This meant he had just gotten started.
A week later I called once more and left him a message, which was never returned. Several more calls and emails went unanswered as well. Six months went by with no Bob, until finally, he popped out of the ether like an electronic jack in the box.
“Hey, I’ve got a great way to make money. We can sell collapsible shields for laptops so people can work in the sun, and the screen won't be washed out...”
The water filter project was never mentioned again, because Bob was avoiding accountability by hiding in his home surrounded by an electronic moat teeming with unanswered emails and ignored voice messages. He was like a child who was playing blocks with one of his friends, saw another friend playing marbles, and ran over to play with him for a while, until he spotted a kid climbing a tree, and ran to join him. Bob had never grown up.
And then there was my former wife Tammy, who changed her name back from Tammy Federson to Tammy Allen. Once upon a time, she’d been really good-looking. She was also intelligent and her parents had money. I was head over heels in love with her when I was at SIU in the early 70’s. But Tammy was attending the University of Illinois 100 miles to the north, so it was a long distance relationship. When I flunked out of college and joined the Army, we stayed in touch, with letters and phone calls during those two years. We did everything but truly get to know one another. After I came home, we got married immediately, and finally, finally, we were together, and it was paradise…for about six weeks. We found out the hard way that we were indeed made for each other. In fact, Tammy and I were as interchangeable as two peas in a pod—two nervous people living together, which made our union about as happy as the marriage between a jackhammer and a buzzsaw. We divorced childless, I saved no photos from the marriage, and I never wanted to talk to her again. I still didn’t want to talk to her. Yet…
I went out to my car, retrieved my cell phone from under the clothes, and dialed Tammy’s number. Even a conversation with a jackhammer would be better than silence. I sat down on the kitchen chair, but felt my bottom touch the seat only after a long delay. I started to feel woozy, something like the sensation I got after a roller coaster ride at Riverview—a big amusement park on the Chicago River—when I was a kid. The heebie-jeebies ran up my spine as I greeted Tammy with:
“I lost my job yesterday, and I’m feeling as if I’m moving when I’m really standing still...”
“Oh that’s too bad. They’re threatening to foreclose on my house,” said Tammy.
“What, again?”
“Oops, hang on, I’ve got another ca—“
Two minutes later Tammy came back on.
“That was them, and this time, they mean it,” Tammy said. “They told me that unless I pay at least $600 of the $7000 I owe them from the past six months, they’ll start eviction proceedings.”
Tammy kept hopping from one crisis to another, with her cell phone in one hand and her computer’s mouse in the other, so that all of her “friends” would instantly get the play-by-play account. From Tammy’s stream of consciousness emails with no paragraphs, no capital letters, no spell check and only dots for punctuation, I’d learned that she was making $25,000 a year as a security guard, had her second ex-husband and her son cosign the loan for a $150,000 house, which depreciated by $50,000 because she couldn’t maintain it, and now she couldn’t pay the loan installments, either. She also owed another $80,000 on credit card balances, was driving around in her brother’s car, and frittering away her money by eating at fast food places, devouring chocolates, and enrolling in pricey weight loss programs.
“Tammy, I’ve told you again and again…” I was starting to get worked up.
“Hang on, Pete; I just got another ca—”
Five minutes later: “Back with you, Chet,” chirped Tammy.
“It’s Pete, goddamn it!”
“Don’t you talk to me like…”
“Listen, Tammy, you can’t possibly pay for that house on what you’re making. You need to get rid of—”
“I’m never going to sell it! No apartment will allow twelve cats, it’s worth less than it was when I bought it, and I don’t want to drag my son into bankruptcy and ruin my good credit, and shit, I got another call. I’ll text you—”
And Tammy was gone in a storm of text messages and call waiting. She wasn’t much different from Bob, except that Bob hid in cyberspace, while Tammy bombarded people with endless communications, so that she would have no time to listen to anyone. By the end of Tammy’s electronic monologue, my teeth were clenched and buzzing. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and suddenly, it was awfully quiet in the Federson household, and awfully boring.
I was sitting with the coffee mug resting on my knee, amidst the mail and books, in a nauseous funk on the floor of an eerily quiet kitchen. To quickly fill what I knew would be a lonely, unbearable silence, I turned on the radio to WFMT.
I gulped down the last of the coffee as Liszt’s 1st Piano Concerto began with Martha Argerich at the piano. When Martha punched out her first chords, they resonated in my solar plexus, displacing the gremlins and stimulating me to action. Soon, I was full of gremlin-resistant, heebie-jeebie-blocking positive energy.
I needed to move, to get something done, something tangible. I needed a project and that required a decision. I spotted the dust mop that had been leaning against the wall for so long that it had left a mark.
Decision made!
I poked the mop under the bed and pulled out bits of rotted food, dead insects, dust bunnies, dirty pens, napkins, wadded-up notebook paper… and a bottle of pills.
That’s where they went.
At one time, I had put all of my pills—uppers, downers, pills for depression, pills for lethargy, and pills for anxiety—into one big bottle. The rationale was that it would be harder to lose one container than five. Right? Then I lost the bottle by forgetting about it after I’d thrown it against the wall the year before.
Another swipe with the mop revealed the presence of The Excitement Of Algebra!, a library book due two years ago. A few years before, I’d had some ideas about going back to college to get my Bachelor’s degree, but I had to repair my miserable undergraduate GPA first. At the top of the academic list was algebra. I had failed it twice in high school and twice in college, and spent so much time obsessing over it that my other classes suffered, which was why I’d flunked out of the university at the end of my sophomore year. With a low draft number, I’d traded the dormitories of college for the barracks of Vietnam. Within 24-months, the Army and I parted company—with prejudice—because my captain was convinced that I didn’t have what it took to be a soldier.
So, the gremlins had made sure that my study of algebra was indelibly linked to my tour of Vietnam. I threw The Excitement of Algebra!, which I had never opened, on the kitchen floor.
Next, the manic dust mop dragged out a clanking plastic Kroger bag with a stylized sketch of the American flag, under which was printed: 1776-1976. In this patriotic bag was a half-full fifth of vodka with a price sticker on the cap: $1.50. There was also a pocket watch with a fisherman etched on its cover that I had bought in Europe while on a student tour in 1970. Next to the watch was an old, yellowed computer-punched photo ID of me, made four decades and fifty pounds ago, and clipped to the ID was a bright photo, taken in the super-realistic colors of Kodachrome, of an olive-skinned girl with high cheekbones, brown eyes and curly brown hair parted in the middle.
Catherine!
The shade of red in the booth in which she was sitting was brightly saturated, and the dark wood wall behind her seemed to glow: Catherine was sitting across from me in a booth at Pagliai’s Pizza in Carbondale, during my sophomore year of college. And for a moment, I was there again, sitting across from the girl I should have married.
In 1971, I’d