The Immortal Words of Captain, Road Prison 36

by Wilson Roberts

Waving a jelly filled cruller in the air he lowers it, dips it in his coffee and takes a bite. Sugar drops from his lip to his chin. “I got these at Katie’s Doughnut Shop. It’s been in the same family for thirty years. They’ve got their own recipe.”

In his late sixties, he wears rimless eyeglasses, a dark suit, a white shirt and a Jerry Garcia tie, his gray hair pulled back into a tight pony tail. He looks across the small kitchen table at the woman sitting opposite him, takes a sip from his coffee cup, raising his eyes as she speaks.

“You were thrashing around last night. Woke me up and I had a hell of a time getting back to sleep.” She’s dressed in LL Bean khaki slacks and an off-white shirt, her dark brown hair cropped close to her head. Pouring sugar into her coffee she lights a cigarette and lets the smoke drift from her nostrils.

“Your book light woke me up.” He takes a bite from his doughnut and looks away from her, toward the wall. “I have many dreams of late. Most are about arguing with old girl friends or trying to find a place to pee. If I’m lucky I wake up before someone breaks up with me or I wet the bed.”

She blows smoke at him. “Un-huh.”

“Last night was different. I dreamed a lion swallowed me whole. The last thing I remember seeing was the autumn hills through the cage bars of the lion’s fangs. I love the fall colors in western Massachusetts . They were at their peak in the Sixties. Of course they were enhanced by mescaline and acid, but so were my dreams, and my girl friends.”

Resting the cigarette on her saucer she pours more sugar in her coffee and gestures toward a compact stereo system sitting on a small table next to the stove. “Do you have to make the coffee so strong? And what’s with the Sinatra crap this morning? I hate that song, what’s it called, ‘It Was a Good Time?’”

“”It Was a Very Good Year.’ What do you think it means, a dream like that? Is it Freudian? Jungian? I mean what sort of analytic filter is appropriate for it?

“How should I know? Before my trust fund kicked in I was a gynecologist, not a shrink. I dislike Sinatra. Every woman I know hates him.”

He finishes a doughnut and takes another one from the box, holding it up, examining it with one eye closed. “I hate those Styrofoam doughnuts the chain shops have, don’t you?” He pauses, still looking at the doughnut, then sighs and looks at her. “The world is deteriorating around me.”

“Your coffee’s been sitting on the warmer too long. It tastes like old athletic socks smell.”

“So don’t drink it. Have a doughnut.”

“As long as they’re filled with jelly.”

“There’s a mix, some with holes, some crullers, some of each with jelly. I suppose the thrashing happens when I’m trying to escape from something in a dream.”

She picks up the newspaper, puts a pair of reading glasses on the end of her nose, and looks at the front page, rattling it loudly as she does. She shakes her head and puts it down, picks up her cigarette and looks at it disgustedly. “Damn. It’s out.”

“Sophia, the girl I lived with six months ago, just before you moved in, was an alcoholic. I could gauge how drunk she was by how far down her nose her glasses had slid. When they were near the end I knew I’d have to carry her to bed. It did make sex easier.” He smiles.

“That must have been nice for you.”

He nods. “It took me some time to get used to understanding you were sober when your glasses were down there, at the end of your nose, I mean. The learning curve of reading different women’s signals and body language always presents me with some difficulties.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t let lions swallow you in your dreams. I’d sleep better.”

“You don’t actually love me.”

“We haven’t lived together long enough for love.”

He shrugs. “I suppose.”

“No supposing. Love takes a long time.” She lights another cigarette. “It’s like building a full size house with Legos. One little plastic block at a time.”

He takes a deep breath. “I’ve always liked the smell of a freshly lit cigarette, the combined odors of paper, tobacco and matches wafting on gray smoke through the air. I don’t smoke tobacco. Never have.”

“You’ve never been with someone long enough to be in love.”

“And you have?”

“I was married for three years back on the Eighties, for two years in the Nineties and for a year and a half in the Oughts.”

“The Oughts are over. We’re on the cusp of the second decade of the new millennium. If your track record of three years, two years and then a year and a half holds, we’ll be together for less than a year.”

“We’re not married.”

“No.”

“Yet.”

Studying his hands, he replies without looking up. “Yet isn’t an operative term. I don’t marry.”

Dunking her cigarette in her coffee, she throws it at the refrigerator and it sticks on the door. She laughs. “Perfect shot.”

“A woman I lived with for a summer back in the early Sixties used to do the same thing, Myra or Minerva.”

“You never told me about her.”

“Probably not. I think maybe her name was Mynah. Mynah Feaster.”

“You never mentioned her.”

“Foster. Mynah Foster. I’m pretty sure that was it. She was what they used to call a neurotic before the DSM III. Obsessive/compulsive I’d call her today.”

“In other words, crazy as a shit-house rat.”

“We don’t use that term.”

“Shit house rat?”

“Crazy. It’s like all derogatory terms. When I was a kid growing up in a little burg outside Philly they called me a wop. It’s hateful.”

“What about shit house rat?”

Shaking his head and grunting, he gives her a dead smile. “I used to call her my little Mynah bird.”

“How cute. Did she chirp and flit around you?”

Scratching his head, he frowns. “I don’t remember. I don’t think so. She didn’t like the name. Said it reminded her of some play.”

“‘A Doll’s House,’ I’d guess. Anyway, you never mentioned her.”

“It never came up before.” Leaning forward he puts a finger on her lips, slightly parting them. “You need to do something about your teeth, whitener or something. They’re quite yellow.”

She scratches her front teeth with a fingernail and flicks plaque toward the refrigerator.

“Forester, that’s it. Her name was Forester. I’m pretty sure. You can get tooth whitener over the counter at the drug store, you know. I think I even saw some in the supermarket.”

She stands, walks around the table and rests her hands on the back of her chair. “You know jack shit about love.”

She takes another sip of coffee, spits it in the cup and setting it down lights another cigarette.

He breathes in the second hand smoke and smiles.

“I might could love you,” she says with a sigh.

“Might could?” He laughs. “Where did that come from?”

“I’ve been thinking about it since you said I didn’t love you.”

“Not love. ‘Might could.’ Where did ‘might could’ come from?”

“I was raised in east Tennessee . It’s a common expression. It means I could love you, maybe.”

“Doesn’t could imply perhaps, maybe?”

“You want to talk about words or love?”

“Love’s a word.” He picks up a regular doughnut and sticks his finger through the hole several times. “I think Joan Baez had a song about love being a four letter word or something like that.”

“Fuck you.” Her voice is without rancor.

“I didn’t know you were from Tennessee .” He takes a bite of a doughnut and leaves the remainder hanging from his mouth.

“I didn’t know you were never married.”

“Not just never married, I don’t marry. There’s a difference.” His words are muffled by the doughnut.

Reaching over, she removes the doughnut from his mouth and stuffs it in hers. “We might could have a better crack at a long term relationship if we don’t get married.”

“I lived with Wanda Jo Szulborski for nearly five years, from Nineteen-Sixty Seven through Seventy-two. We broke up just after Nixon was re-elected. I went through Watergate with Annie French. She left me a month after Gerald Ford became President. Her brother worked for the State Department and got her a job in D.C. That was the end of it with her. I don’t do commuting love affairs.”

“You remember all that and you had trouble remembering Mynah’s name?”

“I’m pretty sure it was Mynah, although I think there was a Myra in there somewhere, either before or after Mynah.”

“So, if I got a job in California would that be the end of it for us?”

“My dear, there aren’t enough Legos in the world to build a bridge from Massachusetts to California .”

“Sure there are. I hate California . Too much traffic. And that governor…” He raises both hands, as if to ward something off. “I’m not going to get side-tracked into talking about politics. They just don’t work for me.”

The phone rings and she jumps to answer it. After a moment she muffles it against her breast. “It’s a Danny Morton for you,” she whispers, the phone muffled against her shoulder. He shakes his head, silently mouthing no, no, no.

“Sorry, Danny. He’s not here.” She listens for a moment longer, then hangs up, returns to the table, picks up her coffee cup and looks at it before setting it back down. “He said something about a TV show he wanted to tell you about.”

“Danny’s my mother’s third husband’s second wife’s grandson. He teaches English at the community college and he’s always doing terrible line by line retellings of old ‘Saturday Night Live’ skits and ‘Seinfeld’ shows. He’s started an online Larry David Fan Club.”

“Sounds annoying.”

“I had a colleague like him in the Social Work department at Smith. They fired him after he got drunk and did an imitation of Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin’s wild and crazy guys for the President and the Trustees at the annual college winter holiday party.”

“You never talk about Smith.”

He shrugs. “It’s a job. The teaching and my private therapy practice supplement the trust fund my grandmother left me. Most of my old girl friends were Smithies when I met them, although some of them were patients.”

“Unlike me.”

“You’re different. You’re the first woman I’ve lived with that I met at an Omega Institute workshop.”

She laughs. “We probably never would have gotten together if the woman I was tenting with didn’t have a bad case of the farts and I hadn’t asked if I could stay in your tent so I could breathe.”

“I was between girl friends.”

“You ever live alone for any length of time?”

“You lie well. I can’t believe how easily you got rid of Danny on the phone.”

“My people were storytellers. I come from a very oral culture.”

He smiles, raising his eyebrows. “I’ve noticed.”

“You’re a dirty old man.”

“Sixty-nine isn’t that old.”

“You’re sixty-eight. You just wanted to say Sixty-nine, thus confirming my diagnosis of dirtyoldmanitis.”

“Do you lie a lot?”

She stubs out her cigarette and lights another. “Only to avoid awkward situations.”

“Define awkward situations.”

“That’s hard to do. They’re like pornography; you recognize them when they come up.”

“If I were truly a dirty old man, I’d have a riposte to that.”

“And that wasn’t a riposte?”

“If you wish.”

“Is this a failure to communicate?”

“Wishing for a riposte?”

“Wishing for anything’s a waste of time.”

They fall quiet. She smokes while he drinks coffee and looks out a window. There is a distant sound of railroad cars rumbling and clanking mixing with the nearby sounds of crows.

He breaks their silence. “That was a vile thing you did earlier, dunking your cigarette and sticking it to the ice-box.”

“You’re dating yourself. Ice-box, indeed.” She dunks another cigarette and tosses it at the refrigerator door. “Bull’s eye. Luring women to live with you and only later telling them you’re not the marrying kind isn’t a vile thing to do?”

“You want to get married?”

“I like marriage. What’s not to like? You stand up in front of all your friends and relatives, most of whom have spent a lot of money on gifts, and tell everybody you promise to love someone until death do you part all the while being the center of attention, having a big party with lots of food, music and dancing then going off on a honeymoon and boffing your brains out for a week, having dinner out every night and lying on a tropical beach during the days, when you’re not making love.”

“Years of putting up with someone you discover you don’t like can be a definite down side.”

“That’s what divorce is for.”

“I don’t divorce. No marriage, voila, no divorce.”

She smiles. “There is that to be said for not getting married.”

“Besides, I didn’t lure you into living with me. As I remember, you suggested it the last night of the Omega week.”

“I fell in love with you.”

“I thought you just said you could love me. Now you say fell in love with me. And there was that case of your tent mate’s farts.”

“Bad farts. And I said might could. I said I might could love you.”

“But how does that jibe with you saying you fell in love with me during Omega week?”

“Falling in love with someone and loving them aren’t the same.”

Getting up, he walks over to her chair, bends over and runs his hands over her body, talking as he does. “Nice lines. High cheekbones, good long neck and broad shoulders, full breasts, but small enough never to sag, hang down to your naval. A woman I lived with in Nineteen Eighty-four had breasts that were milky white and soft. She was only twenty-eight and they already leaked into her arm pits when she lay on her back. She left me the day I told her she was in danger of getting fat. You’re nearly, what, forty-two? You’ll never get fat.” He pauses and runs a finger under her nose. "You do have some light hairs on your upper lip that might thicken and darken into a mustache with age.”

“You’re a complete shit.”

“So, falling in love and being in love are different.”

She points a finger at him and clicks her tongue. “You got it. They’re both nice. It’s the falling out of love that I hate. It’s a sloppy time. People side-wind each other, hide money, make secret lists of what pieces of furniture they want to keep and which ones they want to stick the other person with.”

She pulls away from him and he huffs back to his seat. “Then you’ve got to find a good divorce lawyer, hoping that the other person hasn’t gotten there first, look around for a place to live so that when you leave you’ve got a place to go, and try to get title to the best car in your name alone. It’s not fun.”

“That’s a good argument for not getting married,” he says.

She slowly lights a cigarette and exhales through her nostrils. “Without marriage there’s no commitment.”

“We were talking about falling in love and love. I suggest to you that the first is hormones, and second a mad quest for security.”

“You’re a real prick, you know that?” She dunks the cigarette and tosses it. “Call me Dead-Eye.”

“For chrissakes, it stuck on a picture my brother sent me of his wife’s grandson, Luke. You hit the kid, Luke.”

“On the back of the picture it says his name’s Brian.”

“You read the back?”

“Of course. It says Brian Callwood.”

“So it’s Brian, not Luke. Big deal. Big deal. What’s the big deal?”

“You don’t give a rat’s ass about anybody. You don’t even know your own nephew’s name.”

“It’s not a nephew. It’s my brother’s wife’s grandson. Hell, I’ve only met her twice and I’ve never met her daughter or son, I don’t know which it is that had the kid, Brian, Luke, whatever.”

“Your patients must love you.”

“Some of them love me so much they want us to get naked together. What else of mine have you read? Did you go through my desk, look at my papers, read my bank book?”

“I think I’m going to leave you.”

“All right.”

“All right? Is that all? I say I’m going to leave you and you say all right?”

“You got bent out of shape when I said I don’t marry. You only told me today you were from Tennessee after we’ve been living together for six weeks. You called me a prick. You found it frighteningly easy lying to Danny about my not being here. You sneak around reading the backs of the pictures on my ice-box and maybe my personal papers and you throw coffee soaked cigarettes around my house. Besides, you said you’re thinking about leaving me, not that you are going to.”

“You don’t like me, do you?”

He clamps his hands over his mouth.

“You don’t like women, do you? We’re just holes to you. Like doughnuts, just sweet holes.”

“I love women. If you leave me I’ll have another woman to live with by tomorrow, next day at the latest, if I so choose. There’s a very promising girl, Elsie, Eloise, something like that, who sits in the front row of my Problems in Biopsychosocial Functioning course.”

“Marry me and I won’t leave.”

“Why would you want to marry me if you think I’m a prick who doesn’t like women? Why would I marry you if you think I’m a prick who doesn’t like women?”

She takes a jelly doughnut from the box and bites into it. Red juice runs down her chin. She laughs. “It would be a challenge to see if I could last with you longer than a year and a half. If so, perhaps we could have children and then grandchildren.”

“Children and grandchildren are less appealing than marriage. I never met a child I liked. They’re egocentric brats who think the world revolves around them. Besides, you’re too old to have children and I certainly am.”

“You must be a hell of a social worker.”

He shakes head vigorously. “I’m not a social worker. I teach social work. I train social workers. I make no claim to be a social worker. I don’t even like social workers. Most people who go into social work are self-righteous busy-bodies. I think of them as secular Baptists.”

“And you’re a therapist. Fucked up beyond belief and you dare to offer help to other fucked up people.”

“I do help them. And I meet a lot of interesting women in the process.”

“I am leaving.”

“I’ll help you pack. I don’t want you to think I’m hurt or angry.”

“I’ll do it myself. There’s not much to do, just a suit case and a shoulder bag.” She gets up from the table.

“It’s been a fairly decent six weeks. Good sex the first three and adequate company the following two. The final week with a girl friend is always strained, whether it comes after the first week or the first month or after a few years. The last day always comes before you fully expect it.”

“It’s here now.”

“Where will you go?”

“Boston. New York. Any place that’s not near you.”

“I’ll miss you for a while. You taught me things I’d never thought of. Perhaps because of your profession. I’m sure they’ll come in handy with the girl in the front row of my Problems in Biopsychosocial Functioning class.”

“You’re way behind on that learning curve.”

“You really should do something about that hair on your upper lip. It’s not bad now, but, well you know, things like that can get out of control if you don’t take care of them.” He stands up and stretches.

“You really really should do something about your personality.”

“And make an effort to stand up straight. Your shoulders are getting stooped.

"We had fun for a while, but it’s time for you to go and I’ll be much safer for your going. Sooner or later someone always tries to swallow me whole."

Crossing to the stereo, he turns up the volume, Sinatra’s “One for my Baby and One More for the Road.”

“Too loud,” she says. “You really should get Ella Fitzgerald’s or Julie London’s version, or both.”

“I’m not big on women singers.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Are you going to clean your butts off the refrigerator before you go? How about one last quickie for the road?”

“I don’t think so. No cleaning. No fucking.”

“I might die and you’d have nothing to remember me by. Come on, throw me one last good one, or give me a blow job. I’d settle for you jerking me off. That way you could avoid body fluids. Well almost.” He pauses for a moment, then raises his eyebrows and smiles. “I’d even wear a condom for that.”

“Jerk yourself off.”

“Why not? What’ve you got to lose?”

“You are a total dick.” She leaves the room, her footsteps loud as she climbs the stairs.

Picking up another doughnut, he sticks his finger in the hole, pokes it in and out, and starts spinning it on his finger. Crossing to the CD player he turns the volume further up. Sinatra’s voice fills the room.

graphic: Adha, digital

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Wilson Roberts is a retired Greenfield Community College MA professor of English Literature, Folklore and Creative Writing, who has also been Department Chair in those disciplines, a union organizer, and a storyteller as well as an author of fiction and poetry. His recently published novel, 'The Cold Dark Heart of the World, is available for purchase through Amazon. Read a review of it at recorder.com. He devotes his leisure time now to writing, travel, family and environs on the eastern end of the Appalachian region and also works as a court-certified mediator in small claims and juvenile courts with families whose kids have been taken by the state. His goal for the Mediation Training Collaborative effort is to reunite families whenever possible. He's also been a musician (guitar) and songwriter for many years.