The Day’s Vanity, The Night’s Remorse
A Novel by
Angus Brownfield
SMASHWORDS EDITION
***
Published By
Angus Brownfield on Smashwords
Also by Angus Brownfield
Abrupt Edge
Pool of Tears (Book one of the Mustt Adventures)
The Scrivener’s Tale (Book two of the Mustt Adventures)
Guardian of the Lost Colony (Book three of the Mustt Adventures)
Rigoberto and his two wives
Río Penitente
She’s Got Her Own
Copyright © 2011 by Angus Brownfield
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this Ebook.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication or use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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A note on the cover: The gent occupying all the slots of the organization chart is Max Weber, whose early studies of bureaucracy are still required reading for anyone who makes a scientific study of large organizations, including corporations and government. The photograph is in the public domain and is borrowed from Wikipedia.
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
William Butler Yeats, “The Choice”
I
Redemption is a crap shoot. Redemption has no formula.
Byeford Pritchett’s Bureaucratic Novel, Chapter 1
Crockett
one
It wasn’t an obituary, but the effect was the same. The name, Byeford Pritchett, came off the newspaper page like a tight end on a crack-back block and laid me out.
Sitting in the lobby of what was formerly known as the Overland Hotel, new name, slick new décor, but for me always the Overland. Killing time. Not figuring any excitement in reading the Ashland Daily Tidings. Then the name came jumping out.
And my eyes jumping away from the unexpected and back several years, to the un-slick décor, diving through the entrance of the hotel lounge they called The Saloon back then, where Miss Molly Cardoon once tended bar, the lady Bye Pritchett got together with long enough to produce Susana Pritchett, and not much longer, except for the consequences, which are alive and well today, thank you.
We drank in that bar, knocking it back and forth with Molly, Bye mooning over her like there was still a chance, she hadn’t been so busy painting her paintings, raising the kid he gave her, tending bar. (And, when the urge hit her, bagging young guys, guys with cute asses, she used to say, would take ‘em home.) Bye and I drank a lot together, though not too often in The Saloon, but enough. Bout as much as he could stand to, feeling as he did about Miss Molly.
The reason I was sitting in the lobby, I was supposed to have dinner that night with a lady’s the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s latest artistic director, lady who came to the job about the same time as this newly tricked-out hotel opened. I was early and now she was late and I was glad.
Cause it gave me time to let my eyes ease on back to the front page. I’d been scanning the paper to see if there was anything in it about me, and there was, a box smaller than the one Byeford Pritchett’s name jumped out from, way back in the entertainment supplement, the one has the TV schedules for the week, how I was there to talk about the Festival producing my play, Pax Americana—distinguished novelist, S.R. Crockett; formerly of Ashland and all that.
Former Resident Confined After Railroad Bridge Struggle.
What the headline above Bye’s box say. A box right under the masthead, a late addition to an already made up front page. And before I read the story I read the name again, and yes, it was Byeford Pritchett. There ain’t but one.
I had to look around the lobby, like I’d uncovered something everyone wasn’t supposed to know. And there, on a dais, appeared a relic of the past I hadn’t taken in until just then, the white baby grand used to drive me nuts in the Overland Hotel days. They’d have piped-in music in the lounge and this guy, Thursday through Sunday evenings, playing popcorn music on the baby grand out in the lobby but within earshot of the lounge, and I’d say to Molly, “Whyunchu cut that sound system we don’t have shit coming in both ears driving us crazy?” Sometimes, leaning over, resting her big tits on her arms propped on the bar, she’d give me this look as bland as the piano music and other times she’d wink and say, “I don’t know how,” but whether she did or not she never shut it off, and Bye’d say, “Listen to one of them with each ear, it’ll send you straight into a trance,” a kind of professorial half-smile playing round his mouth, drinking his whatever and looking at Miss Molly like she was actually nice to him.
But there were a lot of things in the lobby that hadn’t been there before, like an exhibition of industrial-grade paintings, crystal vases of cut flowers on every surface, and guests who looked the way people supposed to at a destination resort, linen slacks or shorts and sandals, the women in summery dresses with flower prints, and I didn’t need to worry. They weren’t going to read any boxes in the local paper and they didn’t care diddlysquat bout any former resident—less he one of theirs.
Another time I’d be pissed at their keeping-you-at-bay, prissy-assed self-absorption, but I looked around and saw nobody gave a shit I’d discovered something about Bye, whom I had fully intended to look up if he was in town, figuring he’d done by now with the Honest John-induced on-the-road-again phase of his life.
And then I read the article.
It wasn’t they’d arrested him, exactly, it was they’d taken him down the road to the hospital where they lock up the loony tunes. They’d have you believe he was a crazed killer, holding the police at bay, threatening suicide with a knife to his own throat, and they’d finally subdued him, I’m sure at great peril to life and limb. Suppose they’d a shot him if they couldn’t wrestle a knife away from an old man?
And I must have said out loud what I was thinking, “Oh man, what the fuck’s this noise?” because I felt a ripple run out from me through the beautiful people lately come to Ashland for the plays and trying out the newly refurbished hotel that used to be a dump and never made nobody any money.
##
If this was Bye’s last entry into Ashland, the first was an nine and a half hour bus ride that had taken, depending on how you figured it, four years or four months. It was four years since Byeford Pritchett had settled to the bottom of the emotional sinkhole his marriage had become and realized it was up to him to climb out again. It was four months since the little man in his head—Horatio, Bye called him—said, —I think if you don’t start climbing now, sire, the only way out is off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Because Bye contemplated The Big Dive, the contemplation a distraction at first, a way of not thinking about being depressed, growing slack on too much alcohol and too little motion. He had steered himself one day, after lunch with some old buddies from San Francisco’s Health Department, into the government bookstore in the Federal Building, and bought the tide table for the West Coast of North America, to learn the date of the next super low tide at the Golden Gate.
Figuring he would make this the most thorough-going fuck-you gesture of the century, flinging himself off the ocean side of the bridge as a gigantic outflow flushed detritus of all kinds out onto the shoal know as the Potato Patch. He would recycle himself—feed the offspring of the bottom feeders he’d once fished for out there. No note, no backward glance at The City.
This was in June, the second coldest month in San Francisco next to July, and the biggest negative tide of the year wasn’t till December, so he had plenty of time to think about how he’d park his car in Marin County and how to look touristy strolling out to mid-span and how he would not look down before doing it, he’d reach mid span, turn, climb over the railing, and dive.
##
Bye Pritchett’s eyes fluttered open as the bus, still on its brake-heating descent from Siskiyou Summit, throttled back smartly. Just as his eyes focused, the bus’s headlights illuminated a green and white sign overhead that read Siskiyou Boulevard, and before he could turn his head, another sign flashed by out the side window, which, if he hadn’t mysteriously slipped into a coma, should, by the passage of time since boarding the bus in Berkeley, say Ashland.
A reading light across the aisle lit the bus’s interior, enough to reflect off the window next to his seat and rob the unlit landscape of all but the grossest details. He craned his neck and looked at what the bus’s headlights revealed ahead: straight two-lane country road. Out the opposite windows loomed sawtooth silhouettes of tall conifers and above them a taste of stars.
Four months earlier he’d turned off on Siskiyou Boulevard, late summer afternoon trees breezeless and droopy from the heat, he approached (through a time warp of suspended judgment) what tasted of fantasy—two fantasies, actually, one about a woman and one about redemption.
And now he was fulfilling the second of them; that about the woman having died aborning.
—Even if Jill, the lady in question, weren’t your former shrink, Prince.
Further throttling down; a pair of lighted intersections, a traffic signal, another, blinking in the pre-dawn like yellow metronomes. Now streetlights high above a divided boulevard showed the one-story outlines of houses; a church; more houses, one lit, then two, another church; he remembered Jill saying Oregon’s Ashland had more churches per capita than any Ashland in the U.S.
The boulevard branching around a slight curve, the street, one-way through the business district, falling off gently past an empty gas station and empty side streets, the bus growling a sleepy basso rumble, almost idling. Then a left and the bus rolled to a stop double-parked, with a single sleepy head rising, a sigh of the air brakes and the bus driver’s tired voice, “Ashland.”
two
Through the winter dawn of the day Bye Pritchett arrived in Ashland via Greyhound, Ada Cramer drove down Main Street at six minutes to seven, determined to be in her apron and ready, for once, to unlock the door on time. She passed The Hobbit Hole going south at ten miles over the speed limit but was pretty sure that, even if he saw her, Officer Williams wouldn’t give her a ticket this time—the last had been too recent. She turned left at Second, and left again, bouncing into the alley between The Hobbit Hole and the bank; she braked to a stop as close as she could to the wall at the building’s rear, right past the Dumpster.
Arrested by the seat belt, she stopped and unbuckled, then, arrested again by the memory of painful consequences, reached over and turned out the headlights.
Steam from the cook’s early morning routine fogged the front windows, in winter their perpetual state until enough breakfast patrons arrived to warm the front seating area. Hands washed and clean apron tied, Ada went to the front door with a towel to wipe away a circle of condensation in order to take stock of the world outside. It was her second winter working at The Hobbit Hole, and this cosmic measurement had become part of her early morning routine. Only today, when she looked out, a man in cloth cap and glasses stared back, his face so close to hers she jumped.
It wasn’t just the nearness; his face evoked an image in her mind, like seeing the look-alike of a long-dead relative you only know from photographs.
It wasn’t a bad face, it was actually a good face, a kind face, even, certainly not a frightening face: trim beard, eyes a little sad, a little impatient behind glasses.
But a ghost’s face. First glance through the glass she’d seen his aura, a band of vibrant yellow and around his head a blue one, and she almost screamed. The second time she looked the aura was gone but the familiarity more pronounced, and then, like the fog lifting in a horror movie, it came back to her: she’d seen this face during her one and only—and mainly bad—acid trip the summer before. She backed away from the window, shaking. She made herself look out again, enlarging the circle in the condensed steam, and found him looking directly into her eyes. She blinked; she trembled; she forced a smile.
It wasn’t much of a smile but the best smile she could muster before turning back into the room. She glanced at her watch as she counted the cash drawer and inserted the specials sheet into the menus. She thought she heard a timid rapping on the door.
—One more minute let him in, don’t let on anything, keep smiling. Remember to keep smiling.
Between the cash register and the door she reduced her fright to a simple explanation: the man outside was a real person she’d seen in Lithia Park last summer. It wasn’t like the music in the grass, or the drum beats she saw dancing past, that face was her last pleasant vision before the trip turned ugly.
Goddam, she thought, this is a gift from the Universe, this makes the bad trip not good but not so ugly anyway. I’m gonna look after this guy. He’s my lucky talisman.
She’d have to sort that out later. Right now her wristwatch said 7:00 AM. She still trembled a little as she unlocked the door, but she gave the lonesome stranger a real smile.
As she led him back to a booth she thought, Okay, if I saw him in the park, how come he’s just arrived? Or is that suitcase just something he lugs around? Not just the suitcase, he’s got that pilgrim look in his eyes. She’d seen it in actors’ eyes when the Festival was auditioning, eagerness even the actor wasn’t aware of, but this man wasn’t an actor. He couldn’t put on a face to fool anyone about anything.
##
When the tall drink of water opened the door at last, Byeford Pritchett’s hungers had driven him to the brink of irrationality. He wanted to throw a newspaper rack through the window. Not that he expected anyone to care why he was here, but dammit, you get in the business of feeding wayfarers, you should be prepared to show a little compassion. You should be willing to bend the rules.
Like, I might be the Avenging Angel and God told me to spare Ashland if one person were compassionate. Ever think of that, Mr. hippy cook?
But no, the hippy cook, slouched camo chef’s hat, and his kitchen companion totally ignored him, talking and laughing—probably about some adventure the night before, Friday night, the eagle flying and all that. While he paced outside, the coldest morning in his memory, they wouldn’t even look at him.
And then the two men disappeared like the Lost Dutchman in the fogging of the restaurant’s windows.
Briefly glanced as the waitress asked, “Counter or booth?” they disappeared again as his tall waitress led him into the back dining area.
In answer to her question, he’d said, “Take me to where it’s warm,” not explaining that just now, having quit his former life as if it were a temporary job, the simple diversions of hunger, cold and human contact, were now the compass of his universe.
I am my needs.
Surely this one knows it, surely she put on the Forties slacks and the bobby socks and the penny loafers for me. Surely the wisp of hair on her forehead is a sign she is of the Ashland innocents Jill told me about the last time we met. This must be one of those she had in mind.
##
Of course Ada Cramer, letting him through the door a merciful minute before seven (her wristwatch always fast) could not have known a thing about Bye. Other than his being an hallucination revisited and possibly the universe’s way of making up for her abandoning her dad to the funny farm, instead of sticking around and taking care of him.
Or maybe, she thought, he’s just an ordinary fugitive, the kind who hit Ashland every day. And all she had to do was make sure he didn’t fall off the face of the earth.
She’d ask him, if it seemed appropriate: Were you here last summer? Did I see you in Lithia Park maybe? Hoping he’d say, Yes; yes you did.
When Ada brought his coffee the cap was gone but the overcoat stayed, the top button unbuttoned and the collar turned down. He’d laid aside his glasses to read the menu and his eyes, uncovered, were unbearably open. She looked down at her order book to avoid looking through to the man’s naked soul. She stood poised among odors of sizzling viands, as the man asked what was good, looking up from the menu with the vulnerability of a child who still believes in magic.
“Everything. But lots of people go for our omelets.”
“You?”
“I like the smoked salmon omelet. Knock your socks off.”
He could be one of those oafs who looked at her like a piece of meat and maybe that would be preferable, the kind of sexual appraisal she’d long ago learned to ignore, but his eyes made Ada self-conscious in a bigger way. I gotta boyfriend, Hallucination Man. He’s out of town, or I’d have laid out some decent duds instead of grabbing the first thing that didn’t need ironing when I got up this morning, and I was heavier once, plump even. And now I’m emaciated but not inside, no sir... writing down cottage fries and muffin and juice.
The in-trooping of Saturday’s regulars brought out her Saturday morning smile: at curved-backed mothers with balding sons or daughters developing crows’ feet, meeting for their weekly duty; at couples such comfortable cohabitants they didn’t speak before the second cup of coffee; at Hobbit Hole habitués, like persons who haunt the chess club certain evenings. She smiled at that well-used, once-pretty blond who always takes a paperback from her purse and meets no one’s eyes.
She noted Bye smiling at the Saturday breakfast rituals. As if he hadn’t been out among people in a long time. No, she saw something else, something she could identify with, a consuming need to recuperate from life lived thus far. She served his omelet and watched him attack it. She made the rounds of the tables, refilling coffee cups, and when she looked back again Bye’s food had already disappeared.
“Get you anything else?”
“Tapioca?” he asked.
She laughed. “I only said that cause I’m supposed to. You want cream on it?”
“You find that obscene, don’t you.”
“Listen, for me obscene is saltines before ten.”
“Where’s your Jewish mother?”
“Hey, don’t let these bones throw you; I can out-eat your average lumberjack–only after ten o’clock.”
Bye laughed. “I could eat that way once—then a long time ago I turned thirty.” He puffed up his cheeks and made the motion of his middle expanding.
When he paid she was at the cash register, the odors engulfing her grown complex—he would ever after associate Ada with dill and basil. He asked, his stomach voicing satisfactions, after places to stay.
She explained where the affordable motels were.
“Thanks, but what if I were going to stay longer—live here?”
She flashed upon a vision: a house on a hill alongside Lithia Park, this man in her kitchen, eating breakfast. She said, “Good places go by word of mouth. Let me ask in back.”
He watched her talking with lively gestures to the cook and to a waitress who’d come on after he started eating. She wore a tattoo up her forearm, an arabesque in blue-black that touched the back of her hand below and her elbow above. When she came back she wrote on the back of his receipt, “Leander - 248-6236.”
“Best I can do.”
“Leander?” He turned the receipt over in his fingers.
“California refugee turned genuine Ashland character–owns the only taxi company. Owns this little block of apartments, too. Look like they were a motel once, only they weren’t, but that kind of layout. Cheap. Easy walking distance of everything.” She leaned across the counter and spoke in conspiratorial tones: “They say he bought the apartments from his pot plantation profits.”
Bye laughed and his laughter made her happy. She saw him to the door, wanting to button his collar and turn it up. She walked through customers waiting to be seated and out on the sidewalk with him. “You on foot?” she asked, and then felt stupid for asking.
“Don’t see any of Leander’s cabs.”
“It’s not usually this cold here.” A giggle; goose bumps on her arms. Arms involuntarily crossing over her breasts to cover her cold-erected nipples. “Just keep walking. There’s a traffic light where Sixty-six veers off to the left. —No wait. You go past the stop light at Mountain Avenue, which comes first, and there’s the Oasis Motel. Little cabins, sort of. Cheap. Inexpensive, I mean. And I’m Ada.” She stuck out a hand.
She felt him absorbing the energy from her hand as he said, “I’m Bye, Bye Pritchett,” he said, “and you’ve been very kind.” He smiled, hitched up his valise, and tramped off, leaning slightly forward, as if into a gale.
Ada thinking: Bye Pritchett: it fits. Old enough to be my Dad. Only if I didn’t have a boyfriend I wouldn’t think of him that way, no sir. —Benji’d take right to him. God, Benji takes to any man who’s kind, bless his sweet li’l behind. —Wonder if he’s allergic to cats; Bootsie’d like him, too. Particularly if he were allergic, the little slut. Oh well, that’s the way of it. The good ones are either too gray or too green–or married: God strike me dead if I ever get mixed up with one of those again. This one sure isn’t married. Never been married no matter what he says.
Bye. Bye-bye, Bye.
three
Down Siskiyou Boulevard, Satchmo in his head growling Up a Lazy River, raspy voice attuned to the gut-heaviness of the biggest breakfast in months, the valise now heavier, too, as if he carried the extra food in there. The wan winter sun made scant headway against the cold, walking past Safeway, open for two or three customers. In California it would be liquidated, or turned into a Liquor Barn.
California not so bad, eh? If I were there this morning, after the kids were off to school (don’t think about the kids yet, you mustn’t think about them), I might have walked down to Caffe Espresso for something hot and frothy. Sit beneath the yellowing canvas painted with the Lorca poem in blue and red cursive (in Spanish I never bothered to translate: Empieza el llanto de la guitarra) and read Herb Caen and afterwards go home and maybe tuned the car. Could have started on my novel there instead of in a strange town. If only if only if only.
In the block below Safeway Bye he came upon a stone house that reminded him of a mausoleum. Behind his eyes cold Pacific swells the color of the house’s stones. He read his wristwatch: the time I’d intended going off the foggy Mother of Suspension Bridges I was pacing in front of The Hobbit Hole with its befogged windows. I’ve stood up death, missed the appointment, another cowardly fleeing. Lowest low tide of the year, sluicing out the waters of San Francisco Bay, out over the Potato Patch, taking with it tons of detritus, including dead men’s bones.
Including mine, Horatio. Oh Horatio, I’m so ashamed. How can life be worth living if I’m ready to throw it away so easily? What will I do with this saved life?
—‘Buck up, little man, and chortle.’
A high school girl passed him, in a coat like girls wore in high school when he was that age. She clutched a tote bag to her chest, gave him a curious glance and, when he smiled in embarrassment at what visage his funereal thoughts must be fashioning on his face, a polite half smile.
A bus leaving the curb across the boulevard broke into his thoughts. And then there was the high school campus and although classes were out for the Christmas holidays, kids skateboarding, kamikaze slides down stair rails. He thought, I’ll be all right here. I’ll get along.
He came upon the Oasis Motel as Ada the waitress had predicted, and its red neon sign proclaimed ‘vacancy,’ hanging beneath a marquee on a metal standard, black marquee letters proclaiming: SEE ANOTHER CHRISTMAS: DRIVE SAFE DRIVE SOBER.
As he walked into the office Bye thought, not much chance of doing otherwise. To the question of how long, he answered by paying for one night. The man at the front desk, whose shoulders, walking in front of him, said he was trapped in an abysmal occupation, showed him to a little cabin. A kitchenette. Clean but very cold, as if there not only were no insulation, there was no wall. The man lit a gas heater that stood with its back to the window on the street side.
The Venetian blinds came from a bygone time, like himself; with wooden slats that really kept out the sun. They didn’t keep the noise out, and, wrapped in cold sheets and shivering uncontrollably, he listened to the swish of cars passing on the boulevard until it blurred into sucking sounds of waves passing through the pilings of the Manhattan Beach pier, site of many an adolescent adventure, and as he slowly warmed the sheets, and came out of the fetal position, he was body surfing on the down-current side of the pier. And then he was in a dream.
In the dream he shared a house with his first and second wives but was married to neither of them. The house morphed into a beach cottage, the kind that used to front Stinson Beach, or Redondo Beach, too small for all of them and he knew this because the only room on the stove was for a curious half-teakettle: one straight side and one hemispherical side.
He was heating water to brew tea and worrying that the flame, too close to the wall, was going to ignite it. When he woke the heater had made the room hot enough he’d thrown off the covers. He rolled out of bed, groggy, the dream fading until, pulling on his trousers, all he could remember was the curious arrangement of burners on the stove and the curious teakettle.
He called the number on the back of his Hobbit Hole receipt. A man’s voice, badly recorded, covered current events in Leander’s life: “Wanna drive a cab? drop by Monday at 10:00. Looking for an apartment? come by and look at the place before deciding. And if you’re Bob and you’ve got the dough you owe me, put it in an envelope and drop it through my mail slot, you pud.” The message said the apartments were between Fourth and Fifth on B Street.
Ada was absolutely right about the motel design—low rent motel. Flat roof, no interior hallway: the lower apartments all had doors that let onto sidewalks; stairs at either end of the building led up to a balcony with a cast iron railing. The lights beside each door had, on bygone warm evenings, collected gnat-sized creatures whose exoskeletons hung in festoons of webs so fine you couldn’t see individual strands.
He knocked on the door that said Manager. After a while he told himself he would count to twenty-five, but then the door opened enough to frame a head with long, sleep-tousled hair surrounding a tonsure, and a longer beard. The man hid his body behind the door. “Yeah?”
“Ada said you might have an apartment.”
The face disappeared; the door closed to a half inch. When the face appeared again. an arm came out with a key in hand. “Number 6. I do first month’s rent in advance and a deposit; I don’t do last month’s rent. It’s against my principles. Go see if you can stand it; some can’t. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Surprisingly clean with waxed hardwood floors, it was compact and utterly devoid of charm. Could he stand it? Maybe if he painted a mural on the walls. The kitchen had asphalt tile in black and white squares, an apartment stove and wheezy refrigerator. Except for a chip in the lip of the porcelain sink, the place was in good repair. The water heater stood in the corner, next to a back door. It clicked on as he glanced at it. Someone was walking in the kitchen above, the floorboards creaking, a sound that should fade into background noise, unless a defensive tackle with his cleats on moved in.
Shall this be the compass of my life, then, Horatio?
As if to answer him a voice came from the door saying, “Can you? Stand it, that is.”
“I guess it depends on what I put in it.”
“So, when does the moving van arrive?”
Bye chuckled. “No moving van.” He introduced himself.
“From Berkeley,” Leander mused. “I went to school there myself. Didn’t graduate, I was too busy hustling around, but I studied things I wanted to, like geography and astronomy. I founded the Berkeley Barb, only Max screwed me out of it.” Of the Berkeley Barb Bye remembered only the outlandish personal ads. “Middle age couple seek younger person of either sex who would like to experiment.” “Young, good-looking, virile, with a penchant for large posteriors. Call me if you fill the bill.”
Leander wore a gray sweatshirt washed nearly white. Over that was a plaid work shirt open and hanging out, the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbows. His black Dickies dungarees, faded to charcoal, hung below a prosperous belly. On his feet: work shoes of split leather, on his head: an auto cap in salt and pepper wool tweed. He had combed his beard. He looked over Ben Franklin glasses, waiting for Bye to bite.
Bye asked of the rent and Leander named a price. “I could charge more, but it’s against my principles.”
“I’ll take it,” Bye said.
“Okay, now let’s see if I want you as a tenant.—Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“You’re too old to be selling your body. You do anything else that creates a lot of foot traffic?”
“No.”
“If you just got here I assume you don’t know enough people to have raucous parties Friday nights. Do you do any drugs stronger than weed?”
“No.”
“You aren’t a child pornographer, are you?”
“Heavens no.”
“I gotta check. What are you doing for money?”
“Income from investments. I haven’t got any money in the bank here yet, so I can’t pay the rent till they wire it on Monday.”
Leander stroked his beard. “Got ten dollars?”
“Yeah.”
“That’ll hold her. What are you going to do for furniture?”
“There any place around here that rents stuff?”
“Not yet. We ain’t that sophisticated around here. But up the road in Talent—you know Talent?—I got a storage unit full of furniture deadbeats left behind when they skipped out without paying the rent. You can pick out what you need until you buy the real stuff.”
“The only problem is, I’ve got no wheels,” Bye said.
“Pah; use my pickup. I’d take you there, only I got to fill in for a driver who got busted last night. Come on, I’ll get you the keys.”
“You mind if I pick up some belongings at the Greyhound depot in Medford as I go?”
“Just replace the gas you use.”
##
In the dank storage unit boxes with bedding and pots and dishes sat on dressers and credenzas, several collapsible bed frames leaned against one wall, in sizes from twin to king. Something in him cringed at crawling between sheets owned by someone else, or putting his head on a used pillow (as if I’ve never been in a hotel room) and he hadn’t asked about these things. He took a double bed frame and mattress, because that was the size of the blankets he came across.
He followed Leander’s directions to the bus depot and collected his books and clothes. While loading he was panhandled by a man who claimed they knew each other from somewhere, probably the Marines. Though he’d never been in the Marines, Bye was happy to accommodate someone unluckier than he. He took the freeway back and took the second Ashland exit, where he found, as Leander predicted, cheap gas and a discount department store. He bought a pillow and sheets and writing supplies, and, in the grocery store next door, enough food to get started.
After dinner, the only part of which he cooked from scratch was spaghetti, he sat down at a kitchen table like the one his mother made noodles on in his childhood, a baked enamel top and square wooden legs, on a chair of chromed metal and yellow vinyl, and made a list of the things he needed to buy: bookshelves; something to put on the walls; maybe a house plant to keep him company.
When his money arrived. When he might dare to borrow Leander’s truck again.
When he took the keys back he’d asked Leander about his name, to make small talk. Leander told him he was named for the saint whose feast day matched his birthday. “If I’d been born one day later I’d a been called Oswald, which is not to my liking. Leander’s weird enough. —how about you? How’d you get called Byeford?”
“My parents thought it sounded sophisticated.” There had been a movie in which Edward Everett Horton played a stuffy butler. Bye did not confide that his middle name was Bonham. There were limits to how chummy you got with your landlord.
“You wanna drive a cab?”
Bye declined as politely as he could.
He woke the next morning, wondering if Ashland would ever warm up, and looked out to see it snowing. Falling snow made him happy, although the baseboard heaters took forever to warm even an apartment the size of his.
While coffee perked he opened the notebook labeled "Byeford Pritchett’s Bureaucratic Novel" and on the first blank page wrote, ‘the story in twenty-five words or less,’ then lined through less and put fewer.
“A man, The Good Bureaucrat, has to figure out what to do after he is exiled from the bureaucracy. He has been done-in by the perfidy of others, persons who can’t stand him because he’s a doer instead of a ducker. He tries to exist outside a bureaucracy but can’t make it. So he goes to work in another bureaucracy. He rationalizes that he can be in a bureaucracy but not be of it, only it doesn’t work. He becomes involved and suffers the same fate as before.”
He tore out the page and crumpled it, then wrote this: “The story is about a human being who has chosen to play out his karma in the arena of bureaucracy. [What attracts him to it?] He could have been a farmer, he could have been a priest, he becomes a bureaucrat.
“He quits the bureaucracy because it’s taken everything from him [How? Why?] and he has no more to give. He heads to what he’s heard is a peaceful place in order never to manage another organization. He has always been a handmaiden—a professional manager—never a producer. So he works as a hod carrier, a janitor, a garbage collector, in order to free his mind so that he can become a producer. He decides to write. Writing is something he’s done all his life, he reasons, and all he has to do is adapt. But before he can adapt he repeats his past, [How? Why?] and ends up back in a bureaucracy.
“This time he hasn’t the stamina or capacity to absorb punishment; he also hasn’t the blind pride of his youth, and the bureaucracy beats him. He thought it had beaten him before, but not so. It was he who beat himself. This time the bureaucracy wins.”
He thought, it’s more than twenty-five words.
He thought, it’s too close to home.
He thought, it’s going to be harder than I thought.
four
It hadn’t been for meeting this lady from the Festival I would have got up right then an gone over to the hospital to try an spring Bye. And I did get up an tried pacing for a minute, only there was no straight line to pace in cause of the crowds, which was laughable when you thought of the times Bye and I, slightly lit from drinking at Miss Molly’s bar, came out here an talked in a lobby where you could of shot deer it was so empty.
Shot the shit about everything. He was usually like me when it came to mixing with people, liked women to talk to an walk with and about everything else, cause with men you can’t say, like Bye said to me onct, how he chose not to write poetry, though he liked what little he’d written, cause if you were gonna be a poet you really did have to concentrate most of the time on the work and it meant pretty much giving up relationships.
Most men would want to argue with you about that; Bye and I didn’t argue about it, we discussed it. Why in hell, I asked, would it make a difference you were writing poetry or prose, writing news stories or dialogue in a novel?
He say, “Cause if I concentrate on you, I quit concentrating on the words that make up the phenomenon of the poem.”
“You concentrating on me now,” I say (another thing most men wouldn’t say but a woman would.) “So how’s that different?”
“Different because I can keep that hunk of my brain I need to write fiction engaged in writing fiction, or I can go back to it after I quit concentrating on you, whereas if I’m writing poetry I translate every impression on my brain—visual, aural, emotional—into a poetic expression of the truth.”
“Sayin’ writin’ fiction’s a compromise. Sayin’ it ain’t like real art.”
He made an apologetic gesture, head a little to the side, hand up. “That’s for me. Thomas Mann must have been like a poet of prose. William Faulkner, particularly the short stories. But Mann more.”
Was at Bye’s place onct he showed me a sepia photo of his father’s father. Grandfather Pritchett looked a lot like Thomas Mann. Was a tall man in a fedora and overcoat, slim face, sculptured nose, a mustache took up his whole upper lip. A look say he was at least as intelligent as he was shrewd, a man wouldn’t compromise his ethics cause it takes too much energy lyin’ to yourself.
And that was all of his grandfather you saw in Bye, that look. The only time he was tall was when he was a boxer an you compared him to other welterweights. He must have been angular then, too, but wasn’t when I met him, wasn’t fat but he wasn’t thin, neither. He wore a beard that wasn’t long, wasn’t short, it was medium. An you’re gonna say, “What a commonplace person,” and I’m gonna say, “You wouldn’t say that you could look him in the eye.”
Was cause of that thing he inherited from the grandfather, that look that bespoke integrity, maybe even honor.
It showed up in all sorts of different ways. When we worked together at Grummond Telecom, he was always wondering about stuff he saw on the computer, wanting to get behind it, go beyond it. I didn’t want to know nothin’ bout nothin’, it was trivia that clogged the brain—which, I guess you could say, was my way of keepin’ myself available to write, was the reverse of his thing about poetry an how if you were a poet you couldn’t be in relationships.
Now I don’t believe for a minute Bye and I meant the same thing, using the word relationships. I was with a woman I was with her, I gave her everything I had an sometimes more than I had. You might say I devoured her an she devoured me. But when I wasn’t with one they didn’t exist. Gone, out of my head an heart. I had no desire then to marry one, shack up with one, make babies with one.
Bye got a thing for a woman it was like she occupied every minute of his being, you say someone’s a goner, it was Bye Pritchett. He might as well have been dead, and unless he was writing about her on paper, he was writing her blush by blush, kiss by kiss, thrust by thrust.
An she was writing him.
##
I told him, politely at first, then I ripped him a couple of good ones, this business of going off with Honest John Soult like some farm boy goin’ off to join the circus, some punk goin’ off to join the Panthers when Huey Newton an them were poppin’ whores in Oakland.
He said, “There might be a book in it.”
“Shit,” I say, “you writin’ a book. What’s wrong with the bureaucratic novel?”
He grunted. “I’ve really got something to say, don’t I? I can’t run my own shop, I can’t even be a third class citizen in a punk-ass bureaucracy like Grummond Telecom’s West Coast Communication Center.”
“Only problem was, bro, you took off runnin’ like a hound that caught the scent fore he looked to see bre’r fox wasn’t just making for the briar patch, he already in it.”
“Yeah, well I owe John. I got him tangled in the briars, too.”
“You owe John jack shit. You owe you, first, you owe your daughter fore you owe that ol’ reprobate.”
“He just needs to get out there and walk the bureaucratic bullshit off his boots. Come winter we’ll be back—you’ll see.”
##
Been a whole lot of winters gone by, he was still out there till they nailed him yesterday. Would come back and see Susana a couple of times a year, then I got to write the script for the movie of my second novel and moved down to LA an lost track, then Susana’s mom, Miss Molly, comes to LA to hang an exhibit in one of the tonier art galleries around the corner from Rodeo Drive an I remade the contact.
What she had to say about Bye didn’t thrill me. He was still out on the road, still hangin’ with Honest John, a personage she didn’t like no more than I did, but she passed on a couple of postcards he’d sent that sounded like it was a lark he was on. Except he wasn’t coming back to see Susana no more an that bothered the girl.
“Why?” I asked. Was rhetorical, of course.
##
Like I was asking myself, there in the lobby of the hotel, how come he to be on a railroad bridge in Ashland provoking the po-lice and gettin’ thrown in the hoosegow.
An then I thought, I could leave a message to the artistic director lady at the front desk, say I had a family emergency.
An then I thought, Yeah, an you be doin’ exactly what Bye did he go off gallivanting with Honest John, not watchin’ out for number one.
Let him stew a little in the loony bin. Yeah, let him think on his sins an come to his senses.
##
Years back, when I first rolled into Ashland, the sign at the city limits said population sixteen thousand and change. Still ain’t much bigger, a progressive little city, repertory theater known as one of the best in the country. A state college with pretensions, but heard it was Raider High academically. No black folks to speak of ‘cept athletes on scholarship and a few middle class blenders-in. Occurred to me I could have got a job as an assistant football coach, if I’d had the time to wait, but I didn’t, I needed a job right away an took the first thing that paid more than minimum wage, which is how I met Bye.
Once I saw in a gallery a painting of Ashland you’d swear was an aerial photograph in Fuji color. When you took a closer look at the canvas, though—a sizable canvas for a sizable panorama—you’d see that no photograph could capture the scintillation of tree– and house–filled hills and vineyards and the shadows of clouds bending around rocks and into gullies. It is a painting that blends some homey Midwest feeling (elms shading residential streets in Ann Arbor would be the closest thing in my experience) and the Europeanness of the Alps into the uniqueness that is Ashland, green and slate blue in the painting but azure and gold other times, a linear little city laid up against some pretty vertical hills.
Bye’s take on Ashland was what Robert Pirsig wrote, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, bout riding from Montana to San Francisco and, as he turns south along the coast, feeling chilled by the return of strip malls and used car lots, till he drops down into a valley the beauty of which restores his soul. Was the Rogue Valley, folks, the road he came down on his motorcycle was Dead Indian Road, and there’s Ashland at the bottom.
But me? See, I remember Ashland and I think woman, cause there’s no man (unless maybe it’s Byeford Pritchett) so gracious and so petty and unpredictable all at once as any women you care to think of, and that’s Ashland. I think of a woman, bare-thighed, sipping wine after sex, and that’s Ashland. Yeah, an I think of a woman angry and cold and hard-headed over something silly and inconsequential, and that’s Ashland, too.
But the overall feeling of Ashland is peace, and, heading West, like Pirsig looking for my ghosts, I landed here to seek my destiny.
An found it, naturally.
five
And right as I was reminiscing on the many facets of Byeford Pritchett, the lady I was meeting came up to me, the person you might say was at the heart of the heart of Ashland, artistic director of a company with three theaters, sell a quarter million tickets a year to the beautiful people you see rye cheer in this lobby, plus a whole lot more from LA, Seattle, San Fran and points east.
Walking across the hotel lobby straight at me, cheery smile on her artistic director face, no matter how sour mine must of looked, and she’s heading right for me, ignoring the beautiful people, cause I said I’d meet her here at seven and, since I’m the only man of color in the lobby, it’s not too hard to know which one is me.
And I thought, ‘She’ll say some shit like, “I recognized you from the jacket photograph on your last book,” sticking out her hand to shake.’
And as I came off the couch, that’s sure enough what she did say, “I recognized you from the jacket photo, Leonardo’s Double.” Like the place was full of black folk now known in PC talk as African-Americans. Her hand was tiny but her shake was up from the boots, man.
And I thought, ‘You know, you coulda just met me at the restaurant, but no, you wanted to see where to take me, case I was a Mau Mau or some variety of flaming faggot, like a much more famous black novelist.’
I watched her take me in, head to foot, like I was auditioning, that kind of on-the-hoof look, and I was all right, so we went down the street to a neat little restaurant had outside tables, and I put Bye on the back burner and talked humbly, like a neophyte playwright should.
And as we walked out the front door, there went that baby grand, “These Foolish Things,” in a tinkly, piano bar style. It mighta been the same dude as yesteryear.
The hostess took us right back to the patio, not even a glance at the reservation list, and we sat under an umbrella with crystal and linen and I listened to this little thing with the big title, nice shoulders and arms, her style devoid of anything was supposed to draw attention to her femininity, like she might offend the lesbians in the company, but nice upper body. In mid-season shape.
Say she wanted to direct Pax Americana herself. She had some suggestions for changes in the second act, laughing about how it was always the second act needed fixing in the mix. And I knew she was right. Only I kept losing my concentration, thinking Bye.
Through the walkway leading from the patio’s back door I could see the Angus Bowmer Theatre, people milling in the theater courtyard, getting ready for the play of the evening, and electricity hummed in a summer’s night, anticipation and excitement and something else, like people about to witness a rocket launch or an execution, high electricity, high voltage.
A restaurant that hadn’t been there when I was working as a customer service agent right down the street, finishing my first novel. A smart idea, the walkway from the restaurant leading into the theater courtyard, and if she wasn’t the Artistic Director I bet we wouldn’t have had a table.
Drinking a Manhattan, in honor of Bye, that was his happy mood drink, other times drinking gin over with a twist, or Tequila with nothing. Miss Artistic Director with a glass of Chardonnay she ordered by vineyard and year without looking at the wine list, local and deep colored for a Chardonnay.
Say I ought to try it. And I say I would, ordering fettuccini and scampi in a white sauce to have something to go with it.
“Where’d you get the idea for the play, do you remember?”
“Sure. Fellow named Bye Pritchett.”
“I don’t know him. Is he Ashland?” Meaning, I suppose, is he involved in the theater.
I nodded Yes, no matter what she meant. “He gave me this book called Report from Iron Mountain—ever read it?”
##
The final growl of the bus faded and Bye started walking. Not another vehicle stirred. Up ahead a slender building erased ten stories of the morning’s dying stars and he headed for it, crossing the street at an oblique angle.
And now, he told himself, I’m free. He dropped his valise right in the middle of Ashland’s Main Street and made a gesture of freedom with his arms, then thrust his cold hands into his pockets. Fuck what it’s going to cost, I can do what I want, he told himself (tempting the Fates). All I have to do to keep from bankrupting myself is toe a new line; I don’t retrace the same old patterns, the groove I cut for myself back when, the line.
By ‘the line’ he meant what they mean in auto racing: lap upon lap, trying to stay on ‘the line,’ the exact path in which the tires grip hardest and the car steers truest, hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock, foot coming off the throttle a hair in each turn, gauging when to pass slower cars, when to leave the line’s safety.
Open wheel racer no more, no more lead-footing it, no more left turn only, no more gauging the passes and the pit stops. A dicey little MG-B is what I’ll become, he told himself, racing at Laguna Seca, whipping through the downhill esses of turn eight at a hair-raising fifty-five miles an hour, taking A class machines, Jags and Cobras, cause I can out-brake ’em, dive so deep into corners those big bastards’ll run up each other’s tailpipes.
—Big deal, Horatio said, and entirely off the point.
He knew the tall hotel was dead before he saw any direct evidence: except for the string of security lights up the fire escape side of the building, and the wan light from the lobby entrance, not another light shone. Turning in at the entrance, shifting his valise from one hand to the other, he saw the padlocked chain securing the crash bars inside the door, the paper cup on the floor halfway to the front desk, the desk lit by the dimmest of bulbs.
“How the fuck can you go wrong with the only hotel downtown?” Bye asked himself. Bad bureaucracy, he supposed, for that is how Bye thought.
Somewhere down the hill and around the corner he heard the steady drone of a street sweeper. The only other person awake in Ashland at this hour? Where are the night shifters, where are Ashland’s insomniacs?
Maybe no one works nights around here, maybe Ashland has no insomniacs.
Four blocks back the way the bus had come he was abreast of a building surrounded with trees, a statue on a pedestal in front, and recognized the style: Carnegie library. He climbed the stairs to the front door and read a sign in the window illuminated by the light above the door, “Don’t tether your horse on the front lawn.” Another that said, “Dogs and babies welcome.”
Dogs and babies are all very well and good, but where’s a pissoir when you need one, Horatio?
He visited a clump of myrtles across the library’s parking lot, set down his valise and relieved himself, homeless style, his urine crackling on brittle leaves in the dark.
As he zipped up a police cruiser crept up the boulevard and he wondered, with a slash of anxiety, had the policeman spotted him coming out of the bushes?
The anxiety prompted the desire, throbbing through the recent past like an impacted wisdom tooth, to erase the ignominy of the past four years, to do something to prove he wasn’t as worthless as his wife made out. But there were more urgent needs, the vacancy in his stomach, the wooliness of his head. And cold. Soon each step sent icy spikelets up his lower legs. He stretched his gait as far as the cold would allow, pain reining him in, the shiver in his torso driving him on.
He made a swing back the other way and passed beneath the awning of a restaurant named The Hobbit Hole. Which caught his fancy. Little people who liked to rove but also keep to themselves, little people who liked to live, snug and warm, beneath hills. He hurried on.
He went north, then south, he went uphill west, out of the urban glare, seeing stars again on the crest of the hills, the words, “Starry starry night, flaming flowers that brightly blaze,” coming into his head and then no more as, eastward, he saw a lightening to blue and a lonely Venus; down hill past the theaters where the Oregon Shakespeare Festival would come alive again in the spring, a bookstore he must visit, a tavern to avoid, newly teetotaling. He found another monument and recognized the fountain Jill urged him to drink from, warning it was lithia water but reputed to cure what ails you, and he’d said, “How about a rotten life?”
Posters along the front of the Varsity Theatre heralded About Last Night, Stand By Me, Room With a View, That’s Life! He’d seen none of the movies, though their titles recapitulated his own middle-aged life. He stopped to read the posters.
He came to try his childhood dream, to write. Maybe write a novel that would become a movie. Would there be posters that read, ‘From the novel by Byeford Pritchett, with thanks to Max Weber?’ A bureaucratic thriller you’ll not want to miss.
He will call the hero of his novel Paddy Melaney, Paddy a ring name, conferred as he worked his way through college fighting. He wants Paddy to look a lot like Paul Newman in Somebody Up There Likes Me, but with smoky topaz eyes. Other than that he’ll be a lot like Byeford Pritchett: Berkeley grad turned bureaucrat.
Bye went to Berkeley and had blue-gray eyes, boxed a little—intercollegiate. But he didn’t look like Paul Newman. And while Paddy Melaney was a solid welterweight Bye was a gangly junior welterweight.
They’d both suffered bureaucratic death, though. He had, he’d been told, committed bureaucratic suicide. But he would so construct the plot that his hero, Paddy, would be slain by perfidy. Suicide is pathetic but murder is dramatic. And so is treachery. Its opposite, loyalty, is equally dramatic. Around these he will build the conflict in his novel.
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