Barney Kemp is struggling to keep his composure – to just make the transaction and get the hell out without falling to pieces, really – when the yelp of hard-hit brakes pulls his attention away from the rows of merchandise on the plywood table and to the dirt-caked window flanking his right shoulder.
A chorus of squealing tires follows almost instantaneously, compounding his fear, forcing his gaze onto the fleet of wagons and black-and-whites lurching to a halt on the street two floors below.
From Barney’s vantage point the vehicles sit scattered and still for an instant, and somehow their random configuration transports him to another time, another place – a time and place where Dinky Toy cars lie helter-skelter around his scuffed sneakers on a shade-dappled back-yard patio slab while his mother and her friend from across the street, Mrs. Maclean, sit inside his house, perched by the open kitchen window as they chain-smoke their Camels and Benson & Hedges respectively, drink percolated coffee that’s good to the last drop, and worry about penny stocks, the price of gold, and some place called The Bay of Pigs.
Then, with their suspension units still in mid-lurch, Barney sees the car and van doors fly open in unison (or close enough from his position to seem so in a Busby/Berkeley sort of way), breaking the spell and snuffing out the last incongruous recollection of childhood innocence he’ll reflect upon for some time.
Barney watches the men issue from their vehicles with a collective purpose, forming a tight-knit line as they stream towards the clubhouse. A heartbeat later, he hears them smash open the fortress-like front door below with their breaching ram and ascend the stairs he’d taken just moments earlier. Their pounding footsteps bear the syncopated vigor of war drums, forcing him to step back against the window . . . not that he’d think of jumping.
Now the trio of thick, heavily-inked-and-bearded men that Barney’s been dealing with turn upon him, pierce him with accusatory glares, and for an instant, with the street below his only safe haven, some small part of him actually does consider the jumping option. But events unfold in a blur, leaving him too little time for such a monumental decision. At this point, the best he can do is perform a fast-forward review of his deteriorating existence.
* * *
Barney had been looking forward to the arrival of 2006 and, with it, early retirement. His one concern, if he could call it that, would be how to handle his first real surplus of free time in over thirty years. He knew he was going to read a lot, but it would have to be more than just a rehashing of Robert B. Parker, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum and those other meat-and-potato writers he’d consumed in the past. In the weeks, months, and years to come, he wanted to expand his appetite to include Joyce, Woolf, Hardy – the foie gras of the literary world.
“And,” his wife, Gloria, said, “you can keep the place a bit tidier, too.”
“That goes without saying,” he replied.
Unfortunately, Barney faced an unexpected roadblock on the path to his renaissance. In his warm-up to tackling Finnegan’s Wake, To The Lighthouse, and The Mayor of Casterbridge, he spent too much time reading about the authors themselves, then their classics-writing brethren, chasing one link after another in his internet searches until, by the end each morning, he found that he’d unwittingly drifted far off-course, into venues like (in typical descending order) The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Esquire followed by Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair. He took a modicum of pride in the fact he’d never succumbed to that next step, to websites as pandering as College Tits, but that was small consolation; after months of avoiding his true goal, with his attention span now pared down to ten-minute segments at best, even the thought of CliffsNotes for War And Peace tied his mind in knots.
“Maybe you should take up exercising,” Gloria said over breakfast one day. “I’ve read that beyond its obvious health benefits, it strengthens your concentration levels, too.”
Barney had come across that theory more than once in his meanderings as well, so the next morning, after reading about William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25th, 1897 – July 6th, 1962), and the plethora of important and not-so-important Southern writers connected to him in one way or another, he ordered the Stay-Fit 1000 stationary bicycle on-line, gaining a free pair of ten-pound dumbbells in the transaction.
When the bike arrived, Barney dragged it to the second-floor den and set it in front of the old picture-tube television set, a two-hundred-pound, 1990 RCA model that, for twenty dollars, he’d had the delivery man help him wrestle upstairs upon the arrival of his 50” flat-screen retirement gift. He then scheduled 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. as his exercise hour for obvious reasons: it would give him time to drive Gloria to work, eat breakfast, and squeeze in one last coffee before planting himself on the Stay-Fit for the start of “Einstein for Dummies,” a compelling new series explaining the nature of the universe in layman’s terms on one of the new science channels.
But once more Barney experienced an unforeseen challenge in his quest for enlightenment. As he sat on the bike, pumping his soft and aging legs, he not only felt that he wasn’t getting anywhere, he felt as if time was actually slowing in Einsteinian fashion the faster he pedaled.
Whether his television show's subject matter, his ever-shrinking attention span, or the simple fact that exercising was sheer hell instigated this feeling, Barney couldn't say, but a complication arose from it: Soon, he found he couldn't stay on “Einstein” for more than a couple of minutes before changing stations, moving up the dial, building momentum until his thumb was rising and falling at a quicker rate than his thighs.
To Barney's dismay, it took him only a week to injure himself. He developed carpal tunnel syndrome due to his excessive use of the television converter. The ludicrousness of his situation depressed him. He was shriveling like a forgotten grape on the vine. At not even a year into early retirement from a job he’d longed to quit from the day he’d started, he’d discovered that brokering life insurance policies may, in fact, have been his reason for being.
“Maybe,” Gloria said, “with all of the time you have on your hands now, you could build your new life a bit slower; maybe you could step back and expand yourself in other ways.”
“Well, we haven’t taken a trip in a while,” Barney said. And considering the number of pamphlets and letters littering their mailbox of late, each one extolling the virtues of re-mortgaging for whatever your needs, large or small, he had been thinking about it.
Their visit to the bank opened new vistas: They’d already paid off their original mortgage; Gloria’s salary was good, Barney’s pension more than sufficient; and interest rates were low. Funding for their trip to Europe was just the beginning.
“Do you know what’s unique and beautiful about this time in history?” the fresh-faced loans officer across the desk from them queried as their travel money was being secured. “The average Joe – not that either of you is one of those – no longer has to do without. You can, in fact, eat your cake. So, I’m going to ask, besides the trip to Europe, what else do you really want?”
They thought for a moment. Their son, Max, had left home almost four years earlier to earn his degree, staying each summer to find restaurant work, ticket-sales gigs, or whatever in his University-town’s tourist-driven economy.
“Well, Max is finishing his B.A. in Medieval Literature and he’ll be coming home to live with us in a few months,” Gloria said.
“Just for a while . . . until he finds a job in his field,” Barney added.
“So, we might consider sprucing up the basement – you know, a kitchenette, a three-piece bath, some wall-to-wall, and a television – just to give him a bit of privacy until he finds his legs,” Gloria said.
“Good thinking,” The loans officer said. “It’ll be rental income the minute he’s out of there.”
They were on a roll now.
“Then there’s that second car we’ve been talking about,” Barney mentioned, turning to Gloria. “You know, so you’re not dependent on me getting you to and from work every day.”
“Which, in turn, will allow you to focus on your day without having to start it by battling rush-hour traffic for half-an-hour each way every morning,” Gloria said. “Talk about a concentration breaker.”
“And for forty thousand more,” the loans officer proposed, “we can build you a rock-solid, high-yield portfolio that will carry the entire weight of the loan. You’ll be getting all of these things for what seems like free.”
Barney and Gloria looked at each other, eyes agog. And to tie things up nicely, a sight-unseen, instantaneous, at-the-desk appraisal on their property came in at a hundred-thousand dollars over their private estimate.
The loans officer had been right, Barney thought: 2006. What a great time to be an average Joe – not that he and Gloria were one of those.
It wasn’t until almost a year later – just after Gloria had packed up her Corolla to visit her sister (the victim of a mini stroke) three hundred miles away for a couple of weeks – that Barney noticed an old familiar barnyard-like odor permeating the house . . . an odor he hadn’t encountered since his early twenties.
Someone, somewhere, was smoking grass.
It didn’t take extraordinary powers of deduction for Barney to figure out that Max, still a fixture in the basement, had to be the source of this long-forgotten-but-not-unpleasant aroma. Gloria’s absence aside, it also explained Max’s increased presence in and around Barney’s well-stocked fridge every evening.
A few days passed, and then one night, in one of those hard-to-reconstruct scenarios (had he mentioned the pungent smell of marijuana hanging in the air or had Max, knowing it was there, tried to pre-empt an inquisition by casually asking him if he’d ever smoked the stuff?), Barney found himself debating the drug’s merits and shortcomings with his son, saying he’d smoked on occasion as a young adult but had given it up somewhere between his entry into the workforce and Max’s birth – when the pressures of real life took over.
Then Max asked him if he was still under the pressures of both his vocation and the rearing a vulnerable child. Barney offered a truthful ‘no’ to the first part of the question and a not-so-truthful ‘no’ to the second.
‘Well, there you go,” Max said, producing the joint loitering in his shirt pocket. “Mom’s not around. Why don’t I light it up, and you lighten up . . . just a little?”
Shortly thereafter, they found themselves side by side on the sofa, guffawing over Pillow Talk’s quaint shenanigans.
“Well, nobody dropped their pants or doffed their bra,” Max said when it ended. “But you know what? I still liked it.”
Barney wasn’t about to attribute it to his re-acquaintance with pot, but over the next few days he grew not paranoid so much as more aware of his tenuous and diminishing place in the greater scheme of things. Gloria’s sister’s stroke (she was Barney’s age) helped encourage this thinking. He could easily be stricken with one, as could Gloria herself. As much as he wanted change in his life and was willing to try different things to affect it, he didn’t want change in this manner.
Of course with Gloria still visiting, in the solitude of Barney’s days (especially at the dinner table, before Max’s evening visits) he couldn’t help but reflect and worry: Real estate prices weren’t just dropping, they were plummeting, creating a chasm that exposed the true implications of their recent re-mortgaging; their hedge fund hadn’t merely stopped growing, its branches had been clipped to nubbins in a most-unscrupulous manner, and it was now in the process of rotting at the roots; Gloria's car, although useful, cost an extra five-hundred-and-forty dollars a month to keep on the road (with a male second-driver under the age of twenty-five on her insurance package contributing substantially to the bill); and Max, still without a job in his field (or any other), paid no rent and ate voraciously – especially from 9:00 p.m. till midnight.
Meanwhile, aside from a disc of photos, including a picture of Barney crouched in a lineman’s stance while pretending to lay a cobblestone on The Appian Way and a staged-perspective snapshot of him pushing over the Leaning Tower of Pisa while Gloria cowered beneath it as highlights, Barney’s actual memories of and feelings for the land where Caesar once strode and Nero had fiddled were dwindling faster than his home’s net worth.
Yet despite his growing financial woes (and there, at least, Barney could take solace in company as the little man, en masse, was having the cake snatched from his plate and the plate slapped from his hand), other aspects of his life were falling into place. First and foremost, his personal relationship with Max was as strong as it had been since his son’s middle-school years. Stronger, really, now that it had morphed from father/son to pal/ confidant. And beyond enjoying a movies and a couple of joints together every evening (with Barney showing retirement-age moderation and declining the third toke on any given spliff), Max had finally turned him on to Classic Literature, bypassing mere fifty-to-a-hundred-and-fifty year-old works and hustling him right back to the Middle Ages and Geoffrey Chaucer with the help of some well-chosen excerpts:
“This Nicholas just then let fly a fart. As great as it had been a thunder-clap,” was one that Max had found particularly worthy. “They don’t write stuff like that anymore,” he’d said with a chuckle upon reading it.
“No, no they don’t,” Barney replied. “But these days they’d base a movie on it.” With two tokes in him, Barney thought his response hilarious.
When Gloria returned from visiting her convalescing sister, she noticed the change in Barney immediately – and she liked it.
“I haven’t seen you this close with Max since his grade-school days,” she said over dinner on her third day back. “It’s like you’ve re-wound the clock fifteen years. Plus, he’s finally got you started: The Canterbury Tales; if that’s not classic literature, I don’t know what is.”
Still, Barney knew that Gloria, while rarely mentioning it, constantly worried about their recently besieged finances. They were running a twelve-hundred-dollar-per-month deficit now with no end in sight.
For a while life stayed this way, and while Barney didn’t want to misquote any of the authors on his to-read list, it certainly did feel like the best of times and the worst of times. The combination of his expanding literary horizons, his and Gloria’s mounting debts, and his pot smoking with Max (an event that both he and his son were learning to hide from Gloria in numerous, creative ways) gave a new-found edge to his existence. He did feel fifteen years younger, residing in a state of flux he wouldn’t have thought possible in his stagnant day-to-day life of, say, eighteen months earlier.
Then one night, after Gloria had excused herself, he and Max found themselves waiting for her in front of a fifty-inch, high-def, still-frame picture of Pierce Brosnan (frozen in mid-smile and looking far better than a man in his fifties had any right to, Barney thought). When they heard the sound of a dropping toilet lid echo from the room directly above them, Max looked up to the ceiling, back to Barney, then leaned over and said, “When we were out on the back deck just before the movie started and, y’know, checking to see where I should start next week’s staining and stuff, I forgot to mention – my dealer, Donny Ferguson, isn’t selling anymore.”
“Why not,” Barney asked.
“I don’t know. Some guys say he had an accident, others say no; some guys say they’ve seen him around, others say they haven’t seen him at all. But wherever he is and whatever happened to him, he’s not talking to anyone and he’s definitely not dealing.”
“So where are we going to get our stuff now?” Barney asked.
“Don’t know,” Max said with a shrug. “But we’re almost out.”
When Gloria returned and they started the movie again, Barney could no longer focus on it. He was too busy contemplating the vagaries of life, including some facts he’d gleaned from Max over the past couple of weeks – small-talk that now seemed to carry a bit more weight.
Apparently, Max’s closest friends, and those in the circle beyond, all preferred toking to drinking – information Barney had appreciated upon hearing. Not that over-doing weed wasn’t unhealthy and couldn’t make you stupid. But whether you sat behind the wheel of your automobile or hobnobbed in the better social settings, nothing made you as stupid as excessive drinking, Barney thought, and he’d proved this axiom himself numerous times over the years.
In all, Max knew of twelve people – fourteen if he counted two dads as purchasers – who had bought a quarter ounce per week, minimum, from Donny. The quarters were high-quality (called Kush, whatever that meant) and retailed for seventy-five dollars apiece. Barney pondered this now, along with the drug’s wholesale price of $3500.00 per pound.
“What are you doing?” Gloria asked.
Barney imagined what he was doing – with his tongue poking from the corner of his mouth and both hands open in front of him as he counted fingers.
“Just a bit of math,” he said. “I’m worried about our finances.”
“Well, you shouldn’t let that ruin your family time,” Gloria said. You can fret over them after the movie.”
“Alright,” Barney replied, but he couldn’t stop worrying and thinking. After all, if their status remained the same, family-time might soon be ruined for good.
* * *
Barney consults his watch: 10:53 a.m.
He sits parked in Walmart’s vast lot with six bags of groceries resting in his trunk and an eleven o’clock appointment waiting a mere five-minute’s drive East-bound.
Pulling onto the road, he follows a Front-Street route that shifts from commercial to industrial to lower-class residential in just the time it takes him to reach his destination.
He rolls to a stop in front of the address he’d written on a slip of paper and sits behind the steering wheel for a moment, contemplating his actions. For the first time in the four days it’s taken him to put this deal together – from hunting down Donnie Ferguson’s hard-to-find suppliers, to waiting out their background check, to scraping together his initial investment money – his nerves are starting to get to him. But since a customer base already awaits, he knows that this moment, the procuring of that first pound itself, will be the biggest test of his mettle.
He drinks in the clubhouse’s details now: three-stories, brick-and-concrete-block, a citadel compared to the string of rundown clapboard row-houses around it. Ten, maybe twelve Harleys are parked outside and a string of flood lights and security cameras, attached to its roof’s fascia, hover over the front lot like a murder of crows, tightening his stomach a notch. But the thought of buying most of next week’s groceries and all of the car’s gas with cash, of seeding these kinds of purchases into their daily lives without Gloria’s knowledge until, finally, he’s alleviated all of their financial woes, counteracts his fears.
Slipping out of his car, he double-checks the password he’s scribbled next to the address. He says it aloud to himself as he comes to a stop in front of the building’s fortress-like front door.
Well, nothing to do but get it over with, he thinks, reaching out for the intercom.
After all, a celebratory tub of Rolo ice cream sits in the trunk and he doesn’t want it to melt.
Note: Freedom Fifty-Five was a ubiquitous ad campaign by Canadian insurance company, London Life, that tried to convince hardworking folks that retiring at the age 55 was an attainable goal with the help of London Life’s financial guidance.