Oatmeal for breakfast. Bacon, lettuce and tomato with lots of mayonnaise for lunch. The rest of the meat loaf, turnip greens, roasted sweet potatoes and ice tea for dinner. A good day. I even got a letter! From a pen pal in Finland. I found his name and address in the back of an old magazine. He was fourteen when he placed the ad, he wrote, and he’s amazed that any letter found him. It had been forwarded through three addresses. Now he’s a history professor at a university, has a wife and two daughters. Finland sounds a lot like Minnesota.
The social worker we’d been waiting for came this morning, just like in A Thousand Clowns. There was white stuff all over the front of her blue sweater and long hairs on the back, her own and a cat’s I think, and she smelled like sour milk. Afterwards she and Dad talked out in the kitchen. I got the door for her and watched as she hobbled off down the hall, thinking how much she looked like Piper Laurie in The Hustler, right up to the limp. The limp’s a kind of badge, I guess. Maybe they even teach it in social worker school. I’M ONE OF YOU.
Jack Finney’s book was a disappointment after Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On the other hand, Evan Hunter’s novel of Blackboard Jungle was much better – no contest, really. Right next to it on the shelf was Streets of Gold, so I picked that one up too, and it’s my new favorite. I’ve read it half a dozen times by now. The writer publishes as Hunter and as Ed McBain, neither of which is his real name, which is Salvatore Lombino. He also wrote the screenplay for The Birds. I could’t make much more sense out of O’Hara’s novel of Butterfield 8 than I did the movie.
Whole pages were filled with pasted-in receipts for magazines and paperbacks, lunches at McDonald’s, Good Eats cafeteria and Poncho’s, city bus transfers, cash tickets listing writing tablets, athletic socks, hard candy and breakfast cereals, verses and scrawled signatures scissored from greeting cards, ragged entries torn from TV Guides.
“Come across something there?” Don Lee asked, dredging me back, salvaged. I’d been quite literally out of this world, feet planted squarely in Carl Hazelwood’s, a world that made a lot more sense than our own. I was a visitor there, of course, a tourist, nothing more. Rare enough for any of us to be able to manage even that. But I’d become an old hand at looking through others’ windows from inside. In a way that’s how I survived prison. More to the point, it’s what made me effective as a therapist. And why I’d stopped.
I got up, dumped last night’s leftovers from the coffeemaker, scrubbed cone and carafe, found a filter, put on a fresh pot.
“Ever consider coming on full-time, you’ve got my vote,” Don Lee said.
“I do a mean grilled cheese, too.”
He sighed dramatically.
Adrienne picked up on the fourth ring, breathing hard.
“Turner,’’ I said. “Not calling too early I hope.”
“Not at all. We’re used to short nights. Dad always tries to hold still as long as he can so as not to disturb us, but he doesn’t sleep much. Two or three hours at the most. Good days, he’s able to fall back asleep around dawn.”
The coffeemaker burbled. A raked pickup with glass packs and booming bass blew past outside. When the phone rang, Don Lee punched in the other line and picked up, from old habit pulling a pad of paper close. June would be in soon. For a half-hour or so the street would be busy. If I stepped outside now, I’d emerge into congeries of smells: toast and bacon and coffee from the diner, car exhaust and unburned gasoline, cheap unbottled perfume of magnolia, newly watered front yards.
“Sarah’s out running,” Adrienne said. “I’d had enough, but she thought she’d go on a bit, should be back soon. Shall I have her call you?”
As one ages, signs that the world has changed at first appearance are subtle. One day you realize you’ve lost touch with music, don’t have a clue what this new stuff’s all about. Then the cops start looking like teenagers. You sleep again and wake to a world you scarcely recognize. Running, for instance. Suddenly everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s working out at Bally’s or L.A. Fitness, clinging to the sides of cliffs in day-long climbs, stoking yogurt, power shakes and smoothies like firemen in ancient railroad engines. What the hell’s happened?
“You may be able to help,” I told Adrienne.
“All right.”
Across the room Don Lee said, “We’ll look into it, Bonnie… Right… I’ve got it all written down here… Right…”
“You all getting along okay out there?” I asked.
“We’re adaptable, Mr. Turner, always have been. Making do is where we live.” Upturning a bottle of water, she drank. I heard each segment of the process, from unscrewed cap through glugs to the bottle coming back upright. “What was it you wanted?”
Don Lee said: “Any questions, anything comes up, I’ll give you a call.”
“Who’s BR?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“BR. It keeps coming up in Carl’s notebook, more and more as time goes on.”
“A friend, maybe?”
“His barber, for all I know. A pen pal, maybe?”
“I don’t think I-hold on.”
Voices off, as the phone changed hands.
“You come up against any more trouble like that, you give us a call right away,” Don Lee said, disentangling with a sigh and setting the phone down.
“Mr. Turner?”
“Have a good run?”
“Remember what Woody Allen said about sex? The worst he ever had was wonderful?”
“Chasing endorphins.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Supposedly they come to you when you push yourself to the limit. I ran for years, smacked up against my limit more than a few times. But I never so much as caught sight of the back end of one single endorphin.”
Don Lee poured coffee for us both, set mine before me. I nodded thanks. He sat back down. Attending to his crossword-puzzle book from the look of it.
“Did you have something for me, Mr. Turner?”
“Only a question, I’m afraid… Carl seems to have felt the same way about movies that you feel about running. Or Woody Allen about sex.”
She laughed. “He did! And he loved the bad ones best of all. Like those old science fiction and horror movies he grew up on, god awful stuff. Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jack Arnold, Larry Cohen. Basket Case, Spider Baby, The Incredibly Strange Creatures. A lot of them had something about them, though, awful as they were. Some basic integrity, a personal vision.”
“He talked about them a lot?”
“All the time. At least one of his therapists became exasperated. Said the kind of movies Carl was drawn to merely objectified his paranoia.”
“So would the Congressional Record. ”
Laughter again. “Creatures from lagoons, lost worlds and outer space are a lot more fun.”
“Not to mention every bit as believable.”
The door opened to let June slip through smiling. I noticed she kept her face turned away, and when she took her place at the front desk I understood why. That left eye was a prize of a shiner.
“Did Carl have particular favorites? Movies, actors, directors?”
“You know he was kind of a savant, right? Wherever his attention fell, it set down hard. He was like a sponge that would only soak up certain liquids. I remember one day we were talking in the kitchen and this song came on the radio, ’You Better Move On.’A week later he was telling me all about this obscure singer Arthur Alexander, his handful of hits, his comeback attempt with an album of autobiographical songs. God knows how or where he found out about all this stuff.”
“Same with movies, I take it.”
“Exactly. He could go on for hours about what studio put them out, where they were shot, who wrote the stories and scripts, how they set up this or that scene. He’d quote whole chunks of what Robert Mitchum or Brian Keith had said in Thunder Road or whatever. ’Bullet through the chest, ma’am, just routine’-that was one of his favorites. He absolutely worshiped Richard Carlson.”