My world is miles of endless roads That leave a trail of broken dreams…
Where have you been? I hear you say…
I will meet you at the Blue Café
— Christopher Rea song
Chapter 46: Other People’s Plans
At the Beaches with my brother, I was surprised how upset he was they had torn down our high school to build a new one. One sentiment I didn’t have: I disliked bordering on hated that place. He had a happier time, lettering in track, setting a shot-put record, joining the chess club, dating cute girls.
I was more bothered Mac’s Pool Hall was abandoned, the Ferris wheel and other Boardwalk carnival rides gone, weedy vacant lots replacing burned or torn-down tourist traps. As if that one last good season resort people dreamed of never came.
To me, his master plan for million-dollar net worth was the end-point of his flight from our childhood poverty. He would have been within three years of federal retirement now, but left his secure civil-service job to get rich. Ironic, since allegedly secure state civil-service left me. Back when he graduated FSU and took a GS-9 federal slot, I had been bouncing from job to job, evoking his grasshopper simile. He had his career mapped out: four years’ Navy service counting toward federal retirement meant only 26 to go. Longer than a military career but close enough to see a secure future.
Implied in his plan was climbing the bureaucratic ladder. But his wife disliked big cities so he passed up promotion to return to quiet Tallahassee. In a bureaucracy, that was strike one. When he qualified for transfer from civil-audit to enforcement, requiring a move to Memphis, he passed — strike two.
His government work was picking the bones of the deceased American dream: income-tax collection from those already trapped in foreclosure, poverty, misery. Too clear a reminder, perhaps, of how tough life was growing up on a fireman’s retirement and waitress tips. His catbird-seat view of wrecked lives showed him an opportunity. He seized it ruthlessly.
He “borrowed” money from the matriarch to buy his first tax-sale house. Her terms: forget paying her back if he forgot collecting a loan he made me for house payments the year my son was born. Belated recompense for my first book’s royalties going to the old man’s health care and my brother’s letter sweaters and Enro shirts.
He readily agreed. Maxed his credit cards and partnered with a skilled handyman to repair that first house, rent it, and hunt more bargains.
By the time he refused to pay full price for our oceanfront motel room he owned 35 houses solely or with his partner, managed 35 more for someone else. Real-life Monopoly; he always was a fierce board-game player. His monthly cash flow was more than my whole book deal.
Soon as we finished our road trip I got back on the road alone, headed west through rolling pines and small dusty Panhandle towns. Bought a brass Florida alligator buckle to replace my pewter elk. Got caught in a horrific Gulf thunderstorm that recalled storms on teenage road trips when caution was the better part of valor. Pulled over and waited it out, as I did then.
Still made it for a sensual Friday-night reunion with the Gulf Coast blonde, who had a dozen fresh Krispy Kremes waiting. Sex and sugar; nice. But she was up and at ’em next morning. I was scheduled into her agenda, that management streak I noticed coming to the fore. We examined potential venues for her daughter’s wedding. Site planners recognized her authority and sold like crazy. She had been one of those beauty-pageant moms since earliest days, managing her daughter’s appearances — her life — toward the soon-to-be realized goal of an affluent husband. Thinking of my brother, it seemed everybody had a plan but me.
We took a break at a big flea market. She got me to buy her a cheap cowboy hat to complement the long-billed Filson’s sword-fisherman cap I wore to cut the glare. I scored authentic Dunhill’s pipe tobacco, surprising find in a flea market. In enervating humidity, the whole town was festive with some historical celebration. She was expansive and happy completing her to-do list. We finished in an open-air cafe beneath a moon fuzzy with moisture where the combo played New Orleans blues, the seafood was good, and bug zappers kept mosquitoes at bay.
Over dinner she revealed her management plan for the rest of my life. When I moved here I had to be gainfully employed — she couldn’t support a grown man — what work could I do besides writing? Whoa, whoa, whoa, I wanted to say. But didn’t. She went on: of course I would sit with the bride’s family at church; boy would that frost her ex! In a way it was amusing. But it was more unsettling.
Eventually we went home. With a lascivious grin, she put one of her many porn videos on TV. An unsuspected kink was, as well as women performing fellatio, she liked videos of men pleasuring each other. Second time in my life a woman sought to entertain me with porn. First one was a wife using her husband’s collection, strictly hetero that time, while taking me into the marital bed for a revenge fuck.
Meaningless shifting colors on a screen when there’s a real live woman beneath your fingers and tongue. In each case I turned my back to the screen to afford them the view if they needed it, and visited the mount of Venus.
Was surprised when the blonde resisted. She thought her cunt dirty and disgusting, one of the most illogical fears I ever heard. Gently, I insisted. She was so stirred up she surrendered. Breath caught. That lovely female groan of need as she gave it up. Then she needed me in her. Saying ruefully as I complied, “Guess I’m gonna have to rethink that, huh? Never knew it could be like that…”
Next day, in heat and dense humidity, she showed me the Gulf Coast clear to Alabama. Who knew Alabama had a seacoast? Yep, Orange Beach: offshore fishermen returning with big fish to docks below the seafood restaurant where we ate lunch.
I remembered then even Mississippi touched the Gulf, having learned it after Hurricane Camille. Sailors with a ham-radio hobby at the Jacksonville Navy base where I worked then reported a powerless Pass Christian hospital. I ended up organizing, by telephone, the loan and air delivery of a giant Detroit Diesel generator from Jacksonville. Navy muscle and trucks, National Guard air crew and a World War Two “flying boxcar” that picked it up at our Navy airfield and landed into hurricane tailwinds in Mississippi despite a destroyed control tower. Hard to summarize that kind of work for the blonde’s resume, if I had been going to.
Gulf Coast beach houses sat on high pilings to allow storm surge to flow beneath. Not a place to be in a hurricane. She had grown melancholy. I was leaving that evening. She said she knew she was spinning castles in the air, I was never coming back. And what was there to say to that? She was right.
Our agreement had been to meet and see what happened. What happened would make happy memories. But I already had a manager, as she well knew. Couldn’t help wondering if she saw that as part of my charm: already housebroken, so to speak. Didn’t say it.
She was smart as a whip, a fierce advocate for the abused children she tried to protect in her work. She fought her own depression when twisted families kept visiting horrors on the vulnerable, while her agency pressured her to close cases with no satisfactory outcome. And at the same time she generously devoted a year of emails trying to help me find a way out of my own depression. She was creative and fun and a vigorous lover, and we were happy together, depression gone. So I suppose her matter-of-fact planning was logical and even plausible. She wanted to fit me in her life-plan. Everybody had a life plan but me.
But the only woman I would have left Chloe for had been gone for twenty-five years. I had just been fired when she called about the twenty-year reunion we promised each other, too sunk in depression to go to her, missing my last, best chance. She was gone for good.
The only thing resembling a plan I had was to keep breathing until I stopped. And maybe find a few little moments of happiness along the way before I died. The blonde helped me do that, and I was grateful. But I felt strangely liberated on the interstate back to my brother’s house.
