escape from the small pond
chapter 29
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The shame I felt staying in a dead man’s town like Veddersburgh became fully crystallized after having talked to Emma. Not that I necessarily wanted to leave Veddersburgh. It was more about the ‘promise’ of my youth, as Tommy had put it. We were the ones who were supposed to ‘escape’, who were supposed to be doing great things with great jobs and useful degrees. My own wants and desires were warped and obfuscated by expectations, expectations which perhaps we did not deserve, being from the small pond as we were, if only because we came from stable homes that had books in them and parents who cared to look at our report cards.
Later that spring, Jeb Brown, the produce manager at The Big T Grocery, had been caught collecting shrink to feed his chickens back home (it was a crime, apparently, to use wasted food in a meaningful way instead of throwing it out). I suspected Mr. Goodspeed had known of this transgression for a long while but took his time letting Jeb go to make sure I was sufficiently groomed for the position first.
It wasn’t long before I had my ‘interview’ to be produce manager at The Big T Grocery. The interviewers were Mr. Goodspeed, the assistant store manager, and some other guy who I guess worked as produce manager at one of the other Big T stores. I was sure to use some fancy business terminology I learned from school and other, more literary words like ‘minutia’ and ‘extrapolate’ and ‘cognizant’ in ways that didn’t really fit in the context of the interview but that I hoped demonstrated I was ‘smart.’ I was ashamed of myself the moment it was over.
“Did anyone else apply?” I asked Mr. Goodspeed a week later, as he presented me with the offer sheet that included a massive pay increase. It beckoned to me with seductive power, but I knew that if I took the job, I would never leave Big T Grocery, potentially ever, and that I had to turn it down, not only to meet expectations, but to save myself from a dead-end future in a job I was only entitled to and did not deserve nor want.
“Marshawn, the assistant produce manager, did. But you knew that right?” Mr. Goodspeed said, laughing.
“To be honest...why not Marshawn? He knows what he’s doing, way better than I do, that’s for sure. I don’t know if I should take this.”
Mr. Goodspeed frowned, like his brain could not comprehend this swatting away of privilege and nepotism, as though it were an affront to everything he knew about how the world worked. “But Jude...I know you. I know you’re a good kid, a smart kid. Marshawn, I mean he’s alright, but he’s no you.” He waved his hand toward me. “Are you sure?”
I looked at the photograph of his sister he kept on the desk, of Tommy’s Aunt Liz, the one who died in an accident. Then told him yes, I was sure, and that I would be turning in my two-week notice, because I simply “had to get out of Veddersburgh.” This, at least, was an explanation he understood, if not one I understood myself.
Maggie was furious I did not take the job, but I managed to parlay my decision into a compromise of sorts: I would move to Albany, where, after she graduated, we would live together until we “figured out our futures”, which satisfied her as some form of forward momentum, at least.
This was made possible by my maintained connections to the aforementioned former produce manager Jeb Brown, who found a new job working at a big-box, brand-name grocery store in Albany that specialized in organic foods, not as a manager but as a produce clerk, and he recommended me for the same job, which paid more than my old job in the meat room (though far less than the manager position), enough for me to procure a sketchy, Craigslist-advertised basement apartment in a questionable-ish section of the city that Maggie just barely approved of, a bus ride away from the grocery store.
It was thus that I left Veddersburgh and The Big T.
As for Tommy (the other Big T), I thought of how I could help him stage an escape of his own, and what came to mind was an intervention, but who did I know who was willing to do an intervention for Tommy? There were his parents, one of whom was not completely coherent, and the other well aware of the problem and probably had already done several. Our friends were all gone, and he’d brought his relationship with Emma to annihilation.
In that run to the post office, I had felt a freedom that positioned me for a transition into a world without him. At this point, I was ready to give up my runs with Tommy and carry on with my own, but I felt guilty, like I was abandoning him, and so every once in a while, when the battery in my Town and Country van held up and I had the day off, I’d go back to Veddersburgh, park on his street on Millionaire’s Row, and we’d go for a run together. Usually—only usually—did I not smell the faint residue of liquor on his breath, but even when I did, he made sure to still set the pace and kick my ass as we sometimes ran as far as half-marathons, crisscrossing Veddersburgh and making ourselves a part of the local scenery.
I successfully avoided hanging out with him in other areas outside of running—for my own good as well as his—until the beginning of summer, when one night my relationship with Maggie sublimated into the nothingness from whence it came and left me desperate for his particular kind of affection.
I had a big bust-up with her over the phone about God-knows-what, although I recall it had something to do with her father doubting the safety of my Town and Country van I drove her around in (she had her license taken away after getting into three accidents in three months) and inquiring as to why I could not afford something “better,” and Maggie supporting him in this line of questioning. I had hung up in anger and planned to spend the rest of the night drinking a six-pack of Heineken to myself while jerking off and watching Californication on my laptop.
Or at least, I thought I hung up, and so did she, but since both of us were in the habit of such long, silent phone communication without termination, I had only thrown my phone onto my bed without ending the call. Midway through my third episode of Californication, after my second jerk-off session, and between the third and fourth beers, some strange sounds came from my bed. At first, I thought they were the moans of another woman being pleasured by Hank Moody, but when I removed my headphones, the sexual moaning continued, and I followed it to my phone, where I thought maybe I was listening to Maggie masturbate, but given her vocalizations were periodically interrupted by a deep male voice asking if she enjoyed what he was doing to her, and she was responding that yes, indeed, she did like it—in a way she never did for me when I was doing things to her—I could reach no other conclusion than that she was cheating on me with someone.
I hung up without saying anything. I would break up with her later the next day for a myriad of other espoused reasons that were just as true and as pertinent as her cheating on me. I didn’t want to endanger the relationships I had with the Goodspeed family at large by branding her a cheating monster, a claim she would surely deny.
That night, though, I called Tommy. I needed hedonism. I needed forgetfulness. I needed reassurance. No one could provide it like Big T, and the promise that I made with myself regarding his foibles was broken.
He was at my apartment within the hour.
“What a magnificent place!” he said, looking around when he stepped inside as if it were Versailles. The ceilings were only seven feet high. It was not, as he said, magnificent.
“It’s a basement apartment, dude,” I said, trying to bring him to Earth. He was doing the thing he always did, trying to make me feel like I was more than I was, his kind heart free of judgment and full of genuine enthusiasm. “You didn’t drive here drunk, did you?”
“Of course not!” I only half believed him. “No, no, Jude-dude—this is a hobbit hole of the finest order. This is hominess. This is exemplary coziness you’ve created here. Ah! You’re even representing,” he said, gesturing to my Bukowski poster on the wall.
“I’m just glad you’re here,” I said. “I know no one better than you to get fucked up with.”
He looked at me with suspicion. “You must be very upset to have broken your pact with yourself over partying with me, Jude-dude. I thought you didn’t really like my cousin.”
“It’s the cheating thing,” I said. Tommy sat down at my kitchen table and closed his eyes, nodding.
“Yes, the loss. The competition. The comparison that arises. If you had simply left her earlier, before this happened, you’d be free, unbound, and not at all heartbroken. But as it is, the fact that she’s chosen another to augment or perhaps replace you leads to a negative perception of your own self, your own masculinity,” he said.
“Exactly! Although, I don’t feel heartbroken, I don’t think. More just angry… that he has something that perhaps I don’t have. Besides her, I mean.”
“This is the male condition,” Tommy explained, cracking open the beer I gave him. “Since time began. Since the cavemen. The reflex for comparison runs deep. Sometimes the solution is not to run from it, not to rise above it, but to cede to it and indulge the masculine craving for an abundance of women, to bask in that as it were not possible before, and to simply forget. That is why I have a special plan for tonight.”
“A special plan?”
He pulled out a wad of cash from a money clip in his pocket. “Jude-dude, have you ever been to a strip club? Because I sure haven’t.”
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