Emma Knotwell #3

Emma Knotwell leaned against the counter in her small kitchen, absently stirring a cup of tea she held in her hand and staring out the window at the boy cutting grass across the street. She was a slender and plain woman, tall and erect, a wan round face framed by unapologetically graying hair that fell thickly and haphazardly to her shoulders. A simple light green and brown print dress hung loosely on her spare frame, falling just below her knees. Brown ballerina flats lay near where she had kicked them off. Emma had just gotten home from work, a secretary for a local bail bondsman with offices near the county courthouse.

The late afternoon summer sunlight gleamed off the boy’s sweating torso.

Emma had never married, and her only experience with males had been a few clumsy encounters in 9^th grade. That embarrassment could still redden her face with shame, so she learned to like very much her own uncomplicated company, and she liked to read.

She was also a compulsive pack rat who could never bring herself to throw anything away. Boxes of stuff, the origins of which she had long ago forgotten, lay stacked on tables, the floor, and along all the halls in her house. She skillfully navigated increasingly narrow spaces as time wore on.

Nobody really knew her, other than her boss, Bucky Best Bail Bonds, and a train of unsavory clients of Bucky’s who had both benefitted from his work and rued their fate for ever having met him.

Emma had learned how to vanish, as it were, as the youngest daughter of the town fire chief. A garrulous and hail fellow to his friends and neighbors, Dick Knotwell was a taskmaster to his three daughters. He had always wanted a son, but he and his wife Mary never had one. He had tried to train his oldest daughter, Conway, to do “boy” things like playing catch, whittling, going fishing, and cutting firewood, but she never took to it. She preferred ballet.

He again tried with their second child, Dani, but she was seriously injured snow-boarding after her father had insisted she give it a try. Emma was just old enough to remember hospital visits, her mother crying and her father shouting, Dani’s homecoming, and then the ever-present wheelchair and Dani’s withering legs.

Emma had been a “mistake,” born eight years after Dani. Her father had not wanted another child, much less a girl. Growing up, Emma sensed his estrangement and kept her distance. He would not experiment with gender mechanics again; Mary had forbidden it.

By the time Emma turned teenager, both Conway and Dani had left the house for marriage and school respectively, and the Knotwell household had become quiet indeed.

Emma had been closest to Dani. Perhaps she felt a kinship between cripples, Dani by accident and herself by design? By her father? By her personality? She wasn’t sure, but Emma was as cocooned away from people as Dani was from walking. She never forgot what Dani said to her as she was packing to leave for nursing school. “Emma, honey, I can’t walk, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get to where I want to go. You can walk, but please don’t do it alone. It would be a sad journey.”

Emma watched the boy cutting rows, back and forth. She was thinking how her hair had started turning gray when she was in her 20s. She would see the odd strands in the mirror, and being very much in tune with her inner self, figured that the emerging colorlessness suited her just fine. But now she wondered why she had thought that. Today, she had found out that she very much did not want to die alone, colorless and forgotten.

Bucky had been processing some bail releases, one after another on a pile, when he stopped suddenly and muttered, “well, goddamn…” He was staring at the local paper and looked up quizzically, catching her eye.

“What?” she asked.

“Remember the Rodman case, drug rap, 20K bond that skipped?”

“What, a few months ago?”

“Yeah, that one. Dead. It was the smell.”

“The smell?”

“Yeah,” said Bucky, “the smell. Buried under a pile of hubcaps in his apartment. Dead for a month, they say. Neighbors finally smelled him, called the cops.”

“Hubcaps?”

“He collected them. Hundreds of them stacked ceiling high. I’d seen them when we first bonded him. Weird, I thought, but whatever. He must have been lying under them when I was knocking at his door a few weeks ago. Didn’t smell anything then, though,” he paused. “Maybe we can get the bond back, now.”

“No friends or family?” Emma asked.

“Nobody knew him at all.”

The boy across the street finished his mowing and killed the engine. A lone fly buzzed up against Emma’s screen window. The boy used his tee shirt to wipe himself down, draped it over his shoulder, and walked into the house. Emma thought of the boxes stacked in her house as she followed the boy’s denim backside disappearing behind the front door.

John Jakes #2

This is the 1970s, lower East Side in New York City, between 1st and 2nd Avenue. Grime, abandoned cars, and ramshackle tenements blight the streets much like other parts of the city; Central Park’s hard dirt and disrepair is hazardous during the day, a war zone at night, and the South Bronx resembles Dresden in WWII. Down here, bruised and beaten Bowery drunks stagger around cars at stoplights smearing windshields with oily rags hoping for handouts.

The city closed its last opium den in the late 50s in a highly publicized raid that netted a couple of kilos of opium paste and some heroin, but this is New York City. If it exists anywhere, it exists here. And this opium den exists here on E. 1st St. because nature's original elixir, “the breath of God” that has beguiled and transfixed humans since the beginning of time will always find its place amongst the connoisseurs of a mindful, if manufactured, paradise. Especially for those with enough money and desire.

It’s dark. The few working streetlights cast dim shadows on this hot and humid night. The stench of urine from a nearby subway station thickens the stale air. Midblock, a set of stairs lead down below street level to a steel door, bolted from within. Periodically, a taxi arrives and a man -- almost always a man --gets out, descends the stairs, and knocks a code. The door opens, and he goes in.

This time the man was John Jakes. He lays adrift now on a cot inside, wearing dark Marc Jacob slacks, Ferragamo tasseled loafers, and a wrinkled Brooks Brothers ecru dress shirt, “JJ” embroidered on each cuff (he had left his Rolex at home). Jakes has been wearing these clothes since he arrived here a few days ago. Other prone figures lay on platforms surrounding the room, sucking in opium vapors from caramel dollops of kneaded goo heated just so in a clay pipe that hovers above a gas lamp. The scent of roasted hazelnuts rides the smoke. It is very quiet. Flower courtesans, beautiful Asian women, carry trays back and forth serving their customers.

Jakes is in an opium dream, a beatitude, a dizzying evanescence in its vanishing entirety, inside and outside of him, a heavy weightlessness, a blind vision, a silent hallelujah of release. He doesn’t just live for this. He is this, until he isn’t. And then he starts again.

As a young boy at the Tingley School in New Jersey, Jakes had experimented sexually with some of his mates. Not an uncommon thing for young adolescent prep school boys confused by the strange longing in their loins but still uncurious about, much less attracted, to girls. But when all his friends found that attraction, Jakes didn’t. He long wondered why, and fretted when, but it never came because he learned finally, to his great horror, that he was a “mo” in the parlance of the times, and nobody could know. His social world would not allow it. The closet beckoned, and he went in.

Even as he enlarged his inheritance as a savvy financier on Wall Street, married a wealthy socialite who gave him two boys and two girls, went to all the right parties, cultivated all the right people, and lived on an estate in the rolling hills of New Jersey horse country, he simmered with schizoid rage. You wouldn’t know it. Handsome, auburn hair combed straight back like Barrymore, impeccably dressed, and affable to a fault, those who knew him best would say he was such a sweet man, a kind man, a suave and cultured treasure at any party.

Which is why, when he would stay overnight on “business” in the city, nobody questioned it. He could stay away, be himself for a few precious hours, go to the right bars, enjoy men, and be in his chosen
demi-monde that his other life would abhor. Returning, he would pick up his old role, and start to die just a little more each day.

His wife, Barbara, spent so much time on the golf course and charity balls and bridge tournaments that she didn’t care to question her husband’s growing silences when they were alone. All the kids were either grown or in boarding school, and the two could co-exist easily in their big house for days without talking to each other. Barbara neither sought nor offered sex, and Jakes was thankful for that small favor. But in his absences she had begun meeting other people, very hush-hush, and finally had an open affair with another socially prominent divorcee that led to the ultimate breakup of their own marriage, not to mention feigned shock and dismay throughout their social world and headlines in the NY Times society pages.

Finally freed from his wife and with his kids absent, Jakes went full demi-monde, making up for lost time. He would disappear for weeks, and as he managed his own investments with the help of a private firm, no one really knew where he went or what he did. They certainly would never have imagined John Jakes lying on this cot and dreaming this dream, or that a demon roamed the same streets as John Jakes, or that the elegant and impeccably groomed John Jakes was beginning to rot from inside out.

Melody Rimes #1

You wouldn't need to see the Harley Davidson handlebar tattoo on the back of her shoulders, the handgrips angled slightly down on each scapula, to know that Melody Rimes didn't give a shit. She was a stone in skintight jeans, a black teeshirt hanging loose over bony shoulders and small breasts. Her narrow eyes and sharp nose gave her face a slight ferret quality, but it somehow worked for her. A cigarette dangled from her grim lips, and she brushed back her spiky black hair with her left hand, black enameled fingernails hiding the oily grime beneath. Melody was staring down the street. Her dark brown eyes glinted into the sun setting between the buildings, which cast into sharp relief the receding silhouette of the only man in the world who could talk to her "like that."

Melody Rimes had long ago learned how not to give a shit. Raised on the wrong side of the tracks, of which there were many in the coal town of Sprague, West Virginia, she often slipped away from her family after an early and mean supper to sneak up the hill and beg for handouts from the "rich folk" enjoying their lawn parties and cookouts on The Heights. Melody didn't give a shit because she was hungry. Raymond, her father, was a disabled coal miner and her mother, Betty Lu, was a corpulent, smock-wearing, chain-smoking, former high-school beauty queen who started and ended each sentence with the word "fuck." Between buying cigarettes, Zelko vodka, and lottery tickets, the Rimes didn't have much left to put on the table. So Melody begged.

And Raymond and Betty Lu had to name her Melody, too, in probably one of the last light-hearted moments either of them would ever know. Melody had to live with that name every day at school, kids calling it out in singsong monotony and rhyming nonsense words, laughing at her clothes, her hygiene, and her nasal twang learned from a life in the hollow. She was an outcast, friend to nobody and nobody's friend. Misery was her life, so as soon as the law allowed, at 16, she dropped out and started bagging groceries at the local Piggly-Wiggly, hiding her paycheck from her parents who thought that she still was going to school.

At 18, she left home, used the only thing she had to find a new life with a local biker gang. They all did her, she didn't mind;  Rambling Jack Rose and the Chief and Buttergood and Cueball and others. She actually kind of liked it sometimes. At least she had something that somebody wanted. Cueball knocked her up; she wasn't sure it was him, but close enough. She had the abortion, and then more sex, drugs, and wild rides with whiskey filled out the gang's days. They'd score some Oxy and meth, and keep the local junk dealer busy. Paycheck in, sweet oblivion out.

Then, the only man in the world who could talk to her "like that" showed up. Melody and Cueball were watching NASCAR on ESPN from the threadbare sofa of their "clubhouse," a two bedroom clapboard structure they rented from the guy who owned the Railcar, the only real bar in town. Cueball was fiddling with his key chain and smoking a Camel, slurping Natty Bo in between drags. Melody was thinking about her father, not a bad man really, but feckless and sick. He had gotten Black lung working in the mine, one that turned out to be notoriously unsafe. A cave-in killed dozens of miners soon after Raymond went on disability and the laundry list of safety violations ignored by the CEO, including faulty air filters, eventually sent him to jail. With each year a little more of Raymond wasted away, and Betty Lu began adding more "fucks" into the middle of her sentences until she became profanity itself. Dying quickly in a cave-in might have been better for her father, Melody was thinking.

She had just come back after seeing him when she went to the house to pick some things up. He had been sitting in his chair, plugged into his oxygen tank, sallow and rheumy in equal measure . Betty Lu was out somewhere, "anywhere but here," Melody had thought. She had hoped he would be asleep. He wasn't.

"Girl, what you doing?" he had wheezed when she came in the door.
"Nothing, just picking up a few things, that's all."
"Then you going back to that house?"
"Yeah. That's where I live."
"It's a dump. Why you gonna live in a dump?"

Melody looked around the room, dishes piled up, the odor of fry oil hanging heavy in the air, duct tape over a crack in the front door window.

"A dump, Pa?"
"Yeah, a dump."
"Do I need a reason?"
"No."
"Then I ain't got one."

And so she had gone into her room, got her things. and walked past him and out the door.

"Just want what's best for you, Mel, that's all," he had muttered as the screen door slammed shut.

And Melody had kept walking. And now she was thinking, sitting there on the sofa with Cueball and listening to the roar of engines on the tube, that she was nothing more than a big greasy fur ball hocked up by fate; capital "F" fucking Fate, that is.

Cueball had nodded off. Over the whine of the race cars Melody heard someone knocking at the door.

Four years later...

I just found my blog again, four years after my last post. I think this is a good time to start it up again. I think. I will.