I turned to him and asked, “Well, then, who the hell is scoring this paper, you, Becky, Bill, or me?”
“Why you are, of course.” Jim looked frightened.
“Fine, then it’s a two.”
“Mr. Federson, I think we need to talk with Bill.” Suddenly, mellow Jim wasn’t so mellow anymore.
It’s hard to understand how a person with a PhD, two people with Master’s degrees in English, and a guy with two years of college (me) could get into a shouting match over how to spell c-a-t, but we did, and that’s how I lost my job with the testing company. As usual, it was irrelevant whether I walked out on the job or was kicked out of it. As a parting shot, “Project Captain” Bill suggested I seek professional help.
Yah, like I’ve never heard that before.
I threw my ID badge on the receptionist’s desk, stalked out into the parking lot with stern resolve and…couldn’t get the door open to my 1976 Dodge Charger. After hammering it with my fist a couple of times, the door opened with a rusty screech, and soon I was roaring out of the parking lot in a cloud of blue smoke.
I drove around aimlessly, burning precious gas while I burned off my anxiety. The Charger was a broken-down mess; I never washed or waxed it, never changed the oil—never even looked at the dipstick—and never fixed the huge dent on the left rear panel. The dash was cracked to pieces. The radio and air conditioner hadn’t worked for years. Fast food wrappers, grocery receipts, and brittle envelopes of old mail covered the floor. And in the back seat rose a pile of dirty laundry that had been accumulating for weeks. I glanced at the pile through the cock-eyed rearview mirror, then looked down at what I was wearing: a dirty pinstriped business shirt with an unbuttoned collar and mismatched socks. As much as I hated the routine, it was time to do the laundry.
Soon, I was parked at the local laundromat and, as usual on laundry day, my temper was rising because I was reliving a memory of someone taking my wet clothes out of the dryer, throwing them in a heap on the floor, and putting his clothes in their place. This gremlin-enhanced memory came from an incident in the dorm laundry room while I was attending Southern Illinois University in 1971. As usual, the gremlins tormented me as I watched my tattered 2009 clothing spin around in the dryer. When the dryer stopped, I reached in to test the clothes.
Still wet! Shit!
As I was reaching into my pocket for two more precious quarters, my fingers touched the sticky leather case of my cell phone. I hadn’t talked with Ronald Stackhouse for a while. He had helped me organize my thinking when I worked for WSIU, the radio station at Southern, so that when the record ended I wasn’t sitting there with nothing to say. In 1999, he helped me to find another job when I got blown out the door of WREE, the all-news station, and helped me get back on my pivot when I was axed from the security, proofreading, and janitorial jobs. He always handled me with great tact, as if not being able to hold a job, though troubling, was just a glitch in the grand format of life. Ronald was stability personified, so the gremlins were afraid of him.
I punched the speed dial, but nothing happened because the battery was dead again; it had virtually no charging capacity left. I stuffed the phone back into my pocket quickly, before I surrendered to the impulse of throwing it against the dryer.
An hour later I threw the clean laundry into the back of my car, a place it would stay for another few weeks, for it was destined to make its way back into my house piece by piece, as I needed it. Change was stressful to me, even small changes. And, as of the fall of 2009, I was making fewer and fewer changes in my life because I didn’t want to risk losing what little I had.
I stumbled over the cell phone adapter on the back seat, plugged it into the cigarette lighter, and called Ronald. Before he could even say “Hello” I barked,
“Goddamn it, Ron, this has been one hell of a goddamn day!”
“Who? What? Oh, it’s you, Pete.”
“Damned right it is! I’m at the laundry, and do you remember that son-of-a-bitch who yanked my wet clothes out of the dryer and threw them on the floor when we were in college?”
“He did it again?”
“Oh, funny, Ronald! Do you remember?”
“Pete, that was almost forty years ago.”
“Well, it seems like yesterday because I got pissed off all over again while I was watching my laundry in the dryer a few minutes ago.”
“And?”
“Nothing else, just that.”
“Pete, have you been drinking a lot of coffee again?”
“Not yet. That’s the next stop.”
“Well, don’t. You know that coffee exacerbates your, uhhhhh, you know…”
As Ronald’s voice trailed off, I started the car.
“Ronald, I lost my job today,” I said as I drove out of the parking lot.
“What, not a….uhhh…what happened?”
“The usual. An argument.”
There was a long pause at the other end. I turned out into the street.
“Pete…” Ronald said. “You know the format: take a few days off, update the resume, get your nice clothes ready for an interview…”
I’d heard this advice many times from Ronald. And every time he was right.
“I might have something you can do for me…” Ronald continued. “Do you still have that good mic of yours, and a laptop? Are you still connected to the Internet?
“Yah.” I knew what was coming.
“Well, you could read a few newscasts a day for the station. You won’t have to cover any news. You won’t even have to write it, and the money’s good.”
Ronald worked at WSW in Omaha.
“Ron, I’m burned out on radio…I…”
I was starting to tear up, and I think Ronald sensed it.
“Pete, look. Take some time off. Get your head together, and call me back in a few days, and we’ll talk. Okay?”
“Okay,” I choked.
I didn’t know what Ronald saw in me. I really didn’t.
I threw the cell into the back of the car, and it landed on top of the laundry pile just as I rolled into the Shop King parking lot. Shop King featured not only the cheapest groceries in Fox Lake, but also a 25-year-old redhaired beauty named Lilly. I found a bottle of Old Spice rolling around on the floor, splashed a copious amount on my face, and went in.
In a few minutes, I was standing at the end of Lilly’s line, carrying a basket that included a 16-ounce jar with a black and white label that simply said PEANUT BUTTER. Lilly lifted me out of morbid depression and into boundless joy as she scanned the peanut butter, a loaf of 99-cent bread, a small onion, and a small jar of mayonnaise. When she got to the tuna fish, I was ready to make my move.
“This isn’t really for me,” I said. “It’s for my pet tiger.”
Lilly looked up with expression of disinterest. She knew it probably wasn’t worth the energy to respond, but since she was already bored to distraction, almost any stimulation would be welcome.
“Pet tiger?” she said.
“Yeah, he’s in the car. Do you want to see him? He loves nice girls.”
Oops, that was dumb.
Lilly’s expression hardened.
“No, my boyfriend doesn’t like tigers,” she said as she thrust the plastic bag full of groceries at me. She made sure that when I took the bag, our fingers