A cautionary tale (Written in 1983)
20 minutes
Half a dozen people stood and watched two pool players in the pale light, through which cigarette smoke curled blue and grey. Tan coughed. One of the pool players looked up, and saw a man in his late thirties, unshaven, wearing an old coat, his hand on his stomach, a fist at his mouth to stop a deep retching cough. The pool player eyed along his cue and lined up on the two ball. Tan, his coughing fit over, climbed the hardwood steps to the street. Outside, the late summer air was loud with traffic. As Tan rounded the first corner he saw a man with a great head of red hair. “Dane! Dane!” he called. Dane turned around, “Tan!”
We were both quite drunk as we walked through the early evening traffic.
“Who cares,” said Dane, “my wife has gone. Good riddance to her.”
He lurched against me. “I’m glad we met up. You know I’ve been wondering where you were Tan. Jeez, it’s good to see you again.” He put an arm around my shoulder.
“Your wife gone too eh? Both of them, phht.” He waved a hand away from his chest, “both of them gone,” he paused, “I haven’t seen you for years. This calls for another drink.”
“I know a bar just around the corner,” I said.
A dozen beers later we sat silently. Dane’s eyes did not look at me; they seemed to look beyond my shoulder. Dane began to speak. “Since she left me I cannot sleep. I lie exhausted; little sounds can drive me to despair. If I must be up at a certain hour, I set my alarm, but I barely sleep. The sound of a ticking clock, I swear could drive me over the edge. Strangely, I need an alarm, for I always sleep, just before dawn, just before the moment that would give meaning to the night, that would give the night an end. I lie awake through ages of black. Night does not begin at dusk, nor end at dawn, the night is a state of mind, a black despair, and I never see nights end. Daylight does not help, a stark, ugly light. It’s the soft dawn I long for, that I never see. I wake to noises, cars in the street, trains shake the house. I don’t know how long I can go on.”
He paused in terrible sadness. “I’m dying from a lack of Diane, but it is a disease that Diane’s return would not cure. It has not been weeks or months since she left, but years, empty years.”
He looked up. In his eyes I saw despair so deep I lost equilibrium, I literally lost my balance. I had to put my hand out to steady myself. The table felt cold, my hands clammy. I felt my stomach as tight pain.
I looked again at Dane. Now he looked at me fixedly. His eyes penetrated me. His hands holding the table edge. Across the table were a dozen empty glasses. Around us people murmured. I could think of nothing to say. My stomach, less knotted now, felt bilious. I’d had too many beers, but it was not just the drink that made Dane’s speech so awful… he seemed lost to me. I could not admit that he was lost, but I had no hope. No hope that he would not soon die. No hope that he was not already dead. Dane, Dane, his great mop of red hair now streaked with grey. I was lone guest at his wake, his wake and mine. I felt my life over; empty too as his. The rituals of my day were tedious, the relaxations empty, stupid. Hopeless despair, his life in death.
Dane slumped in his chair, then fell onto the floor. It didn’t matter where he lay, or how. Walking corpse, drunken corpse, dead now, me the only guest, the only witness.
Dane and I, both twenty, had met in college. We’d roomed together. We’d shared everything, except our taste in women. Perfect really. For two men to desire the same woman hardly helps. We both liked jazz. I’d been more musical than him, and also fond of the blues, folk and the classics. Dane was more simple in his tastes, “jazz,” he’d said, “or jazz, either will do.”
He liked best of all to dance to jazz. He danced wonderfully at parties, and to a jazz band in town. I wonder how many women he’d turned on to jazz, because they liked him or loved him. I could never express Dane’s joy, his incredible love of life. Whilst I would sit,
often the whole evening, with a book, listening to music alone; Dane, when home, would dance around the kitchen, cook extravagant, and peculiarly delicious meals, sing (badly), and laugh.
He was at his best when he had a good dancing partner, He said once that he would decide if a woman really appealed to him when they first danced. I asked him the obvious question: (unfortunately, I had not enough evidence of my own to decide) “Dane, are the ones who dance best, the best in bed too?” He’d laughed, “Tan, I only sleep with women who dance well.” so I had had no answer. I still wonder.
Dane had had no real favourites. Sure he’d been excited by many of his partners, but he’d never stayed with any very long. When he dropped them, some of his lovers were deeply upset; he captivated people.
He and I got on really well. He with a string of beautiful and interesting women; me, usually mooning after someone who hardly knew I existed. But I was happy, playing music, drinking with Dane and a few other students we knocked around with. If I ever did get lucky, it seemed always to be with someone from out of town, someone who’d leave soon after anything began. Someone for me to moon about, exchange long letters with, but not see again. Dane laughed at me, and I took his ribbing with little complaint. It’s funny we got on so well. Dane, loud, popular, funny, always laughing. Me quieter, with a few good friends, quite funny too I suppose, but not a crowd stopper.
I wondered sometimes why we were such good friends. But then we liked each others humour, never competed, and didn’t get upset with each others idiosyncrasies.
I remember one night, I sat at home practising my guitar. Outside an enormous storm shook the house. It moaned through the power lines and banged the porch door. It was raining hard. The sounds excited me, and also soothed me. I was practising a Bach fugue I needed to have ready for the following afternoon. I felt happy to be warm, to be dry, to be listening to the wind and the rain. The front door opened, letting the torrential rain blow into the front room.
Dane seemed to be blown in on the wind; he came in soaked, and dripped tremendously onto the carpet.
“Wo! Yippee!” he sang, “can you beat it, what a rainstorm!”
He took off his jacket, hanging it on a chair, and water ran off making a puddle like someone coming out of a bath.
“Tan, Tan, here you are on a night like this, missing all this wonder!” he said striding around the room.
“I want this piece ready for tomorrow,” I said, “and anyway, I love to sense the tremendous power of the storm, without getting a single hair wet.”
I looked at him, his hair windblown, knotted, his jeans a deep blue, stuck to his skin, his boots squelching puddles where he walked. I smiled. It was always a pleasure to see Dane.
I looked down at Dane, now lying across the floor. No one had noticed him, or if they had they didn’t care, I could see no reason to move him; he was as well off there as anywhere. Burial of the dead, it seemed to me was a problem of the living. The dead don’t care about it either way. As well dead here as anywhere. As well dead drunk as dead on his feet, or dead asleep.
Dane, Dane. It wasn’t nostalgia for him that made me think of those days. It was nostalgia of my own. It was my life that had essentially ended with those day’s end.
I was young dammit. I had hopes, dreams. I had no doubts that one day I’d be… what I don’t know. I didn’t assume that one day I’d be a great musician; but I assumed I’d be… whatever it was I wanted to be. I was not success oriented. I despised those that were; students that already knew what they wanted to be. First year students that had their post-graduate studies planned out, I found self-seeking and tedious. More than that I knew, with a certainty, that the world wasn’t as they imagined it; wasn’t a place where you could say; in five years I’ll be doing this.
But I realise now that I was the same. I didn’t think of success in conventional terms; but I did assume I’d carrying on being happy with the way I was. That living as I did would always be enough- or that there would be a painless transition to some other sublime state. Though I doubt I put it this way to myself. I doubt any of us did.
Oh sure we were cynical among ourselves, disparaging the future, disparaging success. But, deep down, both Dane and I felt we had found the answer- felt we were saved.
And so Dane’s fall was my fall.
Perhaps that was the secret of our bond. Both of us reinforced, proved, the worth of our mutual certainty. Our very difference was our strength. A style, a belief, what shall I call it, a way, our way; seemed the more a reality, the more certain because it was true, independently, to two so different.
Of course we were not so different.
Dane dying. Me dying too.
It constantly amazes me to think that in the four years we lived together, in all my four years of college, we stayed, both of us, so consistently as we ‘d been when we first met.
That last year I studied no more, no less than usual. I got an A or a B on most of my papers or performances; with an occasional C if an exam or recital came too soon after one of our more extravagant parties. I could almost sum up my student days by saying that I did well at everything that didn’t fall on a Monday.
Dane on the other hand never studied. On rare occasions, he would read a book from school, perhaps whilst cooking, the book open in his hand as he stirred the wok. And Dane would poke fun at the book, not study it. It was hard to know what his classes were, for even in the fourth year he had not yet chosen a major. What was amazing to his friends was not that he failed some of his classes, but that he passed any; that he passed over half.
We rarely talked about school/college, either of us; but just before I graduated Dane told me he planned to stay on another year to get his degree. Even then, he made no mention of a major.
In fact he didn’t graduate. A year later, he was still short some credits, and Diane, a woman he’d been seeing for four or five months, was pregnant, so he left school and took a job. But, looking back, the rift had begun to open up before then. The rift, we discussed it as that; was not between us, between Dane and I, we carried on meeting and remained the best of friends, the rift, the separation, was between us and our certainty. Our certainty we were ready for the world; ready for anything; ready for ever.
Both of us in our own way were outside of time. That’s why we didn’t change. I know we were not the first, not the only students to cocoon ourselves. But we both felt we were different. We didn’t just cocoon ourselves from life, we cocooned ourselves from time itself. That’s why we had no fear, no hesitation, no doubt. We felt beyond time. And when we found we weren’t, it was too late.
Now, ten years later, both married, both divorced; we were two drunks without hope. I felt sick. My eyes focussed for a second or two on the table in front of me. A dozen empty glasses. The number increased, the images dividing. My stomach heaved, an acid liquid rose up my throat, a fine spray went through my clenched teeth. I tried to get up, but fell back into my seat. I tried again. I stumbled to the wash room, and threw up on the floor of the cubicle. Some went on the toilet bowl, some in. The seat was up. I put it down and sat. Between my feet I saw the mess. I held my head in my hand.
Above my head, through a small window set at street level, feet clattered along the pavement. Behind the sound of tires, the rumble of traffic. I knew the street outside well. I’d drunk here occasionally since moving to town, more frequently in the last few years. Now, living alone, I drank here almost every night.
I felt disgusted. Disgusted with my condition, with myself, with life. Since Shirley had left me, since my divorce, what was there?
Tan got up, pulled up his pants, their cuffs sodden with spew. He lurched out of the cubicle and fell against the far wall of the wash room, staggered out of the bathroom and knocked into the the first table. The people looked up. One gagged.
Tan moved with difficulty, barely balancing, across to his table. Dane wasn’t there, he had gone. He called “Dane, Dane” frantically. A woman at a neighbouring table said, “your friend left, he’s in bad shape”. She turned back to her friends.
Tan moved to the steps. He climbed them, falling several times, once banging his knee and once cutting his cheek just below the eye. Holding onto the doorway he looked down the long, well lit street. Dozens of people still wandered the side walk at this late hour. In the distance, he saw a man stagger. The man tripped, falling into the gutter between two parked cars,
Tan called out, “Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaane.”.
writesimon 