Republic of Dirt (7 page)

I
am not a shirker. God, what time is it? It’s dark outside. I meant to fix the curtains. Lace would be nice. Or maybe chintz, though I’m not a hundred percent certain what chintz is. Flower patterns? The clock says that it’s 5:12, but I don’t know if it’s five in the morning or the afternoon.

I will take this opportunity to … Darn. What was I going to do? There are so many things to do and I can’t seem to remember any of them. Worse, I can hardly see due to this darned light. It’s hard to see the page when my eyes keep closing.

Where is Eustace? Where is my to-do list? The key to being efficient is

T
his afternoon I headed over for Sara’s parent-teacher meeting. I never understood those parents of hers. If you ask me, they don’t deserve the title. Sure, they made her and fed her, but kids need more than food to grow up right. I should know. When I was a boy our old man gave us three squares and not much else but hard labor around the farm and hours of music practice every day. By the time I was seven, he had me and my brothers, Merle and Pride, on the road, playing at county fairs in three states. We never saw a damned penny of what we earned, either. He’d have had my sisters up there with us but they all sang like hens with their necks halfway wrung. Just like our ma. No music in any of the women in our family, which was their good luck.

He was never happy, our daddy. When Merle got ideas about how to develop our act and turn us into the High Lonesome Boys, our old man was spitting mad because it wasn’t what he visioned for us. He laid a few lickings on Merle until Pride, my middle brother, put a stop to it. Pride once hit Daddy so hard I thought he might
have busted his jaw. After that, Daddy let us play how we wanted, or at least how Merle wanted. Our daddy always hated being defied and he stayed mad at us boys forever, even after he saw how much people liked the music. He died before the first record come out, which is just as well.

Me thinking about old family business and not paying attention is how things went wrong at the school. Normally Prudence would have been the one to go to a deal like the teacher meeting, but she’s still not on the mend. I didn’t want her to get all wound up, so I left her napping. Figured she’d be down for the rest of the day. I told Seth to keep an eye on things while I went to the hardware store. Should have goddamn known better than to leave, and that’s the truth.

I parked the truck in the school parking lot to watch for Sara’s parents. Figured if they didn’t show, I’d go on in and talk to her teacher so her teacher knew there was people looking out for her. It’s a fact that we all worry on her, which is probably how there ended up being too many of us at the parent-teacher meeting and not enough of us at home. Just about goddamn kills me that it turned out the way it did.

I
have no idea where to start or who to blame. Well, I guess I should start with blaming myself. That would be the mature thing to do. The email was from my former drama teacher, alluded to earlier. Her name is Bev, but to me she’ll always be the drama teacher. The last time I spoke with her was when she ended our affair right before the big high school theater production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
. I extra-ended the affair and my ability to be seen in public again by staging a public protest over my broken heart. I left school that night and never went back.

As soon as I saw Bev’s name, it all came flooding back. The way she’d made me feel like I was this highly fascinating individual, the way being with her was the best high I ever had.

My response to her email was Pavlovian. I hope I’ve used that correctly. I felt like I had in eleventh grade: sick with lust, self-hatred, excitement and anxiety. I tried to play it cool. After all, I’ve had imaginary emotional liaisons with numerous women. But the drama teacher is different. She’s real. She’s touched me and I’ve touched her. And that, to be brutally frank, makes her unique in my experience. Agoraphobes do not accumulate much in the way of direct sexual experience, especially when they live with their mothers.

So Bev and I started emailing, then texting, and at first I tried to act like it was all very aboveboard and legit.

That was a joke. She never got a restraining order against me. In fact, the police investigation was all about whether she’d done anything illegal to me.

Even though it was just five words, I could practically hear them coming out of her mouth. She has a voice like Demi Moore by way of Emma Stone, which is to say she has a fantastic voice.

And she was asking about me.

Yes, our affair had dire consequences for my life, but it was also one of the most intense things that ever happened to me.

I don’t need to get into the exchange we had. I will say only that I tried to keep it light. SFW, if you will. But our interaction was a very serious distraction. Which helps explain my role in the parent-teacher meeting. Let me set the stage.

Right before the meeting, Prudence had been diagnosed with some virus named after a Japanese guy. It knocked out her thyroid, just as Eustace had suspected. Prudence went to see some specialist all-natural doctor who just moved to town and was said to be extremely hot shit in the alternative health community. The alternative doctor told her it was going to take some time to get her sorted out and the medications hadn’t kicked in yet. Prudence was sleeping about twenty hours a day, she had almost no short-term memory and she’d developed this little potbelly that was sort of cute on her but also strange, like she was wearing a small pillow around her waist. She was also peevish and easily annoyed, which was not like her.

Right after her diagnosis, she put Earl in charge of the farm, but a couple of times a day she’d come flailing out of her room and attack some random problem, such as our superabundance of zucchini or whatever. We’d come home to find her sitting at the kitchen table, pots and pans all over the counter, and strange zucchini-based concoctions in various stages of incompleteness all over the damned place.

Then we’d have to put her to bed and clean up the mess.

It was like having an extremely ambitious toddler in the house, one that could reach everything and did not understand the word
no
.

My editor, Tamara, was getting impatient with me because I was late with two articles about personal growth in recovery, including the one on codependence. I was hiding my correspondence with the drama teacher from Eustace, which wasn’t easy because he was over here all the time to look after Prudence. I was also dealing with the raised beds and helping Earl tend the farm, by which I mean I walked past the raised beds on my way to say hello to Bertie and Lucky and feed them carrots and sprinkle some chicken feed into the coop. With all that going on, it’s a miracle that I remembered the parent-teacher
meeting at all. No, scratch that. I fucked up. We all did. It would have been better if we’d all stayed home.

I only went to the meeting because I knew Earl had gone to the hardware store and Prudence was asleep and I was worried no one from our team would show up. I thought I’d do more good at the meeting than hanging around the house while Prudence slept. And in my defense, when I left, everything was copacetic. Sara was doing something in the chicken coop. Fussing with her birds is a pretty full-time activity for her, so I knew she’d be occupied for a while. When she finished doing mysterious chicken-tending activities, she’d be busy doing some other useful work. I slipped away without saying anything so she wouldn’t ask where I was going. Why bring up the fact that I was worried her useless parents wouldn’t bother attending her parent-teacher meeting? I didn’t want to lie and say I was going somewhere else.

Before heading up to the school, I stopped across the road at my mother’s to say hello. She and her boyfriend, Bobby, were playing some kind of trivia game on the TV, so they barely looked up when I came in.

“Season three of
Survivor
was in Africa,” said my mom to Bobby. “Don’t you know anything?”

Bobby muttered something about Australia but she wasn’t listening.

“Got anything to eat?” I asked.

“You know where the gas station is,” said my incredibly nurturing and maternal mother.

So I stopped by the convenience store for some refreshing potato chips and a bottle of pop, then headed over to Sara’s school. My plan was to hang around casually to make sure at least one of her deadbeat
parents showed up. It was never my intention to interfere. Her dad is a volatile guy and her mom is depressing, so I make a point of staying out of their way. I hadn’t really formulated a plan for what to do if they didn’t show. I guess I thought I’d just make excuses on behalf of the farm.

While I was walking over there, I got a text from the drama teacher. She said she was having some sort of a crisis that only a former pupil could solve. Now that she was split up with her husband, she seemed to think that having proper sex with me was a high-ranking bucket list item. She didn’t say so directly, but I could interpret from the tone of our correspondence.

She’d started working me via text, just the way she had the last time. She talked about my “special spirit” and my “limitless potential.” At one point, she called me nubile, which I quite liked.

I
am
significantly nubiler since I moved to Woefield. In stark contrast to my childhood diet of Chef Boyardee and Tuna Helper, Prudence keeps us in a constant state of hyper-nutrition. She’s a maniac for all things green: heirloom lettuces, Swiss chard, kale, collard greens. She puts mounds of it under, over and inside everything else she makes (everything else being beans and brown rice). Prudence’s food causes harsh initial bloat, followed by serious weight loss. Her flavor-free menus, combined with her passion for making strenuous to-do lists for others, result in nubility. If that’s a word.

When I first got to Woefield, I had a food gut. Now I’m like Axl Rose in his prime. Or Keith Richards at his lowest point.

The drama teacher had obviously noticed that I was looking good when she saw me walking my bike past the school, and our exchanges had gotten progressively more suggestive.

I’d just about decided that I would allow the drama teacher to ravage me in some out-of-the-way location and assured myself that it didn’t count in not having a relationship in the first year of sobriety because
(a)
it would just be sex and
(b)
it would be like taking care of unfinished business.

I’d nearly reached Sara’s school when the drama teacher sent me a sext. Only it wasn’t a picture of her. It was a picture of a flower. A really explicit flower, like something Georgia O’Keeffe might do for
Hustler
magazine. I was just like, holy shit. This is going to be so hot. I texted her that I’d meet her anywhere. Anytime.

That’s when she dropped the bomb.

I texted back with shaking hand that I felt exactly the same.

Naturally, I was like, “Treated? What do you mean treated?” I was thinking gonorrhea or crabs, which would not have been a deterrent to me. At all. But no. It was worse than that.

At the risk of sounding like a Marc Maron podcast, I was like WTF? I stopped dead on the side of the road and texted her the all-important question:

The second I typed the words, I could feel myself getting itchy.

I might not have been worried by the thought that she had STDs, but the news that she might have bedbugs just about derailed me. I develop new phobias with alarming ease.

Now my hands were shaking out of fear.

By this time, I’d reached the school ground. It had become abundantly clear that our physical thing was not going to happen unless I determined whether she had some sort of heinous infestation. It was also clear that if she did, she expected me to deal with it.

She was too embarrassed to call a pest company but she was not too embarrassed to tell me.

Great.

Even though the drama teacher had turned me into an agoraphobic for several years and stopped me graduating high school, this seemed like a new low in our relationship.

By the time I sat on the swing, me and the drama teacher were full-on text fighting, which is a quiet but terrible thing. Those little keyboards seem to amplify messages somehow and make them sound worse than they would if they were shouted from a red face.

I felt the agony of being placed in a terrible
Sophie’s Choice
type scenario, if
Sophie’s Choice
involved risking getting bedbugs in order to finally get laid or not doing that. On second thought, maybe the bedbug/sex choice was less tough than deciding which of your children you’ll hand over to the Nazis. Yes, that was probably an insensitive comparison.

I texted her back to tell her that I was concerned about getting involved too directly with her pest situation because it might activate my phobias, which are legion. She wrote me back that her biggest turn-on is bravery. I wrote her back that it hadn’t turned her on when I bared my soul and my underpants for her at the school premiere of
Jesus Christ Superstar
and was pummeled by some jocks and nearly assaulted by her husband. (Extra-Poignant Background Information: I brought a ghetto blaster on stage with me and played Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” in a move meant to echo Lloyd Dobler’s iconic scene in
Say Anything
. Only I didn’t just play the song. I played it and
sang along
. Drunkenly. In front of a high school opening night theater audience. And as I sang, I stripped off my clothes in an effort to demonstrate my emotional condition, which was raw, because the drama teacher had just ended our affair. As I pulled off my jeans, they got caught on my runners and I ended up falling off the stage. It was a pathetic performance, but I think most people would agree it was a brave one, especially considering that I took all the consequences on myself and didn’t tell anyone that we’d been involved for months.)

She texted me back that there was a difference between brave and foolish. And I replied that I didn’t like splitting hairs or being pressured.

I sat on a bench near the swing set and some sort of wood-and-tires-and-ladder contraption and sent off ill-considered responses to her provocations. Restraint of tongue and pen was completely forgotten for the next half-hour as we texted back and forth.

Fucking technology.

Finally, the drama teacher wrote me back to tell me she’d reconsidered. She didn’t want me as a sexual partner or as an exterminator. She no longer needed my help. “Period.” She actually typed that out.

I’m not the pushover I was at seventeen. I’m a twenty-one-year-old farmhand, which is similar to being a cowboy, but without a horse, a hat or any cows. So I fired back that I didn’t give a shit what she did and I hoped she and her bugs would be very happy together. I texted her that I had a fun life now. God help me. I did.

To drive the point home, I decided to send her a picture to demonstrate just how fun my life was. I wanted to get a shot that showed me behaving in a provocatively carefree manner. So I sat on one of the swings and started swinging like I meant it, pumping my legs back and forth, the whole nine yards. The plan was to take a live action image of my feet way up in the air. But I had some trouble aiming the phone. It was Eustace’s old one and a cow crapped on it or a horse gave birth on it or some other medical emergency happened on it, so that it only worked about half the time.

I needed to get some height to adequately convey my extreme level of jaunty, unaffected joyfulness, which meant full-throttle, maxed-out swinging.

Wouldn’t you know it, while trying to get my feet into the frame I lost my grip and launched off the front of the swing like I was trying out for the lead role in Cirque du Soleil’s Lone Man Cannonball Show. One minute I was looking through the phone at my high tops, the next I was sailing into the fucking void.