Despite working hard to normalize our lives materially, I could not extend that to my relationship with Dee, no matter what. We existed, but we could not fall into the groove that I felt we should inevitably fall into. That was really because the way to fix us was to stay friends and separate, so we could each grow individually. So I was fixing everything around us, naively believing that doing so would cause us to fall into line with the perifrials as they came into alignment. The car, my grandfather's visit, and a change of scenery.
The reality was that nothing changed. It was turning me into a lunatic. My most significant shifts were happening during this period. I felt constant bitterness, helplessness, and jealousy during this time. I was trying to defy gravity in this relationship.
One Friday night, we packed the car full: kids, Dee, Anna, and Horace. We went to a drive-in movie in Ingleside, off the island. We always drank wherever we went. It was a way of life. I was not an angry drunk like some other people can be. But this night, there were extenuating circumstances.
I was extremely agitated that night because the night before, Horace really tried to seduce Dee down on Sandcastle Drive while his pregnant wife sat at home in their trailer. He played it so innocently, always making himself look like he was the good guy. I did not have the heart to call him out in front of Anna. Instead, I was passively-aggressively taking shots.
The fuse was lit when I thought I had seen him sitting with a girl at the drive-in, and I said it out loud. It turned out to be a guy. This humiliation made me strike out at him on the way home. I verbally trashed Horace, his lies, his manipulation, his entire being. I appeared unhinged because Dee was the only one who knew everything that I knew. I had been biting my tongue, and I just lost it. Everyone turned on me, and I unleashed a barrage of hatred at him on the ride back to the island like never before.
They were just waiting to get out of the car, and when I pulled into her yard, Anna threw a whole fountain soda, cup and all at me. She told me what a terrible person I was. I wanted to tell her why I was so mad. But there was no one on my side, and I was sure that would not have gone well either.
I went back to my house, and Dee and Horace came with me. Out in the yard, I pushed him down. I wanted him to take a swing at me. I offered to let him. I kept pushing him and yelling at him. I could see he thought about it, but he kept saying, "I can't, I know Joe Jackson will kill me if I do." I had never been so angry in all my life.
Finally, frustrated beyond what I could bear, humiliated by my jumping to conclusions. I got into my car. I needed to get out of there. Even though I was angry about what happened last night, Dee could not stand behind me because of the way that I acted tonight. If she had, she could have told me I was acting like a tyrant, but there was a reason. But at what cost? Calling out her sister's husband while she was this far along?
I was reaching for an all-new low, and instead of taking the high road, I let this guy, who could not speak a word of truth if he tried, drag me into the pit in which he lived. I needed to get out of here.
I headed to the ferry and drove north to Aransas Pass, Rockport, and Tivoli. I had no idea where I was going. Victoria would be the biggest city in my trajectory. I had no destination in mind; I was just trying to run from the pain that lived inside me. I was mad at Dee for not breaking ties with this deviant idiot her sister was living with. I was mad at myself for holding it in and not just calling him out privately. I was mad at how I had acted. This was not one of my best moments for sure. I wanted so badly to not care about any of this.
As soon as I left the island, I was drinking coffee. I just needed the road, some music, and some time to think. After driving for a while, I needed gas, so I stopped in McFadden for coffee and gas. After filling the car and getting my coffee, I was walking back to the Dodge when I noticed something hanging low underneath the back of the car. My guess was the exhaust.
Nope. Not the exhaust. It was the gas tank! The 1972 Dodge Dart had two heavy steel straps that connected just behind the back seat, then on the other side, to the bottom of the trunk where the spare tire well was. This is what suspended the gas tank to the bottom of the car. Here, the spare tire well had rusted out, and what was left of the steel had torn out, and the tank was reaching the ground.
I ran back into the store. "Do you have any wire, rope, or twine?" The cashier found a little old clothesline rope for me, and I did my best to wrap it around the full gas tank. The only places I could connect this to were the filler tube for the gas tank inside the left side of the trunk. I did the best I could, then opted to drive back to Port Aransas carefully. I drove a few miles, then found a discreet parking lot to pull into and went to sleep.
In the morning, as I drove, I recalled a wild ride last night just before I left the island. I was in Charlie's pasture, driving at 60 miles an hour through the dune-like roads and around the twists and turns. No wonder I was dealing with this. I was just disappointed in myself all the way around. Throwing tantrums the way I had was not the answer. I felt ashamed. No matter what this brother-in-law guy had done, or was doing to me or others, it was no excuse for my ridiculous behavior. Something I was thinking last night came back. I just want to not care about any of this.
Something changed here. I was growing in an accelerated way. It was foreign to me, like I was injected with a serum that was changing my DNA. As I approached the island, I knew what the first thing I had to do was. No matter what others' injustices were, I acted like a complete ass, and I needed to fix that. I was not going to be here again. I drove over to the trailer where Anna and Horace lived. Dee was there with the kids. I first apologized to him and Anna. Especially to Anna, because she was a true innocent party in all of this. I talked with Dee, and we worked it out enough that she came home within a day.
As for my Dodge, I took a broken street sign, bolted it inside the trunk, and ran a plumber's strap from the gas tank straps, through the giant hole in the trunk, to the signpost bolted to the floor. That was my permanent fix. Yes, Vicki-Lynn (the name I gave to my first car), I promised Vicki Magro I would name my first car after her, but in reality, it was more for the Kinks song "Victoria," about Queen Victoria. Lynn was a tribute to the first girl I ever asked out when I was 12, Lynn Nettleton, was absolutely, no denying it, "an Island Car." Annual Port Aransas Rusty Bucket Parade, here we come. <sigh>
Then something happened on an October afternoon that made it feel like I might just be succeeding in building the life I envisioned for us. I stopped into Harry's Beach Street Pub. Dad and I were going to throw some darts. There was Rick, the Shark Hunter, captain of the Orca. I really liked Rick. We were sitting at the right side of the bar when Rick told me that he was moving up to San Antonio. His wife and kids had been up there for a while, and he was driving up there more and more to see them. He had been working a little, but his days as Captain of the Orca had passed, and it was not really sustainable to keep his place on the island.
His wife, Janice, seemed really nice, though I never got to know her well. I imagined he was trying to do better in their relationship, given all his traveling to San Antonio. I was sad to see him go. I loved watching that 74 Plymouth Satellite make a left onto Avenue J, then throttle as it went by my house. 400 cubic inches of barely muffled exhaust. You did not even need to look up to see it was him. He always waved as he drove by.
Rick was thin, shorter than me, and lean, with almost shoulder-length hair. I never saw him without his baseball cap that usually sported a mirrored pair of turbo-style sunglasses. He wore a sterling silver shark-tooth necklace with multiple rows of chain, each row containing many shark teeth. It had to weigh a lot! But he made it work. He made lots of things work. He was small, but fierce, and made you feel pretty good to be around. He brought and contributed energy to any room he entered.
We were sitting at the bar when Rick made the pitch. I am selling the house. Do you know anyone who would want to buy it? My Dad and I looked at each other. I realized that I would definitely love to have his place. He lived on a dead-end road off Station Street. It was a 1969 Ritzcraft mobile home parked on a residential lot on Ruthie Lane, which I had heard stories about him towing across the island with his 74 Plymouth. His price was less than one-third of Brooke's car's price. The lot rent was just $125 a month.
I called my grandfather and talked with him about a loan. I told him there were weeds growing through the living room floor in Jeri's mobile home, where I was living on Avenue J. He thought it was a good idea and told me that he looked forward to seeing it when he returned.
It was late October, and we moved quickly as I did not have much of my own furniture. Friends gave us a couple of beds and a table. All settled in at Ruthie Lane, we decided to have Thanksgiving there. I got way off track with this idea that I was going to make the salad to end all salads. I had never worked with vegetables before, and a little spark from the days of eating at the salad bars of Bonanza and Ponderosa in the late 70's and early 80's got me speeding off the Thanksgiving trail and off on some non-cohesive, mega vegetable assault that put me in my own little version of what that day would be like. Think of it as Clark W Griswald tries to introduce a new food tradition into Thanksgiving.
I jokingly told everyone that I would need the bathtub to make the salad. This was a slight exaggeration. My sister and Dad came over for Thanksgiving, and so did D's family. It was an interesting mix and pretty lighthearted. The several pounds of salad I made, although tried, did not look all that different by the end of the meal. My dad told me that it was the wrong venue. The salad I made should be for a salad party. Being a meat-eater for the most part, I had never heard of such a thing. I knew Dad had dabbled in vegetarianism, so he would know.
I was trying to build a better life in our new home, telling myself that I could do this. Dee's sister had her baby boy, and he was healthy and thriving. It should have been an incredible moment for the baby's father. But nothing changed with him. Anna and the baby were at our house a lot. Horace would disappear for the day, supposedly looking for work. One evening, he arrived at our house on Ruthie Lane. He reported that he had been hired at the beach high-rise resort, Mayan Princess. He was going to make more than people who worked for the City of Port Aransas (me) and would be tending to the guests' maintenance needs. The job came with a brand new Ford Ranger pickup truck to drive and a unit to live in. No more trailer. The man who interviewed him told him that he was exactly what they were looking for.
We were all genuinely happy for him and his family. A better thing could not have come along with a new member of the family. Going from a camper trailer to this would be perfect for them. Not that living in a camper was bad. Many people in Port A lived in trailers. It was perfectly acceptable. All three of us, Dee, Anna, and I, commended him on his persistence in finding work. This was so much more than we could have ever imagined. As we did, he kept adding details to what this would be, its perks, and what was said during his hiring.
I may have been at odds with Horace, but he had a family, Anna was a good person, and I liked her a lot. This was a good day. We ate, and after a couple of hours of questions and answers, the conversation began to settle into a new reality. Then, something happened. It was a strange shift in the reality of our not-well-lit living room.
Horace put his head down and said it was all BS. Anna went wide-eyed, "WHAT?" His voice was full of humiliation, sadness, and self-pity. "None of that happened. I just wanted you to be proud of me for once." Anna looked like someone had just punched her in the stomach. She was devastated. "None of it? You don't even have a job?" He hung his head low. "No, I did not talk with anyone. Y'all are always so disappointed in me. I just wanted one day that you weren't." She was furious. "So THIS is better? Lying to me?" Anna asked to be taken home. I felt worse for her than ever before.
I had done something like this in my senior year of high school, with something unimportant, as a joke with a friend, only to realize that even that brought nothing but disappointment. This was on a level I could not comprehend. It injected a level of bitterness into the night that I could not shake.
This changed my view of Horace. Of course, I knew he was useless, but he had the capacity to be a decent person. The intelligence was there, he just didn't use it. But here, I decided, he was already dead. He would never amount to anything decent. He would never sustain himself, his family, or anyone. He would never be a husband, father, or friend. He was only on the take. Any interaction was just another hit to feed self-indulgence. He was no threat. He was a cautionary tale, like a plane crash that could have and should have been avoided.
We were on the threshold of December. I learned last year that, even though winter in South Texas is not a New England winter, there is still a formidable grayness to it emotionally. I was trying to build a life that could not be built. Hammering the square peg into a round hole. I thought that all I had to do was keep on trying, and eventually I could make it happen, everyone would see, and everything would be great. But no matter how many things changed on the outside, the inside stuff stayed the same. Dee and I needed to be on our own, respectively. We were friends, no doubt. More than that was not right, for right now at least. We stayed on the ride nonetheless, feeling that there were no other options. December, however, can be full of surprises.
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