Waking up
He always felt the same when he woke up. Late. A nagging pressure to move forward, to get things done, to earn. With it came the fact of his failure. It followed him everywhere. Even when he was working it still didn't let up, not all the way. But if he could get right down to it and really make things happen, well, then he forgot for a little while. For a timeless few moments the minutes strung themselves together one after the other, without any apparent effort or cost. He was meticulous at any task he accepted. Of course all too soon his reverie would be broken and the feelings of anxiety and shameful lateness returned. He worked a lot.
It hadn't always been this way. When he was a teenager he'd been an amateur deadbeat, sleeping on the beach and kindly folks couch's all summer just because it was so easy. Renting any old place in the winter just so it was cheap and he didn't have to work all the time...and usually walking out on it anyway just to hitch hike someplace, or no place, eventually all over the west coast. He liked hitch hiking. Sleeping outdoors and being alone for hours suited him, plus he loved the highway for itself.
When he finally got a car it was the end of an era. Everybody made a big deal out of it. His friends treated every grown up thing he did as a freak occurrence. "How could he have started a bank account? Do they have banks in coffee shops now?" or, "He's turning twenty-one? Impossible!" and so on. He knew it and what's more, he was fine with it. He liked being the local symbol of youthful abandon. It suited his vanity.
One cold spring evening he had his last ride drop him off downtown. It'd been an unusually long run and he was tired. He sat on a barstool at a regular hangout until he spotted a friend. He spent that night at the friends place and the very next day he went out and got a job landscaping. Taking the first job he stumbled across as usual. It was time to work again, for a while.
It was a good job for him, he liked being outdoors all day and pretty soon he realized he liked the work too. He decided to stick around and learn. After a year he quit and opened his own little yard maintenance business with one employee. He was good at it, plus the house wives found him charming. Soon he had more work than he and his helper could handle so he hired another guy, and then a couple more. Pretty soon he bought a mortgage on a little house, got a new truck and some nicer tools. And so it went.
Then there was a summer like any other. Of course there was a girl. They'd seen each other around town for years but had only met and hooked up a few weeks earlier, nothing serious. When she informed him she was pregnant she made it clear that she didn't want him in her life. He didn't know her well but their was a finality in her voice that he recognized, an authority he'd not sensed before. She was closed to him now. If, in fact, she had ever been open.
She told him it was her decision anyway, whether or not to have the baby, and that she'd be fine without him around, better even, because she was an "independent spirit" with an "old soul". She said he would just hold her back and that no one had the right to do that to another person.
Reeling from it all, he still managed to sputter that he wanted to be there for any kid that was his, that he felt a responsibility. She wasn't interested and simply continued to tell him how it was going to be. He was too surprised and taken aback to argue much. Over the next few years he often wondered if he had really meant it when he said it. That he wanted to be there.
She took him to the cleaners of course. His was a studied ignorance and he simply took her at her word; she didn't want him around but naturally expected his help financially as she "got on with her life". Of course he would be allowed to see his child. Of course they would stay friends. Of course.
She sang this refrain each time they met. Each time her belly was larger. When she saw at last that he was cowed, that he was resigned to her getting her way, she promptly announced she was gay, produced a steady girlfriend and moved to San Diego, over a thousand miles away. All this before the child was even born. And that, he thought, was that. Life stinks. He went back to work.
******
A couple months later he got a birth notice in the mail. A girl, so many pounds, so and so inches, and more he didn't read. Along with it there was a Polaroid photo of a wrinkly red face framed in white cloth and the first request for money. He put the picture on his bathroom mirror. The next day he mailed a check. He sent one every month after that.
As far as contact went, she sent him letters from time to time, more or less demanding extra money for this or that calamity, and he usually got a few photos of his growing daughter along with. Sometimes he'd see her mother’s stout girlfriend in the background, on the couch or at the table, holding the Baby in her lap. They frequently changed address's and shrugged off any efforts he made to set a date to come down for a visit to see his Daughter. It was never "a good time". It was always going to happen "real soon".
He was a soft touch and always gave what he had without wondering how the money was actually spent. He took it for granted the child was loved and treasured by her mother, dyke bitch though she was. Hell, because of it. The lesbians he knew all deified the female. How could they not take good care of a girl child? At least that was what he thought until he got a letter from the California department of social services.
The letter said the child had been remanded to the custody of the State and placed in foster care after Welfare caseworkers reported an ongoing pattern of neglect in the home. It was only when the child was so committed that his name came to their attention. There was a phone number on the letter. It said to call.
"Why that's right...you just popped up in our computer! Didn't you?", the irritatingly cheerful clerk that answered the phone warbled on and on, like they were talking about something light, like they were old friends. The call was excruciating. At long last he was given a date and time to appear. He thanked her before hanging up.
When he got there they treated him with obvious distaste. The judge called him a "dead beat dad" and informed him that he owed the State back every penny of aid the baby and the baby's mother had received, including the original hospital bill for the child’s delivery. Then one of the social workers present began to read aloud from a file.
It turns out that the whole time he’d been mailing those checks the mother of his child had been on Welfare, Medicare, Food stamps and any other social service or charity she could qualify for. She was also currently in a Methadone program as well as participating in Alcoholics Anonymous as per court order.
The judge went on to say that any aid the girlfriend had received could arguably also be laid at his door for he had, indeed, been the sole financial provider for that household for nearly a year. He said they'd get back to him on that one.
They put a lean on his bank accounts, draining them, and then gave him a payment schedule based upon his income for the previous six months. It was a steep one. He didn't think to argue. He signed what they put in front of him and left.
With no access to his savings he had to scramble to pay his basic bills and it was the first of what were to become routinely close shaves with the mortgage on his little house. There was a ripple effect that stretched over months. He defaulted on his truck loan before he knew what hit him. A couple times he was even late making payroll for his crew. That wasn't popular.
What made things worse was, he'd become so distraught that he just didn't get his head around anything anymore, didn't make any effort to sort it all out. Things went undone. He kept thinking about the little girl in the pictures, His little girl, how he'd let her down, how he hadn't even cared enough to go see her! no, no, no, not him...because he talked himself into believing it was ok and it could wait, he'd get around to it and it would be ok...but it wasn't, It wasn't ok...a year old already...how could she be a year old? Now they wouldn't even tell him were she was. They said he had no say in the matter, no legal right. Now it was too late to get around to it, too late for anything. Most nights he picked up a drink he wound up closing the bar, but he still got up in the morning and went to work every day. It seemed to help.
He had to sort of start from the bottom again so far as work was concerned. His route had been growing fast, before the rug got yanked. Not being able to buy materials or pay regular wages had its effect quickly and now he didn't even have his same old guy who'd been with him from the start. He still had the core of his route and he still went to work.
He could hardly blame his employees. He'd have quit himself, if he could just figure out how to do it. Instead he worked all the harder now that he was alone. His friends at the bar started talking about how he had "gotten all quiet" and "wasn't any fun anymore". They were right.
With an old and frankly sketchy Ford quarter ton he kept at work as well as he was able. Of course, it didn't look good to show up in a loud ass piece of crap belching smoke and the slightest load made it handle like a boat, but he had to make money all the same. Finally his visits to the local watering hole dwindled to nothing. He told himself he was tired of those people anyway, laughing all the time at nothing. His friends wondered aloud what'd become of him; their rebel. After a while they talked about something else.
In the evenings after work he almost always went straight home. He took to taking out all the photographs the child’s mother had sent. He would lay them out on the kitchen table and try to see into the backgrounds. Was the place clean? What kind of furniture was there? He would try to put them into some kind of order, was there a decline? Had she been well cared for?He looked at the child’s face. He just couldn't tell.
It became all he thought about. He lost clients quickly after that but his child support and back welfare payments stayed the same. He had never even met her. She was a beautiful kid; he kept her picture in his wallet, on his bedside, in the visor of his truck.
He rallied and he sagged and he did his best and he did his worst, just trying to get by somehow, anyhow. He was in the storm and no way out. All he could figure was to hunker down, try and see it through. Tough it out.
*******
After a while a groove developed. Everyday after working as many hours as the sun allowed he would stop by the liquor store then go home alone. It got to where it took a pint of bourbon and a dozen tall cans of malt liquor to quiet him enough for bed. Even then he sometimes stared at the ceiling until the birds sang and the light came in his window.
He would rise laboriously, coughing up phlegm and shuddering. He'd stand in the shower until the hot water ran out. In the old days he would have shut it off at the first sign of cooling but over time he took to leaving it, letting it run all the way out until the water was freezing, startling, beating him to awareness. Still, he would stand there. Eventually he'd shut the flow off and step from the shower puffing and blowing, blinking like something from the sea. He would dress and go work until sundown. Liquor store. Home. Repeat.
He fell behind on his payments again and again. Weakening, he used his business credit card to keep up, “just this once". It was maxed out quick after that. He got another one and maxed that out too. When it became obvious he couldn't pay he tried to renegotiate his child support and back welfare payment schedule, to get the State to see his real situation.
The people he talked to at the payment office said they'd be happy to have a specialist take a look at his assets and operating costs, to see what they could do to help. After a cursory look at his numbers they informed him he should refinance his property in order to pay his debt. His payments were not lowered.
The refinance on his home paid the back welfare and child support but that was all. He was still on the hook for the credit cards, the new higher monthly mortgage fee and the regularly scheduled child support payments, which were theoretically channeled off to the foster home were the daughter he'd never met was living her life. Growing up. No one was sending him pictures now.
*******
About a year and a half went by. A year and a half of constantly being behind, of having to decide who to string along and who to make a payment to. Of working six or seven days a week. Of drinking every night for six or seven hours. Of lying to people who knew it full well. It never ended. At last he simply ran down and fell ill, wound up at the local emergency room with walking pneumonia after collapsing on a client’s lawn. He didn't remember the ambulance ride at all.
He stayed a week at the hospital. On the second day he called a friend he hadn't spoken to in a long time. He yakked it up for a bit, pretending everything was fine then asked him to bring a bottle to his room. His friend thought it was just his "crazy old buddy, at it again". He brought two flat pint bottles of bourbon which hid quite nicely, one under the covers and the other in the closet. They talked and he left, after promising to return with more.
Their friendship seemed to have been rekindled then, the two of them talked a lot during the visits. It was honest talk too and both of them remembered why they had liked each other in the first place. None the less, as soon as the hospital stay was over, that was it. He didn't pick up the phone, he didn't return his friends messages, he didn't show at the bar. Work. Liquor store. Home. Repeat. After a while his new old friend stopped calling, again.
He worked, he drank, he mailed off checks. He lost the house and moved into a tiny studio apartment. He gained some weight and developed a chronic cough. He took to following pro wrestling in the evenings and watching late night televangelist's when he couldn't sleep, which was usually.
He yelled at both types of program, sitting alone at the dinette table, gazing at his little portable black and white tv, smoking and drinking, dressed in nothing but the underwear he had worked in all that day. He didn't listen to his records anymore or go to the movies or even read the paper. Just work, tv, and sometimes bed. More often than not he woke up crumpled on one of the upholstered chairs, his back aching, with the tube still on, the sound still up and his alarm clock blaring.
************
The second time he fell ill he stayed two and a half weeks at the hospital. He lost the apartment. The manager stacked his stuff in his parking space. Of course anything worth having was gone by the time he got to it. His truck had also been picked clean. All his gas powered mowers, trimmers and edger’s were gone along with the nicer hand tools.
That night, his first night out of the hospital, he slept in his truck.
The next day he bought a used mower at a pawn shop and went to work like always. He found that most of his route was gone. People had made other arrangements so far as their lawns were concerned.
He saw the way they looked at his truck, his tools, his clothing. The way they looked at him, these wives of wealthy men. They were uncomfortable now. Most of them gave him a small severance along with his final check for services rendered. They would hand it to him with a palpable air of having dispensed the appropriate amount of pity for a lesser being. Then they would say how sorry they were and all that crap. It all added up to the same thing; goodbye.
It felt odd to be dismissed by so many high powered housewives one after the other. Hell, it felt odd to be dismissed at all. He hadn't done anything wrong.
When the sun went down he went to the liquor store. He got his usual and went back to his truck. He put the key into the ignition and lay his head on the steering wheel. There was nowhere to go. He couldn't think of anyone he wanted to see. Couldn't think of a friend he wanted to commiserate with or a lover he wanted to hold. He didn't much feel like talking to anyone about it, about it all, whatever. Everybody could just fuck right off. He drove to the pier and drank his booze. He woke up there the next morning.
With the final checks and the severance pay he had a tidy sum of cash all at once for the first time in a while. He used most of it getting caught up on his child support. The rest he put into his pocket and drank away in a few blacked out evenings. He was pretty sure there were some women too, maybe a couple times.
He still worked as much as he could. He had different clients now and he charged less, a lot less, but he was working. Sometimes he rented a cheap room for the night, got a shower, slept in a bed. Most times he slept in his truck. He saved as best he could and he mailed the child support checks whenever possible, most of the times a few dollars short with an apology attached. He didn’t talk much anymore.
Then the pawn shop mower got stolen, so he switched to detailing at a used car lot downtown. They paid him by the car to polish and wax them, buff out the chrome, that sort of thing. He liked that they left him alone most of the time and they liked what they saw when he was through. But he worked around back were no one would see him.
The guys at the car lot loved his work but they really didn't much like how he looked. Bent over a car with a rag in his hand, greasy brown uncut hair hanging in his pale flaccid face, his eye's dull grey knots, his mouth slack and open. He moved like a man under water. His body radiated weariness as he slowly worked his way around car after car, his clothes turning to rags as the days went by, the cars sparking in his wake. He would stay for hours, doing ten or fifteen vehicles at a time, one after another without stopping.
At the end of each day he would take his money and thank them like it was a new thing. Then he would go to the liquor store.
******
He came awake all at once. Like always. All the way awake and it was time to go, but he kept his eyes closed. He could feel the cardboard underneath him, the newspaper stuffed in his old wool watch coat, the nested stocking caps pulled down low over his face leaving only his chin and mouth exposed. He didn't want to rise. The air stank.
The clock tower in old town struck the quarter hour. "A quarter to what?” he wondered. It didn't matter; the sound had him on his feet. He blinked his eyes as he shed the newsprint, blearily taking in the situation. He was in the alley between the liquor store and the elevated parking garage downtown. After first locating his bucket, with its spray bottle, rags and squeegees, he unzipped and relieved himself at great length. He silently noted his good luck, he hadn't soiled himself. The day was off to a good start already.
He stretched his shoulders and cleared his throat. The moment he did it he coughed, just a little. Then a lot. It was as if the flood gates had been opened. He coughed and gagged and spit for a full minute, leaving the alley wall covered with gobs of sticky black speckled yellow phlegm with stray veins of pink frothy blood running through them here and there. At length he caught his breath and the fit seemed to subside. He looked through his pockets for a cigarette but found none.
He picked up his bucket and strode from the alley, headed to the nearest intersection, taking in the motorist's faces as he went, judging whom he thought to be good candidates for his services. Checking his spray bottle again as the light changed, he stepped from the curb into traffic. He'd use the money from the first windshield to buy a coffee and some smokes, and then he could settle down and really get something done.
