An Inside Joke

[An attempt at fiction.] 

It’s 2:17 PM on the second Sunday in October. My sister turned 60 a month ago. Her youngest daughter, the one I don’t know, drove me down here in her father’s car: Robin and Steve don’t want me driving, not even in a rented U-Haul, because the word is I’m a hazard behind the wheel. The only place I give vent to rage is on the road, and only when I’m driving. Nothing ever really happened, the one time I totaled a car it was from plain inattention, but a passenger read my mind one July while we were on Interstate 64 and called the police in the next rest area we came to.  She’d made up some story about me being suicidal with a gun in my pocket.

So it behooved John Law to pull us over, take me into protective custody, and hold me for three days in a locked mental ward to see if I was committable yet.  Who the passenger was is irrelevant except that I didn’t know her well and she hated guns. Her fantasy that I might hurt somebody sounded convincing enough to the police; she alleged I was a danger to myself because it would be hard to prove I’m not. Or so she thought. 

I told her to drive the car to my place, we lived in the same neighborhood, and then never come near me again. She did, and disappeared. For all I know she changed her hair and I couldn’t recognize her. Faces and names don’t matter much to me, not unless they mean something to me, and almost nobody does.  I made a vow to never go out of my way for a stranger again. “No good deed…”

For three days I practiced reading Proust (I always had my ebook reader with me), kept politely to myself, and acted calmer and more level-headed than I usually bother to be. Then when they let me out I sold the old Chevy on Craigslist for an even $1000, buried my pistol for archaeologists to find if I don’t come back for it, sublet my apartment to a relative of a friend of the landlord, and after 35 years went back to roaming the country. Sometimes I hitchhiked, sometimes I rode the bus; sometimes I stayed in motels, sometimes I hung mosquito netting from a clothesline in the woods.     

The problem was that my sister is in my medical files as my next of kin, along with my psychiatric diagnosis and a bit of my personal history. So some desk worker at the hospital called my sister to let her know where I was and why, and when she called me to hear my story I was stupid enough to be honest with her: I’d been having the fifth or sixth bad day in a row,  that just happens sometimes for no reason at all, and I was probably cussing and muttering to myself about how pissed off I was at all the shit I have to eat. It wasn’t serious, these things come and go, but I can see how it might scare somebody. So the dizzy Scorpio who’d asked me for a ride set me up to get me off the road. A public service, I gather.

And my brother-in-law, who knows me too well, decided that I shouldn’t be driving. Or carrying a gun. Because of my “anger problem.” And if I didn’t agree my sister would get on the phone on Monday, the second day of my stay, and start trying to have me committed. It might have worked, or maybe not, but I like to stay out of trouble. 

So after a few months of wandering the Interstate system, when it started getting cold at night, I decided to move inside for the Winter. But at that point I couldn’t afford the first month’s rent and the security deposit anywhere, and staying in motels would eat up my SSI check so I’d never get ahead, so I had nowhere to go but the sofabed in my sister’s finished basement.  The deal is I pay them whatever it costs to feed me, keep $100 a month for pocket money, and give the rest of my check to my sister to save for me so I could afford to get the hell out by April 15th, IRS Day. Just because that date is easy for everybody to remember, and far enough away so I’ll have a nest egg ready. Oh, and set up a way to get my psych medication there, and never miss a dose. Because my family cares about me and they want what’s best for me. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

So here we are, my mysterious niece and I, at a folding table outside a vegan restaurant.  Neither of us is vegan but she has a friend from high school who manages the place, and they do have good carrot juice. (The secret is the spices, they say.) And carrot juice does well with clear tequila, which I’ve taken to carrying in my “man bag” (‘so it’s purse, fuck you’) for special occasions. And I’m sitting across the table from her, downwind, because I keep playing with a big cigar like I’m thinking of lighting it. I probably won’t, I’ve just taken to fidgeting (hence the booze), but “those things are disgusting, just the thought of them.” Just on principle. And my sister and her husband have always been very big on principles, and they raised their kids that way. And I have been made to understand their thinking, though I was slow on the uptake till I needed to be otherwise. So I’m only allowed to smoke anything outside, and only if it doesn’t bother anybody else. 

So here I am, a bald old man who’s obviously suffered, around the corner from “a prominent research university.” Waiting for somebody I sort of dated for less than a month 39 years ago, a graduate student in something to do with advanced mathematics I can’t understand (I was a poet, you see), whose Facebook page mentions she works in the same school she studied in, whose website informs us she’s been a tenured professor since 1996. And lists her email address. And surprisingly she remembered me, and more surprisingly she admits it. And she’s got nothing else to do this weekend. And she’s always wondered how I turned out.

The last time I saw her I got barred till further notice from Baltimore’s premier gay disco. Because while she and her sister were getting on people’s nerves with their interpretive dancing I started singing along with MacArthur Park. Loudly. Off-key. Leaning against the wall by the dance floor as if I might just topple over. The girls were instructed to help me exit this establishment. Immediately. When I showed up a few days later, hoping to find that cute little twink I’d noticed that night, the barkeep recognized me and told me I was not welcome, nor were my girlfriends. 

She remembered that, she said in her email. And she still thinks it’s funny, though she’s sorry I got in trouble. Oh. “and by the way,” she’s been 12  Stepping for 30 years, and she does Pilates, and she’s vegan. And she’s surprised to hear that I’m not dead of AIDS or suicide or a car crash or something. And I’m the craziest person she ever dated, and the smartest townie she met that year. (“What a waste,” she’d say.) So she just has to satisfy her curiosity, since I popped up. 

And the only person who was available to drive me was the youngest niece, who was an infant when I “ran away from home,” who I’ve seen only a dozen or so times in the past 28 years. Who’s very patient with me, who also has an ebook reader. 

We look like we might be related, she and I, if you see us close together and catch us at the right time, but otherwise we might as well be different species. She looks like a typical suburbanite of her generation, in flowing peasant skirt, a T-shirt about an emo band that broke up before she was born, a paisley headscarf keeping her long brown hair from flapping in the breeze, and brown suede hiking boots over argyle socks.       

While my head is shaved clean, my Fu Manchu mustache is cut off evenly with my bottom jawline, and I’m dressed to impress: a hot pink Oxford shirt, untucked and with the top three buttons open, a black heart pendant on a leather thong just below my Adam’s apple, and camouflage pants bloused over a pair of black leather combat boots that were GI 30-odd years ago when they were first issued. ($27.99 on ebay, with $14.99 shipping.) The boots sport pink paracord laces to match my T-shirt, and I’m wearing every ring I own. It’s a little joke only certain circles would understand, and they’d hate me for making fun of them.