The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter 6
Sunday evening.
I’d come to the end of my prep work — that is, I’d pestered the appropriate neighbors for access to their friendship or spiritual knowledge; I’d promised all-expenses-paid vacations to each and every offspring; I’d ordered the questionable and overpriced supplies for renovations beyond my skills; and I’d pondered my basic existence until I was confused and scared. My tasks would start in earnest tomorrow — with the intangibles to fall into place shortly thereafter.
Perhaps as a harbinger of things to come, I could feel an ugly, mindless tension cascading down the back of my skull and across my shoulders, forming a mullet of pain; by the end of dinner, with each turn of my head my upper vertebrae crackled like a strand of bubble wrap in a child’s fists.
And so, as the evening unfolded, I put down my book and made my way to the garage for therapeutic purposes, orbiting the heavy bag, jabbing at it, trying to work out the knots and beat down my anxieties without giving myself heat rash.
Under less stressful circumstances, I would have relished this window of time — that is, the exact handful of minutes between sunset and true night on a warm August eve when the under-lit horizon in the west fades to dark blue in the east — so I kept the garage door open to chest height to enjoy that particular quality of light as best I could as I circled and poked and pondered and listened to my mixed CD on the new garage boom box.
The garage CD player was a recent upgrade from the decrepit tape player I’d used for the past seven years (we’d given the car a simultaneous sound-system upgrade), and the CD was a burned mix from an mp3 courtesy of Eric and Rachel, entitled Dad’s Greatest Hits, downloaded, no, stolen, from the Internet.
Maddy and I hadn’t exactly buckled on this issue of intellectual thievery, but we never could get the kids to understand our stance behind it, either, and in the beginning, the dialogue between us often unfolded something like this:
Maddy or me: If you walked past a display of apples on a fruit stand, would you take one home without paying for it?
Eric or Rachel: No. That would be stealing.
Me or Maddy: So, you agree with us. You’re saying that if you take something without paying for it — something that somebody else has worked hard to produce and subsequently sell — you are, in reality, stealing?
Rachel or Eric: Absolutely. But we’re not. What we’re doing is sharing something we’ve bought with millions of other people who are sharing something they’ve bought.
Maddy and I weren’t operating from a morally superior perspective here so much as a technologically inferior perspective. When we were growing up, we’d walk into a Sam The Record Man’s or wherever and buy a record or a tape, or, by the time we were in our twenties, a cd. Stealing one of those physical items would be difficult, you’d probably get caught, and ramifications would ensue. Eric and Rachel, on the other hand, had the world’s music at their fingertips within the anonymity of the Internet and tens of millions of cohorts, all sharing bits and bytes of body-less information.
Of course, you can’t compare apples to downloads and we’d basically reached a moral impasse. We all agreed, though, if they took more than a couple of cuts from someone they’d never supported before, they’d damn well better go out and buy at least a “best-of” collection; if they’d already given an artist plenty of money (and we were all painfully aware of whom they were), they could download discreetly from the unexplored portions of their bodies of work. What they couldn’t do was behave like kids in an unguarded candy store, snatching and grabbing in the name of greed.
I listened to a Stuart Copeland tune as I stumped around the garage pondering this issue. I’d never bought a Stuart Copeland CD in my life, had never paid much attention to The Police, either, for that matter, but the kids knew I liked this song, and I now I applied my particular brand of anti-rhythm to the heavy bag as I kept time to “Gong Rock,” a cut from The Rhythmatist.
And maybe I stretched logic and strained irony for the next moment or so as I bobbed and weaved to this morsel of creativity that Rachel and Eric had swiped for me, but just the idea of how I came to own it brought me back to a thought that always lurked, that never left me completely: the reason I lay trapped in this dark and smelly spot (and I don’t meant the garage) was that I believed that I’d had my one morsel of creativity stolen from me those few short years ago.
Could I be certain I wouldn’t be where I was at this very moment if Hollywood (or New York, anyway, with a certain agent dealing with a particular party) hadn’t chewed up Maddy’s and my screenplay, swallowed it, and spit us out like (hay)seeds way back when? Had the act broken me? Who could say. But whether it had or not, its ramifications had certainly helped guide me to this dead-end segment of my life, which, in the near future, involved sharing quality time with the dashing, semi-reclusive young writer across the street (should have been me), chasing down God (there is none), and steering my leaky boat towards some unseen shore.
“Gong Rock” ended and I stepped from the garage for some fresh air. Night still hadn’t arrived in full, but stars, just random pinpricks at this point, dusted the sky; I stood with my gloved fists on my hips for a moment and tried to let go, allowing the warm breeze to blow away the sweat and sweep away the smothering thoughts. After all, the night was the perfect by-product of billions of years of planetary and universal evolution, I was fortunate enough to be here enjoying it, and I still had Maddy, Rachel, and Eric, along with a reasonable portion of my health for a middle-aged man. Any obstacles I faced were mere bumps in the—
And that’s as far as I’d proceeded with my positive thinking when Weir’s obnoxious voice broke my train of thought.
“Hey, Kearns. I see you’re honing your philosophy on life.”
I turned to his house and found him peering through his kitchen’s screen window. He was right, of course. To the best of my limited ability, that’s exactly what I was doing; his statement, though, carried different connotations. He knew it and I knew it. I looked away instead of taking the bait, sliding my hands from my hips and losing the palooka’s pose, but behind me now, Devo wailed away: “Gut Feeling (Slap Your Mammy)” pumped from the garage at a frenetic pace.
I don’t know if my choice of tunes (well, Eric and Rachel’s, actually, although I complimented them for it) spurred him on, or if he’d planned a monologue that he refused to waste, but Weir wouldn’t let my silence lie.
“I take it back,” he said. “You couldn’t spell philosophy if I spotted you the f. You must be training for your next Hollywood scuffle. I hear Haley Joel Osment’s in town on a shoot.”
All right then. As bad as the humor was, he’d still had to have planned a barb like that; it was as if he’d removed an abstract glove (from the previously broken hand/wrist that obviously still rankled) and whacked me across the face with it. I had no choice but to start moving my lips in response.
“No, you were right the first time, Weir. I’m philosophizing.” Luckily, I didn’t stumble on the “f” word and give him added fodder, but I might as well have, considering what flew from my lips next.
“And here’s what I was pondering: if a tree falls in the woods … why can’t you be under it?”
Even from his obscured position, with his head and shoulders silhouetted in the window frame, I could sense him wince. And who could blame him?
“Y’know, Kearns,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t like you from that first moment I noticed you spying on me as I unloaded my lawn gear from the moving van way back when; judgment radiated from you like a bad smell. But for the longest time, I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt because you didn’t appear to be the oaf you’ve turned out to be: you seemed reasonably well-read and well-spoken, the rest of your family carried themselves properly, and … and I just don’t like to stereotype. But you’ve worn me down. I can come to no other conclusion than this: you are the biggest asshole to have ever graced the face of this earth.”
So there I had it: a summary of Weir’s character evaluation. And the fact that he’d said I’d seemed to own qualities that at one time might have made him think differently of me made the critique sting a bit. But his words were hollow, meant to sting, and I knew it — just as I’d known from the start that I’d fallen into his ninety percent category (if a man of his pomp could hold that conservative an estimate on the sum of the world’s stupidity) and that he loved to stereotype. It’s what he stood for — no, it’s what he was — and his confession didn’t leave me searching for a retort this time.
“A reasonably well-spoken asshole, am I? Well, ain’t that the sphincter calling the rectum articulate.”
“Fuck off,” Weir said. He spun from his window and stomped away, terminating our conversation.
I turned, too, ducked my head under the garage door, and gave the heavy bag one good shot on the way to the boom box. The act did nothing to relieve my anger. Thank God Christ would help me share the load, and as soon as tomorrow morning, too.
Thank you for sticking with me and Jim. In case you’ve missed some of my short stories, below is a link to few. Please be sure to check out my home page. Suggestions and comments are welcome!