We Are Still Married (10 page)

One night, arriving for dinner at The Buffalo Wingery, Rob and Nancy ran into Randy and Sue sitting at the bar. Rob and Nancy struck up a conversation and talked for forty-five minutes before they identified themselves. Their former children couldn't believe their eyes! “Mom? Dad?” they cried. “You seem so—so interesting, so alive, so ...”

“Young?” smiled Nancy.

“Yes!”

Sue said, “Mom, it's so good to see you.”

“Call us Rob and Nancy,” said their ex-parents, hugging them. They ate dinner together, and Rob and Nancy were glad to hear that the children were just as happy with their new lifestyles as they were with theirs. The four of them formed a much stronger bond that evening than they had had as a family, perhaps because it was based on mutual respect and not on the accident of birth. “Let's get together again, soon,” they promised. Everything was great.

Then came the stock-market crash in October, and though everyone said the next morning that it meant nothing really and was a natural correction and not a crash, nevertheless life seemed shakier around Market Square and South Market. One cool morning a runner was heading south along Eleanor Avenue past all the new little trees in their brick pots on the sidewalk when the Velcro strip on his left shoe caught the Velcro strip on his left wrist. He fell heavily and broke his right leg so badly it almost had to be amputated.

Word got around fast in The Eatery among the breakfast croissant crowd:
Marc almost lost his leg.
People walked around thinking about it, a wonderful man in his early forties tripped up by himself and almost crippled.

Same day, The Wokery shut down. Bankrupt.

Next afternoon, 2:00 P.M.: a woman, thirty-two, gasped in mid-sentence and pitched forward into her wilted spinach salad at The Coffee & Tea-ery and had to be pounded back to life by the Vietnamese dishwasher. Choking on salad? You think it's impossible and yet it seems that a leaf of lightly oiled spinach can form a tight seal in your throat, a deadly green diaphragm that hard coughing only makes tighter. People sat down to dinner that evening and thought about her, a beautiful slender woman almost slain by nutritious food.

Father Todd, of St. Jude's, disappeared one day, gone to Minneapolis to become the head of a conference center, leaving a note: “I hate goodbyes, so simply left last night. Good luck.” And then a masseuse at The House of Touch was loosening up a muscle in Nick's neck (Nick of Nick's Book Nook) and accidentally hit a nerve and the plump young entrepreneur stiffened and let out an eek and was paralyzed for two days, hung up in the hospital like a side of beef. People felt stiff just thinking about him. When he got out of the hospital, he and Tad sold their two-bedroom apartment in Market House for $94,000, about half what they had paid for it in 1983. A fifty-percent loss; fifty.

Within minutes, the news spread. Men stood ashen-faced around the deli counter at Barnes & Fields. At The Little People Preschool, children stopped their games and stood gripping the fence and weeping, the bitter wind in their faces. Next day a studio went for $50,000, and then a
seven-room apartment with 16-foot ceilings and three WBF's and an FDR
went for $98,500. That night, in The Market Inn, people were getting plastered on a very light, slightly fruity New Zealand
pinot noir
and singing old Simon and Garfunkel songs and trying to be brave.

The bottom dropped out of the resourcing market. Rob and Nancy lost the St. Jude's dialogue job when the new priest, Father Quint, arrived and fired them on the grounds they were not Catholic. Unable to keep up mortgage payments on the loft, which had been valued at $528,000 and was now worth approximately squat, they were forced to move to a dumpster behind The Greenery, subletting the loft to a couple named Trish and Nat for $210 a month. Nancy did a nice job paneling the garbage bin with cardboard from Swedish furniture cartons; they had a futon and kept their clothes nice, had nice haircuts, and took showers at the health club; their magazines were forwarded to them; they kept their two cats, F. Cat Fitzgerald and Meow Tse-Tung;
and yet:
the place was a dump. That was where Randy and Sue found them last Thanksgiving, huddled with the cats in the dumpster, wrapped in down quilts, listening to the Grateful Dead.

“You're coming home with us,” the kids said, helping their former parents up over the high sides of the dumpster and into Randy's black Porsche.

“The $185,000 is all gone,” Nancy wept.

“That's all right. You're with us now,” said Sue. “We'll take care of you.”

“Why?” asked Rob.

Randy said, “We respect you, that's why.” The kids were great. They talked to their new folks and convinced them to hire their ex-parents as domestic servants. Rob and Nancy came to live at La Bamba in a studio apartment over the garage, and they worked in the kitchen and cleaned the bedrooms. They and Randy and Sue grew even closer to each other, and Scott and Lainie got to be close to them, too. There was no jealousy, no recriminations, just a very good relationship all around.

The only problem was that Rob and Nancy were terrible cooks. After two solid weeks of frozen enchiladas, it was clear they weren't doing the job they were hired to do. Randy confronted them one morning and told them that because he loved them he expected them to measure up. It wasn't easy for him or for them either. There was a lot of tension the next two weeks, but soon Rob and Nancy were producing acceptable soups, casseroles, stews, sandwiches, light meals, and that's where things stand right now. Macaroni and cheese, Sloppy Joes, fish sticks. Not great but okay.

J
UST AS I WAS FINISHING COLLEGE in 1969 and was about to join the Marines, the Indiana National Guard made me a wonderful offer, via my father, to join their public-information battalion, and so, despite a lingering affection for those fighting in Vietnam, one bright June afternoon I drove my old Mustang to Fort Wayne to enlist along with my best friend, Kevin. A few miles out of Muncie, he lost his nerve and went to pieces. “I'll never make it,” he said. “I'm sorry. I thought this could remain my secret, but I'm afraid that the stress of Guard training would crack me like a nut. You see, I have a flaw inside me, a dark place in my soul—something painful and unnameable that can only be eased by alcohol. Let me out of the car. I'm going to Canada.” I let him off at the bus depot and never saw him again. Years later I heard that he became very wealthy up there selling amphetamines but then ate a bad piece of meat and got worms and died an extremely painful death.

I went to Fort Wayne and reported to the address that the recruiter had given to my dad over the phone, a haberdasher's called Sid's Suit City, upstairs from a trophy plant in a cinder-block building. A little bald guy with a tape around his neck who looked like his feet hurt stuck out his hand. I showed him my papers, and he showed me a nice green knit shirt (short-sleeved), a pair of yellow slacks, and white buck shoes with red tassels and sharp cleats.

“Those are golf clothes,” I said.

He grabbed me by the neck and threw me up against the mirror and shoved his grizzled face within an inch of mine. “Don't tell me anything I don't ask you for first, you chicken doo. I own you, Mister. If I tell you to play golf, you reach for your clubs, Mister, and if I order you to order two big pepperoni pizzas and a six-pack of Bud, you jump to the phone and do it, Mister, and if I tell you to sit down and watch ‘Andy Griffith,' ‘Huckleberry Hound,' ‘Leave It to Beaver,' and ‘American Bandstand,' I don't want to catch you with a book in your hand. You're in the Guard, understand? Good. Now take your face out of here and get it over to the Alhambra apartment complex, on West Cheyenne Drive. You're in 12C. Beat it, you booger, and take your convertible with you. You're gonna need it.”

He wasn't kidding about the golf. The next Monday morning, forty of us reported bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to Burning Bush Country Club and were each issued a set of Wally Hammar golf clubs and an electric cart and sent out to play. We were assigned to foursomes. Randy Qualey, Keith Quintan, and Dennis Quintz were in mine, and in the next couple months we got to know each other like real buddies. We went out drinking together and everything. We shot eighteen holes every morning—sunny or cloudy, warm or cool, it made no difference.

Two months later, I was fed up. I'd been promoted to Corporal, but why wasn't I doing the job I'd joined the Guard to do: inform the public? Was it because of poor grades in college and a low score on the Guard entrance exam? Was it because of my inability to type? If the Guard didn't have confidence in me, why hadn't they permitted me to go to Vietnam?

I talked it over with my dad, and he promised to look into the matter. Meanwhile, I met my wife at a dance. It was love at first sight. The next three months were the happiest of my life. Then one day I was called into Colonel Mills' office at ComInNatGu—the secret Guard command center housed in a complex of deep bunkers around the ninth hole. You entered the center through a tiny tunnel via a door marked “HIGH VOLTAGE: EXTREMELY DARNED DANGEROUS!” The door was in the janitor's closet of the men's room off the Bee Bee Lounge, in the clubhouse basement. Before I reached the men's room, though, I heard a big, booming voice say, “Sit down, trooper.”

It was the Colonel, looming up behind the bar in a green-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt with a bolo tie made from bullets, shaking up a batch of Bombardiers, his face hidden by a broad straw hat with long loose fronds.

“Understand you got some questions, son. Let's talk.”

I climbed up on a stool and leaned forward and started to tell him that I was trying to figure out why the heck I was in the Guard and what I was supposed to accomplish.

“Mmmmhmm,” he said. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” And then, in a split second, before I could move a muscle, he grabbed me by the neck and hauled me across the bar and had me flat on my back on the pop cooler and was holding a blender to the side of my head.

I'll never forget the cold animal anger in his green eyes as he stared down at me, unblinking, for the three longest seconds of my life. Then he helped me to my feet and offered me a drink.

“Sorry about losing control like that,” he said. “I guess I got angry because I see in you so much of myself. I get fed up with waiting around, too. It's the hardest part of being in the Guard. And it's twice as hard in the ING. You want to know why?”

I did.

“Because we're not even supposed to exist.”

He put a big ice cube in his mouth and ate it like a cherry. “You see, Soviet spy satellites in low orbit are reading Indiana right now like a children's book, and we have to make sure they see us as a bunch of civilians in one-bedroom apartments who happen to like golf a lot. You see, at peak strength, mobilized, the Indiana National Guard numbers fourteen million men. It's the biggest secret army in the free world. And one of the best equipped. We're one ace the President's got that they don't know about—maybe the only one. Get in my car, Dan.”

The Colonel's beige Buick Electra was moored in a secret parking space under an aluminum roof beside the kitchen. Aluminum confuses the heck out of radar, he explained, and beige is the hardest color to remember afterward. The car shone. A good wax job, he pointed out, prevents a person or persons from leaving messages in the dust. When he turned the ignition key, the car sprang alive, antennas rose, the radio came on, the seats themselves hummed with power, ready to go forward or back at a finger's touch. “Always fasten your seat belt,” he said. “It's one thing they'd never expect us to do.” We cruised west into the warehouse district, and he pointed out long, low aluminum ING buildings where the hardware was kept. “We have more than four thousand forklifts, fifty-two hundred portable biffies, eighteen bulk-milk trucks, and four thousand rider mowers,” he said. Those were the figures I wrote down. There were more than six hundred infrared cluster-type thrusters with uplink/downlink/intercept capability. “Only two thousand fifty of those puppies in the whole U.S.,” he said. “So, you see, we're sitting on top of one of the larger secrets in the defense community. Our job: keep it that way. It's tough to sit tight, no buts about it, but when we get the word to go, I want the other side to find out about us all of a sudden. Bang, we're there. INDIANA GUARD HITS BEACHES, TAKES TOWNS AND MOUNTAINS, SWARMS THROUGH HANOI. I don't want the enemy general to be studying us for three years and getting a Ph.D. The big secret of the ING is that we could take ninety percent casualties with no effect on our capability. I don't want him to know why. When the time comes, I want to be able to get in there, search, destroy, interdict, capture the flag, and bring the boys home for Christmas.”