One evening I took my customary walk to the bar a little later than usual. As I recall, twilight was in the air and the weather was cooling nicely. My wife was out of town for work and I felt some mild and pleasant sense of liberty.
A stranger (to me) was tending bar, a gruff bald man replete with misshapen teeth in sore need of a dentifrice. Some younger people were milling about, a few in lab coats, refugees from the local chemical plant. Sometimes a familiar place can seem like a different world.
At least I saw one of my fellow “regulars,” the old farmer, and I was moved by sentiment. I had never before had the courage to simply sidle up directly next to him on a stool and engage in casual chitchat, but suddenly I found myself not only willing but eager to do just that, my lonely feelings due to my wife’s absence intensified and supplemented by the natural impulse toward “male bonding.”
To my astonishment, the old farmer was garbed in a gray pinstripe suit, a far cry from his usual dungarees or overalls. I fear that my opening remark was some jovial observation on the subject.
“My friend died,” came his sobering reply.
He was referring to Ned Brick, the old detective with whom he had so often gambled.
We spoke for a while of sad things, such as a trip to Alaska he had always hoped to make with his first wife but never had.
The old farmer had been a pallbearer at the old detective’s funeral. I speculated aloud at one point as to whether Sandy Baker Jr. had been similarly employed. This the old farmer answered with a grunt.
I made some remark about Sandy, something about how he didn’t seem so bad to me, a half-hearted defense, I must admit, because at the moment my most cherished hope was that the old farmer would like me. We are always going around criticizing St. Peter for denying Jesus thrice before the crowing of the cock, but come on! It is so easy to want to “go with the crowd” who happens to be around. We all just want to fit in.
“You must know about my disappointing, fat son,” the old farmer said.
I was startled in numerous ways. For one, it seemed that a very personal conversation was about to ensue. Also, it was intriguing to think what association Sandy Baker Jr. might have with the old farmer’s disappointing, fat son. Also, it seemed to be a terrible way to describe one’s son. Also, there is the matter of my own weight.
I noted that the old farmer was drinking gin, a harder libation than usual. On the spot I made the mental decision to recall his every word as closely as possible, and to use the lengthy restroom breaks for which he was so justifiably famous to make some notes in my own form of shorthand, which I planned to transcribe in my leisure at home. As you will see from the following, my plan was a success in that regard.
“You’re telling me you never heard of my fat, disappointing son? His name is Shell.”
I paused to think. It is true that I had heard the name Shell mentioned somewhat frequently, though I could not recall in what capacity. I had a nagging sense that the Shell of which I had heard was a woman, or had been talked about in strictly womanly terms. I was amazed to think that this Shell of my imaginings could be a male of any kind. I thought it best not to mention this, and merely shook my head as if in blankness.
Shell, I was informed, blogged constantly about a young actress named ______. I leave the name blank not from pretension or postmodernism, but simply because the old farmer could not remember the name of the actress that his son liked to blog about. Otherwise alert people of a certain age begin forgetting the names of current superstars, and why shouldn’t they? This man probably knew everything about the phases of the moon.
From various clues, I would suspect that the old farmer might have been trying to refer to Scarlett Johansson, due to a number of mentions of “red hair,” though I cannot say so with certainty. Ms. Johansson has been viewed in films with various shades of hair, red certainly among them. Perhaps a certain jpeg from Shell’s blog, at which the old farmer had gazed with disgust, had fastened itself to his mind with, dare I say it, the strange admixture of lust and distaste that is so common for all of us who participate in humankind.
Shell was fifty years of age, and the old farmer found it unseemly that the girl of his obsession still had baby fat on her, in the old farmer’s estimation. This also makes me suspect that her identity was that of Scarlett Johansson, who is a person so soft and creamy, resembling nothing so much as a nourishing bowl of oatmeal.
Hypocrisy! cries the alert reader familiar with the area and its inhabitants. Isn’t this the same old farmer who has a child bride named Cherry of all things, covered in pale, pink freckles from head to shapely toes?
To which I can only respond, “Touché.”
But may I suggest that we pause before rushing to judgment and take a hard look at our own lives and impulses? It is probably far from uncommon that we recognize as great sins the small faults in others that we fail to recognize in ourselves.
Not that there was any sin involved, on the face of it, with the marriage of the old farmer to his legally aged wife Cherry. As I brood on this complicated matter, it occurs to me that what really bothered the old farmer was his son’s timidity. Shell was not going after his dream! Rather than tracking down Scarlett Johansson (for the sake of argument) and asking her on a date, he was content to scan the Internet for candid photographs of her, in effect building a virtual shrine to her in full view of a disbelieving public, at which he could kneel and worship like a wretched mooncalf.
One warm evening the old farmer came home, or so he related, after dropping off his young wife Cherry at the airport, to notice that the living-room furniture had been pushed against the walls. Next he saw Sandy Baker Jr. with his shirt unbuttoned all the way. Sandy Baker Jr.’s ribs were prominent and pronounced and his chest was quite hairless, almost as if denuded by artificial means. As another part of this scenario, the old farmer’s middle-aged son Shell was on his hands and knees. Sandy Baker Jr. was riding Shell around the room like a horse.
Have I mentioned that Shell was living with Cherry and the old farmer at the time, due to his pending divorce? Naturally, the old farmer wished to ascertain what was “going on.”
“I was showing Shell here some tricks,” Sandy Baker Jr. offered, buttoning his shirt, having dismounted, and attempting to make himself look presentable under the circumstances.
The old farmer thought of a postcard that Cherry had mailed him from one of her shopping trips to Dallas, showing a spider monkey in a cowboy outfit riding a large dog. At the time, everyone had said it was “cute” and “funny.” But now he remembered with stark immediacy the grim, desperate faces of the monkey and the dog.
As he told his story, the old farmer had been staring into the filthy mirror behind the bar, staring the way he might have stared at a fallow field, full of longing and knowledge, seeing things a layman could never see. Suddenly he turned those burning eyes on me.
“Stay away from Mr. Sandy Baker Jr. He’ll beguile you with his powers, and soon you’ll be his henchman on his bloody, hidden deeds.”
This was interesting news, because I had recently given Sandy Baker Jr. the sum of $300 that didn’t exactly belong to me so that he could have some special publicity shots of my cat made up.
Inspired by the old farmer’s newfound passion for gin and the reluctant thought of returning to my own dark house, I consumed a quantity of Gibsons and made many embarrassing proclamations, only a few of which I can recall with any certainty, most if not all of them to uninterested strangers.