Tussinland (13 page)

“You know, I’m not sure. He seems okay, he makes a good living as a contractor, and they live in this nice big house. Martie drives a Lexus or something and Frank has one of those big fancy Chevy pickup trucks. But, sometimes, if I drop the kids off on trash day, the recycling can is overflowing with Miller Lite cans.”

Tina looked over at her kids again. She turned back to Paul, looking serious.

“I really appreciated your honesty today,” she said. “Not many men have the guts to talk like that. Not many I’ve known, at least.”

Yes! This was going great.

“Stick around the program, and you’ll find I’m not the only one.”

“Alanon seems to be mostly women.”

“That’s true, I guess. But you can go to open AA meetings if you want. There’s a lot of good sobriety in this town. And program is program, you know? What are there, maybe eight Alanon meetings a week? There’s probably 50 AA meetings.”

“That’s a good idea. Could you recommend one to me?”

“I’m going to one tonight, at the Hole-in-the-Wall. It’s at seven. It’s an eleventh step meeting. Very cool.”

“The eleventh? Which one is that again?”

Paul smiled. He leaned back, closed his eyes and recited: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

“That’s a good one.”

“I know, it’s my favorite.”

“I’m not very religious,” she said, leaning slightly closer.

“Me neither.”

“I’m more … spiritual.”

“Exactly. The program is very open about all that.”

“Really? I don’t have to start going to church or anything?”

“Naw… No way.”

“That’s good to know.”

Paul knew exactly what to do at that point.

“Why don’t you come tonight and see? Can you get a sitter?”

“Oh my mom will take them, no problem.”

Paul stood up. He held out his hand.

“So I’ll see you there, then?”

Tina got up and took his hand.

“We’ll see,” she said.

“Okay, well, it was nice to meet you.”

Paul let go of Tina’s hand and turned to walk away.

“Hey,” Tina said. “What happened that night?”

“Oh, right.” Paul turned back. “Apparently I was at Dante’s Inferno, you know that dive out on Yosemite?”

Tina’s face clouded up. “I know of it.”

“Right. Well, apparently, I didn’t like the selections in the jukebox so I decided to beat it up. That’s how my hands got so bloody and bruised.”

“And the rest of you?”

“The bartender and the owner didn’t like the way I was acting so they took me out back and stomped the hell out of me.”

“You’re right,” she smiled. “That is kind of stupid.”

Tina showed up that night at the meeting. Paul managed to play it cool, he didn’t ask her out, but they exchanged numbers. They talked on the phone quite a bit, and saw each other at meetings. Eventually, they went out for coffee after, then out on real dates, which led to Paul moving in to her house. This process took three weeks.

Tina’s divorce was final six months later, and the two got married. Tina’s Alanon sponsor did not approve of this at all, so Tina stopped going to Alanon. Paul’s sponsor wasn’t too encouraging either, so Paul fired him, and slowly distanced himself from the program.

Getting Paul’s life in order replaced the twelve steps as their common obsession. Paul had managed to get only about three years of college credits in the eight years since high school because of his drinking and his inability to stick with any one thing. They both agreed that he was a very smart and special person and that he needed to stop working dead-end jobs (pizza cook, waiter, construction laborer, route salesman) that he was always getting fired from for incompetence, or quitting out of frustration.

The problem wasn’t Paul, they decided, the problem was the jobs. With Tina’s encouragement, he went back to school at Stanislaus State University to finish his degree, and continued on to get his credential to teach high school English. Paul, who loved to read and study when his messy life allowed him to, was quite clever verbally, and they felt he belonged at the head of classroom, not in some construction site cleaning up trash.

There was one problem though, that Paul figured out to his great dismay during his student teaching stint—he hated teaching and he hated high school kids. He felt uncomfortable in the classroom and found that he had no ability to control or discipline a class. He was a lousy authority figure. The kids saw this and used it to their advantage. He was weak, and they knew it, and his students behaved like fucking animals.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

He earned his credential and was applying for jobs, but the very thought of teaching caused him severe anxiety. But he couldn’t tell Tina this. She was so proud of him for doing exactly what she wanted—and so proud of herself for creating ‘high school teacher respectable Paul’ that he couldn’t bear to disappoint her by telling her the truth.

In spite of the success of their project, the marriage had not been going well for quite a while. Paul, who was temporarily slender when he met Tina (from a brief obsession with the Atkins Diet), had gained back all the weight and more. His huge gut and double chin disgusted Tina, and she gradually lost whatever sexual attraction she once had for Paul. They rarely had sex, and when they did, Paul had to promise to make it as fast as possible and to not speak or look her in the eye.

And the Paul that Tina had fallen for was mostly a character that he’d made up as they went along, a character he’d improvised and created as he listened to Tina and tried to figure out what she liked and did not like. The performance that just took too much energy to maintain. Slowly, the real Paul started to show through—and he was someone neither one of them liked very much.

Feeling trapped, a fat and very anxious Paul managed to get a job at a high school in Turlock, a town about twenty miles south of Modesto. Tina was excited thinking they were about to enter a new level of the middle-class, and she talked him into taking advantage of the hot real estate market where even deadbeats like Paul could get a loan. They bought a brand-new, 2,500-square-foot house in one of the dozens of subdivisions then popping up all over Modesto. They filled it with shiny appliances and fancy furniture bought on credit. The mortgage was quite reasonable at first. But it would go up drastically at some future point—all part of some complicated new financing scheme for first-time homeowners that neither Paul nor Tina really paid attention to until it inevitably bit them in the ass.

The first day of school was torture. Paul knew he didn’t belong there and felt certain everyone else felt the same way. Paul was convinced the administrators and the other teachers saw his incompetence immediately, and, of course, his students smelled fear and took advantage of his weakness.

He became more and more anxious and paranoid every week. His conversations with his colleagues were brief and awkward. He knew they talked about him behind his back, and if any of them smiled, he assumed it was because they were laughing at him on the inside. He avoided the teacher’s lounge and took his lunch breaks in his car.

His compulsive overeating got worse and worse—he could
not
stop eating. He stopped at Jack In the Box for two chorizo breakfast burritos on the way to school each day. He kept M&Ms and Milky Way bars in his desk for constant snacking. He drank from liter bottles of Mountain Dew at all times to quench a never-ending thirst. On the way home, he stopped at KFC and McDonalds and Burger King, consuming large meals two at a time.

All this food and liquid and anxiety gave him heartburn and incredible gas. He perspired non-stop. He had a constant need to pee, to take a dump, and to fart. He knew he stank, and he knew the kids talked and laughed about it. His farts were often sharts and he became obsessed with keeping his underwear and his butt clean. He was often late to class after breaks he’d spend in the men’s room cleaning cleaning cleaning his asshole using the disposable wipes he kept in his back pocket. Many times he noticed that he’d splashed water or leaked piss on the front of his himself, so he wore only black pants to work to hide the stains from his cruel students.

During all of this, he constantly thought of drinking. Kept imagining a younger, thinner, better-dressed version of himself drinking Patron surrounded by the smiling faces of hip men and sexy women. He started going to AA meetings again, sitting in the back and never sharing. Many of the people he’d known from his first three years of sobriety were no longer there. His first sponsor was out drinking again, and his second sponsor was back as a newcomer after a six-month jail sentence for a DUI—he and Paul avoided each other and never made eye contact. He always felt a little better after a visit to the Hole-in-the-Wall, and his drinking urges always lessoned or temporarily vanished.

He lied to Tina and said the job was going great. She knew he was lying and he knew she knew. They started avoiding each other as much as possible. She made comments about his weight and that his clothes kept getting tighter and tighter. Most of the time when he was home, she was gone. He had no idea where she was and he didn’t ask. He fed dinner to Taylor and Tyler every night and made sure they bathed, did their homework, and went to bed at a decent hour. Tina usually walked in hours later looking disheveled in uncharacteristically tight and sexy clothes. He often slept on the couch because that was the only place he felt comfortable enough to relax. Tina didn’t protest.

One night after putting his step kids to bed, he snooped around Tina’s things. In one of her dresser drawers—not hidden at all—he found a large purple vibrator, a massive, flesh-colored, life-like dildo, and a thick, black butt plug. He stared at his finds, his face red with embarrassment and jealousy, not sure if she used the items alone or with some new partner or partners.

In another drawer, hidden way in the back behind some sweaters, he was surprised to see a plastic Ziploc bag crammed with about a dozen prescription medicine bottles. He pulled them out one-by-one and was shocked to see that they were full of Vicodin tablets of varying potency. The prescriptions were made out to Tina in her maiden name and her names from each of her four marriages, and they came from four different physicians. The dates on the labels were as recent as a few days previous and none were more than a month old. This find made him feel oddly satisfied, almost giddy.

The next day was Friday. It was just after the short Thanksgiving break. He was teaching a remedial composition class. It was after lunch and he really needed to go to the toilet. The class consisted of kids well-known for their rampant drug use, five or six football players, and several kids who were just slow and barely able to read and write. He had little control in any of his classes, but he still tried a little bit. For this class however, he had nearly given up.

Jake, one of the football players, loved to give Paul a hard time. He called him Mr. Dung.

“Hey, Mr. Dung,” he said that morning, just after the bell to start class, and while Paul, as usual, stared off into space trying to remember what he was supposed to do that day. “What’s it like to be a complete asshole? I was just wondering.”

The class laughed, even the slow kids.

Paul looked at Jake. Had no idea how to handle this. Got up from the chair behind his desk. He looked at the door, he looked back at Jake.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Dung?” Jake said, “Cat got your tongue? Oh, look, I rhymed. I should get an A today for writing a poem. Right Mr. Dung? Do I get an A?”

The class laughed again, then got quiet as Jake stood up and walked right up to Paul.

“I asked you a question Mr. Dung,” he said. “What kind of an educational professional are you that you cannot answer a simple question from one of your students?”

Paul felt like he was about to fart a big loud fart. He realized this would be a bad time to fart. He squeezed his butt checks together.

“Okay,” Paul said. “Yes, rhyming dung and tongue is certainly quite an accomplishment. I believe it has never been done before. So, yes, you will get an A for today, though I have no idea what that means since I don’t give out A’s for a particularly good performance on a given day.”

Jake looked back at the class with a big smile, a victory smile, then back at Paul.

“For your first question,” Paul said, “on what it is like to be a complete asshole? Now, that question surprises me, because, I think that is something you certainly know the answer to, since you are probably the most complete asshole I’ve ever seen.”

Paul looked beyond Jake at the rest of the class, hoping they would laugh and diffuse the situation, just as Jake slapped him, quite hard, on his left check.

“Fuck you, Mr. Dung,” Jake said.

Paul’s fart exploded. It was long and loud. The class was quiet and still.

Paul walked out the door, leaving it open. There was no hallway, just a sidewalk and some grass leading to the parking lot. He walked to his car. He thought about going back into class. He thought about reporting Jake for slapping him. All he saw in his mind were images of Assistant Principal Annie Pitt looking at him like he was pathetic, and all he felt was shame.