Self-Esteem (31 page)

The self-esteem? Please. Just the self.

Crawford was within a few miles of his house when he tried to call again. No answer at home, none with Dorothy, none with Cal.

His hangover was back again, and his need for a drink rattled the chambers of his wits. It might have had something to do with being close to home, but he wasn’t certain. He stopped at Happy Time Liquor and got his usual bottle of Scotch. He was glad to find the Indian wasn’t there and that rap videos weren’t being played on the TV.

Cal yelled into the darkness. He had just had one of those dreams where you watch yourself doing something really terrible but you can’t stop it — a peculiar experience, this fear, considering his circumstance.

“Are you ready to proceed?”

His heart was still beating with fear from the dream. Not even the reality of his captivity was scarier.

He takes his father’s gun — the one he found while rummaging through his dad’s study years ago. He initially thought it was a lighter, but it wasn’t. Then he thought it was a small-caliber pistol, but it’s a machine gun.

Cal puts it into the back of his Porsche, actually a Rolls-Royce limousine — a black one, very Goth, very deathly. “Where would you like to go?” Rotten Tamales, driver’s cap and all, sits behind the wheel, but Cal feels so self-confident he doesn’t care.

Let that grunt drive me anywhere. Where’s that chronic?

Cal sits in the back seat smoking his funk, and as the limo barrels through the canyon, Rotten is in the back holding a golden bong to the master’s lips.

Flying down that hill, the band room and those poor saps that play sax and clarinet, but Cal sees the ones he wants to hurt: those jocks that huddle outside the main entrance.
They deserve nothing less than death.

The marijuana makes him sharp. But it isn’t marijuana at all. It’s a cold glass of drencrom; it’s Alex de Large at the Korova Milk Bar.

Boy, I’m really in the mood for a prank!

Cal asks “What should I do?”

Rotten tips his hat. “Taketh thy machine gun and cutteth them down!”

“Are you ready to proceed?”

“Do it now!”

The guns — two machine guns, large ones — are not guns, but arms, human arms, extensions of the black leather that covers Cal’s body, his fingers large barrels of death.

“Hey Mr. Happy Pappy,” they all say at the same time.

Killing every one of them will not be a crime.

“Yeah, their lives aren’t worth a dime,” Rotten says, as he rolls his fingers on the steering wheel. “Hurry the fuck up. Dust unto dust.”

“Are you ready to proceed?”

Cal gets out of the car and knows this is wrong.

But it’s something I heard in a song. Right?

“Yeah, it’s a racket like everything else,” Rotten says. “So what?”

Rotten’s words ring out like a command from the Almighty.
So what?
It doesn’t sound like a command,
but oh yeah, I know it is. I know…

Cal raises the guns in fast motion and sprays them dead, hitting most of them in the head without even aiming.

There’s Coach Lieberman and Vice Principal Gore.

They’re laughing so hard, they’re about to fall on the floor.

But they don’t get away, no — not for one second. Cal shoots them both, but
they didn’t deserve it
.

“Ya reckon?” Rotten says.

“No, they didn’t.”

Then the blood flows from the ground to the trees, and Cal feels sad, but a little pleased. Then he wakes and screams in horror at his deed, but someone is asking “Are you ready to proceed?”

Are you?

Crawford was surprised his briefcase was still in the trunk and the tape was inside. He didn’t handle property well during drinking episodes, and sometimes he would wake up from a stupor surprised his wedding ring was still on his finger. He put the bottle inside his briefcase knowing that doing so would ensure he wouldn’t lose the case.

Getting out of his car, he looked at his wedding ring resting delicately on his shaking hand. Unlocking the front door of his home, he thought that he was capable of selling it for a drink if the circumstances were right. He thought perhaps he should hide it where it could never be found.

Then what would be the point of having it?

“Honey?” he said, poking his head inside. “Cal?” The silence was indifferent.

The late morning light was somber. “Cal? Is anyone here?” Lights were flickering from the living room, and he carried his briefcase with him as if a purse-snatcher might be loose in the house. The TV was on and it was the news — or what they call the news — with Crawford’s picture superimposed behind the anchor
monkey
trying to make the story look “official.”

“Breaking News” it read at the top.
Crawford Leaves Hershey Show after Signs of Illness.
Crawford grabbed the remote off the coffee table and turned the TV off. He looked at the ceiling. “Anybody? Hello!”

Crawford clutched his briefcase and walked upstairs, thinking about the gun in his desk drawer. He’d been afraid of that gun for years, but now that fear had a whole new dimension. Would he need to use it?

He also thought that someone might be upstairs waiting to slit his throat or to take him somewhere to make a TV show out of slitting his throat. He wondered if it wasn’t the DTs driving him crazy. Either scenario might be the case.
Or both.

Cal’s bedroom door was closed, and he put his ear to it. “Cal?”

He turned the knob slowly and walked inside with the reverence a minister shows a sanctuary. Nailed to the door, Rotten Tamales — the foremost
that’s-right-I’m-the-Devil
rock star — looked down on Crawford with a Puritan’s gaze.

“Erectum?” Crawford asked the poster, as if it would answer. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Crawford took a step back to get a wider view. He put his briefcase on the bed.
Good ol’ Rotten Tamales. And my parents got pissed off over the Rolling Stones.
Crawford looked at Rotten’s menacing expression — lips pulled tight against the teeth, nose slightly raised in a growl. He was almost congenial, like someone he should find charming, or feel sorry for.

Feel sorry for? Shit. Some sick fuck who has milked millions out of middle-class parents via their stupid, insecure teenage sons? Hell, even worse has taken hard-earned money from destitute single mothers working as waitresses and maids who thought they had to give their kids a little of what the upper-class brats had.

He imagined Rotten Tamales whispering, “But that’s what
you do too
, fucker.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

Fuck tolerance, Crawford thought. Dorothy had told him he didn’t understand and she was right. With a calm self-confidence, he tore the
Erectum
poster off the wall and ripped and shredded it, savoring ever second before leaving it in tiny pieces on the floor. Crawford looked at himself in the mirror and just for a instant wasn’t disgusted.

“No, Dorothy. I don’t understand.”

Crawford looked around the room as if he’d never been there before. What else is in my house?
My
house, Crawford thought. He began searching Cal’s room, starting with the closets then the dresser drawers. The bottom of the closet was filled with tennis shoes piled one on top of the other, none of which he’d seen Cal wear. The dresser was stuffed haphazardly, all its drawers hanging open to various degrees. Crawford pulled out pants, shirts, and shorts, tossing them on the floor.

Black. Black. Everything is black.
When Cal was a little boy, his Granny Lou used to call him Sunshine.
I guess he showed her
.

Crawford didn’t know what he was doing; he was just doing something,
whatever
— whatever
he
wanted. He had a right; it was
his
house. He was the father; Cal was the son. Crawford clenched his teeth thinking of all the “instruction” he had digested over the years on human behavior, especially on dealing with children. But he couldn’t explain this need to trash Cal’s room. He had read every major book on child psychology until Cal had gotten to be twelve or thirteen and then he realized it was all bullshit.

Crawford had respected pop psychology and had kept the faith, despite being a backslider in his everyday life. But now it was looming over him like a mob boss who had done him many a favor.

He was in the training business. And once you go in, you never get out.

Training
.
That’s it. That’s what it is. Like people are animals. Like dogs that need their faces rubbed in their own shit. People as empty receptacles that need to be shaped properly. That’s the rationale. Shaped properly in order to function properly.

“Bullshit!” he yelled.

Crawford reached under Cal’s mattress — a hiding place so obvious he hadn’t thought of it — and found a pipe, a lighter, and a small bag of marijuana. Crawford had assumed Cal would keep his pornography there like most teenage boys, hiding the really incriminating things elsewhere. Crawford reached deeper into the mattress and found nothing. He wondered if his son had any pornography at all. He hoped so. Looking at the
Erectum
poster torn to pieces at his feet, it would be especially troubling if he didn’t.

There was a small pinch of grass in the pipe that had been smoked perhaps once. Crawford put it to his lips and lit it, taking a big hit that felt unexpectedly harsh. After exhaling he gasped for air then coughed violently — his face turning red, saliva filling his nasal passages. He leaned forward, coughing into his cupped hands, then finally stopped, catching his breath. Right away he had that tingly feeling that he hadn’t felt since his undergrad days. When he first started smoking, he enjoyed the intense high of smoking after a few drinks. But a year later he found it made him nervous and antisocial. It got to be more like dropping acid than smoking a little harmless pot, so he changed the protocol to smoking only after a good eight or nine drinks. This didn’t cause nervousness, but it sure could turn a decent drunk into an unpleasant one — triggering inebriation that brought blackouts, vomiting, and other embarrassing behavior. He finally quit smoking marijuana altogether. Crawford decided that drinking was better, rationalizing he’d graduated to a more mature, Hemingway-style recreation. He was “drinking appropriately” for his age, he thought. But no, actually he wasn’t. He was drinking like a frat boy at a keg party.

Surrounded by Cal’s dark wardrobe, Crawford took a deep breath then lay flat on Cal’s bed, his head next to his briefcase. He didn’t know why he smoked the pot; he just did.

Isn’t
that
the excuse of a child? “I don’t know why. I just did… because I could
.
”

It was an excuse he still used with Dorothy from time to time.

Maybe we all just need to grow up.

Crawford looked at the ceiling and thought of all the ceilings he had seen over the years under the influence.

All those ceilings. Even the Sistine Chapel. I should have been sober for the Sistine Chapel.

He thought of that time waking up in Berry’s apartment to unusual patterns on the ceiling that looked like a scaffold made of light. It was beautiful. Turned out to be reflections from a shopping cart filled with empty beer bottles a few feet from the bed. He would later learn he had stolen it from a large liquor store the night before.

“But how did I get it home?” he asked them.

“You pushed it home, twenty-some blocks,” Berry told him.

“We just pointed you in a straight line,” Scott had said.

“And you made me do it?” Crawford asked.

“Made you? Hell, no. You insisted,” Scott said.

Berry and Scott had made jokes about that shopping cart for years, telling Crawford it was a prophecy that his books would be sold in supermarkets.

How do I know I stole that damn shopping cart? Crawford thought. Those assholes might have lied to me.

He opened his briefcase and pulled out the bottle. He broke the seal, took a deep breath, and then tipped it toward the afternoon sun. It went down his throat smooth and felt warm and cozy in his gut. He looked at the videotape lying in the case. It was cold and distant. It was scheming against him.

Crawford walked down the hall and peeked into his and Dorothy’s bedroom as if to find his lovely wife waiting for him in bed.

“Honey?” he said, just in case.

There had always been a maternal element in Crawford’s relationship with his wife, especially when he was intoxicated. But now he didn’t feel the attendant dread of her authority, even with marijuana in his bloodstream. The naughty schoolboy who had been caught smoking cigarettes in the bathroom felt secure knowing there was someone to answer to.

But where…?

Then he saw the note next to the bed.

Dear Jim
If you are reading this note, I’m assuming that you have made it home OK. I hope you’ll do me the favor of calling my mother and telling her what your situation is. At least tell her you’re all right. I will be there soon (at Mother’s) if I’m not when you call. I need to be away from you for a while. I think Cal does as well. Please don’t fight me on this. I know you have a problem, and maybe it’s “our” problem, but I can only accommodate so much.

Dorothy

There was no “Love,” before her name.

Crawford walked down to his study and sat at his desk. He felt like a stranger in his own home. It was stillness, pure silence — the kind a writer dreams of but often wouldn’t know what to do with if he had it. Looking at the
Wall of Shame
— especially that ridiculous picture of him accepting the
James Crawford Day
plaque — he thought of how a house does not make a home — nor a drafty old study, even for a writer — not without the ones you love. He had often used the excuse that the burden of raising a family, of being married and being the primary income earner, was the real reason he needed to drink, “to relax” from all those pressures. Of course, relaxing wasn’t really the objective. The objective was to get shitfaced. And the only reason people get shitfaced is that they’re trying to get away from something. Crawford thought about how he had been trying to get away from this place forever.
This wonderful, warm home.
Apparently, leaning on the bar at a shithole dive felt better, more secure. It was easier, no paternal pressures involved.