GPS (16 page)

The non-stop afternoon sun poured into the room from the city outside, and Jeff had spontaneously broken the seal on a bottle of Bushmills 21-year old. He’d been sent the bottle by the same college roommate that first turned him on to Irish whiskey and explained to Jeff its important history to both their families in some drawn-out drunken story. It was an unexpected Christmas gift a few years back not long after Glenn McHale had tracked him down online. They didn’t see much of one another, but not because Glenn hadn’t tried.

The longer something sat on a shelf, allegedly, the more it was worth. That certainly held true for the many premium strains of alcohol. But Jeff figured whiskey in the bottle was whiskey failing to serve its purpose. It had been a few good days away from the juice, sure, but there was no way he was going cold turkey from here. Not yet.

Draining that first glass of the 21 was like a black tar heroin junkie laying off the needle for a few days and then shooting a bag of China White. Jeff happily began parading around the room for no real reason other than his blood had begun to flow with that extra drive that meant he was feeling the booze already. As if to embody the notion he had no real identity of his own anymore, Jeff found himself copying Ascondo’s rendition of shadow ball, taking imaginary swings in the air. His swings weren’t worth a thing, sadly, but Jeff didn’t care at the moment. The rush of alcohol made him feel alive again.

His cat stood at a safe distance in the hallway as Jeff had quickly poured that second glass, this one another toast to Felix with a few swigs thrown in for old Glenn, one of many who had unsuccessfully tried to remain friends with Jeff in the long term. As his mind began to shift gears rapidly with the thoughts of a drunk in the very beginning stages of a long night, he promptly decided he was going to spend the remaining hours of daylight out in the courtyard. All he needed was the broom and the big roll of trash bags. And the bottle, and the glass. And the radio, and the cat. Perfect.

Although the day was moving along quickly, Jeff made remarkable progress as the 21-year old booze soaked steadily into his bloodstream and his brain. The impromptu renovation project he was embarking on took him back immediately to that long winter in the wake of Katrina, sweeping and hauling all those remains of people’s lives into giant piles at the end of every street, piles which the government still hadn’t bothered to help the city get moved in many places.

At times that afternoon and evening, Jeff felt like an archaeologist, examining big chunks of the nearly six-inch thick layer of debris on the courtyard floor. He’d grabbed a rusty spade off the back porch of the adjacent, long-vacant house that overlooked the courtyard across the alley, and had begun to shovel big squares of the stuff into trash bags.

The whiskey had put a stumble into Jeff’s step by the time the sun disappeared behind the houses, but nonetheless the courtyard’s stone floor was slowly being revealed like the bottom of a cake pan as its contents are consumed. For a while, Jeff broke open each square of crust to see what might be found within. It was easy for him to identify the tier of debris that Katrina had contributed to the layers of crust. It was the wide, compact layer that in his limited searching revealed an almost completely bleached and brittled dollar bill, the leg bone of a dog or nutria and a guitar pick.

Even as the shadows of night began to blanket the courtyard, Jeff pressed on. He intended to finish the task at hand and haul every bag of debris to the dumpster in the alley across the street before he was done.

In the morning, he planned on finishing the job with the broom which had seen no action that day. It really would look nice once the stones had a chance to breath again and reveal the character of the ornate fountain in the center. He even planned to buy a new table and chairs, just like the ones he’d pictured all those days he gazed out here from the window. The cat he’d hoped to have as a companion was the one gazing down from the window on that day. Like the broom, Jeff had decided Lefty wouldn’t have much purpose or much pleasure until he had at least dug the courtyard out of its years of neglect.

By 10:30, Jeff was out of the shower and peering drunkenly down at the darkened courtyard, thinking how great gas lanterns would look down there and, of course, how great Riley would look down there. He figured if he played his cards right, he could have her there in a matter of days, and now knew this had to be the meeting place. Riley had only set foot in Jeff’s post-marriage home to feed the cat and deliver notes, and he planned to change that at once, if only once.

The drunken stupor he now approached was one of the hopeful ones, not one of the defeatist ones that had become more common for him. He hoped there would be no blackout at the end of this one, but wasn’t promising himself anything. In a rare moment of true drunken wisdom, Jeff ambled over to the table, snatched his phone off of it and thumbed the power button until it shut off. He hoped that would prevent any drunk dialing, but he carried the phone into the kitchen and put it in his silverware drawer as further precaution. This was no time to call Riley and he was thankful he’d realized it.

Instead, he spent his last waking hour on the business end of one last glass — the last glass available as it were — of the 21-year old whiskey. His 10-year old cat was on the couch next to him, wishing it could trade places with Jeff’s laptop. The man beneath the computer had fished out his ‘Muck the Fets’ T-shirt which he’d had since he was 16. He put it on to signify how he felt about his current employer and its trading of Felix Ascondo. He hoped the Dominican got the chance to avenge his broken dream someday.

Among the thousands of thoughts and ideas that washed in and out of his brain that day, one that came back to him a second time as he’d showered a day’s worth of New Orleans heat and grime off his body was that he wanted to find out more about the good folks at Warren, the GPS manufacturer. Jeff quickly learned that Warren had a typically underwhelming Web page and one which oddly hadn’t been updated for some time. The home page still carried a banner at the top which said
“2007 Christmas Navigation Sale,”
and was disappointingly nondescript. Under the header that read
NEW FOR 2008
, Jeff found just one line of text that read,
“New models in stock soon.”

He went back to his search page and clicked on a link to a site called techjunkies.com, and found it was some sort of message board for discussing all things gadgetry. His search for Warren Sat-Nav GPS had steered him into a thread about the company’s products. Like any annoying message board about anything, there were long lines of drivel about this or that which could be applied to any product, any hotel or any restaurant. Some loved their 8-inch screens and some hated them. Some said it was the best GPS ever and some wouldn’t be giving Warren any more of their money. Typical. Masses of misspelled words and incomplete sentences. He scrolled further, reading posts completely at random.

“
We used our bran new Warron GPS last spring, and it was the perfect guide for a vacation through Napa Valley! If only that nice women inside the speeker would of told me about Pino Gregio, our trip would of been perfect,”
Ann from Nebraska, clearly an academic, had felt compelled to tell techjunkies.com.

Another one:
“This was my third GPS, as I am a regional sales representative in greater Chicago. I found the Warren model slow and dysfunctional! Numerous times, it failed to store valuable previous client trips I’d made, forcing me to constantly reprogram all the addresses. It also put a damper on a first date when it took me to a restaurant in Downers Grove that was no longer there! I think I’ll fly from now on!”
— Ed from Chicago.

“Nice having you, Eddie. Now piss off to the airport with the rest of the puppets,” Jeff said in a triumphant-sounding voice, deciding once again the fascination of the Internet had managed to elude him.

In one final sweep up to the top of the first page, Jeff happened upon something odd. At the top were the most recent postings, all of which referred to a sudden, unannounced halt in customer service with the Warren Web site and corresponding contact phone numbers. No answer on the phone, apparently, and no returned emails regarding anything from repairs to refunds to next year’s line. Had the company gone under just like that? There was a growing list of complaints on the matter, including a few posted in the last couple of weeks.

“
I am still waiting to here from those ideits about where I send my busted GPS, which stopped working after dropping it on the ground only once! ... Anyone know a contact with Warren? Their websight page seems to be stuck in concreat!!!! Can someone out there help?? I wanted to buy my daughter a GPS like mine for her graduation, but I can’t find any up to date products or anything else about Warren thats up to date!!! Help!!!”

People loved exclamation points, and Jeff loved them because they were a perfect annoyance test for people. Some people were the run-of-the-mill exclamation point addicts, the ones who likely read too many of the strange Mark Trail newspaper comics as kids and simply thought periods and exclamation marks were interchangeable —
“The grizzly bear can mark up to eight miles of terrain in one day! The desert camel can store gallons of water in each hump! Rabbits live in complex communities called warrens!”

More annoying were the people who thought two exclamation points were best (OMG!!), and of course, there was no limit to either of them — how many exclamation points one might be compelled to use or how annoying people might be compelled to be.

With the news about the Warren company apparently being missing in action, Jeff decided to wade through all of the nonsense and read everything in the two-page thread, newest to oldest. Not long after he began to skim instead of read most of the crap and misspelled complaining on page one and then into page two, Jeff’s eyes met a familiar sight. It was a one-sentence post, a small set of words that gave Jeff a jolt of butterflies in his stomach and reminded him that the place he kept trying to write off as fantasy was actually quite real, at least in some way. The one-liner was the fifth reply on page two, and it sent Jeff at once off to bed with an uneasy feeling for the second straight night.

He’d now seen the very same sentence printed neatly on a flyer from that place, had photographed it scrawled next to a gas station toilet in New Mexico, had heard a man in a frantic desert dream call it out to him and now, now he was reading it on a message board, an Internet trailer park if ever there was one. Fittingly, it carried its usual exclamation point behind it.

“
Unete a la Revolucion!”

- 18 -

By the sound of her voice, Riley must have thought Jeff would be serving peanut butter and jelly Thursday night. The planning stage of the encounter that he might have already been guilty of reading too much into had begun with her voice sounding skeptical about Jeff’s very ability to provide food and shelter for himself and a guest without some help from her.

As was often the case between the two these days, there was no chance for any mysterious invitations or grand introductions to the event. Jeff had left a somewhat awkward message on Riley’s cell phone early Wednesday afternoon about her finally seeing his Esplanade Avenue crib for all it was worth, sheepishly avoiding any mention of New Mexico. She had responded much later with her own awkward message on his phone. Jeff had been at Orleans Garden Center with a well-earned hangover that afternoon, spending what little money he had on the final trimmings for the courtyard.

Later that night, and despite being armed with a feeling of suspicion about what might transpire with Riley, Jeff found he still had the drive to make whatever happened the next night happen in an acceptable location. With Lefty’s nose inspecting every square inch of the courtyard like a carpet scrubber, Jeff bathed in his own sweat as he pieced together his new backyard haven.

By its completion, the courtyard featured a very swanky dark wooden table with matching long-backed chairs, a freshly-scoured and gently-trickling fountain with underwater lighting, blooming hibiscus trees and four working gas lamps hanging smartly from authentic looking iron posts he’d driven into the ground to form four distinct corners around the table and fountain.

As he worked, the radio propped on a folding metal chair and powered by a 25-foot orange extension cord running into the garage chirped out WIST’s broadcast of the Zephyrs’ final road game of the long stretch, the third of three at Nashville. The following night, they would see home soil for the first time all season. And for the first time since he lived in New Orleans, Jeff didn’t care to be there for the home opener, and at this point didn’t care if the Mets knew it.

“
And now it’s one-and-two on the man from, well, near Kalamazoo,” Zephyrs’ play-by-play man Tim Grubbs said to the thick evening air. “A few miles closer, and that would have sounded great, as Jones looks in for the sign…”

Sammy Ricard, undoubtedly feeling the sting of watching teammate Blane Ainsley get the call to New York, had apparently been taking out his frustrations on Pacific Coast League pitching, including blasting a three-run homer against the Sounds as Jeff stood in admiration of the magnificent outdoor addition to his home. He’d hit a homer as well. It was like a giant new room. After herding Lefty into the side door of the garage and up the steel steps to the apartment around 9 o’clock, Jeff swiped his cell phone off the table as he passed through the living room. Pouring in sweat, he played the single message he found waiting.

“
Hey Jeff, glad to hear you’re still alive and kicking. Hey, uh, I think I heard you right. You said you wanted to get together tomorrow night. At your place? OK, well, I’ve got something to do from like 7 o’clock ’til maybe 8:30. So, do I need to bring anything? I don’t know, anyway, call me if I do and, umm, I’m glad everything sounds a little calmer. Anyway, if I don’t hear back from you, I’ll see you at your place.”