El cumpleaños de Jose-Luis

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 El cumpleaños de Jose-Luis

 

Johnny took the job driving Las Copitas because he had nothing better to do. They were a four-piece girl group, two guitars, bass, and drums. They played straight-ahead power-pop stuff, and they were cute. They drank like men, knew every coke dealer in every town, and they paid pretty good. It would be ten shows through southern Spain, and the food would be astounding. They all spoke English, and Johnny had a crush on Pilar, the drummer. There was really, really nothing better to do.

They left Madrid Saturday morning, and the first three shows, Ciudad Real, Albacete, and Córdoba had gone great. Tuesday night was Sevilla. The promoter got them a huge paella for dinner, the crowd was rabid, and there was cocaine everywhere. When the girls left for an after-hours bar, at about 3am, Johnny thought it prudent to sleep in the van with the equipment in the club’s parking lot. There, he might get the ringing out of his ears. He wasn’t quite ready for sleep, so he decided to take a walk to La Plaza de España nearby. They had a famous fountain there that he had never seen. He cracked open a big bottle of Mahou, and both the beer and the night were crisp and cool.

As he neared the huge fountain in the center of the plaza, he could hear a man singing. Closer still, he saw it was a man splashing around, laughing, falling down drunk in the fountain. He thought he recognized the voice.

“Jose-Luis?” he called out.

It couldn’t be. What the hell would he be doing in a fountain in Sevilla? The man stopped singing and splashing, and sure enough, it was Jose-Luis, Johnny’s downstairs neighbor from Madrid. He had helped fix the toilet in Johnny’s apartment when Johnny would have had no idea what to ask for in the hardware store. Jose-Luis was short and muscular, dark-skinned and in his early sixties. Right now, his thick, graying hair was plastered down over his eyes, which looked like bloodshot cocktail onions. He tried to focus them on Johnny.

“¡Juanito!” he cried in jubilant recognition. “¡Es mi cumpleaños!”

He awkwardly waded a few steps forward and fell, his head smacking the stone lip of the fountain. It sounded like a rifle shot, but he hopped back up, howling laughter.

“Happy birthday,” Johnny said. He held out the beer. “Ven conmigo Jose. Tengo una cerveza.” He sounded as though he was trying to coax a mad dog into a cage.

Jose-Luis tumbled obediently out of the fountain, staggered to Johnny and threw his arms around him. Johnny gave him the beer, and Jose-Luis leapt onto Johnny’s back, yelling, “¡Andele, caballito!” Jose-Luis weighed about a hundred-fifty pounds and was sopping wet, but Johnny carried him piggyback all the way to the van, Jose whooping, “¡Andele, hijo! ¡Andele, hijo!” and guzzling beer the whole time. In the van, they talked and drank beer and smoked cigarettes. After awhile, Jose-Luis passed out, snoring, smiling, drooling, angelic as the day of his birth. Johnny dropped off soon afterwards.

The van felt like a sauna when Johnny awoke. He looked at his watch, and it was ten-thirty. The girls would be there soon. He used the back of his hand to tap Jose-Luis’s cheek. There was no response. He shook Jose by the collar, but his head just lolled about. This was no good. He put a finger under Jose-Luis’s jaw, and there was no question about it; the old man was cold and dead. Johnny lit a cigarette and begged himself not to panic, but his mind raced. He thought about calling the police, but he had been living in Spain for two years, and he was entirely illegal. He would be deported, or far worse, as there was a large purple welt on Jose-Luis’s forehead. It would sure look like murder when the Guardia Civil arrived. A Spanish inquisition was not what Johnny had signed up for. Not with this hangover. He was sweaty and panting, already raped in a Spanish jail.

He got out of the van and went behind the nightclub. There were some trash barrels and bottle bins in the tall weeds. He ran back and grabbed Jose-Luis under the shoulders and began to drag him around the building. What a party, Johnny thought, he weighs twice as much as he did last night. Oh, no! Did anybody see us coming back?

He laid the corpse behind the garbage cans.

When Johnny emerged, the girls were loitering around the van. He fiddled with his fly as though he had been taking a piss. Paloma, the bassist, said, “Oh, I should go too,” and started past him.

Johnny snagged her elbow and thought fast.

“No, no, I saw a big rat back there. You can go at a truck stop. We need gas anyways.” His hands shook badly as they all got into the van. He could barely get the key in the ignition and then couldn’t find the gears.

When they were a few kilometers outside of town and on the highway, Paloma called from the back, “¿Que es esa? ¿Es tuya Johnny?”

Johnny looked over his shoulder. Paloma was holding up one of Jose-Luis’s sodden work boots between two fingers, grimacing as though it was a dead animal.

“I thought it was Cristina’s,” said Johnny, referring to the singer, the smallest and cutest of the band. “Just get rid of it.”

“Ha-ha,” said Cristina.

Pilar, in the front passenger seat, rolled down the window, and with a “bleah,” Paloma chucked the wet boot out onto the highway. In the side mirror, Johnny watched it tumble along, come to rest, and shrink into a speck.

After that, there was nothing but a constantly diminishing reflection.

They drove several kilometers in silence. Finally, Cristina piped up, “Hey, let’s get some cognac at the truck stop. And put on some fucking music. It’s like somebody died in here.”

To Luby Small's Delight

 

Welcome aboard! Thank you for reading, and after you have enjoyed these two stories, I sincerely hope that you will help me and my collaborators raise funds for what I am confident will be a terrific book.

Here is the link to my Indiegogo account:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-story-tree/x/7918694?show_todos=true#_=_ 

All contributions and feedback will be greatly appreciated!
Also, please encourage others to contribute, but if you can't, please like our Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Story-Tree/316255841872073?ref_type=bookmark

(Also, please note that these two examples have NOT been gone over by my copy editor.)

Thanks again!

To Luby Small’s Delight

I need not wish for Luby Small to rest in peace, because he never, ever gave anything to The World That We Share other than peace, among many other gifts that we folks may often only fantasize of giving.

          My father met Luby’s dad, Mr. Small, back when our family lived in Augusta, Maine. Mr. Small was some manner of co-worker with my dad, as well as a pal. The two guys kept up a relationship after our family moved down to Portland. Mr. Small probably needed help with a CPA-related thing, and my dad, always with the eye for service work for a friend, put my mom, baby Charles, and me into the VW, and we rode the fifty-odd miles north to Waterville, where resided the Small family.

           We got there, parked the VW, rang a bell, and walked up a couple short flights of stairs. On the second floor, there were the accustomed pleasantries between the adults. I tried to scope it all out. At my age of about eight years, I had mostly seen house-type homes. A walk-up apartment, within which a whole family dwelled, was new to me. Surely, any new environment is something which is to mentally process and quickly adapt. I felt an immediate warmth and comfort. It smelled nice there.

For me to assimilate next, of course, were the New People. We had been met by Mr. and Mrs. Small, and by their daughter, Jean, in their kitchen. Jean was in her early teens, to me, a lot like another adult. She introduced herself, and she gave me a warm, confident smile that put me at ease. She and her parents used little effort to make us four Chandlers feel welcome. I happily accepted a glass of ginger ale - with ice cubes in it - out of the Smalls’ homespun kindness, via their refrigerator.

After the pleasantries and my ginger ale, Mrs. Small and my mom left the kitchen to bond as women and to change Charlie’s diaper. My dad and Mr. Small plonked out their paperwork on the kitchen table. Jean took my hand and beamed, “Let’s go play with Luby.”

           On the ride up to Waterville, my folks had told me that there was a kid around my age, named Luby, at the Smalls’ house and that I’d have a playmate. My thoughts danced. Throughout my young life, I had experienced, other than with cousins, only short, transient relationships with boys and girls my own age. Circumstance, not my adults, was responsible for this, but over my eight years, person to person, place to place, time to time, lives and deaths, I hadn’t gotten much of a grasp of permanence. New friendships, to my young mind, were always welcome, yet I figured them fleeting, and that others did too. Still, I was excited to meet this Luby. Jean, I could see, was far more sophisticated than me, yet, from what I knew of girls, I was sure she’d rather play with dolls than to go in for my car, gun, action style of play, as I imagined Luby would.

           Jean and I turned from the apartment’s short hallway into the family room, and the floor was somehow, neatly, cleanly, strewn with lots of basic toys and lots of books for kids to read and more books of puzzles and crayons and pencils and pads of paper and boxes of jigsaw puzzles. It wasn’t a mess. It looked like it all belonged right where it was.

           “Luby!” Jean called, “Michael is here!”

           Luby bounded awkwardly out of his bedroom toward me in his pajamas. He was pie-eyed with excitement to meet me.

“Hi, Michael!” and he wrapped his arms around my far shorter shoulders.

I was taken quite aback, and, I must admit, somewhat frightened. Luby was severely mentally challenged, due to hydrocephalus, what used to be referred to as “water on the brain.” His head was huge, his body gangly, developed to hold his head up. His smile sprang from his face in an unabashed way that I had never experienced. He looked like drawings I had seen of Humpty Dumpty. He towered over me, and he expressed far more immediate affection toward me than any of my grandmothers, great-aunts, or kissy, elderly neighbor ladies could ever muster. I cast a nervous glance at Jean. She beamed, saintly. Luby released me.

           “Do you wanna play?” he asked, indicating the piles of stuff on the floor.

           “Yeah, let’s play,” Jean answered for us all.

           What a cruel trick my parents had played on me, setting me up in my child’s imagination for a new playmate. I was their rube. They had brought me up on this damn car ride to shunt me off while they did their adult things, onto a type of person that I wondered if they’d have invited over to their house. What a gyp!

             “Okay,” I answered.

          Play we three did, and challenging, mentally stimulating play. Jean was intelligent, patient with us boys, gentle, encouraging, engaging, and that, to my youthful heartstrings, made her all the more pretty.

          Luby was fascinating. For all the toys and puzzles and books, which I knew for a fact he had played with again and again, each one seemed brand new to him. He showed me and shared with me each one with openness and originality. Did we play!

Jean and I read aloud, to Luby Small’s delight. We all three played with cars and trains and the jigsaw puzzles. We built blocks, and until that afternoon, wooden blocks as a childhood recreation were beneath me. I learned. I didn’t learn about the complexities of reading words or those of toy cars and trains and building blocks, but I learned of simplicity. Between us three, there was no disparity. We were equals. What one lacked was shared for all by another.

           I kept looking into Luby’s face and eyes and comportment to see or to perceive something; I knew not then, what. It was obvious that Jean had some of whatever that “what” was. She radiated it, and I somehow knew she had gotten it from Luby. It was a purity, an innocence, a transmitted, transmittable comfort. It was a unifying, underlying ease. It was contagious. It filled the room, the heart, the mind, the soul. It was even in the toys and the puzzles and the books.

        The adults said it was time for lunch, so we all had sandwiches and some more ginger ale together, and Jean played a few LP record sides that straddled everyone’s generational difference. Music. Harmony was among us all, kids and grown-ups polarized atmospherically by Luby. Nobody among the eight of us was the center of attention.

After lunch, it was time for the Chandlers to depart the Smalls’ home and Waterville, Maine, but not for good. We visited their place a few more times, and I hope we all experienced the same human magic that was present the first time. I know I did.

        I have been of the mindset to try, in childhood and adulthood, to replicate a formative experience, but nobody in my life could do it like Luby. It was always like the first time we met. The Small family got us up to some lakeside cottage that they had rented for a long weekend one summer, and Mr. and Mrs. Small taught me how to eat and enjoy a lobster. Luby’s and my wading around among the minnows and the reeds was as original, as fun, and as memorable to me as any of our times together. We played and played and laughed and laughed and talked and talked.

            A few years later, having not seen the Smalls during that time, and things being what they are in our societal lack of true appreciation of our friends and neighbors, we got a telephone call.

          Luby had been riding in the school bus reserved for special people. There weren’t too many convenient roads linking towns in the Great State of Maine, so the bus was making a short, daily trip on the Interstate. Sitting across the aisle from the driver was Luby, being his gregarious, innocent, chatty self. The chain broke on a lumber truck in front of the school bus, and a long two-by-four smashed through the windshield and lanced Luby into his delicate, oversized, dear, dear cranium. It did not pierce either his heart or his soul. Luby lingered, comatose for several days, and I do believe that this was his penultimate gift to his loved ones.

His final gift was given at least to me, and I hope, several others.

We drove back up to Waterville, just me, mom, and dad, for Luby’s wake. I had been to several such ceremonies, so I walked immediately to his open casket, not out of curiosity, or anger, or grief, or a notion of loss, not to see, but only to be. Just like Luby.

I knelt, and I looked into his face and his being, searching for what he had, just like I did when we met. Just like what I had stopped doing during our times together and had simply accepted. That which I had begun to learn.

          The top of his head was swathed in gauze. The make-up person at the funeral home must have had the easiest task ever. Luby’s beatific face was what was very probably shone upon his proud new parents on the day he was born. The purity, innocence, emanation of care for others, then still alive in Luby’s countenance, could not have been augmented by a human hand. I glowed then, as he would have unknowingly prompted me in his living innocence. At peace was he, and so was I. He filled the room.

         Thank you, Luby Small, for showing me and those around you a fragment of true peace, for which I still look to you so curiously, to vaguely understand. Thank you for your artless example of goodness, rarely duplicated, that you carried with impossibly unselfish ease.