FOUR LES CLOVER
I walk into Pritchett’s and see Addy and Dez sitting over in a corner booth, both balancing french fries on their noses. As I approach, I quickly realize I have to choose a side. Do I sit next to Dez or Addy? If I sit next to Dez, it will be like climbing Mount Everest and putting my flag at the peak. I’ll be declaring something I’m not sure I want to declare: I like you.
I’m a foot away.
“Which side will you choose?” Addy asks, drawing even more attention to my predicament.
Dez points at the french fries. “Either way, we have the chosen food of your people ready for you.”
I sit next to Dez.
Addy lets out a shout of victory and, much to my frustration, Dez groans.
“Now I have to pay for the food, Adam!” Dez says.
I smile. “You were betting on where I was going to sit?”
Addy nods. “Yep. And my guess was right. Adam, tu tienes cojones grandes.”
Dez laughs, choking on the ice cube she’s chewing on. She slides the fries closer to me. “I like you, so I think you made a great choice.”
The three of us talk about everything. The Bothell, Washington renovation. People from Bellevue. Addy’s boss. How each of us has a different visceral reaction to rain. Finally, an hour or so later, Dez has to go, so I slide out of the booth to let her out.
“I’ll see you guys later?” she says, the booth squeaking as she stands.
“Certainly,” Addy says
I point at Addy. “What she said.”
Dez smiles. “Bye, Hawthornes.”
She disappears out of Pritchett’s along with the thousands of forest animals that sing her name.
“You ready to go home?” Addy says. “Now that your love is gone, how could you ever survive one more minute out?”
I roll my eyes. “I’m totally suffocating under the weight of my unrequited love.”
“Looks like it.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, I’m not ready to go home.”
“What are you ready for, then?”
I know Addy deserves my honesty, so why does it feel like I’m latching on to a tooth with a pair of pliers and yanking? Is the hardness a sign I’m not ready? A sign that no one can ever understand me? That people will only ever leave me on curbs at intersections and on trees in Puget Sound? I close my eyes. I can’t lose Addy. So whatever the result, I know I need to try, and I decide that I’ll carve my words and feelings out with a Swiss Army knife if I have to.
“I’m ready for talking, but I’m going to need another shake. A strong one.”
She smiles. “Mint Butterfinger?”
“Stronger.”
“Whoa. Oreo Butterfinger?”
“I think so.”
We order a second round of shakes, and when my Oreo Butterfinger slides onto the table, I shove the straw in my mouth and take a giant, slow, and agonizing first milkshake gulp. I close my eyes, and take a breath.
“Adam, it’s okay. I don’t want you to feel like you have to castrate yourself in order for this to work. Let it come natura—.”
“Home life has sucked. I’ve ignored it since you left, but it’s sucked. For a while, I tried to get Dad to snap out of it. Making jokes and stuff, but it never worked.”
Addy grabs her shake and then settles into the booth. Her eyes are focused on me. Her ears, all mine. The look on her face is one that says, “I’ve missed your heart” and suddenly I’m brought back to our actual vacation to Deception Pass. Where I’m telling Addy everything.
I talk to Addy about my frustrations with Dad and The Woman. What it’s been like since she left. I talk to her about how they both hurt me, but I don’t talk to her about how she hurt me, why I was suspended, and I definitely don’t talk to her about porn. As weird as my relationship with it is right now, I want to keep it safe. It’s the one thing I have that’s never frustrating. If I’m mad, Addy might not be there, but a million naked girls are. Always.
She doesn’t press me for information. She doesn’t try to unnaturally shove herself back into my brain. She asks clarifying questions every once in a while; she even orders me a third milkshake. What she does might not seem like much to anyone watching, but, to me, it’s everything.
She loves.
And after the last two years, the literal sight of her sitting there soaking in everything I say, feeling my hurt, being with me, is like finding a river running through the middle of the desert. It’s like being told things that seem wise, but I can’t understand.
—
The next morning, I wake out of another Deception Pass dream. This one feels so heavy that my unusual and unexplainable stint of not looking at porn ends before I go to Mr. Crotcher’s.
It’s 4:56 on a Sunday morning so no one’s on the roads. Unlike yesterday, Mr. Crotcher’s waiting for me at the door when I pull into his driveway, so I pretend I’m on the phone. I don’t want to go into his house early or on time. Traditions are sacred. My traditions have been off lately, and I’m afraid to find out what would happen if I mess with this one.
We go up to his study, and he sits down in his office chair. “So I’ve been considering songs, Adam. Some songs on this album have the same title, but the lyrics have changed so much that they’re completely different. Some songs I’ve replaced entirely. I know there’s some lost in my journals and books that should probably go on the album, but I’m just too tired to look. Right now, I have nine picked out, but historically, the album has had eleven songs.” He opens the DAW and starts clicking around. “I’m considering writing a twelfth, but I’m not sure if I’m the one who should write it.” He looks at me, waiting for me to volunteer.
“I’m not going to write anything. I suck at that kind of stuff.”
“Ah, but you don’t. Despite your fork tapping, one of the reasons I brought you here to help me with this is because I am very aware of your poetic capabilities. I grade your papers.”
“Do you make everyone in your programs write songs?”
He smiles. “No. You are the only one who I’ve subjected to this elegant torture.”
“Why me?”
“A songwriter’s heart is a forest of glass,” he says. “The people we invite into them must know how to walk among the trees.”
I laugh. “So you decided the kid who hates you the most was the best choice? The fork thing was when I started hating you, by the way.”
“I know,” he sighs, “and I’m sure I didn’t make it better by being persistent with you.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“You just remind me of me when I was your age, and I wasted most of my young life. I haven’t …I don’t want to see you do the same.”
I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.
“What if we cowrote a song?” he asks, changing the topic for me.
“Doesn’t this album have personal significance to you? Why would you want a co-writer who can only rhyme ‘do’ with ‘I love you’? That’s like, the oldest and most overused trick in the lyrical book.”
He looks at me with disbelief but then says, “That trick could work considering I want to write a love song.”
“A love song?”
“Yes, I’ve never had one on the album. I have many songs that take honest looks at my failures as a husband. Lots of songs about love, but all of them fixated on how bad I am at it …”
He stares out window but snaps back a few seconds later.
“I have no songs that just simply praise Gabby for being loveable. You’ve heard the type before, the sappy songs people play on anniversaries and wedding days.”
He rubs his temples. “It’s a flaw of mine that I cannot look at things without seeing dichotomy. Every coin has two sides. I just happen to have a fixation on the worn and beaten one. It was often a sore spot for Gabby. She often said something like, ‘You’ve written a jingle for a Styrofoam manufacturing company, but you can’t write a pure romantic song about your wife?’”
He shakes his head. “It is true, there is a shortage of men who write love songs specifically about their wives. Ha. Amazing. Five years after her death, she continues being right.”
“What are the album’s song titles?” I ask.
“Always different, though I would very much like to return to …”
Instead of finishing his sentence like a normal human, he closes his eyes for a second, and then opens them and stares out the window again.
“Mr. Cratcher?”
“Yes, let’s record. I apologize.”
—
It’s nighttime. Addy’s doing some telecommute work at the nearest coffee shop, and I’m staring at my computer, itching to surf some videos. After my porn fiesta this morning, I thought I was done feeling guilty about it, but there’s something pushing against my gut, making me feel a tiny bit of unease about my normal ritual. It isn’t much of a feeling, but it’s enough to have stopped me from typing “free porn” into the search bar three times now.
My phone lights up with a number I don’t know. I pick it up as fast as I can. “Hello?”
“Adam?”
It’s not Dez. It’s definitely a guy. That’s incredibly frustrating.
“Trey?”
“Hey, man, Elliot and I are going to head over to Pritchett’s for a milkshake. Want to come?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Good.
Lord.
Has the sky opened up and begun to rain down fire and smoke? Why would I pass up my sea of digital women?
“Alright,” Trey says, “we’re heading over there now. Meet you there?”
“Yeah, sure. Is Mark coming?”
“No, he said he had stuff to do.”
No, he doesn’t have “stuff” to do. Well, except drugs, which is definitely the “stuff” he’s doing. I only know because “I’ve got stuff to do” is my code for “I’d rather look at porn.” I guess it’s not a very original.
“Cool,” I say, “I’ll see you over there.”
I stand and give my computer a confused stare. I feel like we’re breaking up or mad at each other, and it makes me feel uneasy. I sigh and then head downstairs, thinking about how pathetic it is that I feel like I’m cheating on an inanimate object.
I poke my head into my dad’s office. He’s skimming through what he (and the rest of the literary agent world) calls the slush pile. He gets at least twenty emails a day written by aspiring/desperate authors who want to escape the suffocating loneliness of unpublished writing.
“Anything good?” I ask.
“You know, sometimes I have to respond to aspiring writers with ‘I’m sorry, your stuff just isn’t for me,’ but I wish I could tell the truth. For example, this guy’s dialogue sounds like two toddlers talking about tax fraud. The thing is, if that were actually the scenario, I might ask to see the full manuscript. I just wish people stepped back for a second to look at the shit they dress in flower costumes.”
“That’s good stuff, Dad. Tell your potential clients, ‘I don’t represent shit in flower costumes, but some other agent might.’ Anyway, I’m going to hang out with Elliot and Trey at Pritchett’s. I’ll be back later.”
He looks at me as though I just told him I’m going to go look at a house with my realtor.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he smiles. “Go. Leave me alone and bring me back an Irish cream and Heath shake.”
I hop in Genevieve and NPR comes on. Before I can back out of the driveway, my phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Why are there no black lawn gnomes?”
I suddenly feel stupid-bucket’ a’ bull-warm, and my hands stick to the steering wheel.
“Hey, Dez.”
“Are we that racist of a society to not have diverse gnomes?”
“Maybe diverse people don’t care about garden gnomes?”
“You can’t know that. You’re white.”
“You know what? You’re right. I’m calling my lawyer.”
“For real?”
“Yeah, I totally have a lawyer.”
“What an American you are,” she says.
“Should I just save your number?”
“You don’t have my number saved yet?”
I feel like an ass for saying no.
“Well, gosh, Adam, should I have picked another Knight of Vice?” She sounds genuinely hurt and angry.
“Dez, my not saving your number isn’t a reflection on how I feel about you.”
“Well, what is a reflection on how you feel about me?”
Is this a trap question? It has to be. Navigate wisely, Adam.
“I’m considering making you a black garden gnome when I get back to school.”
“Don’t do that for me, Adam. Do that for the world, for society, but if you do do it, you can give it to me. Just make sure it’s for society, not me, but still give it to me.”
“How’s … addiction going?” I ask.
“As swimmingly as ever. Now that I’ve subjected my computer to waterboarding, I’m worried I’m going to pick something else up. Like this beer my dad left here. Like right now. Hold on.”
“Dez? Should you be moving onto something else? Isn’t there an AA step for that or something?”
I pull into Pritchett’s just as Elliot and Trey walk through the door.
“What do you know, Porn Boy? You were sitting there judging everyone at Addiction Fighters the other day. I know the arched eyebrow of the ‘at least I’m not that bad’ face when I see it.”
“Ouch, Dez. You were the one who called me, remember?”
“Yeah, sorry. I’m just frustrated. I want to be fixed. My dad yelled at me for not being driven enough again tonight. It’s like a nightly thing, now. Aren’t I too young to be this broken?”
The thing Mr. Crotcher said about the beginning years being the most chaotic pops into my head, and I get a little pissed at myself for thinking this hard. I don’t understand how I can avoid thinking for two whole years and then be washed away in it in a matter of days.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “We’re all born into chaos, and I don’t think it ever goes away. We just get better at learning how to find beauty in it.” I say this, but I haven’t tried finding beauty in anything but women, especially the naked variety.
“Where’s the beauty in a girl who cycles through life-threatening addictions because her parents expected her to be a banking expert by age fifteen? Whatever. Just save my number.”
Click.
“Dez?”
Silence.
I add Dez Coulter to my contacts, hop out of Genevieve, and wander into Pritchett’s. My typical sitting place is unoccupied. Seeing it empty and knowing I won’t sit there makes me sad. I scan the place for Trey and Elliot and see them waving at me from the back of the diner. I wave back and then weave through the sea of green diner booths, making my way toward the bathroom. While I put toil back in toilet, I ignore a strange tug in my chest that I don’t recognize. I just know it has nothing to do with my bowels. I also ignore the voices saying, “You’re addicted to porn, Adam. Feeding the addiction isn’t a good thing” and make a playlist. I decide I’m particularly excited about a video called Four Les Clover.