Grass Alley #5: There Is A Fuss (from Kayfables)

Drunk Poet

Shit, I am

fucked up

where's my

gold star?

Cap had framed the poem I'd written for him a few weeks before, complete with a genuine stick-on gold star in the corner of the matte. It hung on his livingroom wall near the bookcase. A nice wooden frame, must have taken some looking for. It wasn't from the Dollar Store, either. We'd both laughed when I'd written the poem. It was all too descriptive of people we knew. And of the author. My Father, Cottonmouth, called it "Gettin' rich and famous" or "Bein' a hee-ro." It was what Laney the Music Whore had gone out to do after wiggling her ass on my lap and extorting another night's drinking money, back when I'd lived in D-6. You got fucked up, believed all the press that hadn't been written about you yet. Strutted the clubs, expecting the attention you believed yourself due. Hoped to be recognized, invited to sing or read. You should have been home writing a song or a poem, but you were out there Being Somebody. Looking for your gold star.

I was proud to be honored by my Brother, the Captain. He didn't bestow validation lightly. But just then, I wanted to dim my Aura, make myself as obscure as humanly possible. I didn't want to Be Anyone for a while. I'd had Visibility. This had attracted a Poetry Waif. She'd admitted to being on anti-psychotic medication, but who was sane? We'd drunk beer, made love, written some poems together. Even done up a chapbook. LION WOLF, with the two words sharing an O on the cover. I was a Leo. The Lion was my Totem. Colette claimed the Wolf as hers. We were both Fire Signs. She was a Sagittarius. Just like Laney. Blonde, too. I knew how to choose my doom.

"Could I get another leg, Brother?"

Cap lifted an eyebrow. I'd only been there 10 minutes. It was my second beer and my third shot of Clan McGregor scotch from the Army Airborne shotglass. But Cap had walked with me through the Valley of the Shadow, and he knew I needed the shot. I had just come up the Grass Alley to give Roland the good news. The end had come casually, like the beginning. A young female voice on my answering machine, hint of a Middle Tennessee twang. The first time she'd called, she'd wanted very badly to see me. This time she had only said

"Mr. McQuarry, that case has been dropped, so forget it."

And that was the end of my relationship with the pretty young Police Detective from Metro Nashville Sex Abuse. I'd gone downtown to meet Detective Donnegan three days ago, to give my Statement. No, I wasn't being arrested. The Detective wanted only to talk to me. A certain young woman had made a very serious accusation. One that could take any man out of his life and into the poison jaws of the American Justice System, for a season or lifetime in Hell.

Rape, said Donnegan. Ms. Criss is claiming that you raped her. How many counts? Well, sir, I'm not prepared to discuss that. We're just talking. Now tell me more about this letter you sent Ms. Criss, the one where you call her husband 'the Dead Boy'. Did you intend him some kind of harm, Mr. McQuarry?

I countered with perfect logic. For me.

Do you know any songwriters, Detective?

I could tell that Donnegan didn't mind being addressed as Detective. Maybe she'd just gotten her shield. Maybe her Dad was a cop too, and proud of her. The honorific seemed to mean something to this small sturdy woman, who reminded me of my 11th-Grade English teacher. Jenna McCrae. She'd really had some legs, McCrae. Now I kept firm eye contact locked with Detective Donnegan. I was already a Man. There was no avoiding the appearance of that Evil. Plus I looked like a Hell's Angel. Zero point in making myself any more Monstrous by visibly zoning out on Donnegan's lustrous chestnut hair or finely muscled calves. It was hard, though. Donnegan was very pretty, and she was LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH.

Songwriters? said Donnegan. Yes, I've known a few.

So you know they're very dramatic and, well, sort of crazy.

Donnegan nodded. Her beat was Nashville.

Well, Colette and I are Poets, and Poets are a hundred times crazier than songwriters. We say things like 'dead boy' when we mean someone without any personality. This guy has no personality. That's why I called him 'the Dead Boy.'

Donnegan nodded again. The Dead Boy had been with Colette, had probably even coerced her, when she came in and Donnegan caught the squeal. The Detective continued.

Ms. Criss said that you raped her in your Satanic Temple.

I don't even believe in Satan, Detective. It's just a room I meditate in.

You admit to having consensual sex with her in that room?

Yes, ma'am, certainly. We'd been having consensual sex for weeks. It was, you know, a change of scene.

Stupid motherfucker! Don't make her think you care about sex! Right then, I didn't. Not a bit. But my secret was out. I was a Heterosexual Male.

Mr. McQuarry, did you have consensual sex with Ms. Criss in that room because it had something to do with your Religion, like Ms. Criss told me? No sir, your Religion is not on trial. I just need some answers. Yes, you can take a polygraph. But for now, I just want to talk to you...

It went on. Eventually Donnegan sent me home. Cap had been my wingman. I'm not sure if I could have driven myself down to the Cop Shop when I realized that Donnegan didn't want just my words on the phone, she wanted ME. Once again, Cap had been there to share my foxhole. I knew plenty of ironic hipsters, but it was good to know a Warrior. One who didn't make air quotes around words like loyalty and honor.

I'd dumped Colette Criss with a poem I read in public, proud that for once that I hadn't been a pussy. In your face, faithless Waif. She had, in return, accused me of Rape. I was a Poet. My imagination WAS reality, and I'd spent the three days after I first talked to Donnegan LIVING what I knew had to happen next, what was most likely for a Monster like me. I didn't have it in me to smile. I just took the shot, shuddered, and said it again. That case has been closed. Forget it.

Forget it.

"You all right, cowboy?"

"Cap, I'm just... My anger got so god damn big it finally got infinite, then it went away."

"It will do that on you."

I imagined a distant field or paddy where Cap had learned to know this feeling. We were Old Soldiers together for a moment. Of course you'd been fired on. You were the Enemy.

"That cunt could have killed me. She tried to kill me. I'm not some hard motherfucker, I'd'a got shanked first day in."

"Oh, we're back in Vietnam now, are we?"

"No, we're in PRISON." I drained half my beer. Cap poured himself a half leg of McGregor. He was pacing himself. He always did.

"You mean the one you ain't going to since you sweet-talked that little Detective?"

"What if I'd killed myself before Donnegan called or sent some fucking uniforms to my door? I thought about it, Cap. I'd rather be fucking DEAD than in jail."

"Jail ain't prison. And you ain't in either of 'em."

"I'll lift a leg to that."

Somehow, that tickled us both. We laughed for a good while. It was cleansing. I was still filthy with apprehension. My nights and days had been taken up with cleaning toilets, dumping trash, and scriptwriting what would happen next: prison, where someone would try me and I'd have to beat them senseless. Then they'd come back to try and kill me, and I'd have to kill them. The authorities would add on another life term. If you took even one day of my writing time, my drinking time, my being human time, you had already killed me a little. I saw myself essentially dead if you took a whole year from me. Years were all they had to give to any man convicted of rape. I tried to explain all this to Cap. He let me try, then finally--

"Hey, Killer. Ain't you the one who always says you'd'a been first to get got in the 'nam?"

"Sometimes, yeah. I'm know I'm not a soldier. I'm a fucking wrestler, not a badass."

"I hear the words that you're saying."

"Well, hell, Cap. We both know what I'm not."

"Then how come in this prison yarn of yours, you take out the first guy to test you. Then he comes back with a frogsticker, and you shove it up his ass. Where's the part where you and John Wayne rode in there together?"

"That's how I’d’a had to try and do it. Not like you got a choice, in the joint."

"No, first what you should have done was run up and hit the biggest, Blackest one in the mouth. After he finished whipping you, then you'd have had some credibility on the Yard."

"I'll try to remember that the next time."

"Let's drink a leg to no more next times." We did.

"Now," said G. Roland, in a mock-schoolmarmish voice, "That's all done, and the question

is--what you gonna do about J.C.?"

"Jacey? What should I do about Jacey?"

"Trudy said you and him are having a fuss."

"Say what?"

"That's what he told her."

"When was this?"

"Well, we figured since you-all were havin' a fuss, we ought to have him out to the place where she lives, in Hickman County. Out to the country. Just to give you both a break."

"First I heard of this fuss." I popped another Natural Lite. "Jacey's been back living with me since he broke up with Lucy Vargas. He got a job taking photos for driver's licenses, but I don't expect him to keep it. Jacey's never been reliable."

"You-all are married, you know."

"Married, hell. I'm about to lose my shit with him. Other day, he comes in around six and asks what's for dinner. I was like, 'Whatever you decide to purchase and prepare, Jace.'"

Cap indulged in some of his soundless but intense laughter, building some more lines in the corners of his eyes. He was all but living with Trudy by then. Had painted her house in the country, cultivated a garden there. I had visited many times. It was quiet and pretty, Hawk House. Cap and Trudy had two dogs who were always snapping at each other. Cap had named them August and Jacey.

"So that's where he was all weekend."

"He didn't tell you that Trudy was picking him up?"

"We haven't been talking much. When I'm home, I'm writing. Jacey's jerking off. And I been sort of not thinking about anything but how to stay alive in prison."

"So what's this fuss all about?" Cap was relentless. He had mischief in his crinkled eyes.

"So you guys had Jacey out to Hawk House, to give HIM a break from ME, huh?" I poured a leg, slammed it, poured another. "There isn't a fucking fuss that I know of. This is some of Jacey's bullshit." I slammed the new shot, held out the glass.

"I don't give advice, Aug. It’s bullshit. But a wise man will take a little instruction now and then. And I would instruct you to let that last leg settle a bit before you do another one."

Cap had worked as a bartender. He wasn't cutting me off, but I took heed. I put the shotglass on the coffee table, but it was too late to dam the verbal flood. I was in full Rave by then. Most people would have needed some kind of insulated suit with psychic dampers to handle a full-on McQuarry Rave. But Cap was Cap. He'd been to see the Elephant, and I wasn't that. I was only a yapping dog. Like the dog out at Hawk House, the one he'd named after me.

"OH, I know what he's upset about. Maybe it's because I expect him to stop jerking off, come the fuckin' fuck out of his room, go to work and contribute some god damned money. I am charging him a whole $60 a week for his part of rent and utilities."

"How does that cover your nut?" asked Cap. He knew what my place rented for, knew what utility costs were like, and what a janitor made at Radio House.

"It DOESN'T! Like always, I carry him. Could I get another beer at least?"

"Not a problem, hot dog." Cap went off to the kitchen, still in range of my angry voice. He would have been in range down at the other end of the Grass Alley. I had bottled my feelings up for months. Behind those were the years and decades of being fucked by Jacey.

"Maybe there's a FUSS because I won't drive him to work like his god damn Mom. The bus is just oh so distasteful, he can't handle it. Well, I handled it, Cap, back when we were living in Bellevue and I didn't have a car. And when I couldn't handle it, I walked FOUR MILES UPHILL to our fucking apartment. Where Jacey would be laying in his room drunk, having eat up all the food and jerked himself off to sleep. Putting torn-out magazine pages up on the wall like a fucking serial killer, radiating his paranoid motherfucking bullshit. I toldja the story of how I didn't beat his drunk ass like I shoulda when he jumped me because I called him a punk?"

"I am familiar with that yarn."

"In those days Jacey was like a, a fuckin' poison meteorite. Sending out shit-rays. Whole time he was there, our dog was chewin' the fur off his ass. He quit doing it the day after I kicked Jacey out."

"Canines are sometimes more perceptive than their humans." Cap was not particularly a fan of Jacey Worth. He had asked Jace out to Hawk House from simple decency. Maybe he'd done it more for me than Jacey, and was now just fucking with me, like he did. Keeping me honest as he saw it. I knew that Cap considered Jacey's stuff, his poetry, to be pretentious bullshit. Cap was a portable Epic Poet. He carried a high standard. I wasn't always sure why Roland liked my stuff, but he'd gone and framed some. It was strange the way artists, poets, people, did and didn't mix.

"OK, so Jacey pulled out of his dive. He got with the Big Book, he made his amends to me. All is forgiven. I've pushed him to the moon down at the Windows. Got his songs out there on cassette. I love Jacey, Cap."

"So I noticed. Half a leg?"

"Yessir, thank you kindly. I'm cooled out now. Thanks for the instruction."

"A little instruction is not amiss from time to time."

I tossed off my half-leg to that. "But come on, Cap. I'm not fucking with Jacey. I don't come in his room and stop him from jerkin' off to Little Debbie wrappers. He's been pissed off ever since you and I were in that 'Best Friends' deal in the Tennessean."

"Nothin' to be jealous of." They'd given us a cutesy story and an OK picture of us sitting on the hanging swing outside Roland's place. I loved Beavis and Butthead. G. Roland couldn't understand why. Yet We Were Friends. The usual shallow half-glance.

"What you'd expect, for a Lifestyle section puff piece."

"That reporter gal was cute, though. She liked my poem about the Nubian Queen."

"Yeah. She was striking." I couldn't recall the young woman's name. Something African and complicated. "Anyway, I can almost feel the barometer falling with Jacey. He doesn't dig that you can have more than one Best Friend. Or he's pissed about something else. But that's JACEY, he never tells you there's a problem. He goes on the passive-aggressive defense."

"My Mama was right bad about that," said Roland. I knew some yarns about his Mama.

"It's sad, it sucks. He's going into one his fucking fugue states again. You know he turned me down when I said I'd treat us to dinner at Las Palmas the other night?"

Cap considered this. He knew that Jacey had never fixed me a meal, never even made me a sandwich. Jacey was lost in the kitchen, lost in life. G. Roland also knew that Jacey had never picked up a dinner check in the 20-plus years of our relationship. Or turned down a free meal, which he always wolfed like a starving prisoner. Cap had seen him rut at Waffle House.

"I cannot say that there might not be cause for concern in this matter," said Cap. As the beer cans piled up, his enunciation became crisper. You'd hardly know he was from Arkansas.

I was wrapping up my tirade. "OK, let's say I drink too fuckin' much. But I'm writing and working and paying the rent. Jacey's whinin' to Trudy about what an evil motherfucker I am, I reckon he'll probably be lookin' for someone new to suck off of before long. Maybe even has one lined up. He never comes out and attacks me until he's sure that he don't need something from me. Emotional, material. It's going the way it always has, even when we were fucking kids."

There was a moment. I brooded. Cap took his empty tall boy to the recycling.

"Grab me one while you're in there, Hoss?"

"You're covered."

Cap handed me a cold one, and I brightened. "You know, if Jacey finds another caretaker, it would really be a break for me. What I charge him is chickenshit anyway. It would hardly make a difference. And I wouldn't have to deal with the drama. I ain't sayin' I hate him, Cap. I just want to be away from him for a while."

"So there IS a fuss. I reckoned there was one."

"Hey, fuck you--"

There was laughter in Hell. Then I sobered.

"I could maybe hold on here a while. I GOT to, don't I, after all?"

"I'm about to leave this place myself. Move out to Hawk House permanent."

"Well, cool, man. Good for you and Trudy. But I'll miss you on the Alley, Brother."

By then, I knew the Grass Alley would always run between me and Cap, no matter where we were in Space, maybe even Time. We'd created the connection with Word and Deed. Intent and Active Imagination. Like everything else in the world, the Grass Alley was made with Magick.

"I'm here for a while," said Cap. He was righter than he knew.