Jernigan, page 7
His lawyer called the following day. How much had I known about, ah, “the situation”? I said I hadn’t known there was one. Hmm, he said, how shall I begin? Seemed my father had been days away from being turned out of the stunning old house. He’d taken out a second mortgage to get the henhouse converted and, apparently, to get money to live on and to keep up the payments on the original mortgage. When the money he’d borrowed was gone, of course, he was left with even higher monthly expenses he couldn’t meet. After the insurance company cancelled his homeowner’s policy—they’d been dunning him for three months—the bank had been forced to step in.
Judith took the news like a champ.
“It’s a relief, sort of,” she said. “Isn’t it? I would never have known how long a face to pull while we were going through the money, you know?” She laughed. “God, listen to me. The money. There never was any money, right? Isn’t that the gist?”
“If not the gist,” I said, “certainly the bottom line.”
“Well,” she said, “we can still be happy.” This was 1982. “Probably more happy, don’t you think? In the long run?”
“Quién sabe?” I said. “And on the other hand, que será será.”
“Kissez moi,” she said. One of our better days.
3
When I got around to telling Martha the story—it wasn’t until we’d been together for a couple of months—she was angry that my father hadn’t, as she put it, provided for me.
“Christ,” I said, “he provided for eighteen years. Fuck was he supposed to do? Plus four years of college. I mean, at some point, you know?” The rest of the thought was something like, Sons have to take responsibility for themselves. Not exactly the way I felt, as a son, but the way you ought to feel. As a father, on the other hand, I was all for sons getting their shit happening at their earliest convenience. All for it some of the time.
She picked up something in my tone. I was learning that you had to watch yourself around Martha. Assuming you had stuff you didn’t want picked up. Though really, how intuitive did you have to be to pick up something in somebody’s tone when he starts yelling at you?
“I didn’t mean to touch a sore spot,” she said. “It’s just that all that money could’ve changed your life. I hate to see money that could really, really help somebody just go up—”
“In smoke?” I suggested.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.”
“What nobody seems to understand,” I said (meaning her: Judith had understood), “is that this money never fucking existed. I mean, he was Francis Jernigan and everything, but all the real money got made off of stuff he’d let go for a couple of thousand dollars in like 1952. My mother split in ’56, he boozed from then until ’64 or ’65…. You know, what can I say? By which time it was all Andy Warhol or something, or whatever it was after Andy Warhol. Believe me. There was … no … money.”
Without asking, she poured more coffee into my cup and pushed the milk carton my way. Morning sunlight warming the gray-painted top of the old pine table.
“Anyhow,” she said. “I still think it’s possible to live a more rational life.”
“Quién sabe?” I said. “It’s easy to talk theoretically about the rational life, but when that ole lonesome whistle blows on that ole lonesome 7:48—gal, I just get that ole commutin’ fever in my blood. Cain’t set still nohow.”
“There are ways to make it work,” she said.
“And speaking of work,” I said, looking up at her old electric wall clock. The clock part was set into the belly of a rooster. Why were second hands always red? To tell you, in case you hadn’t fucking figured it out, that seconds went by quickly? Oh, probably just so you could tell the second hand from the minute hand. “The light of common day,” I said, alluding to something or other, “reveals to me that I’ve got about a half hour to collect Danny, drive him over to the bus, get back to the station, find a place in the lot and get my ass onto the platform.”
She looked at the clock. “I had no idea,” she said. “I guess you really better run along. We can talk when you get home, okay?”
Home?
Well, wasn’t I sleeping here most nights? And Danny had pretty much moved in. He’d even insisted on having his birthday party here, such as it was. The four of us and a lopsided chocolate cake from Martha’s unlevelled oven: this was how he chose to turn sixteen. When I’d asked him what friends he wanted there, he just stared me down.
Mornings I dropped him at the corner by Heritage Circle so he could get his old school bus, and he took the same bus back in the afternoon to practice his guitar in the empty house. But he was back by dinnertime. And no wonder. Where would you rather be: Martha’s house with the cooking smells and the corny old braided rugs and the black-and-white tv with the tablecloth thrown over it, or Heritage Circle with the painted walls, cool to the touch and smooth as an eggshell? And, always, that place where the driveway met the street.
On the train, I sat down next to a New York Times, across from another Times and a Bergen Record. Pawed around in my shoulderbag for Northanger Abbey—that’s the one where it turns out the creepy old house isn’t creepy and there aren’t any dark secrets—and found a magazine I certainly hadn’t put there. What the hell was Suburban Survivalist? Same size as Time or Newsweek, with this airbrushed cover of the American Gothic couple, dressed in camouflage fatigues and looming in front of a split-level house, oh so original. Instead of the pitchfork, the geezer with the glasses held a golf club; a kid at their side was sitting at a camouflaged PC. I opened the magazine flat on my lap, so the people across couldn’t see I was reading such a thing, and found “A Letter from the Editor.”
Despite the name, this magazine hopefully isn’t for paranoids or gun nuts—though we do recommend you think about getting a firearm for home protection—but for ordinary folks who want to live more simply without giving up the benefits of the suburban lifestyle. We don’t advocate any radical transformation of society—not that we wouldn’t welcome some improvements!—and we don’t think you should count on it. We’re not into proselytizing. Only you know if you’re discontented enough with the way you’re now living to start making some changes for yourself and your family.
Have you ever been in an old house where the mice have really gotten a foothold? They’ve got their own little spaces behind walls, under floors, above ceilings, secret passages going all over the place. Call us the New American Mice. We can show you the secret ways of getting around everyday suburban America. We’re not about taking over the whole house. We’re about living there on the sly, keeping out of harm’s way, and, hopefully, getting some fun out of it!
Who was this “we,” dangling his hopefullys right and left? The manifesto was signed “Adam Newman,” transparently somebody’s idea of a joke. I paged around and found the masthead: it listed Adam Newman as Editor in Chief, Managing Editor, Art Director, Copy Editor, Business Manager and Ad Sales. The thing was purportedly put out by Orbit Publications, whose address was a post office box in Metuchen and whose logo was a sputnik with a smiley-face and three little curved lines to the right of it to suggest it was moving in a counterclockwise circle.
After “A Letter from the Editor” came “The Rational Life: An Editorial,” by Adam Newman. The rational life according to Adam Newman was spent foraging for unrotted produce in supermarket dumpsters, running a perpetual yard sale, eating rabbits you raised in your basement and making moonshine instead of paying for “government liquor,” all the while taking advantage of such suburban amenities as good schools, relative freedom from crime and squalor, and easy access to cities. All this prefaced by a bunch of boilerplate about soul-killing jobs, the credit trap and the folly of working a lifetime for a retirement you were too old to enjoy.
Then an article about living space—by Adam Newman—which advocated doing all you could to own your own home free and clear so you didn’t have to work to come up with that monthly nut or pay some bank its ruinous interest. Adam Newman seemed to think that could be done by going to sheriff’s sales, or by fixing up an old store or gas station for living quarters. “Architectural distinction,” he wrote, “is where you find it.”
Did you know the first McDonald’s stand, once an eyesore, is now a landmark building? So before you turn up your nose at that flat-roofed cinderblock building (former home of Moe’s TV Repair), remember: it may be a precious specimen of vanishing Americana!
By the time the train got to Penn Station, I’d skimmed the other articles. I read about heating with wood (“Make friends with the guys at your local tree service”), living without a telephone (“If Aunt Tilly dies, Express Mail will still get you to the church on time”) and buying clothes (“Nobody you need to impress will see you rummaging through the shirts at the thrift store”). I sort of liked the fuck-you spirit of it all. But Jesus.
For Martha, though, as I learned that night over dinner, Suburban Survivalist was a trustworthy call to action. One more way you knew she was a little scary, despite the food smells and braided rugs. “But why not?” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to get out of the money economy?”
“Wouldn’t I like to be twenty-four years old and have a twelve-inch dick,” I said. I didn’t want to have to hear how seriously she took all this.
“Perish forbid,” she said, kindly. (Clarissa and Danny, I should have explained, had taken their dinner into Clarissa’s room, or I wouldn’t have been talking about dicks.)
“You know,” I said, “this actually is good.” I’d never tasted moonshine before.
“Tim’s is the best,” she said. “Clarissa and I tried to make our own once.” She gave thumbs-down.
“Quién es Tim?” I said. When I talked Spanish like that, the little Spanish I knew, it was because I thought Spanish sounded streetwise and I was parodying the notion of street wisdom. But it was too many moves. It just sounded crazy.
“You met him,” she said. So she knew a little Spanish too. “At the party? He had on—forget it, men never notice what anybody’s wearing. But he’s sort of tall, glasses?”
I shrugged, dismissing this Tim. Then I remembered. The timber wolf who wasn’t timid. “I mostly remember you,” I said, gallantly.
“We all of us tried to talk him out of that stupid name,” she said.
“What’s wrong with Tim?”
“So funny,” she said, reaching over and pinching my cheek. “Suburban Survivalist.”
“I’m lost,” I said.
“Peter,” she said. “I told you. It’s Tim’s magazine.”
“Somebody you know puts out that thing?”
“I did tell you, Peter. You must not have been paying attention.”
“Listen, I’m sure you did,” I said. I’m sure she did.
“Tell me something,” she said. “Has Danny given you any idea of what goes on around here?”
“Why?” I said. “What, do you sit around—” I was going to say levitating, but I needed something more improbable. Nothing came to mind that was too weird to imagine her maybe actually doing; that’s how much I trusted this Martha Peretsky. So what was I doing in her house all the time? Right, but I mean besides that.
“You look so stricken,” she said. “It’s not anything deep and dark. It’s just that this is a sort of a two-woman survivor community here. Who, disguised”—trying to deepen her voice to a Don Pardo baritone—“as an everyday broken home, fights a never-ending battle.” Back to normal voice. “Though I sometimes wonder why we bother. You’ve never even asked me what I do for money.”
Huh. Yeah. Well. Certainly had me nailed on that one. I really should’ve shown some minimal curiosity, especially when she was seeing me off in the morning and showing no signs herself of getting ready to go to work. Fuck, I really should’ve felt some minimal curiosity. I must have assumed she was on vacation or something, assuming I was assuming anything. I mean, a vacation that goes from July into September? What did I think she was, a college professor? Maybe I just assumed she was my mother, seeing me off to school and not existing until I came home again. (After third grade, of course, it was a sequence of nannies and shit that I forgot about every day. Whole other story, though.) But I was certainly wrong not to have asked what she did for money. Well, I hadn’t. Though on the other hand I wasn’t about to eat shit for it, either.
“Well?” I said. “Do tell.”
“I can see you’re fascinated.”
“I’m curious, yes. What do you do for money?”
“Nothing,” she said, pretty clearly expecting me to smite my brow like a Three Stooge. “I might temp once in a while if I’m really strapped, and over Christmas I usually work at Alexander’s if they need extra help. But basically …” She waved her hand around in air as if twirling a lariat, to suggest her freedom from the everyday. “The house is paid for—it actually was Rusty’s parents’ house. But it was sort of part of the agreement when he left that Clarissa and I would just keep staying here. Anyhow, so with a good big garden and this and that, Clarissa and I can just sort of …” She lariated her hand again. Old Martha here seemed to be pretty popped on that moonshine. “I call her my little cash cow,” she said, “because Rusty sometimes kicks in some money. When he’s feeling guilty enough, basically. You know, maybe she’ll be the next Madonna, support me in my old age. She has the look down, if she just knew how to do anything. But you know, we do fine. And we do it pretty much outside the money economy. I can’t believe Danny didn’t tell you any of this. Did he tell you about Bunny Hell?”
“Is that like Benny Hill?” I said. I just really didn’t feel like getting into all this.
“I think it blew his mind a little at first. You know the way he never lets on, but you could sort of see it. I mean, I guess it blows my mind a little if I think about it the wrong way. But he doesn’t seem to mind eating the bunnyburgers.”
I got serious. “You mean you really raise rabbits? Where the hell are the rabbits?”
“Bunny Hell,” she said. “You want to see?”
She stood up and kitchy-kooed. She opened the door next to the refrigerator and I followed her down the cellar stairs. Fluorescent lights were already on down there, as if it were a business office; black plastic was stapled over the chin-level windows. “I thought we better cover the windows over,” she said, “so people wouldn’t see the lights on all night and think we were growing sinsemilla. Anyhow, voilà. Bunny Hell.”
I counted five cages, made of two-by-fours and chicken wire: three on the built-in workbench, two on a ping-pong table, one on each side of the net. Each cage had three or four rabbits. White, black, piebald; bright, trusting eyes. Martha stuck two fingers through the chicken wire and smoothed between the ears of a chocolate-brown rabbit the size of a roasting chicken. “You want to hold one?”
“I’ll pass,” I said.
“Look,” she said, “I know. But they really do have a good life. You know, for a bunny. Lots of other bunnies to hang out with and fuck—we definitely encourage fucking—and good big cages that get cleaned all the time, good stuff to eat, sunshine all day every day”—she pointed up at the fluorescent lights—“and when their time comes they never know what hit ’em.”
“What does hit ’em?” I said.
“Twenty-two,” she said. “Look it’s absolutely no more immoral than going to the supermarket and buying a chicken that somebody has killed for you. You want to see?”
“Christ no,” I said.
“I don’t mean a demonstration,” she said. “Here.” The basement was divided by a partition; she opened a door into a room that smelled of … some smell from my childhood. She pulled a string, and a bare bulb lit up. One corner was stacked with haybales. “Used to be the coal bin in here,” she said. Coal: that was the smell. Grandpa Jernigan’s basement. “Before Rusty and I put the oil burner in, his parents had this big-ass old coal furnace sitting in the middle of the basement. With all the ducts going all over the place? When Clarissa was a little girl, I used to tell her it was a tin tree for the Tin Woodman to cut down.”
She squatted down and lifted the top of an old metal tool chest. Inside was a little automatic pistol and a box of .22 shorts. “In case you’re here alone,” she said, “and the Revolution starts or something.”
“This is the death chamber?” I said. “What do you do, shoot ’em against the haybales?”
She looked surprised. “Huh,” she said. “Yeah, Tim told me to make sure and use a haybales. Otherwise probably the first one I would have done, the bullet would have ricocheted off the floor and killed somebody. See, what I do is just sort of get a good grip on the bunny, and then I just put the thing right against the back of the, the thing’s head, so I’m shooting into there like. We use the hay for the little guys’ bedding, too.”
“Waste not, want not,” I said.
“Believe me, I know how all this sounds,” she said. “But it’s actually more moral than going out and buying chicken or something. Do you know how those chickens live that you get at the store? You know how they die?”
I didn’t, exactly, but I nodded yes so I wouldn’t have to hear about it. Of course she was right, although you had to wonder if all those millions of miserable chicken lives outweighed a single ruined human life, ending in a drunken human death by automobile. Apples and oranges, probably.
Walking past the cages again, I gave the deathbound bunnies a crisp salute, thinking of the old morituri te salutamus, although in fact I had it all fucked up, since I was doing the saluting and they were doing the moriturying, at least right now. Good and popped on that moonshine myself.
4
But the next morning, hauling myself up the steps of the train with a headache going above and behind my right ear, I’d lost what zest I’d had for all this. It was clear this morning that I had gotten myself involved with another crazy woman: this time, a crazy woman who shot rabbits in her basement. And who would shoot me if I now tried to extricate myself. Who would shoot my son. Shoot herself. Through inattention, through indifference, through—shall we for once just cut the crap?—through deliberately looking away from a father’s responsibilities, I had first let Danny become involved with this crazy woman and her damaged daughter, and had then allowed myself to be pulled into their delusional world.
