Self-Esteem (14 page)

The request made Crawford immediately feel more respectable. “Sure. What do I have to do?”

“Just read what I’ve written and give an opinion or two. It won’t take much time,” he said. “Feel free to say no.”

“No, no. I’d be happy to.”

“I just need to get your signature here,” he said, grabbing a document on his desk. “This just lets the money people know I have an outside review panel.”

“No problem.”

Peters put the document in front of Crawford and gave him a pen, pointing to the line where he needed to sign. As Crawford signed, Peters began rolling down his sleeves. “So how’s the novel coming?” he asked.

Cal opened the front door slowly. “Hello? Anybody home?” Both cars were gone, but he wanted to make sure no one was home. His parents weren’t ready to meet a guy like Darrin. They just weren’t cool enough. Cal knew that Darrin didn’t mind being an unwanted guest. Such a cool guy couldn’t be bothered with such minutiae.

Cal yanked his head to the side signaling Darrin to come in, and Darrin walked in, body erect, like a foreign dignitary at a state dinner.

“So this is it,” he said sticking out his bulbous chin. “Home, huh?” He looked at Cal, who felt anxious and embarrassed.

“Yeah. Home sweet home,” Cal said, clearing his throat. “If it were my choice, I wouldn’t go for the
Better Homes and Gardens
look, but…”

“It’s not your choice,” Darrin said. “Like a lot of things.”

Cal nodded in agreement but wondered if Darrin wasn’t being a little disrespectful. “If my parents come home, you wouldn’t mind leaving out the back, would you?”

“No,” he said, impassively looking over the polished mahogany coat rack that sat in the foyer. “Good thing I don’t have a coat, huh?”

“Why’s that?”

Darrin ignored the question. “They don’t like you having friends over, is that it?” He said, pausing on a picture of Cal at twelve. “Or is it just me?”

“I don’t think they like me having friends at all.” Cal led Darrin into the living room. “My mom wanted me to be friends with some guy — her friend’s son — but I didn’t…” Cal hesitated.

“You didn’t what?” Darrin said, clapping his hands as if to accelerate the exchange. “What?”

“I didn’t like the guy.” Cal laughed nervously. “I don’t think he liked me either.”

“You can’t plan friendships, Cal. It’s like trying to plan who you are. You can’t do it. You just got to be who you are, who you want to be, who you like being, all that shit. It’s very simple.”

Cal nodded, not knowing whether Darrin was being earnest or not. This actually happened frequently, and in such situations Cal always assumed Darrin was being serious. “I think you’re right. You know a lot of things, Darrin. Real smart things,” he said.
That was a stupid thing to say.

“Thanks. You’re pretty smart yourself,” he said with a wink.

Sometimes Cal thought it was odd the way Darrin smiled at him. There was a little too much affection in his glance. But Cal tried not to give it much thought. He figured Darrin was just trying to be sympathetic.

They walked through the main hall, then past the living room and kitchen area. Darrin, unlike many of Cal’s friends, didn’t seem too impressed with the place, and Cal liked that. Darrin just looked at all the family photographs on the wall. And so intensely, Cal thought.

“You gonna call John Wayne a queer?” Darrin said under his breath while staring at a photograph of a seven-year-old Cal in a cowboy outfit.

“What?” Cal said. “Yeah, that was at my grandmother’s house. We used to go there in the summertime. You know, before she died.”

Darrin looked at Cal as if he’d been rudely interrupted. “I don’t give a fuck where it is.”

Cal was surprised. “No problem, man.”

Darrin laughed loudly, showing his teeth, which he rarely did. “I’m just kidding, bitch. Lighten up.”

Cal sat on the floor of his room playing one of his favorite videogames,
Ruthless Road Rage
, where you can shoot people and then run them over while on your way to making a crack delivery. It was good for “getting out your frustrations,” as he liked to tell his mother. It was a common expression among teens, a fashionable rationale.

Darrin sat quietly at the small table in the corner cutting up lines of coke.

“You know that chick Diane Grant? I heard she’s had three abortions. That’s what I heard down at the pool hall. Apparently she’s a whore,” Darrin said placidly, curling the sides of his mouth like an old woman.

“Really? I don’t believe that,” Cal said, putting bullets into a Mexican street thug. He then pulled out a tire iron to smash his skull.

Darrin glared at the coke in front of him. “It’s true. She’s a little whore.”

“You shouldn’t say that. You don’t even know her. I like Diane Grant.” Cal smashed the Mexican’s head.

“You could fuck her if you wanted. You have a nice set of wheels. That’s more than enough. Tie her up,” he said. “Stick it in her butt. Do what you want to her.”

Cal felt uneasy. “Hey. Come on.” Cal said.

“You heard me, dog.”

“That’s sick.”

It wasn’t the first time Cal had heard a piece of Darrin’s sexual advice.

“I’m only kidding, dude,” Darrin said.

Cal escaped back into his game. After beating the Mexican to death, he got in the car and was hauling ass down the street. He just felt like driving. “Isn’t it pathetic how people have to prove themselves by what they drive and what they wear?” Cal said, wanting to steer the subject away from tying up Diane Grant.

“Sounds like something daddy would say.” Darrin had a sinister grin. “Look.” He held up half a soda straw. “Come to daddy.”

Cal pressed pause and put down the game controller. He gripped the straw carefully then leaned over the mirror and snorted the line in one smooth motion. He tilted his head back slowly as his nose turned numb and his eyes filled with water. “That’s some serious shit,” he said, hoping to sound cool.

Darrin took the game controller with a pleased grin. “Damn right.”

Darrin wasn’t in the mood for a nice little drive. He wanted to kill people. He took out a sawed off shotgun and blew a woman’s head off for no reason at all.

“I don’t know,” Cal said, his heart beating faster and faster.

“What?”

“I don’t know about this thing, Darrin. It doesn’t feel right.”

“What thing?”

“You know, that thing.”

“It feels right to me.” Darrin didn’t avert his eyes. He just kept blasting away. “It feels more than right to me.”

“We shouldn’t be getting involved with this shit, man.”

“You look pretty involved,” he said grinning.

The coke had given Cal the confidence to say something he had been thinking for days. “I mean we shouldn’t
deal
the shit.”

Darrin pressed pause on the game and looked at Cal. “We’re not dealing. Look dude, it’s only to get some money for the summer. That’s all. You want everything you got to come from Mommy and Daddy? It’s a couple of car rides. That’s it.” He looked angrily at Cal. “You already agreed.”

The coke hadn’t given Cal that much confidence after all. He nodded slowly as he felt his rapid pulse. “Okay, just this once.”

Darrin pressed play and went back to his homicidal chores. “Just once and we’re set,” he said calmly.

Cal watched Darrin play the game. He watched him get out of his car and stab a woman. He hissed, “Die motherfucker. Fucking die.” He raised his voice a little louder. “Die.” He looked at Cal. “See the expression on her face? That’s funny, huh?”

Crawford hurried back to his car thinking about the last thing Peters said to him. He shouldn’t fret about things like a dumb TV show. He should stick to the important things like his family and his long-term goals.
Yeah, yeah
. Can we be concerned with what we choose to be concerned with? Or is that all just a bunch of psychobabble bullshit? Can we pick our priorities? Our obsessions?
Or am I just going to do what I’m going to do
, Crawford wondered.

Crawford decided to think about something else — his novel. That was the answer. Yeah, just think about that, he thought.
But what novel? You don’t have a novel. Just some notes, that’s it.

Turning on Santa Monica Boulevard, Crawford decided to set goals — timelines, that sort of thing. If he couldn’t think about the novel, he’d think about goals for the novel. It was so much easier working on the
Self
Series
because that type of writing didn’t require anything close to a linear approach. Putting the “program” into stages was arbitrary. It didn’t matter when “Silence those that unjustly criticize you” came along, just so long as it came along. Maybe this idiot prank caller knew that too. Maybe that was part of the joke. Maybe fiction didn’t require a linear approach either. Maybe life didn’t. And maybe the caller knew that too.

Crawford pulled into his driveway, taking note of Cal’s car — Cal’s very expensive car that Cal didn’t pay for. When he was Cal’s age, Crawford didn’t have a car. This was something he reminded Cal of often, never getting the response he was looking for, not getting a response at all.

Crawford just didn’t care to see Cal much any more. He sometimes told himself it was wrong and tried to feel guilty about it, but it never worked. He didn’t care to see his son much and that’s just how he felt. Of course, Cal didn’t want to see him either.

Little fucker. If he’s in his room playing videogames and smoking dope, he thought, that’s fine with me. Just so he leaves me the hell alone.

Crawford went straight to his study to see if he could hash out a few hundred words of quality fiction before Dorothy got home. His afternoon hangover had turned into a craving for more booze, so the distraction of trying to write was even more important.

To Crawford the difference between writing a novel and a self-help book was stark. The thought of “the novel” as a form had so many possibilities that Crawford found himself panic-stricken just by the idea. And he always thought of the possibilities much more than the final product — hence no novel.

Crawford sat in front of his computer slowly scrolling through the text of his uncompleted work of fiction. Twenty-two thousand words. He’d added exactly ten pages in the last year, and that was the most productive year in five.

The novel was about a number of things, of course, with a number of layers — layers upon layers. It was about a psychologist (or psychiatrist — he hadn’t decided) who wanted nothing more than to help ordinary people with their problems, but along the way this led to a troubled patient doing evil things. That’s one thing. It was also about a sociopath named “Melville” who liked to kill fish before he decided killing fish wasn’t actually an act of power since they don’t have “souls.” It was about modern man’s inability to set aside its individual desires for a larger collective goal that could… uh…

“Am I disturbing you?” his wife said.

“No you aren’t,” he said before he realized who it was. “Come in.”

“Cal left. He went somewhere with that Darrin character.” She sat down next to him. “Have you ever seen this guy?”

“Who?”

“Cal’s friend, Darrin.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I haven’t either. I don’t like it when he doesn’t introduce us to his friends.”

“He hasn’t done it in years, has he?”

“I guess not.”

“He’s getting older. Give him the choice,” Crawford said. “Don’t worry.”

Dorothy looked uneasy.

“Come here,” Crawford said.

She stood and Crawford pulled her onto his lap.

“I want to tell you something.” It was always hard for Crawford to make such proclamations sound fresh. “I’m sorry for acting like an idiot. And I want to thank you for putting up with me. I’m going to make it up to you, sweetheart. After the Hershey show and after Cal’s graduation, we’re going on a good old-fashioned family trip. Okay?”

“Okay.” She smiled. “Will you talk to Cal?”

Of course not.
“Of course,” he said.

Carol Clarkson was Jenny Harper’s one and only friend, a woman who had known the details of Jenny’s love life for nearly two years. Carol had been an eyewitness to Jenny’s brief affair with the infamous Dr. Crawford, and she was standing by, as always, to help her friend bring that romp to a close. Dr. Crawford, as Carol liked to point out, was a man who could be called a lot of things, but never a friend. Carol — she was a
real
friend.

Jenny frequently availed herself of Carol’s open offer to call her anytime, day or night. Carol was an unofficial “sponsor” during Jenny’s difficult “withdrawal” periods — always there to listen to Jenny’s tearful “never again” declarations. But in Crawford’s case, “never again” never crossed Jenny’s mind. Crawford’s celebrity status was more gratifying to her than coitus with a sex-skilled nobody. Carol found Jenny’s penchant for married men as irresistible as the tabloids in a checkout line, but hearing intimate details about Crawford was on another level.

There were frequent rumors that Jenny was addicted to married men. She often had men suitors who were unmarried, but they were not interested in her for very long. She herself was bewildered by this. During emotional outbursts she would say, “I mean, are single men just not enough of a challenge or something?”

But Carol never responded to these remarks. Carol never responded because she never “judged,” as she saw it. Jenny just needed to get it all out and then they could go have a nice high-calorie consoling meal, which Carol was always up for, despite her need to lose weight.

Carol stopped on the dark street outside Jenny’s apartment. It was raining.

“You’re not going to make a big deal out of this break up, are you?” Carol asked.

“Big deal? When do I ever make a big deal out of anything?”

Jenny laughed, then Carol laughed with her. This meant Jenny was taking things in stride.

“Just don’t let it get you down. That’s all.”

“I won’t. I was acting like a dimwit the whole time. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You can have any man you want. Don’t forget that. Just because the asshole wrote some book.”