This Isn't Going to End Well, page 3
Schlachthof lived in an aerated plastic box for two days while William built a terrarium in the basement of his mother’s home, where he was still living. The terrarium was four feet high and two feet square. There was a glass panel on one side, and the other three were made of plywood. The lid was on hinges with a latch on one side to prevent escape. Inside the terrarium there was a three-inch base of dirt, with rocks of various sizes scattered throughout. A small branch from a sweet gum tree was attached to the floor somehow, a mysterious and magical detail of construction that was beyond my ken. No matter: since William knew how to do this, there was no reason for me to know, too. Why would two people need to know the same thing?
I don’t know why he built the cage for me; I don’t know why he did any of the things he did for me over the years, other than that he could do them and that Holly doubtlessly encouraged him to. It may have been more for the snake than it was for me.
The terrarium was some of his finest work, an elegant home for a snake, but Schlachthof didn’t seem to appreciate it. When I came home from school he would be asleep in a corner, coiled like a snake right out of central casting, and when he saw me, he would raise his head wearily, and then, unimpressed, lower it. Once out of the cage he was more active, twining himself around my arm or my neck. I never felt my life was in danger; he was easy to disentangle if his hold felt too tight. But the idea that people thought he could possibly hurt me enhanced that distinctive quality of weirdness that I was trying so hard to cultivate. I was the guy who had the snake. We hung out together in my secret room. He was my pal. He only bit me a couple of times. When friends would come by to see him, I acted as though Schlachthof was only truly comfortable with me, so please be careful holding him, et cetera, because he was, after all, a boa constrictor! I had asked William about it, if he thought Schlachthof really did know me and recognize me as his human. He thought it over.
“Probably not by sight, but by smell. The way most people recognize you.”
He sort of smiled. William had made a joke with me! I laughed. We were, like, making jokes. That was pretty awesome.
Schlachthof’s diet consisted of mice, or was supposed to. When we bought him we had also purchased a small metal mouse cage with two mice in it.
“All he has to eat is one a week,” William said that first day, as I watched the mice clutch at the bars of their cell, begging for freedom in the most endearing possible way. Mice do make expressions, somehow, with their little black eyes. They looked pitiful, desperate, pleading. “Just drop one in there and watch nature take its course.”
I carefully unlatched the top of the cage and captured the one that had foolishly cowered in a corner. I lifted him by his hairless tail.
I paused. “I just . . . drop him in?”
“Just let the little sucker go, and the circle of life will begin.”
I did. He landed in the dirt on all fours and quickly took in his new digs. He didn’t move, paralyzed by the three-foot-long boa a mere foot away. Easy prey. Schlachthof played it cool, though, pretending not to see him; this is what snakes did. I imagined this moment of serpentine nonchalance would lead to the sudden, faster-than-lightning strike. William and I watched. One minute became two, three; the mouse, true to form, turned and ran. But Schlachthof made not a move toward him.
“What’s wrong?”
William shrugged. He assumed a studious look. He took a deep breath, working through the possibilities. “He probably had dinner before we picked him up, and so he might not be hungry for a few days. Just leave the mouse in there. At the very least, it’ll be company for him while you’re at school.”
Days passed, then a week, and the mouse made himself at home. He wandered around the terrarium aimlessly, sometimes inches from the tip of Schlachthof’s nose. I took some pellets from the cage where the other two mice seemed, in comparison, happy, and dropped it in to him, feeding food to my snake’s food, in the very arena of its impending death.
But the mouse didn’t die, at least not then. After a week, the mouse realized it had nothing to fear from Schlachthof, and he had his run of the place. He walked past Schlachthof’s deadly jaws without a second look. Maybe Schlachthof was depressed. I got him out as often as I could. I let him nap with me under the covers. But nothing worked. I didn’t know how to raise the spirits of a depressed snake.
Then one day I came home and discovered that the mouse, far from being eaten, had actually bitten Schlachthof on the nose. My snake had two small red marks right by his nostrils. This was terrible and literally unbelievable. What kind of snake was he?
I had to protect my boa constrictor. I removed the mouse and returned it to the little cage.
William stopped by and I told him what had happened.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “The mouse actually bit your snake. That’s insane.”
“I know. What do I do?”
This is what William was for, for me and for everybody else, then and for the rest of his life. He was there to solve mysteries, settle disputes, build things, fix them when they broke. What do I do? How do I do it? How long does it take? What is it called? He had all the answers. He was like an iPhone: there was no reason to learn anything or do anything yourself when it was so easy to get solutions from someone who had already gone to the trouble.
He shook his head. I could tell it wasn’t good news. “Dude,” he said. “Here’s the thing. The snake needs protein to live, same as we all do. But if it’s not going to eat, you’re going to have to feed it.”
He told me I would need to get a syringe, and some egg yolk. Then he showed me how to open the snake’s jaw with my thumb and forefinger and how to squirt a syringe full of slimy orange yolk down its throat.
“Once or twice a week should do it,” he said, “and Schlachthof will probably outlive us all.”
“Great,” I said, with zero enthusiasm.
It wasn’t long after this that I asked William if he’d like to have Schlachthof. By this time, he and Holly had moved into a tiny apartment in Southside, a little bit bigger than a walk-in closet. Southside was cheap, dangerous, the opposite of my home in Mountain Brook where nothing bad was ever supposed to happen to anybody.
But sure, he said, of course: there is always room for a snake. I think he’d expected this to happen, actually, that eventually I’d just give up and he’d step in. He took the snake away, and the truth is I didn’t miss him very much: my passions were powerful but fleeting.
William must have felt like such a stranger in our family. He was from the tribe of people who repurposed and fixed things; we were from the tribe who forsook things, who threw them away when they ceased fulfilling their advertised or desired purpose. It’s easier, abandoning what doesn’t work the way you want it to, whether it’s a bed or a snake or a person; the world is lighter when you let things go and move on. But William didn’t let things go, no matter what they were. His background was in the Boy Scouts, and I think he took the oath of the Scouts and internalized it: “to help other people at all times.” He always tried to make things work. He took on the ballast. This is the gift my family gave him: all that extra weight. Even Holly, the woman he loved, would end up weighing him down. He became earthbound, mortal, and I think that was because of our family.
Even after William left for college, his persona informed so much of who I became in high school, and who I thought I wanted to become. My best friend (whom I’ll call Marvin in the interest of protecting his early history) and I would spend long afternoons dividing small bales of marijuana into one-ounce baggies, for sale and distribution at the private school we attended. I didn’t sell it, that was Marvin’s job; I just provided the secret room where the merchandise could be cleaned and bagged. It was 1974. This job—pot dealer—had been handed down to Marvin by his cousin, who had in turn received it from his cousin; it was a family business. Marvin and I broke up the pounds and, in the tradition of the time, separated out the seeds and stems with the inside covers of our double albums, where the seeds rolled to the crease. After they were weighed and packaged, he took them home, leaving a garbage bag full of stems and seeds beneath my post-waterbed bed—a traditional single mattress with box springs and a frame.
William found me here when he came back to Birmingham. He’d been gone for a year and a half, auditing classes at Oxford in England and then to college at St. John’s in New Mexico, who’d accepted him even though he didn’t have a high school diploma. Of course, he joined their search and rescue team. “We learned how to rappel, treat hypothermia, splint broken bones and, in general, how to deal with wilderness trauma (usually our own!).” It was also where he would read the classics. He’d come back when his father died and now lived back in Southside, with Holly.
He was a drummer so he’d knock on the door the way a drummer might, with some distinctive bop bop de bop, and, opening the door, peer through with an expression of innocent expectancy.
“What’s going on, dude?”
Me: shrugging. Gesturing toward a book or the blue-lined notebook where I’d taken notes from classes that day. “Not much.”
“Permission to enter?”
“Sure, yeah, great.”
Part of growing up is pretending not to care about things you care about quite a lot. I pretended not to care whether he was here. Shrugging, lazy-eyed, laid-back, I’d wave him in like a mob boss to his flunky. He’d be dressed in a variation of the same clothes he wore almost every day for his entire life: a T-shirt and jeans, tennis shoes or boots, hair pulled back in a ponytail. Stuffed into one of his back pockets: a paperback. Where the waterbed had once leaked, there was now a beanbag chair and a corner piled high with throw pillows. Now I had photos of Fats Domino and Waylon Jennings and Eric Clapton on my wall.
He’d get on the bed and lean into a pillow.
I knew why he was here but both of us tried to allow for a polite conversational buffer before we got to it.
“How’s school?”
Shrug. “It’s okay, I guess.”
“You still playing basketball?”
“Yeah.” Though I loved playing basketball, I feigned disinterest. Was there anything less cool than playing high school basketball at a private school? “We have a game on Tuesday. Against Briarwood Christian.”
“I should come and see you play. Holly said you’re amazing.”
Holly had actually never seen me play basketball, though, and imagining William and Holly in our tiny gym, on the bleachers beside the wax-figure parents come to cheer for their children, was a scene almost impossible to imagine.
“That would be cool.”
I struggled to say something more, but the fear of revisiting later what I said now and being mortified by it was overwhelming, and so I said next to nothing. William didn’t share very much information about his life either and I didn’t ask for any, and maybe this is where the ground rules for the rest of our lives were set: Don’t ask questions. Talk as sparingly as possible. Do something, do anything, instead. So we would play pool, ride bikes, drink, smoke, do drugs, play music occasionally, go to bars, fish. But not much in the way of talking.
“Do you still have that magic bag?” he said, finally getting to the reason for his visit, which I already knew.
“Sure do.”
I leaned forward, reached under the bed and pulled it out. William slipped to the floor and leaned against the bed frame, and I sat cross-legged on the beanbag chair. I poured part of the bag onto the White Album, as the eponymous ninth studio album by the Beatles was commonly called.
“Birmingham is dry as a bone,” he said.
I looked at the bare and prickly stems, a bramble bush of them, the seeds rolling off the album onto the floor. “We’re down to the dregs here, too,” I said.
“Better the dregs than nothing at all.”
We combed through the garbage bag. Two weeks ago, it had been easy to get a joint or two off the leftover stems, and last week it was down to a bowl. Soon there would be nothing at all. We spent a good long time going through the bag together, because even when you thought you’d gone through it all, there was always something left, at least until there wasn’t. William found enough for a hit, maybe two. He brushed it into a little pouch he kept in his front pocket.
“This okay?” he said.
“Yes, sure, of course.”
“Well,” he said, and sighed. “Thanks. It appears that the magic bag may be done for.”
“Looks like it.”
“Until the next shipment then.”
“Yep.”
He stood, unfolded himself, stretched, yawned.
“Alright, buddy. I will be in touch.”
No hugs, no handshakes, no high fives. He was gone. And it was okay that it happened like that because that’s what friends do: they check in, they see what’s up, ask how you are and shoot the shit. But I didn’t think he was there to shoot the shit with me, not really: he was there because I had something he wanted. If it hadn’t been for the magic bag, he wouldn’t have been there at all, I thought. Was there anything so wrong with that, though? Everyone wants something from somebody, even if it’s just the last of the stems and seeds. Pot was a gateway drug to my friendship with William—these early days a dim precursor to the more serious pursuits to follow. Because nothing is merely transactional; something other than the thing itself is always exchanged.
But maybe there was something else. Because then he was back, bop de bop bop, leaning through the half-open door.
“I forgot,” he said. “Made this for you.”
He stepped in and handed it me. It was a hollowed-out Jenga tile with a pipe bowl dug deep into it on one end covered by part of a pop-top from a Coke can as a carburetor, a small hole drilled through the other end to pull from. It was the first and only homemade pipe I ever had.
I still have it. In the museum of my life, this pipe may be the sole remaining artifact from that era, the early days with William, the last vestige of my secret room.
4 The Man with No Name
Summer 1973
William and I went to the movies once, just the two of us. I was fourteen years old; William, twenty-one. It was the first time I had been with him out in the world without Holly. He took me to see a Clint Eastwood triple feature matinee at the Green Springs 4, the biggest theater in town, on Green Springs Highway, out on the edge of nowhere. I don’t know why he took me.
He wore his gray leather jacket. The jacket looked like it had been through a war or two. It was loaded with zippers, four big pockets, two on each side. In each pocket he’d smuggled in a beer. There was no one else in the theater, for some reason—not a soul. Just us. A chance private screening. We watched the three Eastwood movies in a row: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We moved in close, fourth row from the front, and for the next six hours hardly spoke. Neither did Clint. He just rode around on his horse with that sad, hard countenance, shooting people who deserved to be shot, saving people who deserved to be saved, smoking a cigarillo. He isn’t even given a name in these movies, and that’s why his character is called “The Man with No Name.” When William handed me one of his four beers, my first, he didn’t say anything weird or uncool like Don’t tell your mother. He just handed it to me and leaned back into the seat with his boots on the seat in front of him and watched the movie. I don’t know how much of the movie I watched, much of my attention being absorbed by where I was and who I was doing it with, the appreciation of this new fact of my life, that I was in a theater, watching a triple feature, sitting next to William. Drinking a beer. The beer was bitter, almost undrinkable. Like cigarettes, it took a lot of time and practice to get past the baseline of its essential awfulness. But I relished it.
I watched the movies, but I also watched William. I watched him to see how he sat in his chair, how he slumped, where he put his feet, how he held a can of beer—how to be, in other words, how to be William—while he did the same thing with Clint. Like what I saw in him, William recognized in Eastwood a kinship he wanted to nurture. In those early movies, Eastwood’s characters were strong, quiet, detached, basically good men who seemed to have been hurt somehow, badly hurt in a way they couldn’t talk about with anybody, even with the women they loved. All they could do was live outside the stream of life, coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress now and again, to help a friend out of a jam, to get justice, revenge if necessary. Characters who didn’t want to hurt anybody but would—and could—if provoked. Lonely and haunted, with the same enigmatic and taciturn detachment. But on the side of the angels, yes, at least most of the time.
I don’t know what happened to “The Man with No Name” to turn him into the wounded thing he had become, and for a long time I didn’t know what made William William, either. He was like—would become like—so many things, so many different heroes and antiheroes to me. A proto-geek on a motorcycle, Holly’s arms around his waist holding on for dear life, or swinging a pair of nunchucks, smoking a cigarette.
He had a code. I don’t know that I would call it a “moral” code, but something like that. Maybe it was drawn from Hemingway, following the ideals of courage and endurance and measuring himself against the challenging situations he endured. Maybe that was why he became a paramedic and an EMT by the time he was twenty-one; maybe that was why he slept with a police scanner on his bedside table, hoping to hear of a tragedy he was singularly qualified to help with. Or why he would risk his life as a way of life, and why, despite the sometimes-dark detachment (especially toward the end), despite the guns in the secret cutaway wall in the bathroom that I would learn about later, despite the paramilitary esprit of his imaginary life—despite all that—he never, ever hurt a living soul, never could and never did. Just himself. I thought of him as the child of James Dean, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Keith Richards, Satan, G.I. Joe, and of course, Clint Eastwood. That was the part he played, anyway, that was the disguise he wore—courageous, sure, but not competitive, not aggressive. He was self-conscious about it, too, and often made fun of the macho masquerade, especially in his drawings.
