flat tire
chapter 28
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I don’t know if the trip to The Torhaus represented Tommy’s first relapse into drinking, or if perhaps he had already started drinking again, or had been since that summer at the ‘meditative retreat’ after junior year and was concealing it from me the whole time. My guess was that he never stopped, but his frequency and volume had declined greatly, living at home with his parents as he was, and I had simply never noticed because I didn’t partake with him anymore.
After The Torhaus, I still ran with Tommy but was careful not to fall into such a situation as that again. We were simply running buddies, I told myself, that was all. Old friends who were now running buddies.
The truth was that in that time I might have subconsciously wished to extricate myself from our friendship completely but was in absolutely no condition to do so. I had a job I hated, a girlfriend I hated, and no other friends. As a result, we ran often, and we ran far, and for me running became a drug, another thing to impart physical trauma and suffering upon myself and attempt to gain something out of. We ran eight, ten, twelve, even fifteen miles once, so long as the weather was above freezing.
The final nudge onto the precipice from which our friendship would hang came when spring arrived with a call to my iPhone from the most unexpected of sources: Ms. Emma Lightfoote.
I watched as her name appeared on my phone toward the end of my shift. I had to let it go unanswered, but as soon as I clocked out, I saw that she had left a voicemail, which was a strange portent. I listened to it on the way home:
“Hey, Jude, uhm...it’s Emma, obviously. Can you call me back? It’s about Tommy, I think he needs help. Call me back when you get this, okay?”
To hear her voice for the first time in a couple of years made me creak with anticipation. I got home, raced up to my room, and called her immediately.
“Jude?” she answered, her voice thin and crying. I could sense it was laden with anger, though, and not sadness.
“Emma, what’s wrong? Is everything okay?”
“No, no Jude, it’s Tommy, UGH. You’re still in V-burgh, right?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Okay, so here’s what’s going on. My father is out of town this weekend, and like a total IDIOT, he left Tommy the key to the house to let him in and feed the dogs, water the plants, etc. and MOST IMPORTANTLY, stuff some envelopes to mail out for his reelection campaign. But Tommy, of course, has taken that as an opportunity to use my parents’ landline to call me, INCESSANTLY, and APPARENTLY, raid my parents’ liquor cabinet.”
“Call you? Why doesn’t he just call from his phone?”
“Oh, Jude, you don’t even know the half of it. I blocked him a long, long time ago.”
“Okay, well, what do you want me to do?” I asked in a sincerely helpful tone. I would maybe stop short of killing him if she asked me to, but not short of much else.
“Can you go check on him, please? And maybe get him to stop calling me and just...make sure everything is okay and that he is not wrecking the house? He’s out of control, the things he’s saying are just...” she sighed. “He’s out of control, Jude.”
“Okay, okay, I understand. I know what you mean, trust me, I do. I’ll head over there and see what I can do,” I told her, already changing out of my work attire.
“Thank you, Jude, thank you, thank you, thank you. Please text me, okay?”
No promise was more easily kept.
I drove my sputtering Town and Country van across the river to the Lightfoote house, which I called an ‘estate’ to myself, even though all it was was a nice big house. The Lightfoote estate, I thought as I pulled up her long driveway, where Tommy’s Impala was indeed parked. I looked at my odometer: 177,777 miles. Tommy would have undoubtedly had something to say about that number.
I went to the door and knocked. No answer. I let myself inside, and it smelled a bit skunky. I turned the corner to the Lightfootes’ dining room and saw Tommy sitting at the table in his Veddersburgh High School track jacket, his head tilted forward and listing, on the table in front of him a bottle of Lagavulin. Also on the table were scattered envelopes, each one with the address of a previous donor to the judge’s campaigns printed on it and stamped, along with a letter for each. The ones on top had bits of marijuana sprinkled on them, and Tommy’s grinder sat tipped over next to the Lagavulin.
When I said his name, he came to and sat up. In his hand was the Lightfoote landline phone, blurting a dial tone.
“Jude-dude, what brings your attention to this matter? Did Emma implore you?” he slurred.
“Yes, she did. She said you’re calling her?” I asked. I grabbed the phone from his hand and hung it up.
“It took a while, but she blocked me eventually,” he reported. “Oh my. Would you look at this mess?”
“Dude. What the fuck are you doing? Smoking in someone else’s house? Drinking their liquor? They trust you to take care of things while they’re away, and this is what you do?”
“You act as though what I’m doing is immoral. A bit crude, perhaps, and certainly rude, but no one is harmed, Jude-dude. You’re just like Emma, making a big deal about decorum and rules. The reality is, though, I am brave enough to live life, and no one else is, that’s the truth,” he said. He was trying to roll up one of the letters into a joint.
I snatched the paper from under the weed. I was dismayed to see some fall on the rug. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. You sleep this off on the couch, and I’ll do what I can to clean this up and stuff the envelopes. Then I’m taking you home,” I said.
“That’s not what’s going to happen,” Tommy said, even as he began to exactly enact the simple plan I outlined. I had found him in a nearly unconscious state anyway, so it was easy convincing him to lay on the loveseat in the Lightfoote’s ‘sitting room’. I went to find the vacuum and worked to clear the dining room table of marijuana particulates as best I could.
I relished every moment I was there. The smell of the home beneath the odiferous marijuana made me think of Emma, benevolent and gracious in beauty. She said to text her. What to text? One of her parents’ new dogs, George, a Cocker-Spaniel, had taken a liking to me immediately, as most animals did, and so I sent her a selfie of me petting him while he licked my face.
I got Tommy up about an hour later, after also stuffing all of the donor’s letters into their envelopes and arranging them in a little box. Tommy seemed slightly more lucid. His head no longer listed, but his eyes were bloodshot like they’d endured a bender.
“Thank you for helping with the envelopes, Jude-dude,” he said. “Now, I must drop them off at the post office before it closes.”
“Uh, no,” I said. “Do you know how drunk you are?”
“Oh, that’s right!” he said in amazement. “I am pretty drunk, aren’t I?”
“You’re an irresponsible asshole,” I said. “If I wasn’t here, you’d totally be out there driving them to the post office, wouldn’t you?”
“No comment,” Tommy said, rolling himself off the couch. “If I can’t do it, then can you?”
“What, drop the envelopes off?”
“Yes, please.”
“If you come with me, sure,” I said.
“Thank you, Jude-dude. I cannot fail Judge Lightfoote in this matter. Nor Emma.”
“You need to stop fucking bothering Emma and get over her,” I told him. He didn’t respond to this, only reached into his track jacket pocket and pulled out a bowl.
“A toke together before we ride? For old times’ sake?” he asked.
“I told you, no. I don’t know any other way to get you to quit other than not encourage it by doing it with you. You want to do it, do it with someone else.”
“Jude, why this insistence? Your refusal to drink and smoke with me does not prevent my drinking and smoking. It only makes me lonelier when I do it. What peril and difficulties have my travails ever truly brought you?” Tommy asked.
“Well,” I began, bringing down a finger for each: “I almost drowned when you goaded me into swimming drunk after junior prom. There was when you got us kicked out of senior prom. Then there was when you got so drunk pregaming the only time you visited me in college that Emma and I had to spend the night taking care of you. Then there was that time you almost got me killed by frat bros. Then I almost had a freak-out that time we took Robitussin, I don’t even know what the fuck that was. Then we got kicked out of The Torhaus...”
“Ahh, but remember when we helped Ms. Minerva Washington? In the throes of the mushrooms on Parade Day?”
“I’m surprised you remember that,” I said.
“How could I forget,” he said. He tried to look at his phone, but it was dead. “What time is it?”
“Half past four,” I said, looking at mine. Emma had texted me back, but I couldn't get myself to look at it.
“I need to get these to the post office by five,” he said, getting up and grabbing the box of envelopes. I took it from him.
“Fine,” I said, thinking of Emma. “Let’s go. We’ll take my car and drop them off, and then I’ll bring you home.”
He hung his head as we said goodbye to the dogs and left, only remembering to lock up because I had the awareness to do so. We got in my van and headed back across the river, Tommy in the passenger’s seat with the box of envelopes in his lap. I hadn’t noticed he also grabbed his grinder.
It was after we went over the bridge that I heard him stirring, once again retrieving the bowl from one pocket and his grinder from the other.
“Big T, what are you doing? Stop,” I demanded.
“Let’s just get a little cherry going, we can pass it between us,” he said, clicking a lighter to ignite the bowl he had just packed.
“Not in my car, please, okay? I don’t want it to smell,” I said. It was no use, though. I already knew that Tommy would do precisely what he wanted.
What I didn’t know was that he would shove the packed and smoking bowl into my face as I tried to take a right onto Market Street. “Take it, take it, Jude-dude,” he said. “Just do a puff and I got the carb for you.”
“I’m fuckin’ driving!” I shouted. I knew, though, that Tommy didn’t regard smoking a bowl as a simultaneous impediment to driving, and that he probably did it all the time. “Tommy seriously, fuck off.”
“I think it’d really benefit your current mood,” Tommy said, still holding it aloft near my face as I drove. “You seem a bit too upset by this Emma thing. Yes, she might have blocked me. Yes, we’ve been apart for years now. But she will come around. It’s pre-destined, if only you read the symbols accordingly.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked. “What symbols point to Emma coming back to you?”
“Perhaps not back to me. But to Veddersburgh, certainly.”
Before I could digest or respond to this prophecy, Tommy decided to again hold forth the bowl despite my protests, and—like with the sorority girl on Parade Day whom I did the body shot off of—I fell victim to the force of a rapidly oncoming and severe sneeze, which vacated the bowl of weed and spread the ashes and embers and greens upon my lap as I drove, and in my anger and distraction, I briefly drove up against a curb outside the Target parking lot entrance, and my tire popped with an explosion of air that left my adrenals firing even as I braked the van to a stop on the side of the road.
Tommy was giggling. “Welp,” he said. “Looks like we shall have to walk the envelopes to the post office if we are to get them there in time.”
“THAT’S what you’re worried about?!? What about my van?” I yelled. I put on my hazard lights and hopped out. The back right tire of my van was totally busted. The side of the curb I hit was jagged and broken, and it had torn my tire near the hubcap. It was unpluggable and would need to be refitted.
“Well, don’t you have a spare?” Tommy said, opening the sliding door and half-falling out of his side of the van. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how to change a tire.”
“I don’t know how to change a tire. But it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to change it,” I said.
“ME!? Why me?”
“Because it’s your fault this happened.”
“How is this my fault? You’re the one who sneezed and then drove into the curb.”
“I sneezed because you were shoving weed that I told you I did not want to smoke into my face while I was trying to drive.”
“Well, you know what, I do know how to change a tire, so isn’t that fortuitous? I guess I’ll do it anyway,” Tommy said, opening my trunk. The Veddersburgh commuting hour was light and the road was not a particularly dangerous one, with a large shoulder, so he’d have room to work, if it were even possible in his drunken state.
“Thanks, how gracious of you,” I said. I opened the door and grabbed the box of envelopes and put them into my little backpack I brought to and from work that I happened to have under my seat.
“A tire without its mates is useless,” Tommy said as he retrieved the spare. “Much like a shoe without its partner.”
I ignored him and strapped on my backpack. “I’ll be back. Wait here,” I told him. The post office closed in ten minutes and was about a mile and a half away, downhill by the river.
I ran down the sidewalk, and for the first time my stride felt both freed from Tommy’s guiding pace, but also propelled by the motivation that confronted me, to perform the task that had been handed down to Tommy by way of Judge Lightfoote, and then proxied to me via his daughter Emma. I don’t know how fast I ran exactly, but it must have been a sub-seven-minute mile, which would have been a record for me, and I arrived at the post office with two minutes to spare and delivered them to the mail clerk drenched with sweat, my khaki shorts having chafed between my legs.
I called Emma as I walked back up the hill in the haze of endorphins granted by the run.
“I cleaned up his mess at the house,” I told her. “And I got your dad’s campaign envelopes to the post office.”
“Thank you, Jude, thank you so much. I guess I can unblock my parents’ landline number now.”
“What has he been saying to you, anyway?” I asked. “And how have you been? What you been up to?” I quickly followed up.
“Oh, you know him. Talking about a bird he saw the other day and how that bird was me sending him a signal as to how my love for him remains. Or telling me how he could feel my presence in the creek at Whispering Pines, or how my blonde hair makes me a goddess, that kind of thing. It’s hard to hear,” she told me. She was speaking near a whisper, like she wasn’t supposed to be on the phone. I heard the playful sounds of children in the background.
“Oh, yeah, yeah I know what you mean,” I said. I was hoping she’d divulge more about her whereabouts and her job and station in life. I avoided most social media. The stuff I kept up with was to follow her and the course of her life, but she was frustratingly withholding on that front, contrasting with our old friend Danveer who’d happily post what he had for breakfast and how he was feeling about the latest Game of Thrones episode.
“Look, Jude, I have to go, I’m actually working right now. But thank you so much. Please take care of yourself. And take care of Tommy. Let’s talk again soon!” she said.
“Okay. You too!”
It would be over a year until we spoke again, in the way that old friends fall off the map as you get older, even with the instantaneous connections that modern technology provides. It felt like she was above me, even though she’d never acted like it. Like she couldn’t possibly want to hear from someone in my tract of life. Texting her opened the possibility of her reciprocity not carrying the same heightened meaning of near-love and adoration that mine would, and I couldn’t risk that at all, and so the gateway between us remained unopened and unexplored for no other reason than our (probable) insecurities.
I got back up to the van to find, miraculously, that the spare tire had been changed appropriately. Tommy was asleep in the back seat amidst the strong smell of marijuana.
I sighed and drove him home.
next (escape from the small pond)
previous (you’ll sometimes walk alone)