Begin to Exit Here (2 page)

“You're still furious. Annie said you were.”

“He despises me because I refuse to imitate the Associated Press or the goddamn
New York Times
and write with that same lofty indifference to life and the blessed reverence for indistinguishable sameness, the stupid bastards.”

“Yes,” Janice said, as if accepting my furiousness. “And then what?”

“And then yesterday at work I had a routine traffic-accident story that's so tediously common I think it's beyond embarrassing that we even
write
them, since most of our readers don't give a shit who got drunk and wrecked
their car again, unless it was Ronald Reagan returning home from a gay bar, or something uncommon like that.”

“Yes.”

“To make the story at least interesting to me, since I was sure no one else was going to be interested in it, I did what I routinely do, which was ignore the entire history of American journalism and write however the hell I wanted. That is, instead of taking the maddeningly stylized approach favored by nearly every newspaper on the continent and writing something like ‘Police charged a St. Beaujolais woman with driving under the influence Thursday after the car she was driving knocked over a U.S. Postal Service mailbox, overturned, and threw the woman from the vehicle,' I wrote it differently, using the same facts. I sat at my terminal and wrote something like ‘Mail spewed across Jefferson Street and a woman was disgorged from her car after she lost control of the car Thursday, knocked over a U.S. Postal Service mailbox, and inadvertently parked her car upside down, which is illegal.' It's true and factual, two qualities that didn't interest that fidgety bastard who oversees the paper to make sure that nothing of any interest accidentally gets printed. So he and I argued over the story. He called me into his office, held up a printout of the story and angrily said, ‘This isn't good journalism.' I said, ‘You're right. It's better than that.' This pissed him off. He said, ‘I'm not sure I need you on my staff anymore.' I should've been quiet, but I said, ‘No, it doesn't take a full
staff to bore the public. Am I fired yet?' And I was. He told me to clean out my desk immediately. I said, ‘Am I a janitor now? Wow, I've already got a new job.'”

What happened to me seemed funny, but also dangerous, since I knew that within maybe six or eight weeks I'd be broke, with only the slight likelihood that I could find a job before then, and I was quiet.

Janice laughed at my story and then she was quiet, too, looking at me and trying, I think, to care about me.

“What will you do?” she said.

“I don't know,” I said. “That's one of the most honest, useful sentences I keep having to say in my life: I don't know.” I smiled wryly, or at least I imagined I did, the way I always smile when something hurts me and I can't stop it.

“Do you dance?” Janice said.

“I don't think anyone would hire me to do that. I have a degree in English.”

“I'm not recommending a career, dammit,” she said. “I like this
song
and I'm asking you to dance.” Someone had put on a Beatles album, and “In My Life” was playing.

“Oh,” I said. “So instead of being my guidance counselor, you want to dance?”

“Yes.”

I said, “Sure. I love this song, too. But let's not dance on the patio where everyone can make fun of us. Let's dance out in the grass, in the dark.”

It was a slow song, and it felt pleasant to have a woman touching my back and leaning her chin on my shoulder and innocently rubbing her thighs against mine, the way people in love do, or the way, like us, that strangers touch and don't feel strange anymore. I wondered if I was going to kiss her. Her hands were flat on my back, and then she moved her hand so one fingertip touched the soft flesh between my neck and my shoulder. I tingled ecstatically, and my penis, having remained aloof until now, showed signs of movement. Those were things you couldn't conversationally tell a woman, so I remained quiet. I wondered, though, if something similar was happening to her but she was too civilized to abruptly describe the activities in her panties. You just don't know.

“You're right,” she said quietly as we danced. “The sentence ‘I don't know' is probably the most honest sentence in history. By the time we're twenty-one, we're supposed to have picked a career or a set of beliefs to last us all of our lives, although I think most people die without having known what the hell they were doing, really, or if they did anything that mattered. I'm thirty-two, and I hate my job, I'm going to night school, in case that matters, I don't have a husband or a boyfriend, and I buried the wrong dead cat. I don't know.”

I laughed and rubbed her back, saying, “I don't know, either. We have that in common.”

“You mean ignorance?” she said.

“Yes. It's something to share.”

She hugged me and laughed. No woman had done that in a long time, and even though it might have just been a minor affection meaning almost nothing, I was happy. I wanted the song to keep playing so we could keep dancing in the dark in the grass, and then she'd kiss me on the lips and press her breasts harder against me and whisper, “Do you want to sleep with me?” and I'd stare in her eyes and say, “No. I want to stay awake with you.” But I couldn't tell her that after only knowing her for about twenty minutes. Maybe after an hour. I wanted my life to work with this stranger, somehow.

Then, we didn't know why, there was a tremendously loud roaring from the side of the house. Janice and I pulled away from each other to look. What we saw was a Japanese sports car crashing into the nineteenth-century tobacco-curing shed that Annie was going to turn into her study, but not now. The unidentified Japanese sports car had slammed through the nineteenth-century front door, and the nineteenth-century wall and roof collapsed onto the hood of the silver car.

“Oh my God. Do you think anyone's hurt?” Janice said.

I said, “If not, they will be. I'll crush the son of a bitch. Annie was going to remodel that tobacco shed and turn it into a study.”

Annie was at the front of the crowd that ran from the
house to the car sticking out of the dark shed. Between the patio lights and the moonlight, we could see that the roof of the shed had crumpled the hood of the car. A long beam or log of some sort had pierced the windshield on the passenger's side, and I started to feel sick and panicky, thinking someone's head might have been torn off. But only one person, the driver, was in the car. He opened the door, stood weakly beside the car and said, “I think there's been an accident.”

Annie stood near the man, waving her arms wildly and saying, “Goddamn you, goddamn you! You destroyed my shed!”

“He's drunk,” Janice said to me. “This just makes me sick.”

A man next to us in the crowd said, “Is he okay? Should we call an ambulance?”

“Wait till I beat the fuck out of him,” I said, pushing people out of my way as I walked up to Annie, who grabbed my wrist tightly. She looked like she was crying and said, “Kurt! Look what the bastard did!”

A woman who knew Annie and who apparently was a friend of the man who ruined the shed walked up to the wobbly man and studied his face and chest for signs of injury, saying, “David. Are you hurt?”

He shook his head. “I think I'm fine,” he said.

I slugged him once in the face, knocking him into the side of his car, where he fell down.

“He's apparently injured,” I said loudly, wishing he'd get up so I could hit him again.

“You didn't have to hit him,” the woman said angrily and sadly. “He's drunk.”

“Then I'll wait till he's sober and kick the fuck out of him,” I said.

Janice grabbed my arm from behind me. I couldn't see her, but somehow I knew it was her, like I recognized her grasp. I relaxed a little, and from behind me Janice said quietly, “Don't hit him again. Let's just call the police.”

“Why? The police won't hit him.”

“Kurt. Calm down.”

Annie, who didn't seem to know the man who smashed her shed, was talking to him informally.

“Stupid bastard,” she said tiredly as the other woman helped the drunken man stand up. Someone had already called the police and eventually a police car, an ambulance, and a tow truck showed up.

A lot of the other people at the party who'd been drinking beer and wine and liquor tried to act conspicuously sober, as if to dissociate themselves from the repugnant drunk, which Janice thought was funny.

“Now we act morally superior to him, even though half of us are drunk, too,” she said. “We're, I think, simply drunk at a more respectable level. Except you,” she said as we watched the paramedic examine the drunken man on the patio. “I haven't seen you drink any alcohol all night.”

“I don't drink,” I said.

“Do you do anything at all?” she wondered pleasantly.

I didn't want to tell her yet that I'd quit drinking nearly a gallon of dry sherry a day because I thought I was an alcoholic, so I tried to look indifferent and said, “I inhale aviation fuel.”

The paramedic was saying to the drunken man, “You're terribly lucky. A building fell on you and all you have is a bruise on your cheek.”

“As soon as we realized he was okay, Kurt slugged him in the face,” Annie said. “Can someone hit him again before you take him away?”

The drunken man pointed at me and said, “I want to press charges.”

“Why don't I just press your mouth shut?” Annie said.

“Were there any witnesses?” a police officer said. About seventeen people saw me hit the man.

“It was dark,” Janice said.

“It still is,” someone said.

“It reminds me of night,” a voice said.

“Me, too.”

The police had no choice but to take the drunken man away, and after the tow truck pulled the sports car from the vanquished tobacco shed, Annie stood next to her boyfriend, Thomas, and studied the crumbled, dark ruin, the splintered, sad-looking timbers. It was perfectly quiet, now, except for a Rolling Stones album screeching respectfully
from the house, and everyone waited to see what Annie would do. Staring at the shed, she spoke mournfully, saying, “I don't know. Almost everyone told me after I bought this house that the old tobacco shed was just a stupid, worthless, decaying shed, that it had no architectural or historic value. But I always imagined the people who built it, sawing down pine trees, cutting the logs, struggling everywhere to make every piece fit just right, inventing something out of the wilderness more than a full century ago, leaving it standing here as ordinary evidence of vanished lives.”

As I imagined the vanished lives represented by the destroyed shed, I almost started crying.

“I guess we could build a bonfire out of it,” Annie said, and that's what we did. People got fallen limbs and branches for kindling from the woods, the endless, maddening woods, and others of us carried and dragged nineteenth-century timbers from the shed to the gravel driveway where the men, like pioneers, constructed a pyramidal stack of wood that kept falling over.

“How do you build a bonfire?” Thomas asked whoever was listening.

“You need some bon,” I said. “Janice? Will you ask Annie to go to the store and get some bon?”

“Bon my ass,” Annie said with amused impatience.

“Is that a brand name? I guess you go to the store and ask which aisle the bon my ass is on,” I said as Annie and
Janice helped the men build an improved pyramidal stack of wood that kept falling over. We decided to just crisscross the timbers and things and use an engineering technique described by Annie when she said, “Just stack the shit. Don't make it pretty. We're going to set it on fire.” Three or four people brought out folding aluminum chairs, although most of us just stood in the driveway around the stack of wood, which was about three feet deep and about five feet in diameter. And then, to make it an authentic nineteenth-century—style bonfire, I poured two gallons of gasoline on the wood and lit the fire with a rolled-up sports section of the
New York Times.
There was a minor explosion. People screamed unnecessarily loudly as a few streams of burning debris were flung upward several feet in reddish orange chaos, but most of the debris fell back into the fire, and although one woman and one man complained of minor burns on their arms, the bonfire was widely regarded as a success, driving away the great dark night, or maybe just making it more conspicuous as we stared with pointless fascination at the swirling flames.

I
t was the first party I'd been to where we set a building on fire. Not that much in life was particularly rational. A repellent drunk had destroyed Annie's beloved tobacco shed, and after we had him arrested and taken away, people dismembered the shed, set it on fire, and resumed getting appreciably drunk as they chatted and joked and flirted around the burning driveway.

“Are we civilized?” Annie asked in a quiet, slightly curious voice as she stared at everyone standing and walking and sitting along the perimeter of the fire. She sipped German wine from a Dixie cup as she sat cross-legged on the ground behind Thomas, leaning her chin on his shoulder.

“Of course we are. We invaded Panama,” I said, drinking
a bottle of IBC Root Beer and smoking a Camel Light. “No one is regarded as civilized unless they invade somebody. That's history.”

Annie smiled at me. “I didn't invade Panama,” she said.

“I didn't, either. I stayed home that night,” I said.

Janice, who sat cross-legged beside me with one of her knees almost touching mine, laughed a little and stared at me. I wanted her to like me. I wanted her to take me home. She was one of the nicest strangers I ever didn't know, and I wished she'd kiss me, was what. How do you find somebody? By accident. You wait for the right accident and someone's there, staring at you.