Cactoosuh
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- Posted: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:55:56 +0000
This story originally appeared in the 2002-2003 edition of Cabbages & Kings. I typed it on Microsoft Office so if it seems a little off in placement, that's why.
THE SECOND CHANCE PEOPLE
by Mike Page
Why am I writing this?
You’ll probably just dismiss it as another piece of fiction by an unknown writer trying to
get attention. But that’s okay, most of it never happened.
Is it because I now know who the people are?
Probably. Insider info on a rare and extraordinary group is hard to contain. I’m not the
best at keeping secrets.
Is this some divine information that should not be disclosed?
Yes. But that’s okay. You won’t believe it anyway.
But God blinks.
Sitting at my desk, trying to write the first story of my eighty-eight years, when the chest
pains came back, the burning irregular beats. Broken from the spell of the story, the searing of
rheumatoid returned to my fingers like a molten wave.
Figured I’d experienced enough horrors in my life to write a good horror story.
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With these horrors in mind I began writing “Meathook Confessions.” A story about a teenager who
loses his mother to cancer, discovers his girlfriend has been using him to get closer to his
brother, then snaps. He hangs his girlfriend up on a meathook in his closet and uses a blowtorch
to torture the information he wants out of her. On the day before I began writing the perfect
ending had come to me. With it I just knew that “Meathook Confessions” would make readers
wince, cringe, vomit and scare them from ever entering another relationship.
Approaching the story’s climax, I exuded the typical false confidence of first-time
writers, thinking this story was the greatest ever written, it would sweep the literary awards, and
it would replace Shakespearean material in English courses across the country. These exciting
thoughts got my sickly heart racing to dangerous speeds. I had to slow down or it would surely
explode. My remedy for these pains wasn’t the miraculous new medicines. Those remind me too
much of my mom and Narissa. So I took walks along Lake Road, breathed in the fresh lake
breeze. With chest pains intensifying, I walked out the front door thinking about how I had to
finish “Meathook Confessions” no matter what. Eighty-eight years. I waited so long.
Johnny Stringer was one of those people.
Judging by his eyeglasses you wouldn’t think he could party hard. Judging by his little
frame you wouldn’t think he played an important role on the baseball team. But it made sense
that he maintained straight A’s throughout high school without too much smarts. His naturally
happy demeanor bothered me. I couldn’t understand how someone with the pressure to perform
constantly could also deal with tutoring the lesser mortals. I couldn’t understand how someone
who knew so much about the world could be so consistently optimistic about it. People like him simply frustrated me.
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But I am thankful for him.
At our post-junior-prom party, a self-styled badass named Phil Westhrope suggested we
ditch the hotel and go to a strip club. The limo had already left, but Phil’s car was there, and he
offered to drive me, Johnny and Narissa, the future mother of my child. Johnny pushed up his
glasses; a sure sign he was nervous. He said Phil shouldn’t drive, he’d been drinking too much.
Phil said he’d only had one drink, which was true, and he was okay to drive, but he peppered
this answer with obscenities. Johnny pushed up his glasses and offered to pay for a cab, another
limo, anything. Badass Phil saw this as an opportunity to act hard in front of nearby girls, so he
ordered Narissa and I to get in.
The sincerity on Johnny’s face frightened me. I told Narissa we should stay. She wanted
to go to pose as a lesbian, but was fine staying too.
Phil said, “whatever” and left ten feet of rubber on the asphalt while accelerating away.
Those of us standing in the parking lot watched him leave with the mild curiosity aggressive
drivers generate. Johnny began to cry. A few hundred yards down the road, walled in by pine
trees, Phil came to a sharp turn. He didn’t slow down and there was no screeching of brakes.
The car wavered and went front-first into a pine tree trunk. The hood caught fire and flames
crawled toward the back. There was panic in the parking lot when the driver side door did not
open and Phil did not come out. What did come out was the most Godawful sound I ever heard.
Initially I thought the high gurgling squeals were those of an unfortunate rat caught and cooking
alive in the engine. But a rat would not be heard from hundreds of yards away. Until that night I
didn’t think a human would either.
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Afterward, with those sounds in my head, I asked Narissa if she could imagine what Phil must’ve felt. She said, “You kidding? I can’t even take a hot
shower.” The squeals continued for minutes as some uselessly called for help. When Badass Phil
Westhrope finally went silent it seemed a mercy.
The next time I tasted hamburger I vomited. I haven’t eaten meat since. The smell
reminds me too much of the charred and twisted mass of metal after firemen hosed it down.
Investigators would eventually conclude that a wild animal had chewed open Phil’s brakeline.
That night I had dreamt I went with Phil. When we crashed I awakened with tremendous
pain in my legs and ribs.
Awake. Alive. Johnny Stringer had saved my life and Narissa’s. My first thought after
realizing I’d avoided a hideous death was a guilty one. It wasn’t “now I can apologize to
everyone I’ve ever wronged,” or “now I can have a family,” or even “now I can have sex.” It
was “now I can write a story.”
I always wanted to be a full-time published author. It’s probably from that pesky innate
aspiration for immortality we all have; a successful piece will speak to people long after I lose
the ability to. Unfortunately, immortality can’t always pay the bills. About one in a thousand (or
some demoralizing number) aspiring authors end up writing as a main source of income. The rest
give up or work another full-time job while publishing unheralded works for virtually no profit.
I gave up. A child on the way prompted me to cut the pipe dream and get a job out of
high school. My dad hooked me up with a landscaping job. But he was disappointed with my
choices, with “knocking up that broad,” with skipping out on college, with the possibility of
working s**t jobs the rest of my life, which I did. These are probably reasons why he drank to numb depression, why I never saw him smile, never saw teeth appear between that bushy black beard and mustache. Only in old photographs. I often wondered what would make him smile, but was too scared to try anything.
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Especially after my mother died.
Whether my dad was smiling or not, the s**t jobs were necessary. I was never a good
student. C-average throughout. I told teachers I was still grieving my mother so they would get
off my back. The sad truth is I was lazy.
Lisa was born shortly after graduation. Narissa and I raised her in a less-than-stellar
environment. We couldn’t afford daycare or babysitters so Narissa was a stay-at-home mom. I
worked the s**t jobs, the manual labor, the mindless assembly line; just enough to keep us afloat.
During these difficult early years I grew to hate Narissa and viewed as judge, jury and warden.
My original plan was use Narissa to get closer to her friend. But one day at the lake she wore a
bikini that made me spend most of the time underwater to hide my erections. I decided that bikini
must be hiding something grand. One faulty condom was enough. When Narissa said, “I’m
pregnant,” I heard, “I sentence you to life.”
For the rest of our marriage I wondered how much better my life would’ve been if spent
with Narissa’s friend. Man, did I ever want her friend. Oh, lord.
Still, neither of us wanted to bring a child into a broken home, so we stayed together to
raise Lisa. When times got hard, Narissa would call me a lazy bum, which I was. I would call her
a broad, but meaning of those names eventually changed from afflicting to affectionate. When
Lisa moved out we stayed together anyway. Neither of us had the heart to break our sacred
marriage vows, or the courage to mess with a good thing.
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We were sixty-eight when Narissa’a stomach cancer came back for a final and most
powerful time. By the end, my broad had no hair or eyebrows, the skin was pulled all tight and
shiny against her face and skull like latex, and her eyes were sunken beads in their sockets.
First my mom, then my wife.
Lisa and her family were in the waiting room when Narissa left us. I was holding her
hand. It was hard to look at her, I hate to admit, and the medicinal aroma enshrouding her bed
turned my stomach. She’d been unconscious. Her hand, harboring more wrinkles, liver spots and
varicose veins than the first time I held it, squeezed mine in some final attempt to hold on.
Arthritis flared as Narissa grinded my hand bones together like kindling. I thought this is what
Phil Westhrope must’ve felt all over his body back on prom night. Christ, what a way to go.
Narissa’s body clenched with her fist, as if trying to hold in life, or exude it. I wondered where
her strength came from. It didn’t look like she had any muscle left. My mother had simply
withered away like a leaf in winter, but apparently Narissa had some reason to hang on through
the season. It scared me because I thought she was going to recover again, only to end up going
through the whole painful process again.
Softly, I said, “Let go, ya broad. Just let go. You’re hurting me.” I meant my hand then,
but I think now I meant more than my hand. Suddenly, she let go. Her body slackened, as did her
grip. Pain lessened as her last breath escaped her. The EKG did its monotonous cry. With my
mom I’d mistakenly stayed at bedside while her blood stilled, and the resulting maroon-skinned
skeleton had given me nightmares for months. With Narissa, I kissed her hand and left the room.
Live and learn, I guess.
I told the doctor about Narissa’s pre-mortem paroxysm.
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He theorized that the tumor in her stomach had grown big enough to block the blood flow in a major artery causing an overflow
of blood in other arteries, one of which was in her brain and had a weak spot where blood pooled
up and punched through. The aneurysm caused her brain to send out one last surge the way a
light bulb has a burst of luminosity before burning out.
When I told Lisa, sparing her the light bulb metaphor, she broke down and I hugged her.
“She’s better now,” I said. “You can go home knowing she’s not suffering anymore. Okay?” As
she left, I realized two things. At fifty, Lisa was finally starting to remind me of her mother. And
at fifty, she was going home with her family. I was going home alone. But with this epiphany
came no sadness. What came was a guilty thought: Now I can write a story.
The three years between my retirement and Narissa’s passing probably could’ve been a
good time to write. Instead circumstance prompted me to dedicate my time to Narissa, who was
experiencing her first waves of tumor growth, tumor removal, rehabilitation, tumor regrowth and
repeat. So I figured since she was finally at peace I could rekindle that old dream from so many
decades ago.
But Narissa was not at peace. She was all over the cheap lakeside house we’d inherited
from my dad. Everything inside reminded me of her. What caused me to nearly lose my mind
was the afghan lying precariously in Narissa’s favorite chair. It was half-finished, with the
crochet hooks still sticking through it. She’d claimed to not ever want to take up crocheting,
because that’s when she’d know she’s an old woman. I thought of the girl who’d once wanted to
enter a strip club posing as a lesbian and had to agree. Yet she took it up anyway. It took her
mind away from the sickness, she had said.
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I held it to my face and breathed in her scents. It might as well have been an onion
because all the tears that went unshed in the hospital followed. I cried into that blanket of yarn.
She’d only been gone three hours, but the unfinished afghan suggested she wasn’t coming back.
Guilt assisted the grief. I was reminded of everything she’d wanted us to do that we’d
never done – movies, books, places. Forgetfulness comes with aging, but the afghan reminded
me of what she said. When she talked I listened; probably the reason she never got any cats.
It took me twenty years to do everything I could remember. Twenty years seems like a
long time to complete a list of recreational activities, but those activities aren’t cheap. Plus, the
older you get, the slower you move, and the slower you move, the faster that young man called
Time can speed past you. Not to forget I was, as Narissa aptly put, a lazy bum.
The last item was to finish Narissa’s afghan. Last because I deliberately kept putting it
off. Some sadistic part of me suggested that if I never completed the task, Narissa would come
home to do so. When I finished it was like losing her again.
There was comfort in the act of weaving all that yarn, in imposing order into a chaotic mess of threads. I could understand why Narissa found it therapeutic at that point in her life. Concentrating on twining together the yarn on my lap allowed me to ignore the synchronous numbness and burning in my fingers. It was comforting right up until I realized I ruined it. Narissa’s part was going along smoothly, then I intervened and made a muddle of the rest.
Eighty-eight years old with nothing left to do and no one left to do it with. Merely seeing
the sun rise no longer interested me. After some contemplation, I made a decision. Lisa was old
enough to get over it, or at least understand.
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I reserved a hotel room for the 19th floor. That would be high enough. But when I got
there it didn’t seem enough. Something about the roof suggested going out on top. I tipped the
nearest custodian $500 to show me to the roof, to which he said, “s**t, this is my lucky day!
You’re the second old crust bag today to pay me to go up there.”
“Did the other come down yet?”
“I dunno, Gramps. Follow me.”
No problem. I would simply wait for the other “old crust bag” to leave. On the roof,
Venus was in the west sky and was the only celestial object visible over the city lights, so that
side seemed appropriate. The other old crust bag was a woman. Chest pains came with the
thought that it was Narissa’s ghost, here to condemn me for ruining her afghan. In the twilight,
she certainly looked like Narissa. With a rational mind, I figured it was Lisa, she’d somehow
sensed my plans, as family members do, and was here to stop me. While approaching, chest
pains worsening, I marveled at how I might not have had to jump for my plan to work.
The woman sitting on a protruding vent wasn’t Lisa, and wasn’t crusty looking to me.
She looked younger than Lisa. She had the successful appearance of a heartless businesswoman.
She checked her watch, then looked around behind her, spotting me. Her face lit up. “Oh, hey!”
she said with the casual joy of a reunion. “I thought I missed you. Boy, what a relief.” She
looked me up and down. “You look so much better this way.”
“Do I know you?”
“No, but I have a suspicion you are thinking bad thoughts, and bad thoughts can hurt,
you know.” She may have looked successful, but she didn’t sound very bright. The light of Venus may have outshined her.
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“Leave me alone.”
She waved me off. “Oh, alright.” She stood, then seemed to remember something. “Oh,
wait! Let me ask you something first, and you have to answer because I’ve been waiting a very
long time to ask you this.”
Curiosity of this woman alone might have kept me on the roof. “Okay.”
“Isn’t there anything that you have always wanted to do in your life?”
I thought of the last twenty years and almost said “no,” but being so close to death makes
a lifetime of flashbacks come the easiest. What came was a vision of immortality. “Yes,” I had to
agree. “There is one thing.”
She smiled. “Well, then, shouldn’t you at least do that one thing before you take the
quick route off this roof?”
The thought that this unknown woman cared enough to dissuade me is a feeling I’ll
never forget. It was enough to block out thoughts of why she was on the roof and why she
assumed I would jump. “Yeah. Thanks for reminding me. I can’t believe I forgot.” Suddenly,
another sunrise was something I wanted to be a part of. I guess all I needed was a reason, and
this woman had given me one. I offered my hand. “You are?”
She took it. “Dorene Yates.”
While heading downstairs, we talked about our lives. She’d been a straight A student in
high school and college, a star soccer player for both schools, and started her own business in
medical supplies, which made it so the next three generations of her descendants will not have to
worry about making money on their own, yet she still found time to volunteer at hospitals and shelters.
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Most recently, she had saved my life.
Dorene Yates was one of those people.
That night I dreamt I fell from the hotel roof. I awakened upon impact with tremendous
pain in my body, which felt nothing at all like arthritis. It was more of a superficial ache, a
phantom pain. But that very morning I began writing “Meathook Confessions.” My meeting with
Dorene Yates had given me the perfect ending to a story that had been bobbing up and down in
my conscious for decades.
There was a comfort in creating the story that was similar to crocheting. It allowed me to
ignore the numb-ache in my fingers. My heart raced with the exhilaration that I was at long last
doing it. It raced to the point of burning irregular beats. After Narissa left us I began taking walks
along Lake Road to fight heart problems. I never took medicine, so this is what I did one last
time. I had to settle it down at least long enough to finish the story. s**t, I never thought you
could be too old to write.
It was a sunny summer weekday, the road practically deserted with everyone at work. I
should’ve felt good with the lake breeze caressing my frail body, but I didn’t. My arthritis was
acting up and chest pains were worsening. Everything seemed dim, as if a dirty window was
blocking my field of vision.
My neighbor Howard – bald, heavyset, middle-aged – was mowing his lawn, and he
waved to me as I passed. When I waved back a shockwave of hot pain emanated from my heart,
but I walked on, sure it would pass again.
By the time I got three houses down, the pain was unbearable. Each irregular beat was a hot poker in my chest.
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I went down to my knees. I thought Jesus, what luck. The first thing I
tried to do solely for myself, the greatest story ever written, will go unfinished. I crossed my
arms over my chest in a meaningless act of fighting off the pain. Waves were crashing into the
shore but it was an ugly sound, like the reaper’s footsteps, and they filled the world.
Not fair, I thought a hundred times. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Not-
A mighty gust of wind blew off the lake, hissing through trees, shaking windows of
nearby houses. It blew over my body, through my body, washing away all the pain, washing the
dirt off the window blocking my field of vision, making everything come into focus, becoming
clearer and brighter. The grass was greener, the asphalt of Lake Road blacker and its yellow lines
more yellow. Eventually, I could differentiate the azurean sky from the cyanean lake, and for the
first time that day, I noticed the scent of my sun-baked surroundings.
Oh, thank God, I thought. It passed again. Now, finally, I can finish my story. But
something inside me didn’t want to finish just yet. Some new and wonderful sense of adventure
wanted me to at least continue my walk to the end of Lake Road and back. So I did, astonished at
how and why my pain had diminished, at how easy walking was. A 1989 Crown Victoria drove
by and a kid yelled, “Loser!” out the window. He looked familiar, which must’ve meant I was
now so old all kids look the same to me. On the way back, a 1998 Pontiac drove by and a
teenage girl screamed, “I love you!” I nodded to her, recognizing her sarcasm but feeling good
about it anyway.
Then I saw a group of people huddled together on the sidewalk. Closer, I saw the body
they were huddled around. I saw Howard’s lawnmower unattended and guessed he’d tried to
catch up to me, probably to talk sports and how the world is going to Hell, when his heavyset physique disagreed and he suffered a heat stroke. A wailing siren in the distance practically
confirmed that theory.
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I started to jog up for investigation, knowing a jog was my limit at such an age. But when
I started, there was no flaring of arthritic pain nor a hot poker stabbing my chest. So I sprinted,
trying to hold in the joyous laughter of reaching a speed I had not in decades, and pain free. My
legs seemed to be moving themselves.
Howard was there, but not on the ground. My smile fell. The man on the ground was the
same person I’d seen in the mirror that morning. He looked sad. My twin, I thought. He finally
found me and died trying to catch up. I reached out my wrinkled, liver spotted hand, only to
discover it was not wrinkled or liver spotted. It was smooth, unblemished, lined with plump
veins. So was my arm. This sight should’ve caused a painful irregular heartbeat but it didn’t. My
heart rate had increased but it did so in peace.
An ambulance arrived. My body was hauled into the back. Howard said, “Be careful with
him.” While accelerating away, sirens wailing, the ambulance faded into nothingness like a fine
smoke. So did the siren. The crowd scattered and soon they faded too.
So many thoughts and emotions tried to tell my body what to do all at once that they
blocked each other from making it down the pipe. I could only stand there clueless.
Then a 1995 Chevy screeched to a stop next to me. A song was coming from the car’s
stereo. It was by Aerosmith, but it was the extremely unbadass 1980’s rock ballad “Angel.”
Steven Tyler sang, “You’re my aaaaan-gel. Come and save me to-niiiiight.” The song abruptly
ended and a teenage voice replaced it. “Dude, you like my new ride? Just got it.” It was Phil
Westhrope.
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I gagged in remembering how horribly his life had ended. My brain came up with, “It
looks like an oven.” My voice surprised me. It was deep and crackly, not raspy and decrepit.
Phil laughed. “Whuhut the ******** are you talking about?”
I shrugged and smiled. I had to smile. He looked better than the ebonized corpse whose
torso had melted to the driver seat with his hands fused to the seat belt buckle. He looked so
much better this way.
He said, “Listen, you want a ride to the beach? A few of us are meeting there.”
Ah, yes. I remembered that day. The first day I saw Narissa in her bikini and had to spend
most of the time underwater. Narissa’s friend would be there too. “I’ll meet you there. I gotta do
something first.”
Phil said, “whatever” and left ten feet of rubber on the road. I ran home. How good it felt.
When I saw my dad flipping burgers in the backyard, a spatula in one hand and a beer in
the other, I had to hold in tears. He said, “Some broad called for ya. Didn’t catch her name
though.” Impulsively I hugged him and thanked him for telling me. Other than the sizzling grill
there was silence. It was the first contact we’d made since my mom passed on. When I pulled
back, his teeth were showing from the middle of his bushy black beard. A smile.
“Don’t mention it.” He scooped up a bloody brown burger. “Almost done.”
“No, thanks.” I flew into the house.
In the bathroom mirror an old friend’s face was pulled tight and had the peach-fuzz of
pubescence. Nothing was sagging or wrinkled. He had a full head of thick dark hair. I locked the
door sat on the toilet and cried my eyes out. If I hadn’t vented the joy somehow, I would’ve
exploded. While weeping, I thought that the waves crashing into the shore had indeed been the reaper’s footsteps. But the mighty gust of lake wind, well, that had been the footsteps of an even higher being.
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This is Heaven. Life.
I am one of those people.
Dad was impressed with my academic turnaround junior year and was particularly
proud of the lines of A’s on every report card through the end of high school. I’m not any
smarter; I forgot everything they tried to teach me in high school before I was twenty-one. Let’s
just say Narissa can’t call me a lazy bum without sounding sarcastic. My dad asks how I do it.
When I tell him the real reason, he says, “Come on, you can do better than that.” He drinks the
same, but now it’s to celebrate. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it won’t prevent his liver from
popping like a poison-filled balloon in eleven years.
In high school Johnny Stringer was a C student and didn’t play sports. He was unaware
of Phil’s impending last ride. I pretended to smell something and looked under the car to
discover the leaking brake fluid. We took a cab to the strip club where Narissa posed as a
lesbian. That night Phil woke up screaming with a high fever. A week later his mother was able
to kiss his forehead before they put him in the ground.
Narissa and I are waiting to devirginize each other. We’re getting married after we finish
our four years of college, but before I start med-school. She commonly says, “Why are you so
perfect for me,” and, “I hate clichés, but I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.” When I give
her the honest response, she says, “You’re so conceited!” I urge her to eat more healthily, to
which she calls me a nerd, but is on the verge of vegetarianism anyway. It must be the pictures of rotting cow carcasses in my biology textbook that are convincing her.
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It doesn’t matter how, I
just want to put off her crocheting for as long as possible. I want to bring her to the hotel roof to
meet Dorene Yates sixty-nine years from now, so at least she can believe. But I don’t think
Dorene will be there. You could say I replaced Johnny, so maybe someone replaced Dorene.
Maybe I wasn’t specially chosen for this and instead all lights flicker a few times before burning
out. For now, I tell her God blinks, allowing us one moment to feel something we already have
felt in a previous life. The French call it Déjà vu.
But of course, she doesn’t need to believe what I tell her.
We’re all around, just the same. I’m guessing everyone is associated with at least one of
us. Sometimes I wonder if we’re angels, but that seems too high a title. I wonder what will
become of me when I meet my end once again. Will I be consciously aware through a third life?
And a fourth? A fifth? Will I finally come to a rest when this life is good enough?
One day I’ll have to finish the afghan. It’s inevitable as death. It’s going to take a lot of
work, and there are no guarantees, but hopefully, this time or next, it’ll come out a little better.
You might be wondering what happened to “Meathook Confessions.” It is, to make a bad
joke, still hanging up on the meathook. There it will remain. Why?
People ask why I stopped the cat fight at the senior prom, why I give a compliment where
an insult was deserved, why I encourage the hopeless. People ask why I tutor, why I volunteer,
why I care.
Why am I writing this?
Sitting here, alive, among other living beings with the sparkle of ambition and love in
their eyes, I wonder this: Why hurt when you can help?
THE SECOND CHANCE PEOPLE
by Mike Page
Why am I writing this?
You’ll probably just dismiss it as another piece of fiction by an unknown writer trying to
get attention. But that’s okay, most of it never happened.
Is it because I now know who the people are?
Probably. Insider info on a rare and extraordinary group is hard to contain. I’m not the
best at keeping secrets.
Is this some divine information that should not be disclosed?
Yes. But that’s okay. You won’t believe it anyway.
But God blinks.
Sitting at my desk, trying to write the first story of my eighty-eight years, when the chest
pains came back, the burning irregular beats. Broken from the spell of the story, the searing of
rheumatoid returned to my fingers like a molten wave.
Figured I’d experienced enough horrors in my life to write a good horror story.
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With these horrors in mind I began writing “Meathook Confessions.” A story about a teenager who
loses his mother to cancer, discovers his girlfriend has been using him to get closer to his
brother, then snaps. He hangs his girlfriend up on a meathook in his closet and uses a blowtorch
to torture the information he wants out of her. On the day before I began writing the perfect
ending had come to me. With it I just knew that “Meathook Confessions” would make readers
wince, cringe, vomit and scare them from ever entering another relationship.
Approaching the story’s climax, I exuded the typical false confidence of first-time
writers, thinking this story was the greatest ever written, it would sweep the literary awards, and
it would replace Shakespearean material in English courses across the country. These exciting
thoughts got my sickly heart racing to dangerous speeds. I had to slow down or it would surely
explode. My remedy for these pains wasn’t the miraculous new medicines. Those remind me too
much of my mom and Narissa. So I took walks along Lake Road, breathed in the fresh lake
breeze. With chest pains intensifying, I walked out the front door thinking about how I had to
finish “Meathook Confessions” no matter what. Eighty-eight years. I waited so long.
Johnny Stringer was one of those people.
Judging by his eyeglasses you wouldn’t think he could party hard. Judging by his little
frame you wouldn’t think he played an important role on the baseball team. But it made sense
that he maintained straight A’s throughout high school without too much smarts. His naturally
happy demeanor bothered me. I couldn’t understand how someone with the pressure to perform
constantly could also deal with tutoring the lesser mortals. I couldn’t understand how someone
who knew so much about the world could be so consistently optimistic about it. People like him simply frustrated me.
Page 3
But I am thankful for him.
At our post-junior-prom party, a self-styled badass named Phil Westhrope suggested we
ditch the hotel and go to a strip club. The limo had already left, but Phil’s car was there, and he
offered to drive me, Johnny and Narissa, the future mother of my child. Johnny pushed up his
glasses; a sure sign he was nervous. He said Phil shouldn’t drive, he’d been drinking too much.
Phil said he’d only had one drink, which was true, and he was okay to drive, but he peppered
this answer with obscenities. Johnny pushed up his glasses and offered to pay for a cab, another
limo, anything. Badass Phil saw this as an opportunity to act hard in front of nearby girls, so he
ordered Narissa and I to get in.
The sincerity on Johnny’s face frightened me. I told Narissa we should stay. She wanted
to go to pose as a lesbian, but was fine staying too.
Phil said, “whatever” and left ten feet of rubber on the asphalt while accelerating away.
Those of us standing in the parking lot watched him leave with the mild curiosity aggressive
drivers generate. Johnny began to cry. A few hundred yards down the road, walled in by pine
trees, Phil came to a sharp turn. He didn’t slow down and there was no screeching of brakes.
The car wavered and went front-first into a pine tree trunk. The hood caught fire and flames
crawled toward the back. There was panic in the parking lot when the driver side door did not
open and Phil did not come out. What did come out was the most Godawful sound I ever heard.
Initially I thought the high gurgling squeals were those of an unfortunate rat caught and cooking
alive in the engine. But a rat would not be heard from hundreds of yards away. Until that night I
didn’t think a human would either.
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Afterward, with those sounds in my head, I asked Narissa if she could imagine what Phil must’ve felt. She said, “You kidding? I can’t even take a hot
shower.” The squeals continued for minutes as some uselessly called for help. When Badass Phil
Westhrope finally went silent it seemed a mercy.
The next time I tasted hamburger I vomited. I haven’t eaten meat since. The smell
reminds me too much of the charred and twisted mass of metal after firemen hosed it down.
Investigators would eventually conclude that a wild animal had chewed open Phil’s brakeline.
That night I had dreamt I went with Phil. When we crashed I awakened with tremendous
pain in my legs and ribs.
Awake. Alive. Johnny Stringer had saved my life and Narissa’s. My first thought after
realizing I’d avoided a hideous death was a guilty one. It wasn’t “now I can apologize to
everyone I’ve ever wronged,” or “now I can have a family,” or even “now I can have sex.” It
was “now I can write a story.”
I always wanted to be a full-time published author. It’s probably from that pesky innate
aspiration for immortality we all have; a successful piece will speak to people long after I lose
the ability to. Unfortunately, immortality can’t always pay the bills. About one in a thousand (or
some demoralizing number) aspiring authors end up writing as a main source of income. The rest
give up or work another full-time job while publishing unheralded works for virtually no profit.
I gave up. A child on the way prompted me to cut the pipe dream and get a job out of
high school. My dad hooked me up with a landscaping job. But he was disappointed with my
choices, with “knocking up that broad,” with skipping out on college, with the possibility of
working s**t jobs the rest of my life, which I did. These are probably reasons why he drank to numb depression, why I never saw him smile, never saw teeth appear between that bushy black beard and mustache. Only in old photographs. I often wondered what would make him smile, but was too scared to try anything.
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Especially after my mother died.
Whether my dad was smiling or not, the s**t jobs were necessary. I was never a good
student. C-average throughout. I told teachers I was still grieving my mother so they would get
off my back. The sad truth is I was lazy.
Lisa was born shortly after graduation. Narissa and I raised her in a less-than-stellar
environment. We couldn’t afford daycare or babysitters so Narissa was a stay-at-home mom. I
worked the s**t jobs, the manual labor, the mindless assembly line; just enough to keep us afloat.
During these difficult early years I grew to hate Narissa and viewed as judge, jury and warden.
My original plan was use Narissa to get closer to her friend. But one day at the lake she wore a
bikini that made me spend most of the time underwater to hide my erections. I decided that bikini
must be hiding something grand. One faulty condom was enough. When Narissa said, “I’m
pregnant,” I heard, “I sentence you to life.”
For the rest of our marriage I wondered how much better my life would’ve been if spent
with Narissa’s friend. Man, did I ever want her friend. Oh, lord.
Still, neither of us wanted to bring a child into a broken home, so we stayed together to
raise Lisa. When times got hard, Narissa would call me a lazy bum, which I was. I would call her
a broad, but meaning of those names eventually changed from afflicting to affectionate. When
Lisa moved out we stayed together anyway. Neither of us had the heart to break our sacred
marriage vows, or the courage to mess with a good thing.
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We were sixty-eight when Narissa’a stomach cancer came back for a final and most
powerful time. By the end, my broad had no hair or eyebrows, the skin was pulled all tight and
shiny against her face and skull like latex, and her eyes were sunken beads in their sockets.
First my mom, then my wife.
Lisa and her family were in the waiting room when Narissa left us. I was holding her
hand. It was hard to look at her, I hate to admit, and the medicinal aroma enshrouding her bed
turned my stomach. She’d been unconscious. Her hand, harboring more wrinkles, liver spots and
varicose veins than the first time I held it, squeezed mine in some final attempt to hold on.
Arthritis flared as Narissa grinded my hand bones together like kindling. I thought this is what
Phil Westhrope must’ve felt all over his body back on prom night. Christ, what a way to go.
Narissa’s body clenched with her fist, as if trying to hold in life, or exude it. I wondered where
her strength came from. It didn’t look like she had any muscle left. My mother had simply
withered away like a leaf in winter, but apparently Narissa had some reason to hang on through
the season. It scared me because I thought she was going to recover again, only to end up going
through the whole painful process again.
Softly, I said, “Let go, ya broad. Just let go. You’re hurting me.” I meant my hand then,
but I think now I meant more than my hand. Suddenly, she let go. Her body slackened, as did her
grip. Pain lessened as her last breath escaped her. The EKG did its monotonous cry. With my
mom I’d mistakenly stayed at bedside while her blood stilled, and the resulting maroon-skinned
skeleton had given me nightmares for months. With Narissa, I kissed her hand and left the room.
Live and learn, I guess.
I told the doctor about Narissa’s pre-mortem paroxysm.
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He theorized that the tumor in her stomach had grown big enough to block the blood flow in a major artery causing an overflow
of blood in other arteries, one of which was in her brain and had a weak spot where blood pooled
up and punched through. The aneurysm caused her brain to send out one last surge the way a
light bulb has a burst of luminosity before burning out.
When I told Lisa, sparing her the light bulb metaphor, she broke down and I hugged her.
“She’s better now,” I said. “You can go home knowing she’s not suffering anymore. Okay?” As
she left, I realized two things. At fifty, Lisa was finally starting to remind me of her mother. And
at fifty, she was going home with her family. I was going home alone. But with this epiphany
came no sadness. What came was a guilty thought: Now I can write a story.
The three years between my retirement and Narissa’s passing probably could’ve been a
good time to write. Instead circumstance prompted me to dedicate my time to Narissa, who was
experiencing her first waves of tumor growth, tumor removal, rehabilitation, tumor regrowth and
repeat. So I figured since she was finally at peace I could rekindle that old dream from so many
decades ago.
But Narissa was not at peace. She was all over the cheap lakeside house we’d inherited
from my dad. Everything inside reminded me of her. What caused me to nearly lose my mind
was the afghan lying precariously in Narissa’s favorite chair. It was half-finished, with the
crochet hooks still sticking through it. She’d claimed to not ever want to take up crocheting,
because that’s when she’d know she’s an old woman. I thought of the girl who’d once wanted to
enter a strip club posing as a lesbian and had to agree. Yet she took it up anyway. It took her
mind away from the sickness, she had said.
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I held it to my face and breathed in her scents. It might as well have been an onion
because all the tears that went unshed in the hospital followed. I cried into that blanket of yarn.
She’d only been gone three hours, but the unfinished afghan suggested she wasn’t coming back.
Guilt assisted the grief. I was reminded of everything she’d wanted us to do that we’d
never done – movies, books, places. Forgetfulness comes with aging, but the afghan reminded
me of what she said. When she talked I listened; probably the reason she never got any cats.
It took me twenty years to do everything I could remember. Twenty years seems like a
long time to complete a list of recreational activities, but those activities aren’t cheap. Plus, the
older you get, the slower you move, and the slower you move, the faster that young man called
Time can speed past you. Not to forget I was, as Narissa aptly put, a lazy bum.
The last item was to finish Narissa’s afghan. Last because I deliberately kept putting it
off. Some sadistic part of me suggested that if I never completed the task, Narissa would come
home to do so. When I finished it was like losing her again.
There was comfort in the act of weaving all that yarn, in imposing order into a chaotic mess of threads. I could understand why Narissa found it therapeutic at that point in her life. Concentrating on twining together the yarn on my lap allowed me to ignore the synchronous numbness and burning in my fingers. It was comforting right up until I realized I ruined it. Narissa’s part was going along smoothly, then I intervened and made a muddle of the rest.
Eighty-eight years old with nothing left to do and no one left to do it with. Merely seeing
the sun rise no longer interested me. After some contemplation, I made a decision. Lisa was old
enough to get over it, or at least understand.
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I reserved a hotel room for the 19th floor. That would be high enough. But when I got
there it didn’t seem enough. Something about the roof suggested going out on top. I tipped the
nearest custodian $500 to show me to the roof, to which he said, “s**t, this is my lucky day!
You’re the second old crust bag today to pay me to go up there.”
“Did the other come down yet?”
“I dunno, Gramps. Follow me.”
No problem. I would simply wait for the other “old crust bag” to leave. On the roof,
Venus was in the west sky and was the only celestial object visible over the city lights, so that
side seemed appropriate. The other old crust bag was a woman. Chest pains came with the
thought that it was Narissa’s ghost, here to condemn me for ruining her afghan. In the twilight,
she certainly looked like Narissa. With a rational mind, I figured it was Lisa, she’d somehow
sensed my plans, as family members do, and was here to stop me. While approaching, chest
pains worsening, I marveled at how I might not have had to jump for my plan to work.
The woman sitting on a protruding vent wasn’t Lisa, and wasn’t crusty looking to me.
She looked younger than Lisa. She had the successful appearance of a heartless businesswoman.
She checked her watch, then looked around behind her, spotting me. Her face lit up. “Oh, hey!”
she said with the casual joy of a reunion. “I thought I missed you. Boy, what a relief.” She
looked me up and down. “You look so much better this way.”
“Do I know you?”
“No, but I have a suspicion you are thinking bad thoughts, and bad thoughts can hurt,
you know.” She may have looked successful, but she didn’t sound very bright. The light of Venus may have outshined her.
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“Leave me alone.”
She waved me off. “Oh, alright.” She stood, then seemed to remember something. “Oh,
wait! Let me ask you something first, and you have to answer because I’ve been waiting a very
long time to ask you this.”
Curiosity of this woman alone might have kept me on the roof. “Okay.”
“Isn’t there anything that you have always wanted to do in your life?”
I thought of the last twenty years and almost said “no,” but being so close to death makes
a lifetime of flashbacks come the easiest. What came was a vision of immortality. “Yes,” I had to
agree. “There is one thing.”
She smiled. “Well, then, shouldn’t you at least do that one thing before you take the
quick route off this roof?”
The thought that this unknown woman cared enough to dissuade me is a feeling I’ll
never forget. It was enough to block out thoughts of why she was on the roof and why she
assumed I would jump. “Yeah. Thanks for reminding me. I can’t believe I forgot.” Suddenly,
another sunrise was something I wanted to be a part of. I guess all I needed was a reason, and
this woman had given me one. I offered my hand. “You are?”
She took it. “Dorene Yates.”
While heading downstairs, we talked about our lives. She’d been a straight A student in
high school and college, a star soccer player for both schools, and started her own business in
medical supplies, which made it so the next three generations of her descendants will not have to
worry about making money on their own, yet she still found time to volunteer at hospitals and shelters.
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Most recently, she had saved my life.
Dorene Yates was one of those people.
That night I dreamt I fell from the hotel roof. I awakened upon impact with tremendous
pain in my body, which felt nothing at all like arthritis. It was more of a superficial ache, a
phantom pain. But that very morning I began writing “Meathook Confessions.” My meeting with
Dorene Yates had given me the perfect ending to a story that had been bobbing up and down in
my conscious for decades.
There was a comfort in creating the story that was similar to crocheting. It allowed me to
ignore the numb-ache in my fingers. My heart raced with the exhilaration that I was at long last
doing it. It raced to the point of burning irregular beats. After Narissa left us I began taking walks
along Lake Road to fight heart problems. I never took medicine, so this is what I did one last
time. I had to settle it down at least long enough to finish the story. s**t, I never thought you
could be too old to write.
It was a sunny summer weekday, the road practically deserted with everyone at work. I
should’ve felt good with the lake breeze caressing my frail body, but I didn’t. My arthritis was
acting up and chest pains were worsening. Everything seemed dim, as if a dirty window was
blocking my field of vision.
My neighbor Howard – bald, heavyset, middle-aged – was mowing his lawn, and he
waved to me as I passed. When I waved back a shockwave of hot pain emanated from my heart,
but I walked on, sure it would pass again.
By the time I got three houses down, the pain was unbearable. Each irregular beat was a hot poker in my chest.
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I went down to my knees. I thought Jesus, what luck. The first thing I
tried to do solely for myself, the greatest story ever written, will go unfinished. I crossed my
arms over my chest in a meaningless act of fighting off the pain. Waves were crashing into the
shore but it was an ugly sound, like the reaper’s footsteps, and they filled the world.
Not fair, I thought a hundred times. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Not-
A mighty gust of wind blew off the lake, hissing through trees, shaking windows of
nearby houses. It blew over my body, through my body, washing away all the pain, washing the
dirt off the window blocking my field of vision, making everything come into focus, becoming
clearer and brighter. The grass was greener, the asphalt of Lake Road blacker and its yellow lines
more yellow. Eventually, I could differentiate the azurean sky from the cyanean lake, and for the
first time that day, I noticed the scent of my sun-baked surroundings.
Oh, thank God, I thought. It passed again. Now, finally, I can finish my story. But
something inside me didn’t want to finish just yet. Some new and wonderful sense of adventure
wanted me to at least continue my walk to the end of Lake Road and back. So I did, astonished at
how and why my pain had diminished, at how easy walking was. A 1989 Crown Victoria drove
by and a kid yelled, “Loser!” out the window. He looked familiar, which must’ve meant I was
now so old all kids look the same to me. On the way back, a 1998 Pontiac drove by and a
teenage girl screamed, “I love you!” I nodded to her, recognizing her sarcasm but feeling good
about it anyway.
Then I saw a group of people huddled together on the sidewalk. Closer, I saw the body
they were huddled around. I saw Howard’s lawnmower unattended and guessed he’d tried to
catch up to me, probably to talk sports and how the world is going to Hell, when his heavyset physique disagreed and he suffered a heat stroke. A wailing siren in the distance practically
confirmed that theory.
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I started to jog up for investigation, knowing a jog was my limit at such an age. But when
I started, there was no flaring of arthritic pain nor a hot poker stabbing my chest. So I sprinted,
trying to hold in the joyous laughter of reaching a speed I had not in decades, and pain free. My
legs seemed to be moving themselves.
Howard was there, but not on the ground. My smile fell. The man on the ground was the
same person I’d seen in the mirror that morning. He looked sad. My twin, I thought. He finally
found me and died trying to catch up. I reached out my wrinkled, liver spotted hand, only to
discover it was not wrinkled or liver spotted. It was smooth, unblemished, lined with plump
veins. So was my arm. This sight should’ve caused a painful irregular heartbeat but it didn’t. My
heart rate had increased but it did so in peace.
An ambulance arrived. My body was hauled into the back. Howard said, “Be careful with
him.” While accelerating away, sirens wailing, the ambulance faded into nothingness like a fine
smoke. So did the siren. The crowd scattered and soon they faded too.
So many thoughts and emotions tried to tell my body what to do all at once that they
blocked each other from making it down the pipe. I could only stand there clueless.
Then a 1995 Chevy screeched to a stop next to me. A song was coming from the car’s
stereo. It was by Aerosmith, but it was the extremely unbadass 1980’s rock ballad “Angel.”
Steven Tyler sang, “You’re my aaaaan-gel. Come and save me to-niiiiight.” The song abruptly
ended and a teenage voice replaced it. “Dude, you like my new ride? Just got it.” It was Phil
Westhrope.
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I gagged in remembering how horribly his life had ended. My brain came up with, “It
looks like an oven.” My voice surprised me. It was deep and crackly, not raspy and decrepit.
Phil laughed. “Whuhut the ******** are you talking about?”
I shrugged and smiled. I had to smile. He looked better than the ebonized corpse whose
torso had melted to the driver seat with his hands fused to the seat belt buckle. He looked so
much better this way.
He said, “Listen, you want a ride to the beach? A few of us are meeting there.”
Ah, yes. I remembered that day. The first day I saw Narissa in her bikini and had to spend
most of the time underwater. Narissa’s friend would be there too. “I’ll meet you there. I gotta do
something first.”
Phil said, “whatever” and left ten feet of rubber on the road. I ran home. How good it felt.
When I saw my dad flipping burgers in the backyard, a spatula in one hand and a beer in
the other, I had to hold in tears. He said, “Some broad called for ya. Didn’t catch her name
though.” Impulsively I hugged him and thanked him for telling me. Other than the sizzling grill
there was silence. It was the first contact we’d made since my mom passed on. When I pulled
back, his teeth were showing from the middle of his bushy black beard. A smile.
“Don’t mention it.” He scooped up a bloody brown burger. “Almost done.”
“No, thanks.” I flew into the house.
In the bathroom mirror an old friend’s face was pulled tight and had the peach-fuzz of
pubescence. Nothing was sagging or wrinkled. He had a full head of thick dark hair. I locked the
door sat on the toilet and cried my eyes out. If I hadn’t vented the joy somehow, I would’ve
exploded. While weeping, I thought that the waves crashing into the shore had indeed been the reaper’s footsteps. But the mighty gust of lake wind, well, that had been the footsteps of an even higher being.
Page 15
This is Heaven. Life.
I am one of those people.
Dad was impressed with my academic turnaround junior year and was particularly
proud of the lines of A’s on every report card through the end of high school. I’m not any
smarter; I forgot everything they tried to teach me in high school before I was twenty-one. Let’s
just say Narissa can’t call me a lazy bum without sounding sarcastic. My dad asks how I do it.
When I tell him the real reason, he says, “Come on, you can do better than that.” He drinks the
same, but now it’s to celebrate. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it won’t prevent his liver from
popping like a poison-filled balloon in eleven years.
In high school Johnny Stringer was a C student and didn’t play sports. He was unaware
of Phil’s impending last ride. I pretended to smell something and looked under the car to
discover the leaking brake fluid. We took a cab to the strip club where Narissa posed as a
lesbian. That night Phil woke up screaming with a high fever. A week later his mother was able
to kiss his forehead before they put him in the ground.
Narissa and I are waiting to devirginize each other. We’re getting married after we finish
our four years of college, but before I start med-school. She commonly says, “Why are you so
perfect for me,” and, “I hate clichés, but I feel like I’ve known you my whole life.” When I give
her the honest response, she says, “You’re so conceited!” I urge her to eat more healthily, to
which she calls me a nerd, but is on the verge of vegetarianism anyway. It must be the pictures of rotting cow carcasses in my biology textbook that are convincing her.
Page 16
It doesn’t matter how, I
just want to put off her crocheting for as long as possible. I want to bring her to the hotel roof to
meet Dorene Yates sixty-nine years from now, so at least she can believe. But I don’t think
Dorene will be there. You could say I replaced Johnny, so maybe someone replaced Dorene.
Maybe I wasn’t specially chosen for this and instead all lights flicker a few times before burning
out. For now, I tell her God blinks, allowing us one moment to feel something we already have
felt in a previous life. The French call it Déjà vu.
But of course, she doesn’t need to believe what I tell her.
We’re all around, just the same. I’m guessing everyone is associated with at least one of
us. Sometimes I wonder if we’re angels, but that seems too high a title. I wonder what will
become of me when I meet my end once again. Will I be consciously aware through a third life?
And a fourth? A fifth? Will I finally come to a rest when this life is good enough?
One day I’ll have to finish the afghan. It’s inevitable as death. It’s going to take a lot of
work, and there are no guarantees, but hopefully, this time or next, it’ll come out a little better.
You might be wondering what happened to “Meathook Confessions.” It is, to make a bad
joke, still hanging up on the meathook. There it will remain. Why?
People ask why I stopped the cat fight at the senior prom, why I give a compliment where
an insult was deserved, why I encourage the hopeless. People ask why I tutor, why I volunteer,
why I care.
Why am I writing this?
Sitting here, alive, among other living beings with the sparkle of ambition and love in
their eyes, I wonder this: Why hurt when you can help?
