Chapter 11 Waking Up to Bagpipes!

By Gary O'Brien

That morning I dreamed of angry dwarfs chasing me through alleyways of shame. They were furious at my use of that tired old “so much money falling out of their asses they needed dwarfs to catch all of it” joke that Naughten had caught and rightfully edited for me. (It’s gone on the first reference now.)
One of the afflicted dwarfs held me down and lectured me. What hurt them most was my assertion that, career-wise, this would be a pretty good job. It incensed him that I would so callously make fun of that. Think about it: can a dwarf be a cop? An airline pilot? A figure skater? What’s it like growing up being constantly reminded of all the things you can’t be, he asked, as he twisted my nuts in a knot then kneed me in the face over and over.
At some point during my sleep I fought him off, woke and staggered to the bathroom. It was very dark. I needed a piss and water to quench the burning on my lips, in my throat and within my throbbing brain. I gulped at the faucet like a hound, reprieved for a while of dull thud that soon came calling again after an hour or more. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, I knew I was in for one of those “come to Jesus,” hangovers that would linger for days, along with a sense of perpetual drunkenness that would leave me begging the Lord Almighty to let me feel like a normal human being again.
What kind of man is it who so callously maligns the little people in his “work” if it can be called that? What kind of cretin is it who can, but doesn’t, opt for real work, because he’s such a sensitive “artist,” while so many good and sober dwarfs out there remain jobless? Then with apparent total disregard for his own good fortune, this same charlatan flushes all these dead brain cells down the john after a night of drinking. Spent brain cells screaming out in yellow swirl, having lost the battle to an inhumane onslaught of poison alcohol; brain cells as valuable as gold to a borderline student, somewhere, hoping for a chance to get a clue. What kind of a monster had I become? This callous hater of dwarfs and the not-so intelligent; did I even deserve to live?
Did I deserve even the polluted breaths I now enjoyed? Did I even deserve the pain I was suffering? I should be dead having sinned so against nature. Pain was too good for me. Pain meant I was recovering yet again from another inexcusable hangover. Pain meant I would survive despite my apparent effort to kill myself with my drinking and brawling.
Yes brawling. Now I was reduced to the most cliché of stage-Irish behaviors, brawling in the street. I was backsliding against two great grandfathers who never brawled, not in their worst, lower-middle class moments, fighting a tide of instinct borne in hard places like Limerick and Sligo; not at their hungriest in Boston and New York did they ever brawl. Yet here was I, generations later, educated, opportunity and the rest of it, risking my life and my good teeth, my position as a substitute school teacher, brawling, drinking, smoking weed, damned near whoring, in my self-indulgent self pity.
Boo hoo hooo, I can’t get published, let me go right out and fuck up my life Boo hoo, pity me…
I didn’t need Graham Greene to tell me I had sunk lower than lead-weighted shit. I knew it.
At precisely 11:20 a.m. there came a loud banging at the door accompanied by the unholy screel from a bagpipe. I lay there and chewed the thickening paste in my mouth, sure that it was a dream. The bagpipe was set on the same infernal note, middle D, and would not move from it. The damned piper must have an air bladder the size of a bus with lungs to match, I thought. He was obviously marching up and down the hallway; his Doppler Shift the only relief from the sameness of that tone.
Yes. In my mind, I pictured a kilted dwarf as well.
Then came the banging again. The one at the door was obviously his tithe-Meister; a dour looking, fellow wee-man, with a felt cap in hand, no doubt, to catch your donations. If you paid, the piper left for a while. If not, up and down the hall, the demon tunesmith went with the screeling pipes ablaze on the one note. The hour of my damnation was nigh. I was in Hell. This situation would continue for all eternity.
The dour, tithe-Meister dwarf always with empty cap at the ready; the trodding wee jocko of the bagpipe going back and forth, me with a perpetual near sleeping hangover searching for small change I would never find, bidding them to go away.
So be it. I stumbled to the door to begin my eternal negotiation. But there before me was a terrified Honduran woman in her mid-30s, (not quite a dwarf but close). Another Central American female in her 20s was working a hall vacuum. She eyed me suspiciously as a magpie.
“House keepen’. You wan us to kong back?”
“For what?” I said on a reflex. Wait, that came out all wrong. That sounded like an illegal contract. Was no woman safe from my knee-jerk depravity?
“Yes-yes,” I said after I understood. “Come back mas tarde. Tal vez media hora. ‘Sta bien?”
“Si, si, ‘sta bien,” she said, “Are you okay, sir? Are you hurt? You want me to send up a doctor?”
She was looking down at my arm. I looked at it. I needed stitches. The damned thing had bled through the shirt Chris had loaned me. Jesus. This was bad. All the Scotch had done was take off the clotted scab. It looked like someone had taken a straight razor to me in a fight, slicing me from my left elbow to my wrist.
“No, no I’ll be fine. Media hora media hora, ‘sta bien?”
“Si, si,” she said as I slammed the door in her face.
I turned to Chris.
“Chris, man. Chris I gotta go. The cleaning lady saw me all cut up and she probably thinks something really weird is going on in here. Chris?”
But Chris Naughten wasn’t answering; not now, not ever again.
There was an unhealthy gray hue to his face, that would only turn blue, then to black as the hours wore on. He wasn’t breathing. His entire person smelled like halitosis. I placed my ear to his chest. Nothing.
“No man, no. Don’t do this shit to me, Chris? Chris?”
I scrambled off the bed around to his side to get a better look at him, knocking over a bottle of pills. I picked up the phone, then replaced it in the cradle, then picked it up, then replaced it again.
I looked down into his eyes; they were dusty and dry, like those of a fish on the dock, clouding over. He was gone.
Someone should be called, but who? Why?
Yes, Chris Naughten was not coming back, but the curious Honduran maid was, along with a team of room cleaners.
Still drunk and in a blind panic, I picked up the little pink pills and replaced them into the prescription bottle. I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t know I had left a few scattered around.
I put my shoes on, grabbed my car keys and headed for the door. I was stopped dead in my tracks by my reflection in the closet mirror.
I was a hung-over wild, deranged lunatic with a huge gash snaking down my left arm. Quickly, I grabbed Chris’s leather coat out of the closet and draped it over the wound.
Reeking of booze and guilt when I got to the lobby I placed a quick 9-11 call alerting them that a man had died in one of the rooms at the hotel. I had been walking past the room when I saw the body on the seventh floor, adding, “I don’t want to get involved,” as if that explained anything.
The dispatcher calmly asked me whether or not I have alerted the hotel staff and I hung up the phone.
My Ford Escort was right where I left it the previous evening; which seemed a million years ago. I kept asking myself “What the fuck happened? What happened, Chris? Why did you do this to me?”
The keys predictably jammed in the lock before I realized I was trying to shove a key to my back yard tool shed into the ignition. When the correct key was seated in the tumblers of course, I started the car; then started it again while it was running causing a pained, scraping yowl from the engine which drew the eyes of a doorman and a couple of midday passer-bys.
The doorman looked right at me; saw the blood on my arm.
“Do you need help there, sir?”
Goddamn, would these fucking people not mind their own goddamned business? Jesus!
With terrified eyes, I wheeled away, bumping over a median divider in the parking lot. I cut hard right so the moronic doorman couldn’t get a good look at my license plate. Then I became a stewing rat in a maze of red lights, hurling blaspheme at every one that held me up.
I was convinced of only one thing: I did not deserve this. I repeated it like a mantra until I had my bearings and was safely headed toward the East-West Expressway.
In the back of my mind I tried to remember everything Naughten had ingested the night before. It seemed to me, in my mental retracing, trying to wrap my mind around whatever those pills had been, I had spied an inhaler in his shaving kit, at some point. So added to all the little herbal pills and so forth we had ingested, the weed and the booze, added to all that slogging, and whatever he had been gobbling in the middle of the night, there was also a bronchial inhaler thrown into his mix. This would be Chris Naughten’s derivation on “Speckled Lady on Crack.”
His concoction now, quite sadly, was called “Look Ma! I’m dead!”
“He should have warned me he was taking all that other shit. How was I to know? This isn’t what I wanted, not what I wanted!”
I nearly missed the turn, and nearly clipping the port bow of a giant gray Cadillac piloted by a slumbering oldster just making the ramp. That obstacle cleared, I plowed the B-Line Expressway for the coast like a bat out of hell.
When I arrived home, I found all my clothes on the front lawn and the driveway. The nightmare would not end, apparently. It was just after 2 p.m.
As I collected my things I was tersely informed by Leslie, that my daughters and my son had been sent to Leslie’s aunt’s house in Port St. Lucie so they wouldn’t have to witness my ouster. I didn’t want to know how she found out everything I had been a part of the previous evening but curiosity had the better of me.
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” I asked, as the cordless rang and Leslie went to answer.
“Well this is obviously her, smart ass. Honestly Gary, I don’t know how you summon the balls to pretend to be surprised.”
“Her who?” I asked.
“Whoever that her is, who you obviously slept with last night and keeps calling our home, as if you didn’t know,” she spat, before turning to bite the head off of the caller. “Hello!”
“Oh, how marvelous! Yes, he’s right here,” she sang.
Now some of our neighbors were peeking out of their homes at all the commotion on the front lawn.
“Gary, it’s a detective from the Orlando police department. Did you rob a liquor store in addition to cheating on me AGAIN!” she shouted.
“Leslie, hang up the phone,” I said.
“Why on earth would I do that, Gary? I am a law-abiding citizen whereas you, are obviously…obviously,” she groped for an answer before blurting, “Where in hell did you get those clothes! You look like a pimp, Gary! Who dresses like that?!”
She threw the phone at he and it shattered on the base of a date palm. No phone was safe in our home, I thought, looking down at the pieces.
With Leslie trailing behind me demanding answers, to which she had every right, to which there was no way in hell I was going to get into it all before putting some serious miles between myself and that stinking corpse of Chris Naughten, (damn him for dying!) I scrambled through the house and garage collecting things I would need.
I took all our camping gear, amassed in years from vacation trips to the keys and North Carolina, and dumped it all into the van. The fishing poles, the small charcoal cooker, the tent, the lights, batteries, coolers, the tackle box, the bubbler for the bait bucket, all of it went in, in record time.
“I need $500,” I said, “ I don’t have time to explain.”
“Fine, you don’t have to explain then I don’t have to ever let you back into this house and into our lives, Gary. Is that the deal you’re looking for here?”
I swiveled my head around. Was she talking to someone else? Was there another party to this disastrous transaction? Of course that’s what I was saying. Of course, Jesus.
“Yes fine!”
I would have signed a pact for my soul at that point, yes. Whatever. I needed to keep moving.
“Gary,” she pealed with the first hints of tears. “I just can’t believe this is happening. What the hell is going on? What is it you’re not telling me?”
“I really don’t…I, I”
“Is this about that damned book again, Gary? Is this about the book.”
Now she had my full attention. I stopped, and looked at her right in the eyes. She was close. I wanted to let her know that much.
“Oh, Honey. We are WAY beyond lapsed contracts and lost manuscripts now,” I said.
“Well what in God’s name does that mean, Gary? C’mon tell me. Twelve years of marriage and you can’t even tell me? Is it me? Do you think I’m having an affair? Are you suspicious again?”
“NO!”
“…You think I’m doing it with the mailman before I get home…”
“NO HONEY! That’s not it!”
“…with someone at work in a broom closet somewhere…? Honestly I don’t know any other way since I go straight from work to home and it still isn’t good enough for you…”
“No, Jesus. Leslie that’s not it!!!”
“…I mean, has someone called and left a message that freaked you out? You know how you get all cooped up here like you are. Is that it? Did someone call?”
“Look, will you stop? Please? That’s not it, I’m telling you…”
“Not until you tell me what it is then, Gary. Doesn’t our marriage mean anything to you?”
I stopped again.
“ I think I, I, I…” Good God, I couldn’t even get the words out. “I think I killed someone, alright? Are you happy? There, I said it!”
“You what?”
“I think I killed somebody.”
“Well Gary you either did or you didn’t; there’s no think about it. Did you hit someone with the car? Is that what happened? Were you running from a DUI stop, ‘cause that’s what I thought when the cop called the first time…”
“No no!! There was this guy, he’s an author. Lyzanne sent him down here to try and, oh shit, I don’t know. I think they were trying to swipe my story from me and leave me out in the cold. I wanted to embarrass this guy, get him arrested or something, leave him naked outside his hotel room or whatever, and instead I think I ended up killing him. We took all kinds of pills, I knew I was stronger than him…I don’t know how it happened between the fight and running from the cops, plus all that weed and the pills he took… Shit, the bastard was on an inhaler and he didn’t tell me. Long and short of it is, he’s dead! I left him dead in his hotel room! DEAD!”
“And those are his clothes?”
This was all she could muster, just now? “And those are his clothes?”
“Well, yeah! We were all covered in mud! I –I –I Shit! We don’t have time to go through all this, Leslie. I gotta get out of here!”
“Wait Gary,” she said. “If all that is true, who is this woman calling us over and over today?
“ I got caught in a bar fight honey. My wallet fell out. She’s probably calling here trying to give it back. Either that or she’s a cop, I don’t know.”
“You weren’t sleeping around again?”
“I wasn’t. I swear to God. Now I have to go,” I said, wondering at the mind of woman: Hey, kill someone, that’s okay but don’t you DARE sleep around on me! That’s a deal breaker!
I grabbed up my notebook computer, the battery pack, and adapter and five reams of paper. All of it went into our white Dodge Ram 250 van.
I told Leslie to wait for about an hour then to shift everything in our checking account to our savings, to fake it like she was trying to stop me from leaving town by depleting checking. As per our agreement, anything coming out of savings has to have both our signatures on a withdrawal slip. But by the time she made her move, I would already have my $500 added to about $200 I still had on me.
I wouldn’t let her hug me in the front yard. The neighbors were watching. I said it would look bad.
“Just stay inside. I’ll peel out of here fast like we’ve been fighting. If the cops think you’ve helped me it will look bad,” I said.
“Gary, just one thing. Are you going to contact us, to let us know what’s going on or is this the last time we’ll see you?”
I stalled for a second and promised I’d get in touch with her in a day or two.
And with tears in my eyes, I was gone.