking young woman standing there.
“Hey,” Mary said, “Pete told me you were hurt. Thought I’d come and say hi.” She glanced at the social worker, “Unless this is a bad time.”
My heart started racing, and I was glad I wasn’t hooked up to a machine that would betray me with its loud racing beeps and bright, blinky lights. Keeping my cool and composed demeanor, I gestured to the leg cast, to the bandage around my head and hands, to the scrapes along both arms. “It’s only structural damage.”
The social worker excused herself and left. Mary settled awkwardly on the recently vacated chair. It was still social worker-warm, which made it oddly both more, and less, comfortable.
I tried to joke. “Good thing I’m on this floor. One level up is Thoracic Park, and those doctors are animals.” But she wouldn’t have it. She got right to the point, fixing me with a look that was slightly pitying, and maybe a lot exasperating. “What were you thinking? You could have died.”
I looked down at my hands, sheepishly, thinking maybe I could blame them for the mistakes I had made. See, not my mind at all, just some unruly hands, now covered in gauze. But she didn’t fall for that joke either, and when I looked up again, she was still staring at me, waiting for an answer. It reminded me of my hospital visitors way back in middle school, how Kevin stared at me, how Aunt Dot stared at me, how my mom stared at me, with expectation and fear all bound together. How my dad didn’t bother to come and stare at me. Was I supposed to heal faster if their stares were more intense? I guess I was supposed to answer her damn question.
“I’m building a time machine,” I mumbled without looking at her. It was harder to say this to her than it had been to say to Pete or Barnaby or the social worker.
She didn’t miss a beat, letting out a very small, but not quite derisive laugh. “Why in the hell do you want a time machine? When were you needing to go so badly?”
I shrugged at her, willing myself to be brave enough to explain, knowing I was going to fail again. This time, she let me avoid answering, by asking another question.
“Do you know who called 9-1-1 that night?”
“No.”
“Your neighbor did. It’s a good thing someone was home.”
I didn’t answer.
“Do you remember getting a phone call from your attorney?”
“Um, kind of? I’m a little blurry, but I remember the answering machine picking up a call.”
“And do you know why he was calling you?”
“Ummm, no. We hadn’t gotten that far yet. I mean, I hadn’t talked to him at all.”
“I asked my attorney to ask your attorney to talk to you,” she paused, scooched her chair a little closer to my bed, so that her hand could rest near mine, “because...I don’t want a divorce.” She turned an impressive shade of pink and looked away, then back at me. “I want us to try again.”
While my heart sped up even more and my voice got caught under the bandages on my head (did you know voices travel through cheekbones? Apparently so.) Mary asked, “I just don’t understand. What went wrong with us?”
I answered with a question of my own, “Why did you say that about regrets?”
She looked confused. She didn’t remember. How was it that a sentence so pivotal to my life had no meaning to her? The wound was too deep to be so shallow.
“Ummm, what exactly did I say?”
I quoted her back to herself. “You said that you needed to have regrets and mistakes in order to fully live. I mean, you pretty much called our marriage a regret.”
“Oh, Scooter. I don’t even remember saying that, but I know for sure that I wasn’t talking about us! We were arguing about the house, right?”
“Right. You were tearing out a wall and the whole thing could have fallen in.”
“But Scooter, it isn’t a weight bearing wall. I made sure of that before I started.”
“It wasn’t about the wall! How do you think you’d feel if I said I regretted you?”
“I didn’t say that,” she argued back. “It had nothing to do with you.”
“Well, that’s not how it sounded. Either I’m a regret or you haven’t lived.” There, I said it. I looked down at my red and scabby fingers poking out of their sterile cages.
Mary started to pick at the imaginary loose threads on the cuff of her sweater, looking down and away and then back towards my lowered eyes again. “I’m sorry that I hurt you when I said that. It’d hurt my feelings too. I grew up with rules that told me to just go do things, take care of things. I never really learned how to take care of people.”
We sat for a long time in the hospital room, with the sounds from the PA interrupting our thoughtful silence.
“Scooter, when I said that, why didn’t you say something back to me? You just ran away and never explained.”
“I guess my parents missed that lesson with me, you know, conflict resolution.” I was quiet for a moment while I thought about what she said. It wasn’t fair of me to expect her to know what I was thinking. It wasn’t fair to blame her for my actions. I couldn’t explain why my actions were often so poorly thought out. Like building a time machine or leaving my wife during an argument. But for some reason, I expected her to moderate what she said and did with no regards to her upbringing.
“I’m sorry, too. I’m really sorry, Mary. And to answer your question about when I needed to go—I wanted to go back before we fought,” I said to her, looking back towards my hands again and shrugging very slightly, since even that movement was pretty painful.
She gave me a tiny smile, about as large as my shrug. “Maybe we can go together. I mean, I heard your place has some...structural damage. You can’t really go back there.” She stood and came close to the foot of the bed, laying her hand gently on my broken ankle. “Come home with me. Please. I miss you. And I baked a pie yesterday.”