Live This Long
James and I meet up; it’s been awhile since we last took up the cafe. Doesn’t do a body much good passing summer inside, anyway. We’d agree on that much.
James says to me, “Did you read my story?”
I’m cautious, talking semantics here. When James asks me, Did you read my story, I clam up on the defense. I’d personally say something like, Did you read the story I sent you? That’s just me, though. Tributes go to the muse, ask me.
I tell James, I did. I tell him, Read it a good three times.
James is nodding, the brim of his cup brought up to his face. He is saying, “What did you think about it?” He pulls a swig from the tea.
Turning this coffee cup in my hand, then between my fingers, I settle the cup on top of the table, pacing myself to provide a response.
I say, I wrote a piece myself.
I am telling him, I rewrote your story.
“What do you mean, you rewrote it?” James is asking me.
I tell James, I took your story and I made another story out of it. Wise? I am asking.
James is pulling the paper cup away from his face. He asks me, “Well, can I read it?”
I don’t see why not, I tell him. I say, I typed up a copy for you.
James takes the loose pages from over the table. I can tell his eyes aren’t all that great. I would say, They’re not what they used to be.
XXX
“Eight-thirty, sharp,” Boss says to me, and Boss asks, “You got the keys?”
Boss, name’s Jimmy, Jimmy is the groundskeeper for my alma mater, the high school off Broadmoor Street. Made a dry run on the bus Friday. Something like six stops away; about a thirty-minute bus ride, all-in.
I tell him, Yes, and, I do, over the phone and in my blue jeans with no shirt, standing with the other hand pressed against my hip. Come to resolve something about myself. Authorities like Boss Groundskeeper Jimmy, I am at military-attention standing there alone in the window in this vacant room. The words, Yes I do, could well enough be one word. Not because I’m impatient. There’s no need to hurry through words over the phone like that. It’s a respect-thing.
I haven’t always been so, afraid.
Boss says, “Good.” He adds, “because a guy with a record, to be honest, Jack, not easy getting you this job. Had to pull some ties to get you in, you wise?”
I understand, I am genuine when I say this. The inflection in my voice doesn’t exist. My tone is flat. A pitch too high, I’m trying too hard like desperate, for pity. A pitch too low, wrong time to be assertive, like I’m better than Boss.
This is the first job I’ve had since my release from the detention facility. Or jail. No need to sugar-coat.
Boss says, “I’m counting on you.”
I nod into the receiver. Yes sir, I am telling him.
“Good,” Boss says. “Like I said, Jack. You’ll do fine. Just keep your head down, have your work done on time, and there won’t be any hold-ups.”
I could say something kiss-ass like, I really appreciate this opportunity. Too many big words for Boss. Keep it simple, stupid, says my old man.
XXX
Don’t know really why I’m showering. Going to be sweating something fierce today, in the sun.
No. You know why you’re showering, I am thinking in the shower. You’re taking a shower because it’s the first day on the job. Weather report says ninety-one. Over-heard about it on the television set when I went into the kitchen for a coffee. Smoked a cigarette on the front porch. Feels warm even now, I thought. That was five-thirty this morning.
The nerves, couldn’t sleep. Just as well.
Halfway house, sober living house, there’s maybe a difference; wouldn’t really know. Guys here are drying out from a routine buzz off plastic-handle vodka. Guys here used to hunt, prowl, got caught up in a drug game or else were fixed for coffin. James Dean, lives fast, dies off too soon. These men making their changes, though.
My parole officer, he told me, “Jack, life’s a marathon, not a sprint.” He told me, “You’ve got to pace yourself.”
He’s saying this to me now in the echo of tile, grout, and soap.
XXX
Shit, shower, shave. Guys here at the house, some of them, have tagged the bathroom mirrors with permanent markers. Others went on carving their old lady’s name with an Xacto knife, Swiss Army pocket knife. On detail, the boss around here, different than my job boss Jimmy, his name’s Kevin, guy who runs the house, he put me on bathroom detail my first week.
He told me, “Wash out the sinks and get as much of that Sharpie off the windows and mirrors, could you?” That morning, 151 days sober, I scrubbed like a maniac. Needed to earn my keep. Name it; Goo-Gone, Simple Green, Windex, and Clorox bleach. Hard to keep chemicals like that around the house. Household cleaners in the wrong hands, and all. Kevin, though, he knows I wouldn’t drink them down to figure a high, but some of the other guys might use them to another end. Huffing, I’m guessing, but I’m no cop. I ain’t a rat, neither.
Keep up my bunk, I keep a good ship. The word tidy never sat well with me, think it’s kind of a woman-term. Can’t make up another word for it. Orderly, I guess.
Kevin thinks so, he believes in me. Routine, he preaches. “Don’t find yourself slipping into old habits,” Kevin says at Meeting. “Stay the course,” he tells us. Stay the course, he says, so I keep the good ship up and running.
Always been orderly, I’d say. Kept clean aside from my record. That’s reason enough for Kevin one day on the front porch when he’s telling me, “Jack. I might have a job for you. Got a guy out in San Ramon at the high school needs someone. Read through your chart. Says you graduated there, Cal High, back a ways,” Kevin says.
He told me, “Seems you’re coming up on review close after your sixty days here in the house; I’d put in a word to your P.O. The school district may hold you up for a background check. Record like yours though, may not be too much a stretch for the job,” Kevin said to me.
I appreciate that, I said to him.
Kevin said, “‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ is what my mother always used to say.”
I told Kevin, My dad would say, ‘When a door closes, tends to open up some windows.’
XXX
I am passing through the front door and check my grandfather’s Timex. He passed the watch down to me. He called it a timepiece. I had to put in a new battery after I got released. Old one must have kicked while I was in, I thought. Having a plastic bag full of personal effects bundled up and handed back to me after a stint in County through a narrow slit of a window, second thing was, What was I wearing that day? First thing was, Christmas.
XXX
Kevin is asking. I’m two steps away from the sidewalk and I near drop shit.
Shit not like, shit, shower, and shave. Shit like, Fuck. What’d I do now?
I turn back spookled out and see Kevin standing on the front porch, coffee in hand.
Good morning, I am saying. Kevin looks down at the concrete stairway, braces his weight with the hand he’s not using to hold the coffee, and takes on down three steps.
He asks me, “You got that bus pass I left you?”
I pat down my left pocket and wonder, Why not my right pocket? I am thinking, I’m a righty. Nerves, I am thinking, and dismiss it.
I am flashing him the bus pass and I’m nodding. I say, Thank you for the lift.
“Just make sure you’re back by five, you know. House rules.”
I nod, could go on about the schedule. I’m trying not to look at my grandfather’s watch. He, this is my grandpa, he used to say, ‘Keys, watch, wallet, ass. Don’t leave your house without it,” but I’m not trying to be late for the bus, neither.
I say to Kevin, Thank you again, Kevin. I turn my heel against the sidewalk leading a block toward the stop.
We don’t shake hands, but I know he’s pulling for me.
XXX
Bus is due to stop here off Clayton Street in ten minutes. This will be my first time back to school, never rode the bus back then. My mother used to drive me years ago, half my life. And then I am thinking, Not so much the case. I used to teach, but that was back in my early twenties. Substitute teach, for the same district. Took the bus a couple times when my car was in the shop. Back when my driver’s license had two points on record. Before the third, a fourth. And anyway, those days are behind me.
Nothing speaks a new start like that get out of jail card. I believe in life that much.
Nerves, I am thinking. Sitting at the bus stop, This is good, I counter. Halfway house, halfway out. Not getting my hopes up, though. I can’t. Every dog has his day, they said. Life moves pretty fast.
My head, it fills with cliches while I’m being patient about most things. Like a nervous tick. In the doctor’s office, I tend to think, You’ll feel a slight sting. That would be the blood test, testing my lithium levels. Or in a restaurant, I’m eating back a ways in time. I am thinking about the waiter saying, “Enjoy.”
Jail takes a different patience. If there isn’t a hobby laying around in the cobwebs, rolling around about the skull like a couple of marbles, there just ain’t much to do but wait out a sentence.
All the cliches can’t work fast enough before a mind gets weak and peters out. My old man says, Insanity is when you keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. My old man didn’t ever do hard time.
Stay the course, Kevin said, so I’ve stayed in order with a routine, keep up my bunk, my effects clean and on my persons. Never know what will come around. Or who. Like a job through the closest thing I got to a friend in a house that’s not mine to go round, cleaning up mirrors around the washroom, where others have carved out tributes into the mirrors,into bunks, in panes.
I clean, and clean up well. That’s why, I am thinking to myself, that’s why I took a shower this morning.
XXX
The 36-bus pulls up, squealing axles, brakes squeak. The exhaust from the pipe leading out the bus is black. I smell the exhaust before the bus comes to a stop a foot away from where I’m standing. A thought dashes through me about a locomotive, shoveling coal, and the entrance to the bus, the door folds into the cabin.
County Connection, this bus line, the bus here makes a beep-beep as a warning as the bus lowers down on hydraulic suspension. I am thinking about a children’s song, Wheels on the bus go round and round.
All this activity, the bus making this racket. Really pulling out the bells and whistles for me, I am thinking, and I am thinking, Red carpet rolled out in front of me, I wouldn’t be surprised. The trumpets sound off beep-beep-beep.
Last time on a bus, besides that dry-run, was on transport from corrections to the detention facility. I remember this now for something.
XXX
Paying cash for the fare, I’ve only done that in the past. I’m looking over at my left to the other passengers sitting there as I hand the driver my pass. This driver here, he nods down toward the pass-scanner; makes a motion with his eyes before bringing them back up to mine. He doesn’t say anything like we’re in a library, people sleeping or something like that. Like this guy’s spent enough breath on first-timers, he’s lost for words now.
I scan the pass Kevin had left on my bunk. Left this note with that pass. Reads like, Here’s that pass I told you about, and, Food in the refrigerator for lunch. Best. He printed his name on the paper.
Folded this note up and stuck that paper into my wallet. I need that good luck. Or else, maybe I just want to feel normal again, being on the outside, like having something to put in my wallet, like normal people, people with dollar bills, photos, business cards from people.
After going through the system, I weeded through a mess of wallet trash. Packing in an end of overdrawn debit cards expired from while I was inside, business cards from regulars, customers I had met bartending, when they’d start in with, “I think I might have an opportunity for you…”
Jail does that. Makes me think for a couple days, if I’d taken them up on one of those opportunities. Can’t wind up about those chances, though. Key was finding that hobby I was talking about.
Found a Starbucks gift card, balance was zero last time I went. Kept that card for good luck and told myself I would put some cash on the card.
Another card from a deck of fifty-two, the deuce of spades. Deuces, like the peace sign from hippie days or when I had showed the inmates that same peace sign on my release. I’d tucked that playing card between two pages from “The Outsiders.” Saying, peace like rest in peace, or goodbye. It’d be a fight, saying farewells to the dark, hard times like that, so that spade made sense. The spade trumps all the suits, has a fighting air about it. So, I kept that card from the deck. Said to myself, I’ll never look back. My old man was told, Erase the past. My grandmother said that to him.
As for the inmates at the detention facility, hope they count the deck first. Was my deck, anyway. Commissary cards, they’ll figure it out. A golf pencil and a joker card, a hobby. I’ve always said, Work with what you have.
Had my driver’s license taken away by the cops, or else that’d be in my wallet. In the front of the wallet.
Billfold, my grandfather called his wallet.
XXX
Bus is pulling slow against the curb. I see cars passing by through the right-side window. On-coming traffic isn’t slowing for the bus, turn signal flashing. Busdriver is on a schedule, I am thinking. I check my watch, time reads around 7:15. I had set this watch forward three or four minutes, can’t remember which. Keeps me on time, early for the doctor’s appointments, appointments with the court-ordered psychologist, and that job interview two weeks back with Boss from the school district, when Kevin drove.
“You know,” he said in his pickup, single cab. He said to me, “It’d be good to see Jimmy.” Kevin added, “Friend of mine and all. You know,” he started to say, “between us, Jimmy used to be in your shoes, while back. Been sober long, long time, him.” Kevin said, “That’s Jimmy for you.”
I couldn’t relate; supposed Jimmy and me would be level. Kevin didn’t say much anything else on that ride.
I am remembering this on the bus right now, about how I could have opened up like a flower two weeks ago during that interview, I could have. Could have gone on an end about my past life teaching with substitute teaching, student teaching and all of that gone way by now. None of that has a real matter on me today. System doesn’t look too favorably on folks like me. Used to bitch on a piece about their dispositions, the poor kids.
Better this way, I am thinking. But that’s how they want me to think. Systems do that to a person. Corrections, discipline, collection calls, check-ins with my P.O.
Product of my environment, owe it to a society that raised me up in good schools and a woman, tough as nails, my mother.
Came up with this tattoo idea; reads Suburban Renaissance, Old English. Rebirth, that’s its meaning, renaissance. A body’s got to go through life and death. Lived in San Ramon pretty well all my life, see. But I’ve got to say, not one bit easy getting my feet back under me. Diagnosis for manic depression almost a ten-year, distant past back a ways. Gotten me in a lot troubles. Survived to tell the tale, way I figure.
XXX
Keys to the stadium, the pool and campus, Boss told me after the interview. Got those keys in my hand, I’m giving them a look-over on the bus, in my seat. Keys here make me think of a custodian, aren’t that many, just three of them. Given this job pans out well, I’ll have them figured out in a pinch. First day, most I have to worry about is showing up on time, having these keys, and nothing unlikely will happen. I’m no slacker. Working hard in the summer, on a Tuesday like this. Labor Day, yesterday. No work, kids were off on their three-day weekend, teachers too.
Boss said to me at the interview, “Just so we’re crystal,” he said and meant short for crystal clear, I think. He said, “This job, tending to the campus and this list of requirements for the job, you know, you’re on a probation period. Ninety days, so three months, wise?” he said to me.
I nodded as he peeled off a sheet from the paper file he kept on hand. I reached over his desk, trinkets, mixed nuts with no cashews, I noticed. Wasn’t hungry. Reminded me of beer nuts at this dive once.
That sheet with those job requirements typed on it was left with oil from those nuts, cashew oil smudged on it. Smeared fingerprints.
Made me think about being at the station, when the cops, they booked me.
Boss said the word probation and ninety days. Made me think, makes me think now riding this bus, number-36 bus, how ninety days sounds like a couple of chips away at sobriety. If God gives me a ninety-day pass at life. Lucky, I’d say. Or by the grace of God I go, quiet into the night.
XXX
Runs in the family, men in my family like my father. My grandfather before us both, when he had said, “Didn’t reckon I’d live this long.” I had been old enough to hear well enough to understand an inkling of his mentioning this. Grandpa and me, we’d been weeding in his tomatoes together out there in San Andreas, Calaveras County. Bent down next to me, showed me a thing about pinching weeds out by the roots. “They won’t come back,” Grandpa said. “Get gone with you, weeds!”
Grandpa had been sweating something fierce, but he gave out a chuckle. Made me laugh, too. He sifted through the dirt he called soil. Hands more like rock. Remember wishing I’d have worn hands like my grandad’s mits. Big hands that had broken horses, lumbered redwoods. Hands carried axes, shovels, a hammer. Grandpa, he built his own tools. A man of his craft, I’d tell the story of him.
It was something of a deep thought Grandpa had out there in the tomatoes. He told me, “Didn’t know I’d live this long, I tell you,” through the sweat, heat, and land.
Remembering now on it, on the bus I’m thinking of Grandpa when I’m shutting my eyes to go off in prayer a minute. I pray, “May you be with God.” Not every man really lives. I open my eyes.
XXX
I blink, adjusting to the light coming in through the windows of the bus. When my eyes can make out the red, digital names from the approaching cross-streets, Alcosta Blvd. scrolls by. The stop at Broadmoor is up next. I am reaching for the bus-stop cable, this yellow wire running the length of the bus windows, on both sides. I pull the cable and there’s a ding, and a woman’s voice says, “Stop requested.” For a reason or whatever, I feel important. I am thinking, This will be the most special I’ll feel all day. I stop this idea coming back to me.
“Not every man really lives,” my grandfather had said.
Standing up and shaking my limbs out, I am figuring how to loosen the sleep from the backs of my legs. I’m giving the back of the bus a once-over, but there’s nothing to report. There’s no reason to write home.
Beep-beep-beep, the bus is squealing. Hydraulics are simmering the bus on down toward the ground, hissing like an asp. Or else giving out a breath the way God might sigh. Pride has got me floating down the corridor toward the exit doors, they’re swinging inward as I think, Might as well be a red carpet.
Stay the course, and, Kick that idea out your head, I think. Maybe it’s the nerves. New job and all.
Tipping my cap to the driver. I like to be on good terms with service people like this busdriver or otherwise, bartenders at a bar or baristas in a cafe, too. My mother gave me this smile I’ve got.
I’m not grinning like an idiot, jack-o-lantern for nothing, but I grin and say, Thank you, sir.
Busdriver salutes my direction, eyes bent on the road, two fingers. This driver, he says, “Don’t study too hard.”
I nod; I won’t.
September, 2016