Taking the Five South
We were approaching Solana beach, and I knew we only had about twenty-five miles to go. It reminded me of that song 25 Miles to Go by Edwin Star. Steven hadn’t said more than two words in the last ten miles. Something was going on inside his noggin. When you know a person over 50 years, you may not know exactly what they’re thinking, but you can tell when they’re having it out with their grey matter.
“Did I tell you about the Glass Bottles Incident?” Steve asked me.
“Not yet.”
“Mike collected glass bottles, all sizes, shapes and colors. He’d line them up along the highest beam of the patio so the sun would shine through the various tints. They gave him the only esthetic appreciation he could garner from Betty’s sterile house. Not a magazine anywhere, no pictures on the wall, no open books, the couch still covered in plastic, an esthetic wasteland only T. S. could enjoy.
Then one afternoon when Mike was drinking in Point Loma across from the Naval Training Center, she ordered Deb, “Get out the yellow pages and phone every bar within five miles.”
The task proved impossible and Betty lost her patience. She went out to the patio and grabbed a chair and a broom. She climbed up and knocked every one of the bottles down; crashing on the cement, including a pair of antique door-knobs turned purple by sitting them in the Mojave, a souvenir of their honeymoon in Tucson, Arizona.”
The Del Mar racetrack and fair grounds were off to the right. The county fair was over on the fourth of July so the parking lots were empty. You could see breaking waves making white foaming lines in the turbulent blue water just beyond. In Mexico near Caliente they exercise the horses in the sand if that’s got anything to do with anything.
“Towards the end Mike had a heart attack and was trying to recover in a wheel chair. About a month before he’d bought Betty a white shag rug; so long they combed it with a special rake. She wouldn’t allow him to cross the living room, since the wheel chair made tracks. She forbade him access, like the Colossus of Rhodes with its legs crossed.
When Mike passed away a few months later, Betty was silent all through the funeral, until the very end, just when everyone thought the curtain was going down. It wasn’t. Betty suddenly threw herself over the casket, like Sarah Bernhardt, real dramatically, and sobbed like Nefertiti over her son. If I’d been a member of the Academy I would have given her my vote.”
“I guess she was the most evil woman you ever met.”
“I don’t think she was evil, exactly,” he said. “But she was bitter, extremely bitter. You know we were cleaning out the garage and I found some old pictures of Deb’s. Mike and Betty were in some black and whites. She was still skinny, and he was young and fresh-faced, you know that’s how they used to describe F. Scott Fitzgerald, fresh faced, and was wearing a sailor suit. He was in the navy and I even found a commendation for service to his country signed by President Reagan. They were a couple, a romantic item back then.
“She didn’t look mean?”
“Naw, in fact she looked happy. But I think I got her figured out. Betty’s given name was Olga, and she came from a small town in the Ukraine. She was uneducated and most likely superstitious. She had her own view of how the world turned.
So she immigrates, ends up near Rochester, New York. That’s where Deb was adopted. And that’s one of the keys, adoption.
While really young she marries some guy before Mike. He works for the railroad and when he drops dead a year later, she inherits his pension or something. She’s in the pocket. She meets Mike, young and fresh-faced o’Catholic, o’ curly-haired manly Mike.
She marries him but after a while they find out they can’t have children. Betty is sterile, as sterile as her living room thirty years later. They adopt Deb. But Betty, turns out, isn’t mother material. She only wants a kid for social status, to look like and feel equal to “all the other girls”.
When Deb doesn’t cooperate she gets beat with a traditional wire hanger or stylish high-heel. Mike is aware of it, but for some reason never confronts Betty. It’s his tragic flaw, and affects his relationship with Betty and Deb too. The poison seeps from the offending vein into the precious tissues of both heart and lungs.
They both drink and both smoke. They deceive. Deb sees it while she’s growing up and copies the style with drinks and smokes and takes medicinal powders of her own. Then she runs away from home and eventually meets what she calls later, “A skinny arrogant dope dealer”, just what she needed. The cycle continues with another generation, only the substances change. The tragedy just doesn’t live on, it thrives.
I remember Deb telling me that one time Betty was giving so much cash to St. Didicus church that the priest came by and returned the money, said they couldn’t take it.”
“Really?” My eyes grew as big as the saucers in Earth vs. Flying Saucers.
“Serious. She knew at that point what she’d done, and was attempting to buy a stairway to heaven. Alienating the two people closest to you was getting to her. But it didn’t stop there. It went on until the day she died.”
Off to the right was Torrey Pines State Beach, overseen by stately sandstone cliffs topped with weathered pine trees bend to angles sculpted by the wind. La Jolla would be next. We’d be at the end of our journey soon but Steven was nowhere near finished.
“I don’t think Betty was happy in this life and she won’t be in the next. Bitterness poisoned her well. I used to think what made her worst of all was the fact her daughter was pretty. Did I tell you that?”
“You’re kidding. Most women want pretty daughters.”
“There was a point when Deb was growing up when Betty would associate with other women. She lived in Tierra Santa and was a social climber. You know how women talk and compare shoes, dresses, diets, make-up, and their children? Well, it was obvious that however pretty Deb was, she wasn’t Betty’s biological daughter. Everybody in Betty’s social group suspected it. Deb was Greek. Betty was Ukrainian. The colors didn’t match; the facial structure was different. Betty convinced Mike to purchase Deb like a Cadillac just for show. I’ve seen the adoption papers.
It was something else that really bittered her up. I figured this out after reading Thomas Hardy. Betty was of the opinion that nature or god or even random circumstances were against her. She saw no recourse to her pattern of life. Sterility, death, bitterness, alienation of affection, followed by bitterness in the extreme. She couldn’t seem to bail her way out of it in church by buying penance, a dispensation, or confessing. The only thing left was sentencing by the microbial guillotine, and nature let the microbes do it.
She passed away of sepsis. So, evil? Not exactly evil, but maybe the next worst thing.”
We rushed down the gentle slope past Mission Beach and Sea World Drive. In Old Town, Presidio Park with it's look-alike Spanish mission museum was on the hill to the left. The real mission was down Mission Valley a couple of miles. People that don't know San Diego think the Presidio is it.
Natives know better. I was a native, and Steve was too. He just finished Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy about a month ago. Back as a senior in high school he convinced the entire English class to read it. At the time he had the mistaken idea it was a Maugham-like story, though he’d never read Maugham. Thought the setting was an island in the South China Sea. You know, natives huga-buga, huga-buga.
It was Hardy, an example of a tough-read Hardy. He still schleps the guilt of how his classmates suffered through it. An entire class suffering because of one dude’s impulsiveness and enthusiasm.
But since then he re-read it, along with two bios of Hardy, then Tess, Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, Wessex Tales, and Jude the Obscure. Said if he read the masters his own writing was bound to improve. “Doing Hardy,” he called it.
We turned off the freeway and headed to my home in North Park. It was the same house where he’d put the candy dish my parents got in Venice on his head when he was twelve right before it fell down and crashed. It was the same house we squirted Seven-up in bottles at each other after school, and he’d come home an hour late, all sticky, and catch hell from his mother, who had been a master sergeant in the WACS and knew how to give hell in a tender loving way. It was neither an unfamiliar nor uncomfortable place, furnished with two immense Springer Spaniels as friendly as old shoe leather.
As we were unloading in the garage I noticed his stacks of manuscripts. I asked the good fellow, “How much of what you write is personal stuff, and how much is fiction?”
“Why, all of it,” he answered without hesitation. “The world is my pen fodder.”
©Steven Hunley 2013
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by pontifex
