The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter Seventeen
By three o’clock Monday afternoon, I’d finished applying the first coat of primer to the third floor; I stood in the centre of the room and looked around, admiring how the paint gave the drywall, previously splotched and striped with joint compound, some sort of unity, and how the abundance of natural light (with the Weatherlux 3000 hovering directly overhead) gave the newly whitened room a heightened sense of space.
When I finally slapped on the last coat, I’d have to rent a chop saw and air nailer to cut and install the vast amounts of trim needed to complete the room. Contemplating those tasks without shuddering brought a couple of thoughts to light, the first being that if I were measuring progress, I’d done well in some ways.
But if I harbored any thought of becoming a contractor after this, I’d have to think again. Imperfections abounded in the room — nothing that rugs, blinds, and hokey posters of the 1900 Paris World’s Fair wouldn’t cover, mind you, but enough to make me realize that the best I could aspire to in this field at this point in my life would be a contractor’s slugger, with hopes of exchanging the wrecker’s sledge and square shovel for the skill saw and drywall tape by the age of fifty or later — just about when I expected my knees and back to give out.
It almost allowed me to admire John, as sour as he’d become, in his attempt to change white-collar occupations while I stayed frozen in, or out of, my blue-collar world, unable to do anything but install paving stones for a living while still wielding any sense of knowledge, bravado, or identity.
And the thought of stepping outside of my previous existence, of putting on a tie and jacket for anything more than a ritzy soiree, actually (and even there, if I remember properly, I couldn’t pass muster), was totally beyond my ken. I’d never grown up. It was as if my quarrel with the movie star had been a wake-up call, and I’d opened my eyes in that bed of screenings to discover that I’d slept away a huge chunk of life — the part that made you competent, made you confident.
“Yo, Dad!”
I stiffened, once again startled into the real world, as a voice yanked me from my thoughts. To my left, Eric stood near the top of the pull-down stairs and peered through the pre-built railing surrounding its opening.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Mr. Berkshire’s at the door.”
Shit. Maddy’s warnings, both pre and post slumber, hadn’t stayed with me at all or at least I’d have contemplated fabricating a brush-off. But now . . .?
Eric eyed me for a bit, pondered my hesitance. “And he’s swinging a six pack,” he finally said, smiling.
“Oh, really. Tell him I’ll be down in a moment.”
Shit again. My reply had tumbled out of my mouth far too quickly.
Smiling even wider now, Eric spun and left, allowing me the solitude to replay our exchange in my mind while I drained the remains of the paint tray back into its tin.
Undoubtedly, the Bayview Extension experience (and how my tainted personality was affecting the kids) was going to do that for a while — force me to armchair psychoanalyze my every interaction, that is — but upon further review, my guilt subsided. I’d worked hard until three o’clock, well-earned pints awaited (along with someone to drink them with), and I had no need to drive at their conclusion. I finished my quick cleanup and hurried downstairs.
I found Berkshire on the front porch; he’d already popped the top on a Molson Canadian tallboy, and he sat on a chair with his legs stretched out before him, crossed at the ankles. Five more beers, still in their plastic rings, sat on the table beside him, and Maddy’s and my script rested on his lap.
“Grab a seat and a beer,” he said, nodding to the table.
I could have been insulted, and I should have been insulted; he hadn’t contacted me before coming over, and the last time we faced a similar situation, with me standing at his front gate, he’d sent me packing because he was “busy.” But more than just the adult beverages called to me. A professional writer of sorts sat before me with an opinion of our screenplay, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t anxious to see if it still held the impact it had in the past.
I sat on the far side of the porch table, twisted out a beer for myself, and snapped it open. As I tilted it to my lips, Wendell asked, “So how was your trip?”
“Good,” I said. “Good.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I busied myself with lighting a smoke. As I did, I offered the pack to him, not remembering or gleaning, from our previous brief meetings, where he stood in the bad habits departments — although I had, if memory serves, mentioned seeing him lug a lot of beer into his house in the past.
“Thanks. I quit,” he said. He set the screenplay on the table, reached for the pack, and plucked one out. “A year ago.” He lit it and continued, “Unless I’m drinking beer . . . or Scotch . . . or I’m . . .” He paused now to blow smoke, then, “Ashley doesn’t know, so if you don’t mind . . .?”
“It’s safe with me,” I said.
“So anyhow,” he said, now that we had both hands full and were equipped to talk, “I read your guys’ screenplay, and I’ve got to say, I liked it. A lot.”
“Thank you.”
“And please, don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but even though you said you’d had an agent for it and some interest, I wasn’t expecting this sort of quality.”
I shrugged. “That’s okay,” I said. “I was expecting your sort of expectation. After all, I’m the guy, I mean, I was the guy in this neighborhood, the only one, that got out of his car each evening with his clothes covered in grit from shoveling all day long. It does leave an impression.”
“It wasn’t because of how you looked or what you did for a living.” He stopped and took a huge haul on his cigarette, savoring it like a man who’s quit, then: “Well, maybe it was . . . a bit, but Ashley and I have talked to Maddy, so we know something about you guys. It was more like, if this was your first shot, and, as you said, your one shot, it just seemed a lot more polished and structured than I expected. Y’know, not something with potential, but a finished product, with all the qualities I think you need in any good mainstream writing: characterization, conflict, crisis, and resolution, and you peppered it well with foreshadowing, complications, reversals.”
“Well, we spent a lot of time on it — half a year at least on a painstaking first draft and a number of revisions before we even thought about marketing. After a while I didn’t feel like a total novice, and what you read was one of the last two drafts.”
“So that’s how you learned?” Wendell asked. “No classes, no previous throwaway attempts?”
I shrugged. “That’s it. I just kept plugging away with The Random House Handbook, Formatting Your Screenplay, Strunk and White, and a stack of screenplays by my side, and Maddy spent almost as much time in her off hours writing and rewriting the outline with me and learning aspects of the trade I still know nothing about.”
We talked on, with Wendell bumming another smoke and, I’ll admit it, surprising me with his knowledge of screenwriting. Admittedly, the two of us weren’t recreating a summit meeting between Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, we were just talking story, but it was refreshing, and something that Maddy and I had quit doing in the “hollow” years following our disappointment.
Halfway through the first tallboys and second cigarettes, with my vocal chords sufficiently pliant, I asked Wendell when and why he had decided to become a writer. He looked thoughtful for a while, as if he’d never given the question any thought before — as if he’d never imagined giving his answer to the host of Imprint or whomever (although, who knows; maybe he had already. I wouldn’t have seen it). But he did seem to contemplate his present response for me alone now.
“The summer of Grade 11,” he said at last. “But at that time I hadn’t pinpointed the aspiration as writing, per se.”
I suppressed the urge to repeat, “Per se?” with my eyes all agog, and asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean that was the year after my parents had gotten divorced and my mother had dragged me out to live in Scarberia. Grade 10 was a miserable experience; I was stuck in a huge, ugly suburb and a huge, violent high school, without my dad, without a single friend. But by Grade 11 I’d hooked up with a couple of guys, and by that summer I’d fallen into a pattern. Most nights we’d hang out till one or two in the morning, drinking a few beers or smoking a joint on whoever’s back porch was most accessible. After that, I’d go home and read in bed till dawn — anything and everything: Robert B. Parker, Roger Zelazny, short story anthologies, my mother’s Atlantic Monthly — then I’d wake up at about three in the afternoon and repeat the process.”
“Not a bad set-up,” I said.
Wendell nodded. “Not at all. I wasn’t getting into trouble, not really, and my harried, newly single mother, to exonerate herself from guilt, I suppose, let me be — although she probably kept a closer eye on me than I thought. But by the next year, when decisions about university or the job market rolled around, I could think of only one occupation that came close to interesting me. I’d already mentioned it in passing to one of my new friends, Phil Burton, the summer before; we were sitting in the gazebo in his backyard, passing a joint back and forth, and I said, ‘Y’know, I wish I could do this for a living when I’m finished school.’ Phil said, ‘Like what, getting wasted, man?’ And I said, ‘No, like shooting the shit for as long as I want, then reading till I fall asleep with a book on my chest.’ Phil thought I was hilarious. He said something like, ‘Save it for the retirement home, dork. You’re gonna have to work for forty years or so before you can do that on a regular basis.’ But right then and there, without knowing it, I’d summed up my career aspirations: shooting the shit and reading.”
I caught myself before my mouthful of beer actually shot from my nose, but I couldn’t fully disguise my reaction.
“I know,” he said, nodding. “It is sort of funny. But what the hell did I know? Writing isn’t some mystic combination of shooting the shit and reading, and most of the time I feel like I’m in way over my head — like a sixteen-year-old who’s made his decisions for all the wrong reasons and is still waiting for the fun to start, but . . . But enough about me; that’s not why we’re here. What’s the real story with you guys?” He nodded to the screenplay. “Why’d you give up?”
I let out a breath, trying to make my story less convoluted in my mind, knowing I couldn’t. “Y’know, I probably don’t have the chronology of events or even all of the facts right in our little adventure,” I said. “Maddy handled so much of the business side, and Lord knows I’ve addled my brain enough in the interim.”
As if to prove a point, I paused to sample my tallboy and light another smoke before saying, “But I think it went something like this: By the first winter that both kids were in preschool, Maddy and I recognized that we were heading into one of those changes in life, not a big one like kids leaving for college, but a little one; we realized that for the first year in a while, I’d have some free time in the off-season. Not full days, so I couldn’t sign up for Defazio’s on-call snow removal schedule, but full mornings, at least, with nothing to do. And that’s when we started thinking, just joking around, really, that we could put together a better story than some of the stuff being passed off as movies at the time, and that maybe I should take a crack at screenwriting.”
Wendell nodded: Isn’t that what everybody thinks. Then he reached for my smokes.
“Anyway,” I said. “I think I’ve told you the next little bit. Maddy and I worked at False Roomers all winter and into the spring, until it started consuming us, actually, and then I had to go back to work. But we’d managed to finish a first draft and a few revisions, so Maddy marketed it — from home, from work, a lot of times right up till nine or ten at night when you take West Coast hours into account — and by June, we’d landed representation with Guzman and Lemay in New York.”
“Not bad,” Wendell said. “And, by the way, not typical.”
“We didn’t think so, either,” I said. “In fact, we probably got too full of ourselves. Anyway, an agent in their office, Margaret Somebody, struck up one of those chirpy, happy relationships that people often get into with Maddy. She suggested a few minor changes and sent us some other clients’ scripts to look at — we’ve still got a first-draft copy of Dave, loaded with typos, kicking around the house somewhere.”
Wendell nodded, impressed.
“Over the phone, she also gave Maddy a full itinerary of where she wanted to shop the script. We were giddy. Things were happening so fast, I walked around feeling like I was in the grips of a permanent head rush.”
“But?” Wendell asked when I paused, knowing the head rush didn’t last.
“But she quit the firm, with no reason given, sometime in November of that year, and the agency sent our script back to us. It took us until the next summer to get any more interest, and even then, Maddy did it herself through direct solicitation, with a pretty successful movie producer.”
“Who?” Wendell asked.
“The executive producer of Left Alone,” I said. “He worked on The Paradoxical Pizza, too. The film that started off what’s-her-name’s career with such a big bang.”
Wendell responded with a low whistle, then, “Pretty good.”
At that moment, Weir’s front door opened. He stepped onto his porch, preoccupied with something down around his feet, then froze and looked over at Wendell and me. As he did, the unmistakable sound of a yipping puppy rose from below.
“Did Weir get a dog?” I asked.
“This past weekend,” Wendell said.
Weir looked away, feigning total concentration on the mutt, a cute little bundle of black and grey fur, as he scooped it up, carried it down his porch stairs, and set it on his walkway. It wasn’t an infant, but it wasn’t very big, either, and it scrambled around his ankles as he tried to lead it southbound and away from us on its leash.
“Without a word of a lie,” Wendell said, “he’s called it Virginia Woof.”
“No way!” I said. And then (I don’t know where it came from or why), I followed with: “Does that mean he has to pick up long, unpunctuated streams of shit at the park?”
Wendell guffawed; then I did, too. And as I tried to palm spewed beer from the front of my shirt, Weir stopped, five yards south on the sidewalk, and glared over his shoulder at us two schoolboys giggling behind his back.
“Goddamn it,” Wendell said, sounding disappointed, avoiding Weir’s brief stare-down. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Why not? He asks for that sort of treatment.”
“Maybe,” Wendell said, “but I was still being petty. It’s just . . . I guess I haven’t gotten over how he insulted me a while back.”
I was surprised, partially with Wendell’s integrity, but also at why I should have thought, for all of this time, that I’d held a singular place of honor in Weir’s bitter little world.
“What did he say to you?” I asked.
Wendell took a double hit, beer then cigarette, and said, “It’s not so much what he said as what he did. We exchanged a few words a couple of years ago, and afterwards it got back to me that he took As If It Mattered into his classroom and used ‘Marathon Man’ as an example of how not to write a short story.”
I shook my head. “Y’know, if Weir’s not careful, a guy as twisted as he is could pull an Eddie Kolbin himself one day and self-destruct.”
I caught a glimmer of acknowledgment in Wendell’s eye with that statement. I’d read his story, defended him, and tossed in a smidgeon of irony all in one sentence. In an off-kilter way, I should have felt good about my slyness, but if anything, the moment exposed a spooky, otherworldliness to the situation. In a planet of this size, what were the odds of the three of us occupying this small parcel of land? But these were the facts: if you drew an imaginary boundary from my house to Weir’s to Wendell’s and back, you’d outline the proverbial Bermuda triangle of lost letters, encompassing the failed screenwriter, the embittered English teacher with unfulfilled dreams, and the earnest short story writer with one foot on the bottom rung of a rickety, overcrowded ladder.
Wendell drained his beer and slipped his finished cigarette into its opening. “Anyhow, what’s that saying about publicity? He showed the book to maybe two hundred students, so I shouldn’t be complaining.”
He reached for another Molson, now unattached and sitting on top of False Roomers, and picked it up. A wet ring marred the title page, but I was already into my second beer, so it didn’t matter as much as it might have.
“But enough about me,” Wendell said. “Let’s get back to your screenplay.”
“Right, where were we? Oh yeah, Maddy had somehow put it into this producer’s hands, and he loved it. She dealt with him quite a bit over the next couple of years, phone calls, faxes — this was before the everyday use of email, for us, anyway, so we’ve still got those filed away in hard copies somewhere. By that September, he said he was anxious to get things rolling and his colleague/friend was going to be in Toronto for a few days; maybe we could meet him when he got in for a lunch at Mövenpicks downtown.”
Just rehashing the story now, all these years later, made me reach for my cigarettes. I lit one with jittery hands.
“So we both booked a day off work and I broke out my Dockers,” I said. “You couldn’t believe how rube-like I felt that afternoon, sitting out on the patio, across from a man who likely oversaw multi-million-dollar movies littered with big-screen stars. Mostly, I tried to let Maddy do the talking while I ordered the dish least likely to stain, flop, or stick and steered clear of the beer.”
Wendell laughed. “I’m sure that’s just how you remember it.”
“I don’t remember it,” I said. “The only incident I do recall was at the end, after we’d stood at the table, shook hands, and he’d left. I was thrilled that we’d made it through the ordeal, but I was drained. In fact, Maddy and I both had to sit down again, just to get our bearings, and that’s when I noticed two women, decked out like Bay Street lawyers who’d made the five-minute trek for their salad and half-bottle of vintage, sitting beside us. One of them turned to us, winked, and said, ‘Sounds very promising, guys. Good luck.’”
“So what happened,” Wendell asked, “to the promise?”
“We’re still not totally sure,” I said. “Maddy and I tried to get back to a normal routine while we waited, but all we could talk about was what our new life would be like, writing screenplays around the swimming pool and taking up golf. Occasionally, one of us would break out laughing and state that we’d have to maintain our professionalism and never, ever start on the mai tais until after two on workdays.
“We had little Rachel and Eric to think about, too. How were they going to adapt to California? Every aspect of our lives seemed to be on the brink of monumental change, but over the next couple of months, the producer’s phone calls came less and less, until, finally, he called one day — sounding truly apologetic and disappointed, Maddy said — to tell us that after all this time, they were just too busy with other projects to pursue ours.”
“And that was it? Your dreams were crushed?”
“Uh-uh. Not yet. We were crushed, naturally, but Maddy wasn’t going to let things end that way. We were working and raising two young children, though, so it took a while to regroup.”
I yapped on, telling him about the handful of mid-level agents she’d secured for us over the next couple of years, each of them dangling compliments like carrots for a few months before fading into oblivion. I also mentioned how we’d discussed writing another screenplay but had decided against it for the time; the commitment would have been massive, especially during my work season, what with our ongoing marketing, fine-tuning, and childrearing. Not only that, but realistically, we weren’t going to produce a better market-breaking script than the one already in our hands.
“Time did pass, though,” I said. “And whenever a Problem Child 2 or whatever sullied our TV screen on a Saturday night, it heightened Maddy’s frustration. Eventually, she’d had enough; she decided to try to launch an independent production herself.”
“Herself?” Wendell asked. “As producer?”
“Why not?” I said. “She’s a smart woman, and she’d gathered all sorts of knowledge along the way in our . . . real-life farce. At that point she was going to do it one of two ways, by getting the bandwagon rolling or by rolling up her sleeves for the duration — with me tagging along, of course. At least a dozen indies are shot in town every year, and we’d psyched ourselves up: there was no way ours couldn’t be one of them.”
Wendell smiled and shook his head in wonderment as he reached for his third beer. I don’t know if he was marveling at our ability to absorb punishment or if my yarn just outright surprised him.
“Smoke?” he asked. I nodded at the pack and he took one.
“Anyhow,” I said, “Maddy created a production board and budget and we started contacting the list of hopefuls we’d drawn up for cast and crew — locals, mostly, with the idea of creating momentum from the ground up, until we had a sort of unstoppable, low-budget force. And the first guy we talked to, Wynne Wallace, hopped on board.”
“Wynne Wallace, the lead singer for Babylon?” Wendell asked.
“Yeah, he’d just come off that seedy little hard-rock flick . . . what was it called again?”
“Horse,” Wendell said, filling in my blank.
“Yeah, that’s it. Anyhow, his agent said they’d read the script we’d sent, liked the change of pace, and to keep them posted on proceedings for scheduling purposes, and that’s when Maddy decided to look for a little help. Way back when, the LA producer had told her that if she ever needed someone to talk to in the future, he might be ‘a bird in her ear.’”
“Wow. That’s pretty good stuff from a guy of his stature,” Wendell said, sounding sort of impressed.
“What can I say. Maddy’s likeable. Maybe all he could give was advice, but maybe, we thought, he could hook us up with a director, even a second-unit director, or some other pros around town to start filling out our roster. Anyway, she phoned him, laid out our circumstances, and, after he’d agreed that the actor/musician idea was a great start, he dropped the bombshell: he’d thought a current popular sitcom, one that had premiered that very fall, was our screenplay.”
“Huh? What sitcom was that?” Wendell asked.
I told him, and as he processed the information, I continued.
“We’d been aware of the show, although we’d never watched it. But when we took a closer look we realized the similarities to our screenplay were mind-boggling.”
“More than coincidental?” Wendell said.
“More than coincidental,” I said. “And after doing some research, including reading an interview with the show’s lead actor and crunching the dates he’d stated, Maddy concluded the show had been pitched to him six months after our ex–New York agent had said she was going to ship False Roomers to the show’s very same New York producers.”
“An alien comes to Earth in the guise of an anthropologist and finds lodging in a rooming house in order to study human beings,” Wendell said, nodding now, looking pensive as he dropped a one-sentence, on-the-fly slug line for our screenplay. “As apposed to a group of aliens, with their leader in the guise of a physicist, coming to Earth and finding lodging in a rooming house in order to study human beings.”
“Not bad for off the top of your head,” I said. “And of all the letters and faxes Maddy had filed away, none from that particular agent had stated her intentions with the producers of that show. Her mention of them had been strictly verbal.”
“Which meant that you had no concrete evidence to weigh against a product that wasn’t an exact copy, so you couldn’t pursue litigation, but you’d had your screenplay rendered obsolete by a TV show that had totally stolen its originality . . . its thunder, as it were.”
“Exactly,” I said, a bit surprised by his response before remembering that he’d be looking at it from a writer’s point of view. “But you know, over the years I’ve given it some thought. I’ve tried to rationalize. Happenstance does occur; similarities abound in the entertainment industry. Plus, yahoos the world over claim to have had their intellectual property stolen, and when you look at it from the outside, you never know who to side with; in fact, most times I side with the celebrity. So it could have . . .”
I stopped, unable to finish the statement. “Nah,” I said. “I still believe we were fucked.”
“Must have made you want to wear one of those Maxi Nighttime Wingy things for a while,” he said, and I couldn’t even detect a hint of a smile.
“Apropos,” I said, nodding. “While we bent over to pick up our four-leaf clovers at that special time in our lives, we had our pockets picked and were reamed simultaneously. Years later, it still hurts. But what are you gonna do?”
“And so that was when you packed it in?” Wendell offered.
“You would think so, wouldn’t you? But no way. It’s almost as if we had to receive one final humiliation before we could put it to rest. I’m sort of hesitant to mention it, though, because I’ve got absolutely no one to blame but myself, and my sheer stupidity, for that fiasco.”
“Hey, you gotta tell me now,” Wendell said, laughing, “if you’re calling this one a fiasco after all that other stuff.”
He was right. I did have to tell him now. “It was maybe half a year later,” I said. “The television show was a hit and our script had lost its punch, but Maddy still couldn’t quit snooping around a bit, reading Variety and such, and she’d caught wind of a screenplay contest where the top three placements won a year’s apprenticeship with a major studio in Hollywood, along with a salary of twenty- thousand dollars. The pay was a minor stipend, really — the true prize was an office on a studio lot and some sort of job as a junior writer, the proverbial foot in the door. So she thought, Why not? It was a writing sample, not a shooting script, and she mailed it out. But there were about thirty-five hundred other applications and False Roomers held a powerful jinx, so we put it out of our minds.
“By that time, with the kids in grade school, I’d finally gotten my priorities straight and was on snow-removal standby for the winter, but I lay snoring on the couch the day a secretary for the Chesterfield Screenplay Contest contacted us by phone about our submission. Apparently, we were finalists and they’d be contacting us by week’s end with further details. Naturally, I flipped — dancing, cartwheeling, doing the chunky-man boogie around the living room before phoning Maddy at work to tell her the good news. We’d won.”
Wendell squinted at me for a moment before saying, “What do you mean, you’d won? You’d been contacted as finalists.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “Am I really the only person alive who’s that illogical? Thirty-five hundred applications, three winners, and we’d been contacted as finalists. I’d automatically assumed we were part of the final three . . . and that’s what I told Maddy. In turn, she told everyone in her office the same thing, and we spent the entire week trying to figure the logistics of two writers, one winner, and how the hell four of us would survive on twenty-five thousand dollars in Los Angeles for a year.”
“Once again, I’m making an assumption,” Wendell said, “but neither of you ended up in Los Angeles for a year, did you?”
“Nope. We’d made the final ten and received a hearty congratulations for our top-drawer screenplay. Maddy can laugh about it now, but it took a long time for her to live down my idiocy in her workplace. And as for me . . . I don’t know if the ‘three-knockdown rule’ is in effect in that business, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve thrown in the towel. I refuse to receive any more brain damage.”
“So you spent all this time and effort becoming good at something, and you’re never going to give it another try?” Wendell asked.
“Hey, what can I say? We were just another couple of wannabes,” I said. “And writing a good screenplay’s not that big a deal for anyone with reasonable intelligence and a lot of dedication. Really. Look at the stuff being made. You write short stories, but you could switch over right now and do better than most. The thing is, anyone with half a brain should already know not to bother. Hollywood’s a well-guarded pie, and slices aren’t always handed out on merit.”
Wendell stayed quiet for a beat before saying, “Did you ever think that when you punched Matt Templer in the head, when you smashed him to the ground, that subconsciously you were looking for retribution for the way Hollywood had treated you and Maddy?”
Maybe. Maybe that’s just what I was hoping to find: retribution; although that would be exactly the kind of in-your-face symbolism a goofy short story writer would be looking for.
And if so, my actions hadn’t worked. But something was working. Right then and there, I felt better than I had in some time, as if retelling my experience, a saga I’d never before recounted from start to finish, had been cathartic, like squeezing and draining a mental pustule. I felt light, almost happy. Of course, I’d downed three tallboys, the equivalent of six beers, in a short amount of time, but I was an expert at how that made me feel. This was different.
Just what had I been worrying about the night before? That I felt swamped, like my minimal list was endless, its goals unachievable? Well, the day was only half over and already I’d applied a coat of paint and was in the midst of spending more time getting to know my neighbor better; I sat drinking with him. At that very moment, I could even see associating with his entire family. And if an outside cynic said that was just the alcohol speaking . . . well, that same alcohol could speak just as eloquently around our barbeque or in their living room.
Then there was the Bible thing. I looked over to Rose’s place and saw her sitting on her porch. I know, I know, I wasn’t exactly soaking up the Scriptures, but I enjoyed Rose’s company and we would get to it. In fact, right then and there, I raised my left arm, pointed at my watch, and mouthed the words after supper. Rose nodded and smiled, anxious, I’m sure, to give me a lecture on daytime imbibing and the importance of temperance.
To date, probably getting to know the kids better had been the hardest goal to strive for — not that I didn’t enjoy it (most of the time), and not that I didn’t already know them well. But attempting to understand, with my well-documented limitations, that they were not me, that they had their unique trials and tribulations to face, and that I’d never get over being scared for them every single day of my life, that would be a lifelong learning process, and at least I was starting to recognize the fact.
“So, what do you think?”
“Huh?”
Wendell, still waiting for some kind of response, had dragged me from my ruminations.
“Do you think you attacked that Templer guy to make some sort of statement?”
“I don’t know . . . maybe. No. The asshole took a swing at me and I swung back.”
“So,” he said. “Where do you go from here? I mean, you haven’t exactly been ostracized from your lifelong profession, but you’ve had a fairly damaging paragraph added to your résumé’s job skills section—”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks kindly.”
Wendell grinned and continued. “And although you’ve worked hard at picking up what I would consider a decent replacement skill,” he nodded to the screenplay, “you tell me you wouldn’t consider walking that path again.”
“I’ve told you. It’s a path to nowhere.”
“Only if you retrace your steps exactly.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I have a path for now.”
Of course, this one included not looking for a new job, and its final destination was to surprise both Maddy and myself with my capabilities. As an aspiration, it sounded insubstantial at best, and more than a little silly.
But I couldn’t help thinking that Maddy had me headed in the right direction.
2023 is almost over and so is this Jim Kearns novel. One more chapter and epilogue to come. Thank you to all who have stayed with me this year through the novel and short stories. I hope I can entertain you in 2024.