Hard Exit, page 8
“Like I said—like you. Maybe Amanda’s right.”
I stopped walking and looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“When she fixed my coffee, she said, ‘Jami has Jack’s heart. I just have his cock.’”
“She didn’t say that.”
“For real, Jack.”
“You’re a stranger in her house, and within a minute of meeting you she discusses my heart and my cock?”
“Said she messed up real bad last night, then mentioned your dead … mentioned Jami, and said she broke some agreement.”
“She must really be hung over. Or still loaded. I’m not up for this now. We’ll take the kayak up the stairs on the side of the house and head into town to take care of our shit before I have to wade into hers.”
“Very poetic.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jami and I fell in love at Santa Monica High School. We met in journalism class and worked on the high school newspaper together. I’d been a shy, frightened kid until I met Jami, but after meeting her I suddenly understood why love stories resonated through the ages. I no longer wanted only to be peacefully content, to exist unnoticed—I suddenly wanted to achieve lofty goals, to conquer the world, and to satisfy her every whim. But Jami wasn’t whimsical. She had a fantastic sense of humor and could goof around enthusiastically, but she was driven, dedicated, fiercely intelligent, and knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was to spend her life with me.
We attended UCLA together and collectively became known as J.D. (Jami Donohue and Jack Drake), a couple who shared everything, including initials. People either admired what we had together or hated us on sight, figuring that we had to bat each other around behind closed doors because in the world they lived in, total, immersive love only existed in fairy tales. But ours was no fable. We had a rare relationship in which a look could convey paragraphs, and a smile could make everything right. We both graduated with honors, then were married three weeks after the graduation ceremony. Mike was my best man.
My parents insisted we were too young, that I’d been with only one woman, so I couldn’t possibly know what love was. I looked at their sham of a marriage and knew what love wasn’t, and their disapproval cemented how right Jami and I were for each other. Jami’s father had died of colon cancer when she was ten. Her mother, Denise, showed us nothing but support because she saw how happy her only daughter was with me. But it was more than that, I think.
Denise had once loved the way Jami and I loved, but her fiancé died in a car crash. She went half crazy before she pulled herself together and eventually married for circumstances—kindness, steadfastness, financial stability. She knew what going through the motions felt like, so when Jami came home and declared that after six years of being together with me, being happy with me, we were going to make it official and spend our lives together, Denise smiled and asked, “Where would you like me to send you on your honeymoon?”
We started in New Orleans, stayed at the Windsor Court, ate beignets at Café du Monde, drank Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s, slurped down oysters at Antoine’s, listened to jazz almost everywhere, laughed our asses off, then headed for the “other” Louisiana. We sampled boudin, a Cajun sausage, throughout the southern part of the state, listened to chanka-chank music in tin-roofed juke joints, fished for redfish in Calcasieu Lake and for sac-au-lait, as the Cajuns call crappie, in the Atchafalaya Basin. We had an amazing ten days, then went home to begin our lives together as husband and wife.
I was hired by the weekly Malibu Surfside News. I commuted from our fair-to-middling one-bedroom apartment in West L.A to the office in Malibu. Jami could only land work as a salesperson in a Westwood department store, so we hand-to-mouthed our existence, working hard during the week and enjoying Southern California’s outdoor attractions on the weekends. Hiking, biking, and splashing in the surf are basically free, so we partook of these activities as much as we could. On the rare occasion that we argued, we argued about money. But our financial situation improved when I moved to a daily Santa Monica newspaper, then to the Los Angeles Daily News, and Jami eventually became a buyer for Nordstrom.
Money became less of a concern, but the plans we’d made for our lives required higher degrees of satisfaction and intellectual stimulation than our jobs were supplying. Frequently changing my beats wasn’t enough for me to feel challenged or contented by my reporting jobs. Buying blouses for women who already had closets filled with the latest in haute couture didn’t do it for Jami, either.
After reading a few of the short stories I was writing late at night to keep my synapses firing in a way I could tolerate, Jami suggested in an authoritative tone that I go back to school to earn my doctorate. “That way,” she said, “on the off, off chance you don’t ‘make it’ as a real writer—a novelist, a playwright, or perhaps a screenwriter—you’ll become a professor, get to work on beautiful campuses, be surrounded by smart people, and immerse yourself in the work of the authors you love.” She smiled at me. “And you’ll still get to come home to wonderful me.” I couldn’t fault her logic, but I suggested that if we were going to go into debt, the two of us should both contribute to our indebted future. “I’ll agree to apply to grad schools if you get your teaching credential, my dear.” So that’s what we did.
After meeting Jennifer on campus and having her confirm my suspicions about the dissertation I was foundering away on, I came home to Jami that night and explained to her the dissertation that wasn’t. She pulled the box of notes and missteps from beneath the desk in the living room and told me to convert all of it into “the best damned essay ever written. To help inspire you creatively,” she said, “I’m withholding my physical charms until you deliver a five-thousand-word article that meets my approval.”
I knew better than to argue. The next day, Jami presented me with a present. As I opened it, she said, “It’s likely symbolic because you write on a laptop, but I thought the occasion should be punctuated, so to speak, by something special.”
I opened the card, which read:
My Dearest Jack,
Because I believe in you!
Love Always!
Your Biggest Fan,
J.D.
I unwrapped the present and opened the small, thin box. Inside was a Montblanc pen, black and silver, sleek, hefty, and understated.
“Thank you, my love. It’s perfect. I won’t let you down.”
While Jami kept me fed and highly caffeinated, I wrote longhand with my new pen. For the next eleven days, I didn’t work on my dissertation, concentrating my efforts instead on delivering a piece that Esquire, my favorite magazine, couldn’t reject. I put years of aspiration into that story, which Jami had suggested I title, “Only the Winners.” She read the piece and declared, “Not only will Esquire publish it, but you’ll also be asked to expand it into a book.”
Once again, she was right. The magazine piece was well received (the editors didn’t like the title, changing it to “At All Costs,” but they asked only for minor revisions to the copy), and I felt ecstatic for a week. Thanks to Jami and Jennifer, I could now look at all that time futzing with the Baseball Encyclopedia as time well spent. I bought two dozen copies of the issue when it came out a few months later, sent them to friends and relatives, added dance moves to my walk every so often, and made love to my wife frequently, the significant payday proving to be an aphrodisiac for both of us.
Two months after the issue hit newsstands, I was in the middle of a heated game of one-on-one with Mike in the Wooden Center on the UCLA campus. He was the better athlete and the better player, but my shot was falling that day, and I was four points from winning two games in a row, which would’ve been a first for me against Mike. He ratcheted up the smack talk to rattle me, but I’d believed myself invincible the last few months, and it appeared that belief was becoming reality. I had the ball at the top of the key when my cell phone rang. Mike told me not to answer it, but I walked to my gym bag on the sideline and picked up the phone. An editor at Simon & Schuster loved my Esquire story and wanted to know if I’d be interested in expanding it into a book. “We will, of course, negotiate the advance,” she said. “Of course,” I replied, forcing myself to finish the conversation before hanging up and shouting, “Yes!” at the top of my lungs.
“Dude, what the hell was that?”
“There’s a chance I won’t be teaching freshman English anymore.”
“What, the book?”
“Yes, the book.”
“Fuckin’ A!”
“My thoughts exactly. I’m calling Jami.”
“Go ahead, but don’t think this game’s over.”
I dialed her cell and got no answer, then remembered she said she was going for a long bike ride. Neither Jami nor I answered our phones when we rode our bikes because nothing was more urgent than paying attention while riding. When we rode, we tucked our phones into a pocket in the back of our cycling jerseys and returned whichever calls we missed when we stopped riding. I left a giddy summation of the great news, told her I loved her more than words could express, and said I’d see her soon. Then I sank four shots in a row to beat Mike’s sorry ass.
We headed into Westwood to celebrate. The first drinks hit our bellies at 1 p.m. By three o’clock, two bartenders had said we’d had enough and refused to serve us. At 3:12 my cell rang. It was Jami returning my call. I answered but heard an unfamiliar man’s voice say, “Something very bad happened. I hit your wife with my van. An ambulance is on the way. She wants to talk to you.” The stranger handed her the phone.
“I love you, Jack, you know that, right?”
“Yes, Jami, I know that, and I love you, too. Where are you? I’ll be right there.”
“On the coast, near the big rock we climbed that time. The pain’s unbearable. I think my hips are broken. And my collarbone. My helmet shattered.”
“Oh, baby. Save your energy. You’ll be okay.”
“Don’t think I’m gonna make it.”
“You’ll make it, Jami, I promise. Tell that guy to tell the ambulance to call me and let me know which hospital they’re taking you to.”
“You know I love you, right, Jack?”
“Jami, stay positive. When I see you, I’ll share some good news.”
“The book?”
I could hear the ambulance’s siren approaching. “Yes, and it’s all because of you. Stay strong.”
The siren cut into the conversation, and I heard determined voices. “I love you, Jami, and I’ll see you soon. Please give the phone to someone.”
“Hello?” asked another unfamiliar male voice a few seconds later.
“This is her husband. Where are you taking her?”
“Ventura County is closest. Know where it is?”
“Yes. Please take care of her.”
“Do what I can,” he said, without conviction.
Mike and I sprinted out of the bar toward his car, which was parked on campus about a mile away. After what seemed like forever, we reached the car, breathing hard, and he insisted that he drive because I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. Had we been two drinks less drunk, we might have made a different decision. But we let panic and the alcohol decide for us, and we barely made it off campus before Mike saw the flashing red light in the rearview mirror. “Shit,” he said as he pulled over. I didn’t know what he was doing, so I yelled, “Go, go, go.” Then I figured out what was happening, and I knew we were screwed.
The officer insisted Mike step out of the car and run though sobriety tests. “Look,” I yelled at the officer, “we’re drunk, we admit it. We’ll serve as much time as you want when this is done, but take us to the hospital.”
“Settle down, sir, or you’ll be charged, too.”
“My wife is dying, you prick.”
He looked at me sternly and said, “I’ve heard them all, so save your breath.”
I jumped out of the passenger-side door intending to pummel the bastard, but Mike deftly stepped around the cop and bear-hugged me.
“Jack, we’ll take a hit, and Jami will recover. Settle down, or this will turn ugly.” Mike had had more than a few traffic stops, so he knew how easily they could go bad.
“Okay, for you and Jami, I won’t brain this asshole.”
Had we hailed a cab, and had that cab managed to negotiate through traffic over the 405, then north on the 101 for fifty more miles at record speed, I probably would have been able to say goodbye to my wife while looking into her eyes. Instead, Mike was being booked, and I was being threatened again with a drunk-and-disorderly charge when Jami was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. on March 26.
She’d been right about the broken pelvis and collarbone. She hadn’t mentioned her broken left arm and couldn’t have known how severe her head injury was. I wasn’t at her side to provide comfort, to let her know she was my world. Had I been there holding her hand, looking into her eyes, and reassuring her she was going to pull through, for us, for our children, could she have made it? The power of love has been known to work miracles, to deliver results that transcend the bounds of medical knowledge. If I’d looked into her eyes, could I have saved her? And how might doing so have helped me?
The driver of the van, Hugo Gonzalez, was a carpet installer, a stone-cold sober family man driving home to Oxnard. He reached to change a CD (trying to put in “Johnny Cash–Greatest Hits,” he told me later), when he veered three feet right across the white line onto the shoulder and hit Jami with the right-front panel of his Dodge Ram 2500 van. He heard a thump, and, in his side mirror, saw her tumbling off the asphalt into the dirt and rocks near the road. He stopped and ran back to her.
“I knew she was bad, and so did she,” he told me at his arraignment for a vehicular manslaughter charge. “She kept trying to grab me like this, but her left arm didn’t work, and what she kept saying was, ‘Tell Jack I love him. Tell him I love him and never give up.’” He put his hands on my shoulders and looked in my eyes.
“I’m fifty-six years old,” he said. “I’ve been married twice. I even loved one of them very much. But never in my life have I seen anyone more sure of what she was saying.”
He was trying to be supportive, to apologize, to tell me how lucky I’d been to have spent time with the incomparable Jami Donahue. But what I heard was that I’d failed to save the only woman I’d loved, and I’d now be sentenced to a life of impossible expectations. No one would ever be Jami. I wanted to hit him because I knew he was right.
CHAPTER TWELVE
After I’d replaced the rotors and distributor caps, Game and I headed to Compton in the Land Rover with the kayak secured to the rack on top. The Saturday-morning traffic along the coast was light. While Game and I talked sports, I remembered I’d forgotten to check his wound that morning. I asked him how his shoulder was, and he shrugged and said, “Awwight.” Considering my complete lack of sleep and the causes thereof, the drive was more pleasant than I’d anticipated because Game’s enthusiasm for sports was as intense as mine was at his age.
I pulled into the small parking lot in front of the Wave Skimmer shop in an industrial part of Compton, south of Oakville. We got out of the SUV, and I removed the straps that held the yellow kayak to the roof rack. We hoisted the kayak from the roof, carefully avoiding the protruding spear shaft, then we carried the boat to the entrance. To the left of the large, ocean-blue sign that said WAVE SKIMMER above the front door was mounted an orange one-person kayak, tilted forward, as though it was riding a wave. We set the kayak down and entered the shop.
A twenty-something, overly muscled dude with a buzz-cut and a scraggly goatee dyed bright purple nodded, dropped his cowboy boots from the counter, and swung himself upright on his stool. He wore a black sleeveless t-shirt emblazoned with the Ultimate Fighting Championship logo, and he sported a tattoo of a lime-green iguana on his left bicep. On his right was a red tattoo that read: 88. I recognized it for what it was—a symbol of hatred. It stood for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, as in HH, as in Heil Hitler. More subtle than a swastika, but I wouldn’t bet against his having one of those emblazoned somewhere out of sight on his body. His black cowboy boots appeared to be made from diamondback rattlesnakes. I bet myself that when he opened his mouth, one of his teeth would be gold.
The retail operation appeared to be minimal because the small store only had room for three kayaks, standing upright in a corner. Obviously, the customers who purchase thousands of Wave Skimmers each year bought them in big sporting goods chains such as Bass Pro Shops, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and REI, or online. The floor of the shop looked as though it hadn’t been swept that week, and the counter had balled-up wrappers from Carl’s Jr. resting next to a stack of Wave Skimmer brochures.
“Help you?” the clerk asked in a couldn’t-care-less tone. When he spoke, I lost my bet, although a front tooth did look dead.
“Yes. I stupidly put the tip of a spear through the front of my two-man, and I was told you guys could make the repair here at the factory.”
“Well, yeah,” he said, eyeing Game, “we can fix it, but this ain’t the factory.”
“No? What’s that in back?” I looked through the swinging saloon-style doors at workers hunched over slabs of molded plastic in various colors. The two workers I could see wore surgical masks to keep them from inhaling the particulates kicked up by the drill and saw I heard whirring. The uninterrupted buzz forced us to speak over the top of the noise.
“We deal with handles, seats, cargo nets, hatches, fishing accessories here—and repairs—but the factory’s in Mexico.”
I nodded and motioned toward the door. “The boat’s outside,” I said. He stepped around the counter, gave Game a wide berth, and went through the door and looked at the damage to the kayak.
