Like Home

2006

I barely recognized him. I mean, there was no mistaking Craig’s long square jaw, the shock-blue eyes behind now-superfluous designer frames. His name was on a whiteboard under a bolted flatscreen, and the others loosely arranged about the tight, spare space would testify to the fact of it all.

It was Craig, in rough sketch in a nightmare journal, deep lines and gaunt hints and his essence charcoaled in by a tortured artist wholly unfamiliar with the model. He managed a smile as I approached bedside. It was a flickering glint at the bottom of a deep well at midnight, and it took effort. As did mine, and I placed a hand on his gowned shoulder as if to brace myself at the rim of that fathomless well.

“Miss you, bud,” I said, locking in on that distant light even as I lightly squeezed what felt to be bone and little else. “Miss lunch.”

Realizing that was about what there was to say. A short jaunt off the frontage road that fed into the sprawling offices onto the Beltway with the dashboard dispensing Edie Brickell or that other one I’d always ask him to identify and remark as how I really liked that and would have to seek her out until the next biweekly lunch rolled around. It was always a great 70 or so minutes (we were salaried, and we could vanish for days leaving behind chaos and bloodstains, as long as the work product materialized by Friday). Snarky social commentary, unfettered corporate catharsis, abstract BS, almost anything no holds barred.

It was the smile, like one of those intrusive lane sensors in the later models except his would dim if the conversation threatened to meander over the solid double line. That line usually came up quick – the perforated line of trust seemed always just this side of the hairpin curve or the low-visibility rise. I eventually learned how to subtly crimp that wheel and, eventually, how to keep safely in my lane.

And that was about Craig and me. I was the last one, so I gave him a last squeeze and something I hoped to sell as a smile, and we shuffled out. Well, the two of us – Louis, Craig’s former boss and the host of this impromptu final “lunch” with Craig Dannameyer, lingered. I found out only later Louis had orchestrated three previous living visitations, two of us each, all at the spur, no prep. A long goodbye, Raymond Chandler notwithstanding.

A colleague of Craig’s was pissed, hurt twice over after his trip to the Walnut Avenue Nursing Home two days later. It had been an abrupt departure, maybe seven months prior, with no explanations or farewell drinks at the Chili’s down the block. Like the rest of us, he’d earned the trust never given. But I got it. Fear and religion crackled fiercely through the folks we served and counseled and stumped for, and Craig had come up “through the counties,” specifically the one where Harold Dannameyer kept Holsteins and beans. And as for us, well, Craig didn’t want us to see him after AIDS had had its go, until it just really didn’t matter a fuck how anybody saw him any more.

Louis’ administrative assistant Anna was the ride today, and we trudged carefully across the slushy-but-slick nursing home lot without a word. At one point, she grabbed my elbow and guided me out of a faceplant. On safe ground, I planted a gloved palm on the hood of Anna’s Taurus, took a bracing breath of late winter air, and without preface broke into loud, ugly, gasping, convulsive sobs. Anyone spotting us likely would have assumed father and daughter, in that generational inversion where child becomes parent, patiently hugging through helpless parental grief. They wouldn’t have given it much thought, save perhaps to ponder what they someday might leave behind the Walnut Ave’s security doors.

**

Louis asked me to write the eulogy a month later. The service was in Jersey County down south, while I was unavoidably headed for a biotech conference in Boston. “Mike, Craig said he didn’t want some FFA graduation speech,” Louis informed me. “Craig didn’t really want this whole show, either, but he said if his folks insisted, he wanted somebody who actually knew him to have the final word.” Truth be told, this was about what I could do a little too late.

I was careful, of course, as had been the hometown obit I’d surfed up in preparation. Back in my Southern Indiana daily days, the local funeral home had handed off the obit of a middle-aged woman who’d by whatever means had ended her own life. The female sole survivor listed was curiously unidentified, and being the officious young sprout eager to graduate from death notes and honor rolls, I told my editor I was calling Jason Kittleson at Kittleson and Calhoun for details. Stu waved me into his office and quietly but just a tad too harshly read me the facts of small-town life and provincialism, his view of who this whole “death racket” actually was for, and how we served who got left behind even when or maybe especially because no one else would. Stu never was a really Quixote, but he knew how to keep innocent folks out of the windmill blades.

It was about two weeks after they sent Craig off that I kicked off a new round of occasional lunches with Louis. Our government relations director was a Louisiana boy who’d wound up trading cotton for corn, and he was affably political on the clock and musing and esoteric over a plate of rib tips and cole slaw at a cinderblock shack on the deep west side where almost no one much clock-adjacent ventured. As promised, he conferred a butcher-wrapped parcel of some unspecified swamp meat to our ancient pit master, Cyrus Mead, with whom he struck up some brotherhood of smoke and soul first time they met. If Craig lived – and ultimately died – having to keep his mask in place, Louis had a country gentleman’s manner and an easy wit that seemed to serve him at any compass point. I had my work, I did it pretty well, and self-deprecation and a closed mouth had become a fairly effortless costume to slip on and off.

“Well, Andrew’s still a mite frosty with me – he takes it personal Craig couldn’t confide in y’all, or for that matter me,” Louis smiled sadly. “Craig lived fearful. Wasn’t necessarily who he trusted, but who you or Andrew might place your misguided trust in. Remember what you told me Joel Grayling said first time he spotted you two heading out to lunch?”

“He closed my door and asked if I was sure I wanted one of the guys to see me eating alone with Craig, if I wanted to risk what they might think or say.”

“And just what’d you tell him back?”

“That even if I were so inclined, anyone with a lick of sense would realize Craig had much better taste. And that my friends were my friends, and to hell with what people think. Sounds pretty pompous now I say it aloud.”

Louis grinned. “Principle does these days. But I will say, it’s an easy principle for you. Now, don’t get your back up. Why you think you feel that way, are willing to take that risk?”

I laughed. “Well shit, I was on the yearbook staff, the speech team, for crying out loud the Creative Writing Club in high school. For a while, I thought ‘faggot’ was my actual name. I got to where I could laugh it off, as my mom woulda said, considering the source. But at some point I wondered what if that was your life, if instead of trying to get your goat, the morons had nailed it in one? And this is what life might be from here on out?”

“And you moved on. And, see, that’s the jist of the matter. ‘What’s bred in the bone will not come out of the flesh,’ as Mr. Daniel Defoe is reputed to have said. Boys like Craig and Joel, they’re anchored where they were bred, no matter where they wind up. That’s a mighty pull, even if you’re anchored in fear and prejudice and some pretty powerful false prophets. Home’s where the heart is – don’t remember who claimed that one, even if it’s a pretty heartless place. Those weekends Craig ran off to Chicago, St. Louis -- those weren’t his sanctuary. He didn’t know how to find his sanctuary, or how to live there, live with himself. You done, Mike? I need to settle up with Cyrus, and I forgot something I needed to tell him ‘bout how to fix up that cocodri.”

**

Louis was a member in strong standing of what Grandma proudly called The Clean-Plate Club, but a styrofoam clamshell bounced on the console. Cyrus had presented it to Louis with great dignity as we left – what my friend called a lagniappe. I Yahoo’d it back at the office.

It was a starter complex tucked in off The Beltway, behind the Red Lobster and a sprawling carpet showroom. Eight years ago, I’d inhabited a nearly identical quadruplex, mine behind a Chinese buffet that graced Poverty Transition Row with a powerful and glorious garlic perfume. I was registered there, as well, as a Clean-Plate Club platinum member.

Middle of a Tuesday, a single vehicle inhabited Unit 125-128’s lot. A blocky old man in jeans and a tidy short-sleeved plaid shirt of ‘80s Penney’s or K-Mart vintage hefted a box effortlessly into the Ram bed with a thud that belied his wobbly, seemingly weary demeanor. Positioning Holsteins and manhandling alfalfa bales and grief had toned Harold Dannameyer.

“This’ll just take a minute,” Louis promised, waving to the bereaved farmer and retrieving a paper box from the backseat floor. He carted what I assumed to be Craig’s office effects over to the gleaming black Dodge. Harold accepted the box and a clap on the shoulder, and they chatted for a moment before the dairyman hobbled to his cab, stretched inside, and hobbled over to me. I took in a long gulp of early summer air, braced myself for a second, and climbed out.

“Harold,” I said, smiling deferentially.

“Mike,” he echoed. He placed a calloused paw on the hood of Louis’ Victoria, gripped my hand with the other, and without preface, yanked me into a hug.

“Thank you,” Harold choked. “What you said, wrote. You know, thanks. Just, thanks.” He locked into the embrace, I suspected as much to shield what was now soaking into my shirt.

“Hey,” I offered, patting him awkwardly until he released. Harold grinned, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was shimmering in his wet eyes. I had a fairly good idea, or I could conjecture or maybe even hope, which was the wrong word for it. Whatever it was, he’d take it back home, put it on a shelf somewhere next to his mask and Craig’s knick-knacks and photos.

Then he remembered, and extended a plastic case at me, pausing to study my face curiously.

“He said he could trust you with this,” Harold related slowly, a question as much as explanation. He opened his mouth again, then his lips quivered shut, he nodded once and squeezed my shoulder, as if bracing for the journey home. As Harold hobbled back to his truck and Louis back to his car, I remembered to look down at the CD. Norah Jones. Feels Like Home.

“Oh. Right," I mumbled.