Rockerman

                                                                        

He thought he’d seen movement in the brush across the street behind Dina’s truck, but when he rubbed his eyes and opened them the impression was gone. The same thing happened once last week, too, and this time he started to think maybe there was something wrong. Then his right eyelid fluttered violently for about three seconds and his chest twisted tight.

He looked around the room.

Students quietly clicked the keys on their laptops. Rockerman winced and glanced up at the clock. He’d been teaching for 20 years. It didn’t feel that long but there had been a marriage, two kids both grown and gone, six cars, three houses, the death of both his parents and the dream of where he once imagined he’d be by now. 

The bell rang. Bags were zipped and phones slid into pockets.

“Have a good weekend!”

The last student stood up and headed for the door.

“You, too, Mr. R.”

He sat for a moment and took in the emptiness and the muffled calls of kids outside the window as they plodded towards a row of buses lined up and waiting for their cargo of future Subway artists, Target team members and maybe even some teachers.

He put the vape to his lips, drew it in deep and massaged the thick muscle of his chest. The route of the little fog down his throat and into his lungs inflated them until they were utilized to their absolute capacity; his chest walls were taut and it absorbed and processed and transformed until the fog coalesced with the blood in his body and made its way throughout his system. He counted to ten in his head and exhaled a controlled and composed long breath through the tiny rictus made of his lips and imagined a loosening inside of his chest.

The buses began to pull away in a choreographed departure from one end of the parking lot to the other like giant orange dominoes in reverse. When they were gone he stuffed his bag with student papers, an empty lunch container, and his computer, zipped up his jacket and thought about which way he’d take home. Friday always created the impression of options that didn’t exist any other day of the week.

“Hi, Rockerman.”

“Hey! Yeah. Never more than today.”

“What’s that?”

“The weekend.”

“What about the weekend?”

 I thought you asked if I was ready for the weekend.”

“Nope, just said, hey.”

He had this habit of anticipating conversations based on past exchanges. 

“Long day, huh?” 

Barry Showalter had been emptying the trash from Rockerman’s room for months. He’d replaced Dale Gillespie, who’d had a stroke two Christmas vacations ago and now moored his vessel at Sunset Shores. 

In an extended conversation of separate five minute increments at the end of each day he’d learned Barry was a plumber in the Army at Spandau Prison in the 70s. He told Rockerman he’d been on the other side of a fence one day packing up his tools when he looked up and locked eyes with an elderly prisoner being accompanied by an MP. The man stopped and looked at Rockerman while raising his hand in a greeting. 

“Hullo, American.” 

Barry waved back and then turned to his work and finished packing up his tools. He could not have predicted that he would repeat that scene hundreds, maybe thousands of times in the years to come. While he just missed Vietnam, he always felt that maybe that two minutes outside the fence was better. Sometimes he did have to explain who Rudolf Hess was, but usually there was a kind of surprise at his brush with infamy that left an impression in its wake that elevated him from plumber to the guy who’d met a Nazi octogenarian genocidist with a penchant for gardening. 

“Take it easy, Barry. See you Monday.”

“You got it.”

Fourteen minutes later Rockerman still felt the uncertainty clutch at his chest, or maybe it was the egg salad he had for lunch. The maples were just turning yellow, but the enchantment of the seasons was lost on Rockerman. He gripped the steering wheel of the old Dodge and hoped for the pressure in his chest to disintegrate. 

He visualized it like that--the integration of anxiousness--little clumps of anxiety--like sticky snow flakes piling up--accumulating--integrating one with the other until the entire cavity of his body was packed with it. Now, as he moved down the road into the countryside, where he lost himself each evening and weekend, he awaited the dis-integration of the mass built up in his chest. He was always waiting for it and when it came--as he turned on to his road, he felt it--like a soda going flat, the fizz and pop of it changing into something else again.

He nosed up to the hitch sticking out from the front of his mobile home, which was now buried in a raised garden filled with peonies under his dining room window. The bulbs of each peony were still alive with ants lapping up the sweet nectar from the buds.

This was his third year here. He’d had a friend named Cheyenne living with him for a while but she missed her old life and he hadn't seen her or her stuff for a month now. They had sex pretty regularly through that time; the mutual gratification a temporary salve. He heard she got back with her ex.

He imagined his life like the gap between songs on a record. Each mistake or misstep a song separated by that gap, a blank space of scratchy nothingness, until, through inertia, the needle caught the groove and he worked his way into the next episode. And like a record, the songs didn’t change--only continued to their natural, martial conclusion and then reset to begin again.

He sometimes tried to recast this pattern--to convince himself he performed a worthwhile duty, but the deception had hollowed him out. He often hung in a loop of self gratification, momentarily heightening an awareness of his role as a teacher--a necessary and important shaper of widgets and cogs as commodities and tools. The futility usually remained shrouded by the veil of a profane refusal to acknowledge that he, too, was a commodity--a tool. Teaching was a job, a check, health insurance--and a carbureted monstrosity in a fuel injected world.

Somewhere, early in his life he was inculcated with a Romantic notion of his place in society and for years this notion had eaten him from the inside out. But these thoughts were a field lain fallow--just wild empty space for lonely wandering to the edges and back again. But then, the needle scratched and sought the groove. 

Rockerman had a crush on Dina. She always arrived at school before him in the morning, but he tried to watch her get in her truck when she left at the end of the day. He still didn’t feel like he was receiving any signals from her--not even much eye contact. He imagined it out. Extrapolated it to the nth degree and discarded the possibility at all. Not after what happened.

He knew he must appear, if not entirely, almost certainly a little, pathetic. He drove a beat up car, lived in a trailer house (which was supposed to be temporary) and hadn’t updated his wardrobe since before his divorce. Not to mention the huff off his vape in the classroom at the end of the school day. Desperate.  

Ah, the cycle continues, Rockerman thought. He looked forward to Dina serving him a fruit cup, French toast sticks and milk, hopefully before the morning rush began.

He had sex with Dina once, or rather she had sex with him in the gravel of the parking lot late one night behind the Buena Lotsa bar. They were both drunk on gin rickeys. He didn’t know she waitressed there, so when she sat down next to him and dug into the paper bowl of peanuts on the bar and told the bartender she’d have whatever he was having, Rockerman smiled and washed down the peanut he’d been chewing with the second half of his rick and ordered another.

He learned Dina had a son who lived with his dad, but she got to see him every other weekend. He was taken from her in the delivery room. She was high on meth at the time and there wasn’t any indication the practice would end soon. Social services stepped in, removed the hot little body from her chest and custody was granted to her ex, who’d already come out the other end of his addiction and held a job as a machinist at the plant.

He hadn’t imagined Dina’s efforts to crawl back from the abyss, patch her life together and regain visitation rights with her boy. The idea that this arduousness--this brutal path back from hell was part of Dina’s story--had given him a thrill, impressed him even. Imagining the plight of other people had always been a weakness of his. Probably, the solipsistic fuse that set off his own divorce.

At some point she had pulled up her shirt and showed him the infinity tattoo on her rib within view of her areola. He could smell her deodorant. Baby powder. The tattoo was punctuated by a pale, oval shaped birthmark and he remembered thinking it interesting that she’d chosen that specific spot for it.

That was one of the last coherent thoughts of the night. He knew she was infatuated with him at the time because he was a teacher and so she thought he knew things--more important things than she did. He knew better.

On his walk to the cafeteria, Rockerman contemplated titles for his memoir. It was a nervous habit. Recently, he’d settled on Love Stains. 

Look up buddy and pull your finger out of your belly button, he mumbled to himself.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and rounded the corner.

“Good morning, Dina.” 

“Hi. What can I get you?”

“Fruitcup and French toast sticks, please.”

She smiled and the corners of her eyes crinkled just a little in a smile, too.

“Thank you. A couple of sausage links, too, please.”

Her hands were sinewy strong and gripped the spoon accentuating the shape of her knuckles and delicate fingers through the tight latex gloves. He remembered those fingers now from that night in the parking lot. It had been months, but ever since, they’d avoided each other out of a sort of mutual embarrassment. 

“I’m sorry I haven’t approached you since we hung out at the Buena.” He hoped he didn’t embarrass her.

“I know.” She looked down at the serving tray piled high with shiny sausage links. “I’d like to forget it.” She paused. “I was in a bad place.”

He thought he had greater control, but she caught the look on his face.

“I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just--” There was shuffling and the plunk and click of plastic trays behind him. A line of students had begun to form. 

“Do you want to talk? We could get a beer, or coffee.”

“I do,” She said earnestly and turned to the girl behind him. “What can I get for you, Sweety?”

On the way back to his classroom, Rockerman pondered his past relationship with his ex-wife. Cheyenne didn’t really count. He’d married his highschool sweetheart with whom he couldn’t find the heart to break up, so he had two kids and stayed married for seventeen years. Then she divorced him. 

Not good, Rockerman. Heads up, now.

The cafe was cold and the newspaper by the register was two days old. The clink and slap of breakfasts being prepared and porcelain plates colliding with stainless steel in the back mingled with the sound of frying pork. Two old men were knuckled into thick, steaming coffee mugs. Dina and the messy red hair of a young boy were visible behind the tall booth at the back of the cafe. He rubbed out the tic in his eyelid and slid in next to the boy. Dina laced her fingers around a coffee cup in front of her and smiled apprehensively.

“Hi, Rockerman.” She paused. “I have something I need to tell you.”

The look on his face seemed to cause her own to harden.

“That night...at the Buena.” She looked at her son who was busy eating a pancake as big as his head. Then she turned and looked directly into Rockerman’s eyes. “I’m pregnant.”

At that moment a calm crossed over Rockerman and he felt the needle snap into the groove. He reached across the table and covered Dina’s strong hand with his own. Hullo, American, he thought. Hullo, American.