The Loss of Leon Meed

A week earlier, Prentiss had been at Safeway to pick up some eggs and a bag of potato chips and wound up patrolling the hard liquor aisle, his brain a crashing wave of foam and confusion, feeling an almost sexual longing for the amber beverages lined up in regulated rows. Whenever he got to the end of the aisle and told himself to turn left and leave, to just put that shit out of his sight, because he knew he couldn’t go back to the way it had been, and the life he’d rebuilt after leaving the hospital could fold without so much as a huff or a puff, he turned around and made another pass at Johnnie Walker and Jim Beam and Lord Ron Calvert—all the old aiders and abettors—and thought the magnet’s not losing its pull. A pretty girl with short black bangs whose Bonanza 88 shirt said her name was Eve grabbed a quart of rum and wandered off humming an unhummable song. It was brighter than day in aisle 11. It was baseball-stadium-at-night bright. And then some fourteen-year-old white kid in thrashed army fatigues and ballistic eyes sidled up to Prentiss trying to be cool, the studied subversion, with a “Hey man, what’s up? Me and my friends outside are wondering if you’d be into buying us a bottle of Cuervo and we’d throw in something for yourself, like such as a few beers?” And the kid was so stoned and had such shitty teeth and stupidly cut hair and Prentiss knew it wasn’t a play at entrapment. Though the point was—yes, the sad truth was—that the kid was angling for a way to jump into the very hole Prentiss was trying to crawl out of.

So tragic. Prentiss wanted to shake him real hard and say, It ain’t like that. It ain’t so easy you getting waylaid tonight and thinking it’s no big thing and all bets are off, all the pain disappeared and you get to feel like some street-corner prince put on earth to fuck and run. Booze is the long-term proposition. Booze sets up residence in you and in return it gets rid of the pain but that’s no fair trade, because the pain isn’t gone it’s just hiding, and while you’re in that limbo and your nerve endings don’t mean nothing, while nothing means nothing, your pain’s developing immunities so that when it comes back it’ll reintroduce itself and there ain’t no movie this scary so that you’re begging for mercy and it’s you down on your knees penitent, and you didn’t mean to let the pain get so big, honest, you were going to bring it back and work with it a little, treat it with respect and figure out what it’s got to teach you. But by then it’s too late. I’m saying, by then the clock’s run out and you can’t ever make a move on your own again. You’re its slave forever on a plantation as big as your mind.

But Prentiss didn’t say this. Instead he ran a black hand over his black face and turned to the kid and walked toward him and said, as gently as he could, “That’s not a good idea for either one of us.” The brightness of aisle 11 was practically blinding, and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” wafted out of the ceiling speakers, all dulcet tones and why-not-pick-up-some-extra-gum. The kid backed into and overturned a basket of limes and belligerently kicked one of the rolling green citruses and shuffled down the aisle and turned left and wasn’t overcome with the shakes. Prentiss longed to follow him.

This Monday was another gray day, and a cement truck at the corner of Fourteenth and C Streets was grinding the devil’s own bones. They should be handing out earplugs. Prentiss walked by it on his way back from A.J.’s Market, coughing the rising dust and wiggling his right big toe through a sock hole as he passed an old bird-looking dude he saw hanging around sometimes, not doing anything.

Prentiss was expected at the library in an hour and hadn’t taken a shower or had breakfast or done his stepping. The stepping was hard. Pulling an apple pie out of its crinkle wrapping as he entered the two-bedroom apartment he shared with Carl Frost, he took a bite and stared at the fresh copy of Daily Reflections: A Book of Reflections by A.A. Members for A.A. Members sitting on the coffee table. He had no trouble with the first step: “We admit we are powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable.” Wasn’t his totaled car, revoked driver’s license, broken collarbone, and $61,000 worth of structural damage to the Fortuna Doll Emporium building proof enough? And the job firings and estranged girlfriends and chronic fatigue? Damn straight, his life had become unmanageable because of alcohol. As plain as an overhead B-52. But the second step was turning out to be a real barrier in his path toward recovery: “Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.” Now, who in their right mind is going to hand over the steering wheel toward recovery to some Power that might not exist? That was just irresponsible. Prentiss had gotten himself into alcoholism, and Prentiss was going to get himself out. Simple as that. And it was this same “Power” that had allowed every tragedy he could think of to happen, from slavery to the World Trade. Prentiss was supposed to trust his recovery to that? What’s the expression, you must be kidding.

“Prentiss, that you?” called out a voice from the bathroom.

“Me.”

“Could you do me a favor and bring me some paper towels?”

“We out of toilet paper?”

“Looks that way.”

“I wish I’d have known; I was just at A.J.’s.”

Prentiss stuffed the rest of the apple pie in his mouth and took a roll of paper towels to his roommate in the bathroom. “That’s a potent odor,” he said. “Makes my fruit pie taste bad.”

“Thank you.”

“Seriously, you got a problem there.”

“Mayday, mayday.”

“You owe me money.”

“I always owe you money.”

“You got to put it up front now or they’ll shut down the utilities.”

“We have flashlights.”

“The second due date is coming.”

“We can make fires in the garbage can.”

“Going to turn off the water and we won’t be able to flush your evil shit away.”

“I’ll build an outhouse.”

“Seventy-four dollars, Frost. Today. Seventy-four dollars.”

“But I have to pay Sadie when I see her tomorrow.”

“Who’s Sadie?”

“My therapist.”

“A man’s got to have priorities. Don’t make me look for a new roommate.”

Prentiss went to his room and got out one of his work sweaters, a downy V neck decorated with rows of off-center maple leaves. Pulled on the boots. Patted his two-inch Afro into an approximate square. Started walking across town to the clean, well-lit Humboldt County Library, where the books and movies kept piling up for his sorting pleasure. Pleasure. Yeah, right. About as much pleasure as having your balls licked by a cat. A frazzle-haired woman pushing a stroller with no baby in it breezed past him when he crossed the street to the courthouse. He was going to be late. But for seven bucks an hour, did he care? True, the county had given him the job as an alternative to living in a halfway house, and he had to be grateful for the little bit of freedom this allowed him, though it was a chafed freedom, a liberty restricted to fighting his impulse to sit down with a gallon of red wine and let the good times roll. Oh, but it was all sour grapes these days.

Prentiss had been living with Frost for two years and considered him his only close sober friend, though they didn’t do much together besides watch TV and go to the flea market for the distinctive clothes Frost favored. Prentiss didn’t pretend to understand Frost, who in high school had chastised him for not being black enough—the irony of Frost’s being white didn’t seem to matter—but who lately had let slip a few race-is-irrelevant comments regarding affirmative action. Sometimes Prentiss stood in Frost’s room, which had a map theme going on—every square inch of wall space was covered by maps of the world, of Uganda and Estonia and East Timor, of small towns and big towns and mountain ranges and highway grids and famous buildings (the Louvre, Buckingham Palace, the Carter House)—for an effect that was like staring at someone’s brain circuitry. His own, maybe. There were stacks of National Geographic on the floor and piles of loud, colorful clothing on the bed and in the room’s corners, as well as newspaper clippings about car accidents. Prentiss would wonder at this cartographic nerve center and then gratefully return to his own, normal room.

The next morning he got up early to go to the bathroom and couldn’t fall back to sleep, so he poured himself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen and was examining the toy mouse that came in the cereal package, when a strange woman walked in and let out a half-second scream.

Prentiss threw down the mouse and tried to see straight. “You a friend of Frost’s?”

“I’m sorry?” she said.

“Carl’s. You a friend? My name’s Prentiss. I was just settling down to some breakfast cereal and found this little Ziegfried the Marvelous Mouse toy come in the package.” He looked from her to the table. Frost never had women stay the night. As far as he knew, Frost didn’t know any women. “It isn’t a regular thing me examining a plastic mouse this early.”

“My name’s Justine. I just met—I mean, yes, I’m a friend of Carl’s. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.” He looked at her and she stood there zipping her purse open and shut. “You want some toasted wheat biscuits?” he asked.

“No, thanks. Could you tell me where the bathroom is?”

“It’s back there in the hallway on your left. But at the moment we’re having a toilet paper shortage. I could offer you a paper towel.”

“That’s all right. I don’t live far from here. I can wait.”

“Suit yourself. But there’s nothing so urgent to me as the first pee of the day.”

“I don’t suppose you,” she said, staring nervously at the refrigerator and its magnetized poetry and clipped, careworn coupon. “I don’t—”

Prentiss looked at her in the weak morning light and she seemed about to say something before stopping, removing her hand from the purse, and walking out the door.

That afternoon, Silas Carlton was in the Bead Emporium, staring at rows and columns of bead drawers. He felt the paralysis of choice that struck him sometimes at the grocery store when he’d face seventy-two different breakfast cereals (he’d counted them during one of his twenty-minute stupefactions). There were too many alternatives. Ah, he’d think, give me a Soviet food line any day where I have to take whatever they’ve got. Unburden me of these decisions. By that logic he should have grabbed the nearest cereal and not bothered deliberating over the bran o’s and crispy muesli flakes and frosted chocolate nuggets, but he had preferences—he had tastes—and a bad selection would haunt him until he threw the cereal away and went back to the store, at which point the difficulty would begin again. Other people didn’t have this trouble and were quickly filling up plastic baggies with beads. No hesitation. A silver-haired saleswoman with thin gold-framed glasses sat on a stool holding a closed book of crossword puzzles and staring at him. Silas didn’t like people to pay attention to him while he shopped. Made him feel pressured, like he was being monitored and any deviation from standard browsing behavior—if he spent too long reading a label or talked to himself—would get him in trouble. As maybe it would.

He left the store without buying anything and felt a huge relief, like he’d resisted temptation, though all he’d done was fail to get a gift for his great-niece Lillith’s seventeenth birthday. He walked down and up the dip in Buhne Street—exacerbating but not making unbearable the pain in his knees—and turned left on Harrison and stopped in for a fountain-style soda at Lou’s Drugs.

Beto the Argentinian was at the counter with his long sideburns getting ever longer. He gently patted the stool next to him when Silas approached.

“Silas,” said Beto.

“Beto,” said Silas.

“It’s good for you to join us.”

Beto sat alone and no one was behind the fountain. The aisles of Lou’s were empty. The cashier was gone. The ceiling corners of the store were without security cameras.

“Where’s Lou and everybody?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you just get here?”

“Since two hours ago.”

“There hasn’t been anyone here in two hours?”

“People were here. Lou was here. But they left.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lou wouldn’t just leave the store to be robbed by gangs.”

“No gangs come in here.”

“My point is that there are valuable items lying around.”

“I’m not saying if it were my store I would go away, but Lou is different. He is a smart businessman.”

“I’ve never heard anyone call him that.”

They sat in silence for some time before Silas said, “You mind if I ask you something?”

“Okay.”

“A few days ago, in the morning, early, did you come by my place and peek through the window for a minute and then run away?”

“Me?”

“I’m just curious.”

“You think I spy on you?”

“That’s not necessarily what I’m asking.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Okay.”

Beto pulled three white gold rings from his left hand and laid them on top of one another on the smudged porcelain countertop. Silas reached around the soda dispenser for a glass that he filled with cola before adding a thick vanilla syrup. Beto stared at the carbonation running up the insides of the glass and whistled. Silas drank it all out of a bent straw.

“You were thirsty,” said Beto appreciatively.

“Yes.”

The front door jangled open and Lou walked in, a short man with a brush-bristle crew cut dyed jet black. His eyes were red from the conjunctivitis he claimed to have gotten from the redwood and marijuana pollen in Humboldt County’s air. It clogged his tear ducts. Although he’d lived in Eureka for forty-seven years, his Georgia accent sounded thicker to Silas than any Southerner he’d ever heard. Lou talked about retiring in Georgia, but he hadn’t been back to visit in over a decade and feared the changes time had wrought. Better the devil you know, he said.

“Lou,” Silas said. “You left this place unattended. Beto and I could have broken into the pharmacy and taken everything.”

“You’d have left fingerprints.”

“True.”

“I went to the police station.”

“What for?”

“My employee Leon—part-time guy—is missing.”

“I read that,” said Silas.

“His mother’s offering ten thousand dollars for his return.”

“They think he’s been kidnapped?” Beto asked.

“They didn’t let on what they think.”

“What’d you tell them?” asked Silas.

“That a couple months back he stopped coming in because of an illness.”

“They think he’s dead?” Beto asked.

“They didn’t let on what they think.”

“You going to hire new help?” Silas said.

“I am.”

Silas left money for his soda on the counter and left. Walking down and up Buhne hurt his knees this time, and when he got home he took pills and lay in bed until his consciousness went blank.

3

In a small condominium in Old Town Eureka, Barry Klein dabbed water on the button-sized stain marring the front of his double-knit sweater and rubbed and rubbed it and then draped the sweater over the radiator. He went to the kitchen and placed two apples, a shearing knife, a corned beef sandwich, a pockmarked copy of The God of Small Things, and a thin folded blanket into a wicker basket, his Prairiewalker model Longaberger, and closed the top. It was four thirty and he wasn’t gay. Sunlight dappled the checkerboard carpet on which he rested his huge feet in the living room. The hairs growing out of his two big toes were long and he was ashamed of their coarseness, of their pubic quality. He would never again wear sandals.

A cat meowed from the top of a bookshelf and he said to it, “You could easily be a dog. I could’ve gotten a dog and been happy. It’s a cliché for gay men to have cats but that doesn’t matter because maybe I’ll meet a girl at Rainie’s tonight.”

He thought about eating half the corned beef sandwich, but then thought better of it. As a new guest, he was presenting at that evening’s Longaberger party, meaning whatever he packed was what he’d show, and if that included a half-eaten sandwich, what impression would that make? That he couldn’t control himself? That he was too poor to afford a whole one? That he kept an unkempt home? What a wrong impression that would be. Barry looked at the walls of his one-bedroom apartment and saw the Napa wine poster perfectly aligned with the street-facing window, a photo collage of his family and college friends, the theater masks of laughter and tears, a giant handwritten quote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Now hold on. Would he have an Oscar Wilde quote on his wall if he weren’t gay?

“Don’t be so literal,” he said to the cat, which stared at him mercilessly. “Lots of straight people like Oscar Wilde. He has big crossover appeal.”

He shaved again and applied antioxidant cream to the worry lines on his forehead and put on the sweater he’d cleaned, which was casual and said I’m approachable. He really hoped he would meet a girl at the party.

He looked in the mirror and raised his eyebrows and saw with a sinking feeling that the worry lines weren’t fading despite the diligence with which he daily applied the cream. And the hairline at his temples was getting uneven. And that stain on his sweater hadn’t gone away! What did he have to do, cut it out? Put on a patch? Bleach the whole sweater? He ran more water over it and said to the cat, who had followed him into the bathroom, “Last night didn’t happen so I wish you’d stop thinking that.” He’d been roaming around on the Internet and had paused to graze in a pasture that wasn’t his preferred pasture, not his oriented field, and the stain was proving impossible. “I was just looking around,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything.” The cat sneezed. “Do you understand? Nothing.” The image of loving a man and touching a man and intimate urgent kissing and reaching down to grab an erect cock and his grabbing yours … Tonight he would meet a girl and impress her with his observations about Rainie and the ridiculousness of Longaberger parties—twenty adults all swapping stories about how they use their Longabergers?—but that it was a good excuse to be social without getting drunk or sitting through a dumb movie. He would be supercharming. There was to be an eclectic group of Rainie’s friends with names like Elaine Perry and Sadie Jorgenson and he didn’t know how many of them would be single. But how long can you call it accidental grazing when in your heart of hearts it thrills and excites and fills you up with a longing so pure, so real, so intensely overpowering that you could turn your back forever on the prospect of a tepid marriage to someone you have to constantly tell yourself you’re attracted to, and for what? Social approval? A military stint if he ever so chose? Freedom from fear of Faggot! You like to suck dick, huh? How you like to swallow blood? And bashed skull and helplessness and shame—oh God, the unutterable shame—and self-censure and the imprisonment in a life, a position, a love that dare not speak its name? Barry took off and folded up his sweater and placed it on the dry-cleaning pile. Then he put on another sweater and strategically ruffled his hair so that the thin parts weren’t visible, making perfect his beauty. He felt good. He started crying. Tonight, maybe, he would meet someone.

A few hours later he was ready. The map to Rainie’s house that came with the Longaberger party invitation unfolded on his couch like an origami flower bud, and Barry would have left it sitting there if he hadn’t thought in the back of his mind that he might bring someone home later. Everything in that case should look neat and inviting, so he took the four-square-inch paper to the recycling bag. Then, with basket in hand, he met his neighbor Amphai in the hallway outside his apartment and gave her a light one-armed hug.

“You all set?” said Amphai.

“I feel like one of those Saint Bernard rescue dogs,” said Barry, lifting his basket to his chin.

Within fifteen minutes they were at Rainie’s, where a man neither of them knew welcomed them in. Barry shook his hand and—was he imagining it or did the man thumb-press his palm significantly?—walked into the living room, where he set down his Longaberger next to the fireplace and a cast-iron tool stand in which were slotted a mini-broom, fire poker, and extended-reach tongs.

“Amphai and Barry!” Rainie said, emerging from her bedroom in a knee-length yellow dress tied at the waist, her hair freshly released from curlers. “You’re the first ones. Have you met Alvin? We used to work together at the Cutten Nursery. These things usually start on time, so the others should be here any minute.”

“Hi, again,” said Barry shyly, Amphai and Alvin nodding around the triangle.

“I had cucumber slices over my eyes for two hours today,” Rainie said. “You want coffee? I’d peek a little and it was like I was actually inside the cucumber, you know you get cucumber juice deposits around the corners of your eyes. And what do you think of this dress? I got it and a hoop skirt at the Hop-Hop last weekend for only forty dollars, tax included. The guy who owns that store was in our year at Eureka High, Amphai. Jason with a Spanish last name. Who’s got psoriasis or some really unfortunate skin predicament, but it turns out he went with Sandrine, remember that French exchange student our junior year who everyone thought was a lesbian, well according to Jason they were getting it on for three months.”

“She left a used rag in the toilet once in the gym and I went in right after her,” said Amphai, stirring her coffee. The spoon-on-porcelain nrr-nrr-nrr sound driving everyone a little crazy once they tuned in to it. “There it was like an aborted fetus.”

“That continental charm,” said Rainie. “The exchange students were always so gauche, to use one of their words. Except the German boys and oh God do you remember Claude?”

“With the big cock.”

“Ladies, ladies,” said Alvin, who had a thick, well-trimmed beard and curly black hair styled into a pompadour that Barry thought becoming. “Some of us haven’t had our dinner yet.”

“Sorry.” Rainie poked him in the ribs. “Making you hungry?”

“I refuse to dignify.”

“Then the three of you should sit down and the others will literally—oh, that’s the door. Hold on.”

By six fifteen, twenty people were standing or sitting in the living room, ranch-dipping celery sticks and saying, “the farmers’ market in Arcata is a spent force” and “appalled by my mom’s Tupperware parties and thought I’d have to be lobotomized before doing anything like it” and “broken condom is how she described it to me, not that they won’t love it with all their hearts.” Of the twenty people, eighteen were women.

“Welcome to those of you who it’s your first time at a Longaberger gathering,” said Rainie, pushing a cart stacked with baskets to the center of the room and smiling at everyone. She unpacked the baskets and arrayed them in crescent formation with their identifying name tags in front. The 2002 Ambrosia Combo. The Small Harvest Blessings Combo. The 2005 Founder’s Market Basket Combo. “As most of you know I’m Rainie and I’m a Longaberger independent sales associate, which means that I’m licensed to sell Longaberger products by the Longaberger company itself.” The first of the coughs and sneezes and body mutinies from the audience. “I’m going to give a little historical background and then show you some of the more fantastic models and give you a chance to buy the ones you want. I know that stocking up on holiday Longabergers is one of your main reasons for being here, but I think it’s also important for you all to enjoy yourselves and get to know one another. I’ve made some of my best friends through attending Longaberger gatherings just like this one.”

During the ensuing report on Longaberger history—the inspirational account of an epileptic and stutterer named Dave Longaberger whose learning disability prevented his finishing high school until he was twenty-one, a man who then founded and, against the advice of friends and creditors, sold two successful small businesses to finance his dream of creating the largest basket manufacturing company in the United States—Barry scanned the faces around him hoping to alight on an interesting and attractive person—woman, he meant—whom he might approach after the demonstration. His eyes kept hiccuping on Alvin’s, who for some reason was looking at him, so that he had to yank his gaze elsewhere and settle on, say, Sadie Jorgenson, a generously built therapist with frosted hair and a thin silver necklace buried in the folds of her neck.