 |
| The Sunshine State |
April 6, 2014
Dateline:
Sanford, FL
Subject:
Waiting for BC
That’s
Bob Castle (See “Saint Jack.”)
and his nephew Randall. We’re to spend a week in the Sunshine State, doing
this, that, and the other thing. I arrived today, just before noon. Castle and
Randall don’t get in until late tomorrow.
So there’s plenty of time and
opportunity for panic. For example, I’ve already lost the keys to the rental
car. I will add that I’ve also found them, but in the meantime . . .
None of my friends have ever mistaken
me for cool-hand Luke. Most obviously – you don’t have to watch me in action −
I look nothing like Paul Newman. The picture under “About Me” is clearly a
caricature; but, sadly, it flatters me. I’m not nearly so joyful, especially
when I’ve lost something. Then, I exhibit the opposite of either joy or cool: panic!
“Oh, SHIT!” And my gorge fills at the
same time I begin running around turning everything I can lay my hands on
upside down, crawling around on the floor peering under every piece of
furniture, emptying every receptacle – suitcase, briefcase, waste cans, looking
like a character in a poorly made cartoon, where the cels aren’t turning over
quite as quickly as the eye can see.[1]
It doesn’t matter that this kind of
thing happens on a more-than-once-a-week basis. Every panic is new. And none gauges the consequences. How bad
can this be? I haven’t lost a child − or
a wife. This is why we don’t have children, Roz says, and why we’ve never married. I haven’t lost a beloved uncle or a Fabergé egg. But the panic couldn’t
be worse, if I had lost him, or the egg, or had gotten married.
I’m never saying to myself, “So what?”
If the rental car company can’t unlock the car and start it from outer space, surely they haven’t given me the
only key that will open and run it. So what if the lost key rate is . . . I’m scouring my contract to see, but
the print is too fine. But, say it’s
$250 − that seems fair. It’s chump change for Castle, I imagine.
Roz
has never warmed up to Bob. And I don’t think has to do with the kind of law he
practiced from the time he began practicing, defending the sleaziest criminal
cases, the mother- and father-rapers on the Group W bench. She didn’t warm up
to him when he walked away from his practice. He didn’t run, only walked. It
wasn’t that some mother-raper he’d gotten off with probation descended deeper
into the muck of father-rapery. Apparently, BC came into some money and decided
he was done. Where the money came from I don’t know. When I asked, his response
was, “Sometimes these things happen." He may be a hard guy to warm up to.
He’s a hard guy to know. He walked
away from law, and he took up “lassitude” − his word. He writes a little, draws
a little, plays piano in a bar. He’s skillful at all: a clear-eyed writer of
stories that begin in a messy middle and end when the sun comes up; a maker of
pen-and-ink sketches of buildings that seem never to come completely to rest − they look as if they are about to fly away piece by piece (or line by line); a fluent fake-book reader. But he
is only skillful and always leaves the sense on the eye or ear or narrative
portion of the brain that something has been forgotten or, more accurately,
remembered later, but he didn’t have the energy for or see the sense of going
back and putting it in.
Still, I find him an endurable companion,
if I keep in mind that I have to be willing to take what he offers and not want
more. He is, perhaps, the best of acquaintances but a disappointing friend.
Roz
and I had agreed to spend a week in Florida with him, because he had invited us.
It seemed foolish to turn down a free trip. To me, it still does; so I’m
pressing forward. Roz backed out, when the nephew was added to the itinerary,
rather late in the game. She didn’t want to be the fourth wheel, she said.
The keys, incidentally, were under my
book, Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice,
face down on the bed. If I had put a bookmark in it and closed it properly (as
I was taught), they would never have gone missing.
S
[1]
The term herky-jerky is, my dictionary tells me, a “reduplication” of jerky, in
its meaning of characterized by jerks or tics. I'm a cartoon running at 8 cels per
second.
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