Things Will Never Be the Same Page 16

  She looked around. It was the longest I’d ever heard Barb talk in my life.

  “You know where he was?”

  “No. Where?” we all three said.

  “Ever eat any Dr. Healthy’s Nut-Crunch Bread?”

  “A loaf a day,” said Bob, patting his stomach.

  “Craig is Dr. Healthy.”

  “Shit!” said Bob. “Isn’t that stuff baked in Georgetown?”

  “Yeah. He’s been like thirty miles away for fifteen years, baking bread and sweet rolls. Jamie said, like some modern-day Cactus Jack Garner, he vowed never to go south of the San Gabriel River again.”

  “But now he is?”

  “Yep. Supposedly. Andru’s gonna fly down to Morey’s in Corpus this week and they’re going to practice before they come up here. Abram always was the quickest study and the only real musical genius, so he’ll be okay.”

  “That only leaves one question,” said Penny, speaking for us all. “Can Craig still sing? Can Craig still play? I mean, look what happened after the Miami thing.”

  “Good question,” said Bob. “I suppose we’ll all find out in a big hurry Saturday night. Besides,” he said, looking over at me, “we always got your tapes.”

  * * *

  The name’s Frank Bledsoe. I’m pushing forty, which is exercise enough.

  I do lots of odd stuff for a living—a little woodwork and carpentry, mostly speakers and bookcases. I help people move a lot. In Austin, if you have a pickup, you have friends for life.

  What I mostly do is build flyrods. I make two kinds—a 7’ one for a #5 line and an 8’2” one for a #6 line. I get the fiberglass blanks from a place in Ohio, and the components like cork grips, reel seats, guides, tips and ferrules, from whoever’s having a sale around the country.

  I sell a few to a fishing tackle store downtown. The seven-footer retails for $22, the other for $27.50. Each rod takes about three hours of work, a day for the drying time on the varnish on the wraps. So you can see my hourly rate isn’t too swell.

  I live in a place about the size of your average bathroom in a real person’s house. But it’s quiet, it’s on a cul-de-sac, and there’s a converted horse stable out back I use for my workshop.

  What keeps me in business is that people around the country order a few custom made rods each year, for which I charge a little more.

  Here’s a dichotomy: as flyfishing becomes more popular, my business falls off.

  That’s because, like everything else in these postmodernist times, the Yups ruined it. As with every other recreation, they confuse the sport with the equipment.

  Flyfishing is growing with them because it’s a very status thing. When the Yups found it, all they wanted to do was be seen on the rivers and lakes with a six hundred dollar split-bamboo rod, a pair of two hundred dollar waders, a hundred dollar vest, shirts with a million zippers on them, a seventy-five dollar tweed hat, and a patch from a fly’ fishing school that showed they’d paid one thousand dollars to learn how to put out enough fly line to reach across the average K-Mart parking lot.

  What I make is cheap fiberglass rods, not even boron or graphite. No glamour. And the real fact is that in flyfishing, most fish are caught within twenty-feet of your boots. No glory there, either.

  So the sport grows, and money comes in more and more slowly.

  All this talk about the reunion has made me positively reflective. So let me put 1969 in perspective for you.

  Richard Milhous Nixon was in his first year in office. He’d inherited all the good things from Lyndon Johnson—the social programs—and was dismantling them, and going ahead with all the bad ones, like the War in Nam. The Viet Cong and NVA were killing one hundred Americans a week, and according to the Pentagon, and we were killing two thousand of them, regular as clockwork, as announced at the 5 p.m. press briefing in Saigon every Friday. The draft call was fifty thousand a month.

  The Beatles released Abbey Road late in the year. At the end of the summer we graduated there was something called the Woodstock Festival of Peace and Music; in December there would be the disaster at the Altamont racetrack (in which, if you saw the movie that came out the next year, you could see a Hell’s Angel with a knife kill a black man with a gun on camera while all around people were freaking out on bad acid and Mick Jagger, up there trying to sing, was saying, “Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting each other?”) On the nights of August 8 and 9 were the Tate-LaBianca murders in L.A. (Charles Manson had said to his people “Kill everybody at Terry Melcher’s house,” not knowing Terry had moved. Terry Melcher was Doris Day’s son. Chuck thought Terry owed him some money or had reneged on a recording deal or something. When he realized what he’d done, he had them go out and kill some total strangers to make the murders at the Tate household look like the work of a kill-the-rich cult.) On December 17, Tiny Tim married Miss Vickie on the Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson as best man.

  The Weathermen, the Black Panthers and, according to agents’ reports, “frizzy-haired women of a radical organization called NOW,” were disturbing the increasingly senile sleep of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He longed for the days when you could shoot criminals down in the streets like dogs and have them buried in handcuffs, when all the issues were clear-cut. Spirotis T. Agnew, the vice-president, was gearing up to make his “nattering nabobs of negativism” speech, and to coin the term Silent Majority. This was four years before he made the most moving and eloquent speech in his life which went: “Nolo contendre.”

  We were reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or rereading The Hobbit for the zillionth time, or Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. And on everybody’s lips were the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. (Nixon was working on that, too.)

  There were weeks when you thought nothing was ever going to change, there was no wonderment anymore, just new horrors about the War, government repression, drugs. (They were handing out life sentences for the possession of a single joint in some places that year.)

  Then, in three days, from three total strangers, you’d hear the Alaska vacation—Flannel Shirt—last man killed by an active volcano story, all the people swearing they’d heard the story from the kid in the flannel shirt himself, and you’d say, yeah, the world is still magic. . . .

  I’ll really put 1969 in a nutshell for you. There are six of you sharing a three-bedroom house that fall, and you’re splitting rent you think is exorbitant, $89.75 a month. Minimum wage was $1.35 an hour, and none of you even has any of that.

  Somebody gets some money from somewhere, God knows, and you’re all going to pile into the VW Microbus which is painted green, orange, and fuchsia, and going to the H.E.B. to score some food. But first, since there are usually hassles, you all decide to smoke all the grass in the house, about three lids’ worth.

  When you get to the store you split up to get food, and are to meet at checkout lane number three in twenty minutes. An hour later you pool the five shopping carts and here’s what you have:

  Seven two-pound bags of lemon drops. Three bags of orange marsh-mallow goobers. A Hostess Ding-Dong assortment pack. A twelve-pound bag of Kokuho Rose New Variety Rice. A two-pound can of Beer-Nuts. A fifty-foot length of black shoestring licorice. Three six-packs of Barq’s Root Beer. Two quarts of fresh strawberries and a pint of Half and Half. A Kellogg’s Snak-Pak (heavy on the Frosted Flakes). A five-pound bag of turbinado sugar. Two one-pound bags of Bazooka Joe bubble gum (with double comics). A blue 75-watt light bulb.

  It fills up three dubl/bags and the bill comes to $8.39, the last seventy-four cents of which you pay the clerk in pennies.

  Later, when somebody finally cooks again, everybody yells, “Shit! Rice again? Didn’t we just go to the grocery store?”

  PS: On July 20 that year we landed on the Moon.

  Now I’ll te
ll you about this year, 1989.

  The Republicans are in the tenth month of their new Presidency, naturally. After Cuomo and Iacocco refused to run, the Democrats, like always, ran two old warhorses who quit thinking along about 1962. (“If nominated, I refuse to run,” said Iacocco, “if elected, I refuse to serve. And that’s a promise.”)

  We have six thousand military advisors in Honduras and Costa Rica. All those guys who went down to the post office and signed their Selective Service postcards are beginning to look a little grey around the gills.

  There are 1,800,000 cases of AIDS in America, and 120,000 have died of it.

  On Wall Street the Dow Jones just passed the 2000 mark after its near-suicide in ’87. “Things are looking just great!” says the new President.

  Congress is voting on the new two trillion dollar debt ceiling limit.

  Things are much like they have been forever. The rich are richer, the poor poorer, the middle class has no choices. The cities are taxing them to death, the suburbs can’t hold them. Every state but those in the Bible-belt South has horse and dog racing, a lottery, legalized parimutuel Bingo and a state income tax, and they’re still going broke.

  Everything is wrong everywhere. The only good thing I’ve noticed is that MTV is off the air.

  You go to the grocery store and get a pound of bananas, a six foot electric extension cord, a can of powder scent air freshener, a tube of store-brand toothpaste and a loaf of bread. It fits in the smallest plastic sack they have and costs $7.82.

  Let me put 1989 in another nutshell for you:

  A friend of mine keeps his record albums (his CDs are elsewhere) in what looks like a haphazard stack of orange crates in one corner of his living room.

  They’re not orange crates. What he did was get a sculptor friend of his to make them. He got some lengths of stainless steel, welded and shaped them to look like a haphazard stack of crates. Then with punches and chisels and embossing tools the sculptor made the metal look like grained unseasoned wood, and then painted them, labels and all, to look like crates.

  You can’t tell them from the real things, and my friend only paid three thousand dollars for them.

  Or to put it another way: And Zarathustra came down from the hills unto the cities of men. And Zarathustra spake unto them, and what he said to them was: “Yo!”

  PS: Nobody’s been to the Moon in sixteen years.

  MY TRIP TO THE POST OFFICE

  by FRANK BLEDSOE, AGE 38

  I’d finished three rods for a guy in Colorado the day before. I put the clothes back on I’d worn working on them, all dotted with varnish. I was building a bookcase, too, so I hit it a few licks with a block plane to get my blood going in the early morning.

  It was a nice crisp fall day, so I decided to ride my bike to the post office substation to mail the rods. I was probably so covered with wood shavings I looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid that had been hit with a slug from a .45.

  I brushed myself off, put the rods in their cloth bags, put the bags in the tubes with the packing paper, and put the tubes in the carrier I have on the bike. Then I rode off to the branch post office.

  I’m coming out of the substation with the postage and insurance receipts in my hand when I hear a lot of brakes squealing and horns honking.

  A lady in a white Volvo has managed to get past two One Way Do Not Enter signs at the exit to the parking lot and is coming in against the traffic, and all the angles of the diagonal parking places. She has a look of calm imperturbability on her face.

  Nobody’s looking for a car from her direction. As they back out, suddenly there she is in the rear-view mirror. They slam on their brakes and honk and yell.

  “Asshole!” yells a guy who’s killed his engine in a panic stop. She gets to the entrance of the lot, does a 290 degree turn, and pulls into the Reserved Handicapped spot at the front door, acing out the one-armed guy with the Disabled American Vets license plates who was waiting for the guy who was illegally parked against the yellow curbing in the entrance to move so he could get in.

  She gets out of the car. She’s wearing a silk blouse, a set of June Cleaver double-strand pearls and matching earrings, and a pair of those shorts that make the wearer look like they have a refrigerator stuffed down the back of them.

  “Are you handicapped?” I ask.

  She looks right through me. She’s taking a yellow Attempt to Deliver slip out of her sharkskin purse. She has on shades.

  “I said, are you handicapped? I don’t see a sticker on your car.”

  “What business is it of yours?” she asks. “Besides, I’m only going to be in there a minute.

  That’s what you think. She goes inside. I shrug at the one-armed guy. With some people it was their own fault they went to Korea or Viet Nam and got their legs and stuff blown off, with others it wasn’t.

  He drives off down the packed lot. He probably won’t find a space for a block.

  I take my bike tools out of my pocket. I go to the Volvo. In deference to Bob, I undo the valve cores on the left front and right rear tires.

  Then I get on my bike and ride down to the payphone at the bakery three blocks away, call the non-emergency police number, and tell them there’s a lady without a handicap sticker blocking the reserve spot at the post office substation.

  After mailing the rods and using the quarter for the phone, I have eighty-two cents left—just enough for coffee at the bakery. It’s a chi-chi place I usually never go, but I haven’t had any coffee this morning and I know they make a cup of Brazilian stuff that would bring Dwight D. Eisenhower back to life.

  I go in. They’ve got one of those European doorchimes that sets poor people’s nerves on edge and lets those with a heavy wallet know they’re in a place where they can really drop a chunk of money.

  The clerk is Indian or Paki; he’s on the phone talking to someone. I start tapping my change on the counter looking around. Maybe ten people in the place. He hangs up and starts toward me.

  “Large cuppa—” I start to say.

  The chime jingles and the smell hits me at the same time as their voices; a mixture of Jovan Musk for Men and Sassoon styling mousse.

  “—game,” says a voice. “How many croissants you still got?” says the voice over my shoulder to the clerk.

  The counterman has one hand on the coffee spigot and a sixteen ounce styrofoam cup in the other.

  “Oh, very many, I think,” he says to the voice behind me.

  “Give us about—oh, what, John?—say, twenty-five assorted fruit-filled, no lemon, okay?”

  The clerk starts to put down the styrofoam cup. In ambiguous situations, people always move toward the voice that sounds most like money.

  “My coffee?” I say.

  The clerk looks back and forth like he’s just been dropped on the planet.

  “Could you sort of hurry?” says the voice behind me. “We’re double-parked.”

  I turn around then. There are three of them in warmup outfits—gold and green, blue and orange, blue and silver. They look maybe twenty-five. Sure enough, there’s a blue Renault blocking three cars parked at the laundromat next door. The handles of squash racquets stick up out of the blue and orange, blue and silver, gold and green duffles in the back seat.

  “No lemon,” says the blond-haired guy on the left. “Make sure there’s no lemon, huh?”

  “You gonna fill our order?” asks the first guy, who looks like he was raised in a meatloaf mold.

  “No,” I say. “First he’s going to get my coffee, then he’ll get your order.”

  They notice me for the first time then, suspicion dawning on them this wasn’t covered in their Executive Assertiveness Training program.

  The clerk is turning his head back and forth like a radar antenna.

  “I tho
ught they gave free coffee at the Salvation Army,” says the blond guy, looking me up and down.

  “Tres, tres amusant,” I said.

  “Are you going to fill our $35 order, or are you going to give him his big fifty cent cup of coffee?” asked the first guy.

  The ten other people in the place were all frozen in whatever attitude they had been in when all this started. One woman actually had a donut halfway to her mouth and was watching, her eyes growing wider.

  “My big seventy-five cent order,” I said, letting the change clink on the glass countertop. “Any time you come in any place,” I went on, “you should look around the room and you should ask yourself, who’s the only only possible one here who could have taken Taiwanese mercenaries into Laos in 1968? And you should act accordingly.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are ?” asked the middle one, who hadn’t spoken before and looked like he’d taken tae-kwon-do since he was four.

  “Practically nobody,” I said. “But if any of you say one more word before I get my coffee, I’m going out to the saddlebag on my bike, and I’m going to take out a product backed by 132 years of Connecticut Yankee know-how and fine American craftsmanship and I’m coming back in here and showing you exactly how the rat chews the cheese.”

  Then I gave them the Thousand Yard Stare, focusing on something about a half mile past the left shoulder of the guy in the middle.