Vocation

  

You need some change? For a full minute Jerry watched her gently shake the plastic container from side to side and slide her finger around the inside of it.

A yellowed tusk protruded into the bottom of the woman’s upper lip while she poked a wrinkled digit around her green plastic coin purse for enough change to pay for the can of Mountain Dew. Her tennis shoes lacked strings and her legs were covered in sparse, coarse hair below the dress that hung under a faded blue Minnesota Twins hooded sweatshirt. The ends of the sleeves were torn and loose and got caught up in her fingers.

Excuse me, Maam? Do you need some change? 

She cocked her head in his direction and he raised his eyebrows in anticipation. She smiled. The tusk was the only tooth in her mouth. 

I just have a dollar. He dug around in his shorts pocket, keys jangling, while she stood there smiling at him. 

Here you go.

She moved towards him and reached out for the dollar, and while she looked straight at Jerry, she never spoke a word, just smiled. She gripped the bill and pushed it into the coin purse. There was a quarter sized dark scab on the top of her forearm with a dried rivulet of blood that must have leaked from it earlier but had never been wiped off.

The sun beat down on Jerry and the sidewalk in front of the post office. It was going to be another hot one. He lost sight of the woman as she turned the corner of the building and headed into the shade.

Jerry didn’t usually check his mail in the morning but he’d forgotten about it on Saturday and he was expecting a package.

Hi, Jerry! 

Rita Spencer, heels clicking on the cement, shiny red toe nails, lumpy tight skirt and a bob that made her head look like a pumpkin. They’d dated once, for a while, but she got bored with him because he didn’t take her places. Since then, he’d felt a little lucky it worked out that way; he didn’t like to be mean to people. Not even Rita.

Hey Rita. He did a half turn to signal his disengagement but she circled around on him. How’ve you been--I haven’t seen you around. Have you lost weight or something, you look slimmer?

In fact, he had and religiously did one hundred sit-ups and push-ups every morning and walked wherever he was going whenever he had the chance.

No, not really. I just need to check my box and get going.

Oh, Jerry, you haven’t changed, the same sweet guy.

She was nice, he thought, but she always made him hungry and he didn’t need that.

See ya, Rita.

The smudged U.S. Postal Service logo on the window attendant’s hat drew Jerry’s eye and no matter how much he looked around the room behind him, that smudge brought him back. He’d slid the yellow slip from his box indicating a package nearly two minutes ago and after a cursory look around the attendant was back standing before Jerry with only the worn formica countertop separating them and a rusted iron window. Now the postman consulted a clipboard that hung beside the counter and ran his finger down the page while a nub of a pencil taped to a piece of string swung from it. 

What was the last name again?

Ghostgy. G - h - o, he began spelling it.

Yep, here it is, Ghostgy. He pronounced it “ghost guy.”

Gost - gy, Jerry said it slow, enunciating precisely.

According to this it should be right here. Let me give it one more look.

He could still smell the rain in the air even though it had passed hours ago. He couldn’t remember the last time he woke up in the morning to thunder and lightning and rain. He’d always thought of that as a phenomenon of the afternoon or early evening, not something that could begin while he was still asleep--but of course it could. 

He heard the attendant before he saw him. 

Here it is. He slid a cardboard tube onto the countertop.

Sorry about that; it had been pushed sideways behind a big box. Anyway, there you go.

It looked smaller than Jerry anticipated and, although it did have a heft to it, he worried it wasn’t right. He stepped out of the the building and decided to sit at the picnic table in front of the frozen yogurt store and examine the contents.

The poster unfurled, heavy and thick, across the top of the picnic table. A muscled man with a ponytail, some sort of bright white high top exercise shoe wearing a green singlette was photographed in twenty different exercise positions arranged on a glossy grid. There were no words associated with the individual photographs, only the man’s grimacing or smiling face, depending on the intensity of the position and, across the bottom of the poster, in splashy, energetic, yellow print were the words No Pain No Gain.

He’d ordered the poster online from the free computers at the library a couple of weeks ago when his exercise routine was a frenzied combination of running around the outer edges of town, doing situps with his feet pinned under his couch and eating baby carrots for breakfast and lunch. Since then it had tapered off and he hadn’t had a baby carrot now for three days.

Jerry took his hand off the poster and let it roll back up. Then he put his right foot on the edge of the picnic table seat, straightened his upper body and leaned forward, approximating one of the poses from the poster. He looked down at the outside edge of his calf and admired the tension in the muscle there; he stretched forward with both arms and reached for the crevice between the table top boards and exhaled a low moan of lactic acid free ecstasy.

River heights apartments were not near a river or on a height but Jerry did pay $50 less a month in rent because he didn’t have a deck, only a sliding glass door with a wrought iron barrier to keep people from falling to their death or at least to a broken bone, since it was only the second story. Ando, the maintenance man, thought Jerry wise for this decision, since, as he said - nobody use that damn patio anyway. This morning, Ando was changing the blades on a lawnmower in the maintenance stall, which was the end garage stall of a long line of them. Jerry, in another feint at thrift, pulled into a parking space, another $75 off the rent for no garage stall.

Hey Jerry, give a hand, hey! Ando’s thin forearm strained under the torque of a wrench hidden below the mower deck.

Sure, Ando! What do you need?

Ando wore a stained khaki short-sleeved collar shirt that said Ando above the pocket and jean shorts. 

Take slack up in deck. Grab here. Lift so I can loosen bolt a little. Jerry got in position, taking the weight with his back and not his thighs as he’d learned. He immediately smelled the kimchi aroma that rolled off Ando in his sweat. The mini fridge in the maintenance stall was lined with plastic pint jars of the fermented cabbage and after five in the afternoon, Ando could often be seen sitting in a plastic lawn chair drinking a Budweiser and plucking chunks of kimchi straight from the jar with long wooden chopsticks. 

The son of bitch is tight Goddamnit. He strained at the wrench.There! He grunted in a thick exhale. Thanks Jerry.

Occasionally Jerry joined Ando in the parking lot for a beer but lately he’d stayed off the stuff as he solidified his regimen and made plans. 

Watchyou got there, Jerry.

Oh nothing just some mail. I’ll see ya later Ando. Take it easy.

Kay Jerry, beer-thirty soon, hey?

Yeah, maybe.

His apartment faced the back of the property, where there was a horse pasture attached to a trailer house and a small rotting barn that leaned into the wind. Somedays he could smell horseshit floating through his window screens and  would draw the scent deep into his lungs groping for a connection to the animal.

Jerry cubed a block of tofu, rolled them into a sizzling pan with a single piece of bacon and a can of green beans and thought about the two locations he had in mind for his studio. 

The Candy Jar had shut down last year after one of the strippers had been beaten and raped afterhours by a mentally unstable customer, who was then shot and killed by the bouncer,Teddy, who’d seen the crime finish up in his rearview mirror at two in the morning.Teddy’d graduated high school with Jerry and lived in the same building. It would need a lot of work.

The long narrow room at the old Nickel Nook was his favorite though. The last time he pressed his face up against the glass he could see rows of students performing the routines he’d taught them. Jerry used to read copies of his favorite comics in the aisles of the Nickel. He never dreamed that the space might one day be his.

The door to the refrigerator was his touchstone. Emblazoned across the feezer door were the words: Plan Your Work - Work Your Plan! Jerry chugged a quart of raspberry Crystal Light and booted up the computer on the breakfast bar. He’d just got it back from the repair shop where it had been completely wiped clean and reconfigured. The little jackass in the cage gave him a smirk when he went to pick it up too. Dude, you should be more careful with the porn. 

Before he began to take control of his physical fitness, Jerry’d come to rely on the feeling of possibility that developed each time he brought up the pictures on his computer, worked himself into a frenzy and then came down, ashamed and disgusted with what he’d just done. The endless pop-ups were a minor irritant before he jacked off, but afterwards, a single pop-up sometimes made him want to destroy his computer altogether. Slowly he began to think it wasn’t the pop-ups at all--that he was merely channeling his rage at a machine but it was really himself he was angry at and he needed to modify that relationship--create a date night so to speak, so he cut off a pair of sweat pants, pulled on a t-shirt and sneakers and started to go out at night, first walking the perimeter of the town, then slowly jogging it until he worked up to a healthy run twice around. After that he added the sit-ups and push-ups. It wasn’t until over a bowl of Sunday morning Lucky Charms, scanning the TV that he found a threesome working out on a Hawaiian beach, Pacific white caps racing across the screen behind them, speaking to him in a language he had only just begun to understand--that the seed he hadn’t even realized he’d planted began to grow into an idea, a brittle, plastic idea; he wanted to help others feel as he now felt-turn this new found avocation into a vocation.

He’d cleared out his living room for a workout space on Sunday mornings and mastered the routines, even tried to work on the banter, but he never was good at banter.

The phone vibrated on the countertop; Jerry leaped up to answer.

Jerry?

Hi Mom.

Jerry? She said it again, in a breathy whisper this time.

Mom! He felt guilty for his elevated voice.

I’m here Mom.

Jerry. I need coffee for the morning, Jerry. It was a plea and he couldn’t take many more of these calls. 

O.K. Mom. I’ll be over tomorrow.

O.K. Jerry. Jerry?

Yeah Mom?

I love you Jerry.

He stopped and listened to the silence on the line. Through the window, Ando sat in his lawn chair in front of the storage garage outside while the sun was half concealed now behind the tree line.

I love you too Mom. He could hear her breathing slowly on the line. Bye.

They’d never expressed their feelings for each other when he was a kid. In fact, she had been pretty selfish and slept over with other men while he stayed home alone--in the same apartment complex he now lived.

The buzzer grated on Jerry every time he had to push it to enter Golden Horizons. He couldn’t handle his mother anymore and when she needed him to help her use the toilet and the shower, he checked into this place.

Her dementia had progressed in the seven months she’d been there, which is why he didn’t bother with coffee. She would have it served to her with a cookie in the commons room during social time like everyone else.

The smell sicklied over the stale coffee brew and some antiseptic odor.

Mr. Ghostgy?

I’m sorry your mom used the phone again yesterday. I hope it’s ok. She was lucid and asked so kindly.

What does lucid even mean? He mumbled beneath his breath.

I’m sorry?

Never mind. Are they having coffee yet?

She sat belly up to a roundtable with a left over 4th of July decoration as a centerpiece. A man in a wheelchair, slumped over, arms folded in his lap, sat across the way, a plastic mug of coffee the color of dried up chocolate pudding cooled in front of him.

She sucked at the coffee making a slurping sound to cool it before drinking. He waited until she set the mug down before coming around where she could see him.

Hi Mom. What’s happening?

Her face slackened.

Mom. It’s me, Jerry. He slid his chair closer--speaking more slowly.

Jerry.

She began a low whine like a puppy and then the volume began to grow and her eyes grew large and fearful.

Mom! Not now. 

But now she whimpered and looked frantically around the room. 

Mom. It’s ok; I’ll go. He got up to leave and the sound grew quieter as he moved out of her field of view.

She doesn’t know what she’s doing, you know. 

It was the nurse from the station by the phone. 

Don’t hold it against her. She’ll probably talk about you all through supper later.

Yeah, I know. Hey, don’t let her use the phone anymore, OK. She didn’t know what she was saying to me last night and I think it just works her up.

He’d felt saddled with his mother’s care before but now that she was at Golden Horizons he felt guilty not taking care of her. He’d get an ice cream--maple nut and pistachio--at the ice cream by the scoop place in the C-Store on the way home.

He ran around town three times later that night until he felt like a blade was piercing his side and then he ran harder until it disappeared. 

A thin slice of light bisected his bedroom wall and alerted him to the sound of a large machine outside. A slow mechanical winding and a revving engine, then stop, the winding, a rev, and stop.

What the hell is going on? He thought before rolling out of bed and opening the blinds.  It was the shiny yellow cab of a Mike’s Towing and Repair truck at the farm out back. The flatbed was raised to a forty-five degree angle and Mike or someone was standing at the controls on the side operating a winch with a cable that led to the back legs of a huge roan horse that he’d seen hundreds of times eating grass out there in the small pasture behind the complex. He’d been near it a few times by the fence and had even heard its teeth tearing at the grass and munching ecstatically. Now its rear legs were wrapped with a metal cable and its lifeless head and front legs dragged slowly across the uneven ground as the cable was wound back into the winch behind the cab of the truck.

Bang, bang, bang, he heard on his door. He had to piss and unless he stood on his head to do it, he was going to have to wait out the rager in his sweats. 

Bang, bang, bang. He threw on a t-sirt and tucked himself in the waistband of his pants.

Hang on! 

Bang, bang, bang! 

I’m coming. 

He looked into the peephole. Ando.

What the hell Ando, I’m sleeping.

Jerry, you should come see what is going on out back.

I saw. The horse. I know.

No Jerry, not the horse. Teddy’s place. Out back. Come and look.

Ok, let me get some shoes on. I’ll be right out.

When he got out there, Ando was on his knees inspecting the window frame that sat just above ground level. The screen was torn and the glass had been broken from the inside and pieces of it lay in a semi circle on the grass. 

 

Ando had a key and walked around and inside, down the stairs and knocked on Teddy’s door, a thick mustiness attacked their senses. When there was no answer, he unlocked it.

Hello! Teddy! They entered slowly, singlefile--the smell of burnt popcorn and urine was undeniable, a scented candle in a pool of dried wax on the coffee table, and the sink was filled with dishes stacked precariously on top of one another. 

Teddy? They walked to the hallway and peered into the the bathroom.Nothing. They continued heading towards the interior bedroom. Next to a mattress on the floor lay Teddy, in maroon boxer briefs with white trim breathing loudly through his mouth. They stared at him--bits of broken glass and smeared with with his own blood, crumpled up on the floor, like Martin Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. 

Ando pushed a broomstick into his thigh and woke him up.

Teddy, stoned and drunk, had heard the horse, but, instead of leaving by way of the door, in a myopic sense of urgency, knocked out the window, crawled outside and ran to the fence in the half light of early morning, told the old woman who lived there that something was wrong with the horse, that she had to call 911 or it would die. The next thing he remembers is getting poked in the leg with the broom.

Jerry taped the poster on the back of his apartment door, laced up his sneakers, prepositioned a kitchen chair and began working on the positions outlined on the grid. There would be mirrors on the walls of his studio and bare iron poles that ran the length of the room. He’d already discarded the Candy Jar--after the incident with Teddy, the association didn’t appeal to him. The Nickel would be his studio and that is what he imagined for himself now as the curve of his kitchen vinyl floor elongated into the Nickel Nook’s space, plate glass at the front, two restrooms and storage at the back and mirror lined workout space for him to guide his disciples. The vision, while beautiful, also paralyzed him and when the angry sound of a lawnmower began outside the spell was broken; he sat in the kitchen chair and unlaced his sneakers. Later, he thought.

He closed the screen where a patio should have been, lay down on the couch and dreamt of the woman with the yellow tusk thrust into the sky as her mouth opened too wide in his mind to scream. She stood in the spot he’d first seen her yesterday, the early sun and black birds against a blue sky circled and dove suicidally over the parking lot light poles where the roan from behind his complex nibbled tufts of crabgrass that grew like veins of green gold from cracks in the pavement. 

Leaning against the glass from the inside, the sign, SOLD,  caught Jerry by surprise and even then he imagined it was he who had purchased it. The cavernous space behind was dark and he walked to the door. Another sign.

OPENING SOON!

Quick Fit Wellness Studio

Help Wanted

The phone number listed wasn’t local and Jerry chastised himself. He was going to call the realtor this week and here it was snatched up and taken from him. Taken from him. Sometimes he couldn’t help but feel that everything was taken from him before he had a chance to get it. 

Jerry dislodged his cell phone from the holster strapped to his hip, dialled the number on the sign. He knew no one would answer at this hour but he wanted to lodge his interest in the position advertised all the same. He stated his number twice, just to be sure.

By the time he rounded the last block before arriving back at the complex he had modified his plans and thought getting some experience on his resume might not be a better way to get off the ground first.

Jerry slept soundly that night and did not dream. While he rinsed his cereal bowl in the sink the next morning, his phone vibrated and his heart soared. He knew they’d call. He could punch in and out for a while, maybe find himself a nice duffel bag, a black one with orange piping along the edges and a shoulder strap that he could hang his sneakers from. He’d only wear them in the studio--they would be impressed by that. Hell, anybody would. The phone vibrated its way towards the edge of the counter.

Hello? This is Jerry.

Jerry? Are you bringing coffee, Jerry?

He closed his eyes and squeezed the lids shut so tightly that his eyeballs began to ache. When he opened them, he looked across his apartment, into the living room, at the tv and watched the waves run in ferocious white lines across the screen and a palm tree rock excitedly in the wind while a beautiful woman in a leotard stood on a platform on the beach and the disciples in front of her awaited her instructions.

Jerry? I love you, Jerry.

Jerry?

.