drink, which was fine by me I'm not cheap that way. Tommy's problem was that he wasn't content to drink alone. I'd hand the guy a beer and the next thing I knew he'd be hanging out for hours, ruining my afternoon lineup by talking through all my programs. Anything on TV reminded him of a long story revolving around what he referred to as 'the women.
'Oh, Dolph,' he'd say, watching the paroled rapist face his victim. 'The women are going to be the death of me, and you heard it here first.'
With Tommy it was never any particular woman but, rather, the entire worldwide lot of them whom he seemed determined to conquer on an intimate basis, one by one, if it took him the rest of his life. I would listen, taking into consideration the fact that you really have to wonder about any male over the age of fifteen who still prefers to go by the name Tommy. I endured him a few afternoons a week until the day I had planned to watch the youth posse, when he actually pounded on my door, begging to be let in. He looked hungover, washed out, more pale than usual, a sweating mess. Tommy brushed past and took a seat on my kitchen table, his hands trembling so bad he could not light his own cigarette.
'So, Tommy,' I said, thinking about the program I was certainly going to miss. 'So, Tommy, what's shakin'?' He put his doughy head in his hands and kneaded it with his fingers for a few minutes before telling me he'd been having trouble with blackouts.
'Blackouts? What do you mean by that? Was there a power failure in the building that I don't know about?'
Tommy looked at me and shook his head. He released a sigh of hopeless disgust and rose briefly from the chair before settling back down and proceeding to tell me this story: The last thing he remembered it was Sunday evening at around 7:00P.M. and he was in his living room, having a few drinks and feeding the fish. The next thing he knows it's Wednesday afternoon and he wakes to find himself tied to the radiator with a pair of panty hose. His apartment is completely empty of furniture. He is naked and there are four piles of human shit on the carpet.
Now that's a good story.
We are quiet for a few moments before I say, 'Gee, Tommy, it sounds like you've got a real mystery on your hands.'
His shoulders began to tremble and I thought, Please don't cry, please, please, please don't cry. He of course began to sob, a painful protracted lowing that, I am fairly certain, stopped in their tracks any species of moose or elk in the surrounding tri-state area. Something told me I should touch him, place my hand on his shoulder but he was my super and he was sweating so I decided to light another cigarette and wait for him to get this out of his system.
He came out of it, finally, choking the words 'I. . just. needed to. . tell. . somebody and I. . figured you would. . understand.' His eyes shifted to my trash can, brimming over with empty beer cans and dead bottles of scotch. 'I. . figured you. . might. . know where I was. . coming from.'
And that irritated me beyond belief, that he might claim to know me. The last thing I need is a diagnosis from some wasted crybaby who drags a fucking mop for a living. The only reason I ever gave him the time of day was because I felt sorry for him. It ticked me off so I said, 'You know, Tommy, I don't quite know how to tell you this but on Tuesday night you came to my door and literally begged me for one hundred dollars.'
Tommy lowered his head and shook it slowly from side to side.
'Then you said that if I wouldn't lend the money you'd be willing to earn it the old-fashioned way.'
'What's that supposed to mean, 'old-fashioned way'? What are you talking about?'
'Then you sank to your knees and made for my belt buckle.'
'No,' Tommy moaned, placing his hands over his ears. 'That's not possible. You know I'm not that way.'
'Well,' I said, 'you really didn't seem like yourself that night but, then again, I'd never seen you wearing a skirt before. You just seemed so damned desperate that I pulled out my wallet and gave you the hundred dollars.'
Tommy rocked back and forth, hugging himself with his freckled arms. 'No, God. Oh, please, tell me no.' But while Tommy cried 'No,' some small voice deep inside his tiny brain whispered 'Maybe, maybe, maybe.'
The following morning I found an envelope containing five twenty-dollar bills slipped beneath my door. Chump. I should have told him five hundred.
A while later I was returning from the Laundromat when I noticed a different guy cleaning the halls. He introduced himself as Eightball and we got to talking. I asked about Tommy and was told that he had checked himself into a rehab center some-where in New Jersey.
'That Tommy,' the new janitor said. 'He's a real wild card, isn't he?'
'He sure is, Eightball.'
I figure that, wherever he is, Tommy will at least have a good story. If he plays his cards right he'll be wowing them at AA meetings for years to come.
Gill's story, on the other hand, isn't going to impress anyone. I don't even think that being an alcoholic was his idea. It's something he got from his supervisor at work. This guy noticed Gill had been having a couple drinks during his lunch break and called him into the office for a little talk. That night in the Indian restaurant Gill told me how the supervisor had closed the office door and handed him a list of alcoholic warning signs, telling him that he would definitely have to answer 'yes' to the question 'Does my drinking interfere with my job?' The whole thing was a setup if you ask me. The supervisor spilled out his own story and offered to accompany Gill to a meeting, where, Gill said, 'I really started thinking about my life.' Then he started magnifying everything, which is a big mistake be-cause if you think too hard about anything it's bound to take the fun out of it. That's what happened to Gill. He's no fun any-more.
I remember saying, 'So your boss gave you a quiz so what? Do you think it's the only quiz in town? I could sit down right now and hand you a pamphlet and say, 'You'll definitely have to answer 'yes' to the question 'Does mynot drinking interfere with my friendship with Dolph Heck?' Take my quiz, why don't you? Why would you listen to some asshole of a supervisor before you'd listen to me? He's just trying to recruit people, that's all. He's a so- called alcoholic so he wants everyone else to be too. Can't you see through that?'
Gill looked at me and said, 'I've come to see through a lot of things, Dolph. I've come to see through a lot.'
After that there was nothing left to say as nothing gets on my nerves more than someone repeating the same phrase twice. I think it's something people have picked up from television, this emotional stutter. Rather than say something interesting once, they repeat a clichZ and hope for the same effect.
Seeing as Gill doesn't have a decent story, I guess he'll be forced to surround himself with people who pride themselves in their ability to understand. It's fine to understand other people but I think it is tiresome to pride yourself in it. Those are the types who will bend over backward to make Gill feel 'special,' which is sad to me because Gill really is special. I tried to tell him but he wouldn't listen. Actually I probably didn't sayspe cial, a word that, outside a restaurant, has no value whatsoever. I think I used the termrare, another restaurant word.
While Gill is worthy of attention, his story is not. He hasn't even had any blackouts. I've had a few. More than a few, but they always take place in private and they're nothing to write home about, nothing like Tommy's. The closest I've come to the Tommy zone was three weeks ago when I received a telephone bill listing quite a few late-night calls to England. The curious thing is that I do not personally know anyone in England. I thought they'd made a mistake and considered protesting the charges until a few days later when, leafing through a stack of magazines on the living room floor, I came upon a heavily notated page torn from theTV Guide. I saw where I had circled and placed seven stars beside that week's three-part PBS 'Mystery' presentation. At the bottom of the page were a series of oddly arranged numbers, which looked like locker combinations. These matched the numbers on the phone bill, leading me to assume that I must have actually dialed international information and phoned Scotland Yard at the end of each program to congratulate them on another job well done. Still, though, that's nothing to get worked up about. Exceptional would be to find yourself on a plane headed to England, wearing a tweed cap and demanding that the stewardess put you in touch with Chief Inspector Tennison.
Since receiving my last phone bill I have taken to fastening the telephone to its cradle, using some of the threaded packing tape stolen from what used to be my job. In the rare event of an in-coming daytime call I can always grab a knife or scissors, but luckily the task appears to be too strenuous during my ever in-creasing personal mystery hours. Another problem solved with simplicity and grace.
My next project is to fashion a cushion to the hood of my vacuum cleaner. Again this morning I woke on the
