Jericho Pilsbury
Paul B Kramer

 

Jericho Pilsbury


God I'm scared. Tomorrow I'm off to Iowa City for their Summer Writing Festival. I've already used up three years of my life taking writing courses, fooling myself into thinking I had something. What was I on when I came up with this harebrained idea? Six hundred dollars down the crapper. I know I'll be humiliated. The quote, authentic, unquote, writers will put me on the first bus out of town along with my two shit stories shoved up my fat pimply ass. I know it.

My bloated body is tense, my eyes, thyroidal. Oily droplets of sweat sheen my face. The place is saturated with body heat and I shiver inside the walls I put up to protect myself against my all too real anxiety. The smile is its facade.

I'm at the �Grin-n-Beer It� sucking on my fifth beer. I've just come back from smoking a joint in the alley with Jeff and Dave and Simone. It was Jeff who asked me if I wanted to join them outside. "Jerry dude," he said, as he wrenched his hand on my shoulder. I wasn't expecting it; I nearly pissed my pants. "Dude, lighten up. Only asking if you wanted to join us for a breath of fresh air."

Dave said, "Yeah, what up?"

"Nuthin' up though I wish it was," I said--in Simone, I thought. It was my stock answer to Dave's stock question. Simone, Dave's honey, head-flicked the bright orange hair off her pencil brows and winked me one of those blue almond eyes that say, 'Yeah, c'mon Jerry. Please?' Fuckin' Dave. What a lucky motherfucker. The guy still has zits and works at Slappy�s. What she sees in that loser I'll never know. I know she wants me--yeah right. In my wet dreams. So I guzzle backwash, grab my Boros, and go along thinking the pot will take me out of these walls. WRONG! It makes things worse. Goddamn pinner. All I got off it was frustrating fucking paper. Now I'm scared and frustrated, with unbreachable walls.

Grin�s is a place that was once described as "Cheers on acid." Time seems to pass without consequence in an alcohol-tinged swirl until "last call." I trudged into the bar and onto a bar stool at ten P.M. It's now eleven. I'm traveling at five beers and a paper hit per hour. At this pace, with three hours to go, I'll have had twenty beers and two good tokes. Fucking great. The five beers haven't phased me one bit.

For the past thirteen years alcohol loosened the keystone that kept my walls upright, solid. They invariably caved after five or six drinks, allowing me to Slinky from one bar stool to the next, shmoozing with old friends, making new ones, scoring women and weed, and a possible free drink. Everyone calls me Smilin' Jerry, only tonight the facade smile is fortified; it's permanent, plastered on with only one thought-- Iowa City. Tomorrow. And this Slinky is all slanked out, boxed in by yet another wall.

I cower as I look at the face staring back in mirror. It's not mine. It's my father's maniacal face; I could almost feel the vein in his left temple pulsating. He's yelling. I smell his nicotine breath. What was you thinkin' you mama's boy? You, a writer? Ha! Don't make me laugh. You shoulda been a carpet salesman, makin' sales like yer old man. The world always needs another carpet salesman. Everybody's got a floor, don't they? And it mighta forced the coward outa you, too! No sales means no eats and no babes. You, a writer? Shit! Yer nuthin' but a tenth grade dropout. Yer nuthin'!

Drinking keeps my walled world carpeted. "Hey Tommy," I say, my voice quivering. "Let me have another."

Four years ago I threw in the paintbrush. Sold my last gallon of semi-gloss. Climbed down my last aluminum ladder. I was a paint salesman for fifteen years. Paint oozed through my veins, putting a strain on my heart. Alcohol thinned the blood, I thought. Kept it primed. The Sherwin Williams company doctor said my pump was going full throttle. "Is there any stress in your life, Mr. Pilsbury?" he asked. "Any at all you want to talk to me about?" So I added a twist of lemon to my customary vodka on the rocks. For health reasons.

Teardrop-shaped Christmas lights are strung on top of the mirrors behind the booze from one end of the bar to the other. On the wall above the mirrors the fixed, glassy eyes of an antlered elk, sans body, stare vacantly ahead, like mine. A Smashing Pumpkins song screams out of the jukebox. It's palpable, and I think the virtuosity in music is gone, but I like the pleading whininess of the song. They have a message. They want to be heard. I want to be heard.

The top of the sports section reflects off the flower-patterned lighting fixture onto Daddy's shiny head. The pits of his white short-sleeved shirt are turning yellow, again. Mommy's pouring him his third cup of coffee; she accidentally spills some on her blue floral muu-muu. She has three others just like it. Daddy blows cigarette smoke, Kent smoke between sips over the over-easy eggs frying on the stove. The white spice-patterned vinyl wallpaper is yellowing. There are cigarette burns in the white gold-specked table. I'm eight, reading the headline."Mah-Fie-Ah Don Sen-tenked."

"Hey Gertie, will you look at this," Daddy says, as he lights his fourth Kent. "The bums lost again. That makes nine straight. Dammit Marge, I wish they'd fire that fat ass manager, Herman Franks."

"Mommy, listen. Mah-Fie-Ah Don Sentenked. I'm reading."

"Jerry, it's Mafia Don Sentenced," Daddy says. He coughs, then laughs at me. "Mah-Fee-Ah. Sen-Tensed. Hey Gertie, doesn't that take the cake. The kid thinks he's reading. Whatta dummy."

I dummy up till tenth grade. My walls are impenetrably sky high. Daddy dies of lung cancer after having had three strokes. The only high school credits I get are in creative writing and work study. Miss Jirik, my creative writing teacher, takes a special interest in me, encouraging me to write down my thoughts, ideas, anything. "Write about walls," she says.

Through work study I get a job at Montgomery Wards, selling paint. I make $1.95 an hour. My perpetual smile is just another wall. At the end of the semester I quit school to work full-time. Mom needs the extra money. The fucking bastard! I think.

I love Grin�s. It's my sanctuary. It's the place where I can take down my walls, the place where I can be anybody I want to be after a few beers, replacing the old walls with new alcohol-fortified ones. I love drinking.

I swivel around and see that the bar is full of life, spirit, my friends. A "tee-hee-hee" resounds. It's coming from Brian, the chess guru. He has a cantaloupe head, barren on top, errant gray everywhere else. He's wearing his trademark tie-dyed shirt. "Check Mate," he shouts.

There's shapely Sherry with the turquoise ear cuff. One night all of us were watching The Hustler, and Paul Newman said, 'I'd like a sherry, very pale and very, very dry.' Sherry followed the line without missing a beat. "Honey, this Sherry is never dry." After that no one is dry.

Two ceiling fans rotate slowly, swaying in unison to Pinball Wizard, distributing the bluish cloudy cigarette smoke and lofty chatter onto smokers and nonsmokers alike. I'm on my tenth beer as I look at the mahi-mahi mounted next to the elk. It's pointed upstream, with fins erect, toward the door. I think man, that's one humongous smoked fish as I let out a wall shattering chuckle. I gaze into the mirror. My dad is wagging his yellow calloused finger at me. I smile.

Damn you Dad! I ended up a salesman just like you, only I covered walls, not your fucking floors! Isn't that what you always wanted your only child to be a salesman? Hey Dad, everybody's got walls, right? I'm Smilin' Jerry and I Cover The World. You poor fucking dead bastard! And, get this--I AM A WRITER! I WILL BE HEARD! His image fades and my face reemerges. I'm trembling but it feels as if major walls are disintegrating. I feel clear. I can see. I'm buzzed up good. No more beers for me.

Halfway down the bar I see Craig, the resident folk singer. In his beret and with that raspy voice he reminds me of Sam Kinison. A small crowd is gathered around him as he sneers. "So my kid comes home from his first day of football practice with a note from the coach stating that he needs an athletic supporter, you know? A cup."

"Hey Craig, how about another, on the house?" Tommy asks.

"Yeah, yeah, so where was I? Oh yeah. So I take him to the Sportmart and all they got is mediums and larges. So I ask the register jockey if they got any smalls in back. I mean the kid's only eight years old for God's sake. Anybody got a smoke? Thanks. So he answers, 'Sir, the smallest size they make is medium. Medium is small.' What the fuck do they think? My kid has a problem with self-esteem or something?" The group breaks into raucous laughter. He continues. "I go back to get the medium, open the box, and realize that hey, the thing could double as a spaghetti strainer during the kid's off-season." I'm definitely in good mood. Defiantly.

Christine walks in and sits beside me. She's one of my three conquests since I've been coming here. No pleasantries are exchanged as she looks into my bloodshot eyes. She has a chipmunk smile and crinoline hair, and is dressed in a loose fitting print blouse and capri pants. I laugh when I remember the time when her partial fell into her drink.So I go into our running gag-

"You look Brazilian, like Rio de Janeiro," I say, as my fingers rhythmically snap overhead like castanets.

"I'm actually Antarctican. Can't you tell, Jericho?"

"That's cold. That's really cold."

"As cold as an iceberg, and you're the Titanic."

I jump ship and swivel back to my mirror image. Tomorrow you're going to Iowa City because you have to find out if you've got talent, it soothingly whispers. To put yourself, your writing, on a professional stage. To be critiqued and to learn how to get better at your craft until you master it. You will be heard!

"Last call!" Tommy hollers. And my walls, for now, come tumbling down.

 

 

Copyright © 2010 Paul B Kramer
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"