The Sapphire Express (4 page)

3

House Party

During the painful years that followed my family’s death, I slowly learned to embrace solitude and appreciate the absence of forced socializing. I liked being alone, and I was no longer scared of my inner voice. The man I saw in the mirror every morning had become my friend, and I had accepted that I could have conversations with him and protect myself from demons with his help. My mind had learned to survive alone, and seclusion had transformed from a scary and hopeless sinkhole into a source of strength and balance.

I rarely encountered any living souls, but I occasionally talked to my neighbor, Sandy, and the unlucky debt collectors who made the grave mistake of dialing my number. I had lost respect for most human beings, and I just wanted to be left alone in my private world. I had no desire to share my pain with those selfish creatures who sat on a shuttle bus from Disneyland and refused to offer their seats to a pregnant mother carrying her sleeping toddler in her tired arms. I was sick of people who were nice and polite only when things went their way, when things were perfect.

The debt collectors called me because it was their job, but Sandy started coming to my door voluntarily after Lucy had thrown her rooster handbag on the passenger seat of her Cavalier and told him that their marriage was over. His loneliness had forced him out of the house and encouraged the desperate man to go and talk to people he previously didn’t see as being worthy of his time—people he didn’t need when he had Lucy keeping him company and listening to his stupid stories while massaging his hairy back with her tanned hands.

Sandy didn’t seem to notice that his misfortunes revealed the selfish prick who lived inside his beautiful body, and his behavior reminded me that even a beggar with a hot dog becomes a man’s best friend when he is left starving on a dirty street corner. He loves the beggar’s cracked lips and the greasy food he carries in his stained bag, but only until the tide turns. Then he despises him again and forgets his help and his repulsive hot dog, even if he had promised to remember him forever, to pay back every favor he ever did for him. He wants to erase the unfortunate memory from his brain because it wasn’t the real him there on the streets, after all.

I was that beggar with a greasy pork hotdog, and Sandy came knocking—hungry for companionship, hungry for humanity, hungry for an escape from the prison of his solitary thoughts that no one wanted to hear anymore.

However, his hunger didn’t flatter me much because I knew that I was one of the last souls on the list of people he thought would offer a firm shoulder to cry on. It was clear that all the others had told him to go back home, and that was the only reason he was at my door. I wasn’t his friend. I was just a stupid neighbor.

When he knocked for the first time, he was sad and dirty. The superwinner was standing there like a frightened puppy, and he looked like a man who had aged a year in one single, hellish night. It was evident that the wretched soul had been crying and squirming a little too long in that rusty fishing hook that Lucy had so effortlessly slipped through his spineless worm’s body. He seemed ready for the lidless perch to emerge from its reed home now and gobble him and take all his happy memories with it to the depths. He was no longer the Sandy I had once so admired. He was an old, bitter man who had let his dreams die simply by becoming complacent and unloving. He had created a suffocating world that every woman hated—a world where sharp cold words, dull breadwinner’s routines, and clumsily hidden denigration had replaced romance, exciting laughter, gratitude, and surprise.

Sandy’s knock was yet firm and hopeful, but he was at the wrong door. I had lost all interest in the man after my daughter died, and I couldn’t care less about his life, or what he was wearing or doing in his goddamn garage. It was all totally meaningless to me, and my jealousy of his glorious life was just a departed memory somewhere in the desolate corners of my hateful soul.

Yet I still opened my door to the crippled bird out of neighbor’s duty, but I didn’t feel anything when he gazed at me sheepishly and said, “Man, life is so difficult. I don’t know what to do anymore. I am lost.”

I looked at him with dispassionate eyes and asked, “What do you want, Sandy?”

“I…I just want to talk to you about something,” he said quietly.

“Why?”

“Because I am a human being, and I need to talk to someone, OK?”

I was quiet for a moment and said, “OK, Sandy. Tell me what’s wrong.”

The sad crow looked straight into my eyes and said, “Lucy is gone. She wants a divorce.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I’m broke, and my libido is gone.”

“How did that happen?” I asked in a genuinely surprised voice.

“Uh, I was fired a couple of months ago. Didn’t meet the quotas and stuff. I’m about to lose my house now. I have nothing left, and I can’t keep up the appearances anymore. I just can’t.”

I sighed deeply, looked at his puppy’s eyes, and said, “Damn you, Sandy. Don’t tell me that this is true. Don’t you tell me that this is true.”

Sandy looked at his feet, closed his eyes and said, “It is true, man. It’s all true.”

I looked at his disgustingly healthy hair for a moment too long and asked, “You know what? You are a dick, Sandy. Don’t you do this to me. Don’t you do this to me now!”

He looked at me with startled eyes and asked, “What, why, why do you say things like that, man? I’m in pain. Can’t you see that? What is wrong with you?”

“No, Sandy, no. You can’t be broke, and you can’t be in pain. You can’t get a goddamn divorce.”

“What, what, man? What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? I mean that you are a superwinner, Sandy. A superwinner! Don’t you know that?”

“What, a super what?”

“A superwinner! You are a superwinner, motherfucker!”

After I had said that, he started sobbing and whispered with a quivering voice, “No, God, no, you’ve got it all wrong, man. I am a loser. That’s what I am.”

“No, you are not. I refuse to believe you. You are lying! You are lying to me!”

Tears started flowing down his cheeks like cool morning rain on a broken barn window, and he said quietly, “Man, I was jerking off in the handicapped restroom at Walmart just this morning, and I cry like a little baby every night. Is that the man you are talking about? Is that the man you call a winner?”

I was quiet for a moment and said, “Jesus Christ, Sandy, you really ruined it for me, didn’t you?”

He raised his head and looked even more confused than before, and he asked with teary eyes, “What do you mean, man? How did I ever ruin anything for you?”

I sighed deeply and said, “You wasted my jealousy, Sandy. You wasted my goddamn envy. You tricked me, you idiot. I was jealous of you all these years, and now you march here and tell me that it was all smoke and mirrors. This is a goddamn disaster, man. At least tell me that you were happy before Lucy told you that she was divorcing you. Tell me that, you bastard! Tell me!”

Sandy looked genuinely frightened, and fresh tears surfaced from the abyss of his tired soul. Then he looked at me with defeated eyes and said, “Uh, no, man. I haven’t been happy for years. Lucy hasn’t touched me in ages, and my health is going down the drain. I am in pain all the time, and I can’t even sleep because my back hurts so badly. I have been on my feet for twenty years selling those Chevys for Mr. Cooper. I am a wreck, man. What can I say?”

I shook my head and said, “But what about your house, your pool, your car, and all those damn alligator shirts? What about them?”

“Man, I have more debt than the government, and the car is leased from Cooper—of course it is. They will come for it any day now.”

I didn’t say anything because I was in a state of total shock and disbelief.

Then Sandy asked, “What? Did you think that people actually own their damn cars? Are you stupid, or what?”

I sighed and asked, “And the shirts?”

“Shirts? What fucking shirts, man?”

“The alligator shirts, Sandy!”

“You mean the Lacoste shirts?”

“Yeah, the alligator shirts that cost a hundred dollars a pop. What about them?”

“Those are all fake, man. A friend of mine in Ho Chi Minh City keeps sending them to me even if I don’t want the shrinking, staining rags. They are all crap, worse than the cotton T-shirts Lucy buys me, uh, used to buy, from Walmart for five bucks.”

I looked at him sternly and said, “That’s it, Sandy. I can’t take this anymore. I just can’t. I bought my damn car because of you. I was obsessed about those alligator shirts, and I wanted to have your life. I wanted your garage and your fridge full of beer and food. I wanted your goddamn premium beef jerky, and I wanted Lucy. Tell me, Sandy, aren’t there any people left in this world who are genuinely happy? Are there any people in this cursed town who are as wealthy as they look, or are they all faking, too? Is that what you are saying, Sandy? Is that what you are saying, Goddammit? I deserved a true and authentic target of envy, and you stole even that from me by revealing the truth. I’m done with you, Sandy. I am done.”

The beaten man looked at me incredulously and said, “I don’t understand what you mean, man. You are not coherent. You are not all right. Are you stoned, or what?”

I didn’t say anything. I just stood there and looked at him.

Then he glanced at his shoes and said quietly, “Screw you, man,” and walked away.

“Yeah, you fly now, little bird, you fly now. And try to remember that the sun will rise every goddamn morning, but it’s not guaranteed that we wake up happy and full of yummy food, OK?” I said and closed the door.

Sandy came back a few times after that night, crying and drunk, but I didn’t have much to say to him. He only talked about his personal troubles and never seemed to even remember that the curved black blade of the Grim Reaper’s scythe had licked me hard and almost taken my head off.

It didn’t take long before he stopped coming altogether, and that was the end of our little neighborly heart-to-hearts. I was fine with that, though, because I was busy planning for my curious future and trying to understand the new me. I simply had no time for Sandy and his homemade pain. In fact, I was getting tired of the whole damn neighborhood and slowly starting to realize that a change of scenery was the only way forward for me. I was no longer the same man who had lived in that dream house with my loving family. I wasn’t a father, a husband, or a math teacher anymore but a wretch of a man who had been forced to become so free that he had actually ended up in prison. I had no responsibilities, and I was accountable to no one, not even to God. I had been transformed into something that did not even have a name.

That new creature knew that he needed to move away from the adorable suburban people and their barking dogs, and live alone somewhere where silence was the only king in town. He knew that he was dangerous and unpredictable and no longer belonged among the happy and hopeful, the ones whose dreams were still alive. He was tired of being sad and didn’t want to live in that depressing house anymore and breathe its heavy, air every time he closed his badger’s eyes—every morning he opened those sad peepers again and remembered that his family lay in the wormy ground.

That creature didn’t, unfortunately, have the necessary money for the move in his bank account, but, fortunately, a pleasant surprise had arrived in the mailbox in the form of a life insurance compensation. Eden had always been very kind to the door-to-door salesmen who rang our doorbell on hot summer days, and she had found it very difficult to say no to the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime offers they carried in their tawdry black briefcases. Sometimes she hid behind the curtains and refused to open the door altogether because she didn’t want to say no to the salesmen and disappoint them. On one occasion, she even ran upstairs and crawled under the bed and put her fingers deep into her ears until the salesman was gone.

I am not exactly sure what had happened on that evening when the lucky life insurance salesman rang our doorbell, but for some peculiar reason, Eden had decided to purchase a shiny new policy from him and keep it hidden from me. I think she did it more out of kindness and compassion for the hapless road warrior than for fear of the premature arrival of the Grim Reaper, but whatever the reason for buying that insurance was, I was its sole beneficiary, and the check was now safely in my wrinkled hand. It was a fairly decent payout, too, four hundred thousand dollars; more than enough to provide a new start for a confused man who was lost somewhere in the lonely hills of the posttraumatic world—a world where working for a paycheck was no longer possible.

I owed some money to the government and a couple of private lenders, but I decided that I would not pay them back—not a dime. I wasn’t afraid of them anymore, and I felt like I had paid enough taxes, interest, overdraft fees, handling costs, and whatnot already, so I was just going to keep all the money and tell them to leave me alone. It was a good and simple plan, but I knew that I needed to be very careful because the greedy pencil pushers would try to steal my money if I gave them even the slightest chance to do that. But I wasn’t going to.

To be honest, the IRS, the banks, or the goddamn municipal code, for that matter, didn’t intimidate me much after I lost my respect for death. They transformed into something that didn’t really concern me anymore; something that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about. After I had emerged from the sunny end of the meat grinder alive, all the almighty laws and regulations I had so much feared, and so meticulously followed my whole life, had become weak, even adorable. They were something that I wanted to squeeze and pat, like a puppy that amused me but didn’t deserve my respect or fear. The puppy, of course, tried to bite my goddamn fingers off because he—like all small dogs—thought that he was so doggone powerful and dreaded.