KYMS

This story addresses alcohol dependence.

KYMS

My husband’s uncle was a novelist with a day job in the British Civil Service. He taught me to write KYMS on my notes at the beginning of every meeting. KeepYour Mouth Shut. What an invaluable tip.

This story began the night I joined Indivisible. You’ve gotta do something and they were at least trying. Laurel Center’s chapter of Indivisible was founded during the winter of 2017, by people who had gone on the Women’s March.

I didn’t go, though I made pink hats for a couple of friends. The charter left at four in the morning for the five hour drive to DC. It was a chilly day. I have asthma. In that pre-Covid era, some dedicated person or three on the bus would definitely have a cold. I would come home exhausted and get sick and what good would that do?

And I’m not much of a marcher. I also didn’t go in the carloads that went to Seneca Falls, which is only a couple of hours’ drive.

Nonetheless, my husband and I were invited to the first Indivisible dinner and movie night. 

My husband, a tangible project kind of guy, was unwilling to undergo the boredom that is the price of civic engagement. I don’t love it either, and Pot Lucks, i.e. meetings with no agenda, disguised as social events, promise high levels of aggravation. He would spend the time I was gone working on the old door I wanted him to refinish, sparing me the sounds of electric sander and accompanying curses. 

Laurel County is a much married place, so all the tables were set for eight. Whatever Miss Manners might recommend elsewhere, it is customary here for couples to sit together. My default dinner partner was a man I knew as Brian Smith, who proceeded to weird me out by introducing himself as Padraic Kennedy. He spelled it for us, so we wouldn’t think it was Patrick. “Are you by any chance Irish at all?” someone asked him.

“And a poet, worse yet,” he said. He spoke with a bit of a brogue. Brian Smith did not. “Retired literature professor, long time nomad of creative writing residencies, recently cast upon this hospitable shore.” 

He cast me an anxious glance. Okay. He was using his pen name. I knew why.

I was the registrar at the Laurel Center Food Pantry. That morning, I had processed Brian’s application and signed him in. He didn’t want that to be the first thing the local Progressives learned about him. It would mess with their expectations, for sure.

It didn’t with mine. My husband and I had careers in the arts. I know what those residencies pay. It is pure luck that I am on the giving side of the Food Pantry tables, not the receiving one.

Lots of people don’t want it known that they get food from us. Even if they and their families worked hard all their lives at lousy jobs that didn’t enable them to save. Now they’re ninety and they’re picking up their food in their walker with an oxygen tank hanging from it. We treat them with the respect they deserve and don't out them. Even when they’re as obnoxious as Brian/Padraic was.

We give everyone a pound of hamburger. He said he was a vegetarian and could he please have extra vegetables instead, then changed his mind and said he would take it for his cat. The woman behind him in line, who headed a large, desperate household, and to whom the volunteer had been about to give Brian’s meat, rolled her eyes and made a comment about pet food versus people food. The volunteer rolled hers back. “I retract that statement,” he said, with what he must have believed was a winning smile. “I’ll take the food I don’t normally eat for purposes I won’t reveal.” That got around fast. 

I thought, in a town of thirty-five hundred, this two name thing won't work for long. He should hope he makes a better impression tonight. And he did. 

Whatever Indivisible’s stated mission, those present saw little point in trying to vote out or even influence our elected representatives. Most of them had run unopposed. We were looking for things we could do besides lose elections. What might we do to change Laurel County for the better?

Brian/Padraic suggested that we plant a community garden to grow vegetables for the Food Pantry.

People liked that idea. A member volunteered space in their back yard. “This could be truly bipartisan! Everybody likes the Food Pantry.” 

Oh yeah? If we had a dollar for everyone who tells us that those people are just too lazy to work, we could buy a lot more food. But mean people are worth ignoring. KYMS.

As for the community garden idea, Padraic/Brian turned towards me and brogued that he hoped this lovely lady would want to take part. I knew better than to take it personally. He'd been flirty with all the women. What a charmer, we were supposed to think.

I could see how Brian/Padraic got that way. He was a skinny, sallow old guy with stringy, sparse gray hair, but these were clearly the remains of a terribly handsome young fellow. Fine boned, transparent skinned with leprechaun green eyes. Surrounded at work by naive, romantic aspiring writers, eager to love his poetry and admire his artistic integrity. Poor, but never a sellout. It's shrewd to lean into that persona if you can. Good looks and charisma can keep an artist on the right side of that terrifying border between bohemianism and squalor. 

My husband and I had a large garden of our own. We already contributed produce to the Food Pantry. If Indivisible wanted their own garden, someone else had to do it. I was prepared to say this and repeat as needed. But the discussion period ended and it was time for the movie. I could KYMS.

It was not a movie but a selection of TED talks about the ill effects of globalization on third world countries. I think. A few minutes in, the guy projecting the film from his laptop paused it, to add his own commentary. Upon which, several of us, including Padraic/Brian, escaped under cover of darkness. P/B asked if we wanted to go for a beer. 

I didn’t. I went home, where the buzzing and profanity coming from the basement proved that my husband had held up his end of the deal. I took us each down a glass of wine.

Soon we all realized that Brian was Brian’s sober name and Padraic was his Tragic Alcoholic Irish Poet name. The double identity, too, probably worked better when he was younger. Now, it was no longer that double, for one thing. Now, he was just the new town drunk.

In that capacity, he dropped by the the Food Pantry Garden during the homeowners’ kid’s birthday party. When it was the homeowners’ turn to host Outdoor Church. And more.

He kept getting thrown out of bars for starting political arguments. He became Indivisible’s best known member.

Indivisible asked him to leave the organization. 

Like all the news you really wish would get around, that didn’t. No one was interested. Most non-members who had even heard of Indivisible dismissed them as a bunch of Socialists, which some of them were. Real Socialists, not just people who weren’t Republicans.

Padraic started posting poems about birds on the local Audubon Society Facebook page. Though there was some overlap, the Laurel County Audubon Society is a much larger group than Indivisible, and the members were inclined to like him. 

The new Methodist minister was a birder and (excuse me, can’t help myself) took Padraic under his wing. Some of his congregation complained about the kinds of people he was bringing into church. He came back quoting Jesus, who said he had not come to call the righteous, but the sinners. A group that included all of us. I am an atheist, but I liked that guy. He got Padraic into Alcoholics Anonymous, also a larger group than Indivisible.

I got busy on my own. I helped a friend run a losing campaign for local office. I wrote a lot of letters, to our Senators, to our Congressman, to the local paper. I agreed to give a talk on how to do that at an Indivisible monthly meeting. 

The day before my appearance, I ran into Brian, as I guessed he was that day. He seemed pretty lucid. “Nice letter last week,” he said. I thanked him. He added, “I was on the front page, you know.” 

I did know. The Borough Council had met that week, and the paper always covers their meetings. His name had actually appeared on the continuation page, not the front, but I kept my mouth shut. How fragile did your ego have to be, to embellish your placement in a Laurel Center Gazette article? At the meeting, he had proposed establishing a garden, for the benefit of the Food Pantry, in a disused ball field on the edge of town. Did I want to be on the Board of Directors? How about volunteering? Donating?

I was prepared for this. Bob, the director of the Food Pantry, who was also on the Borough Council and my next door neighbor, had come straight to our house from the meeting, for a glass of wine and a primal scream. “He’s been talking to me about this since last summer. I’ve been begging him not to do it.” AA had been helping Brian, but Padraic had lapsed spectacularly, publicly, several times. Bob added, “When he’s sober he can write a perfectly good proposal. Better than most of the ones we get. So we kind of had to let him proceed. We gave him guidelines to meet. Who knows, maybe he’ll manage.”

When I got to the Indivisible meeting, the guy with the laptop was struggling to connect with the community center WIFI. It was a Saturday afternoon. He was trying to phone the center’s director at home, but she wasn’t answering. “I actually came down here yesterday to make sure I got the right password,” he fumed. “She changes it all the time.” It appeared that she had changed it again. I wondered if he had talked at her about globalization. Someone with an iPhone was creating a hot spot he was trying to connect with but, oh, never mind.

Anticipating such a situation, I had printed handouts. More than enough, it turned out. Only a few people came to hear my little talk. I think all of them brought homemade cookies, though. I ate some while I waited. After I spoke, laptop guy had a video to show. He wanted to make sure it was cued up, so as not to waste anyone's time.

Meanwhile, the room throbbed with outrage over Brian’s proposal. The nerve of him. The Food Pantry Garden was Indivisible’s project that he had ruined. Thanks to him, last year’s host didn’t want them back. Now Brian/Padraic (interchangeably execrated) was taking it over for himself. Stealing it.

Since I was there to speak, I had not written KYMS on my page. I pointed out that the Food Pantry Garden had been Brian’s idea in the first place, so why shouldn’t he pursue it on his own? And if Indivisible also found a new location, the Food Pantry could easily absorb two community gardens’ worth of vegetables. 

Someone asked me, “Are you friend of his?” 

I was not. But I saw him often at the Food Pantry. I don’t think you can help caring about a person you feed, even if you don’t like them. What a terrible situation he was in, old, poor, struggling to conquer a lifelong addiction. It explained his whole career, always moving from one brief residency to the next, never invited back. Retirement might not have been a choice; probably no one else would hire him.

And here was a room full of people - well, not that full, but still - people who wanted to build a society ruled by fairness and generosity? Listen to them. 

When laptop guy finally got the password and I switched to the topic I had come about, my presentation was not that well received. No one minded when I left right afterwards.

Brian did meet the Borough Council’s requirements and they did allot him the space he asked for. My walking friends and I passed by there sometimes. It never amounted to much, though one year they grew a whole lot of pumpkins. Brian carved and sold them to various Main Street merchants for the benefit of the Food Pantry. “Except,”one of them told me, ”Right after I paid him for mine, he crossed the street and headed into Your Mama’s Mug.”

But his falls off the wagon became fewer and less memorable. He stopped calling himself Padraic. In 2021, he ran, unopposed, for Borough Council.

I don’t need to be friends with all my political allies, so I am happy to say he was an excellent council member. He wrote articles for the Gazette explaining the council’s decisions. He encouraged people to come to meetings. When the council arrived at a stalemate over ordinances regulating AirBnB’s in town, he set up social media pages for the Council and solicited opinions. The comments were so angrily divided, they made the problem worse, but it was still a good idea. 

One evening in June of 2023, after missing his AA meeting, he was found trying to uproot the rose bushes in front of the county hospital. When the receptionist told him to stop, he threatened her, so she called the cops. They took him home and told him him to go to bed. A little while later, he was back, cutting the rose bushes down with an axe. When the cops returned, he shook the axe at them. When they booked him, he called himself Padraic.

He did thirty days in the county jail. He got thrown off the Borough Council.

My husband had died in April. I didn’t much keep up with local news that summer, but no one could miss that story.

My friends took me out walking with them every day. Once, after Brian/Padraic, whoever, got out of jail, he rode by on his bicycle, a trowel sticking out of his backpack. He had lost his drivers license who knows how long ago. When we passed his garden, the bicycle was leaning against the fence. We didn’t see him. He must have been inside the tiny tool shed. When we went by on our way home, his bicycle was gone.

I don’t know when he left town. I gradually became aware that I was never running into him. I had stopped working for the Food Pantry during Covid, when we stopped registering people. We just gave food to anyone. By the time Covid passed, my husband was too sick for me to go back.

Laurel Center is a gossipy place. Brian was not entirely friendless. Maybe someday I’ll hear something about him. What do I hope to find out? I suppose, that he still thinks he’s worth saving, like all of us sinners.

Indivisible now has a number of community projects going. They did find another householder with a back yard they could use. They’ve been growing a garden there for several summers now. What do I mean, they? As so often happens with volunteer organizations, one person pretty much does it all.