judd mcdonald
 

the thin ice of modern life


My five year old, who these days insists on being called Clifford (a name his mother came up with) walks up to me from the monkey bars, little chips of barkdust clinging to his blue Tuff-Skins. He holds a Ziploc baggie in his left hand and asks me: “What is this father?” (he also now speaks, always, in complete sentences, vaguely British). He drops the baggie in my hand. “What ever is it?”

We used to call it a dime bag, though there’s only about a penny left. “Looks like grass clippings,” I tell him. He knows something’s going on. He’s too smart for me.

“What do you mean grass clippings?”

“Sure.” It’s as if I’ve been spontaneously lobotomized. “Someday when you’re big enough to mow the yard, you’ll save the grass clippings. Some of them.”

For the record, Cliff, Clifford, has begun to make me nervous. I’m awkward around him quite obviously the way I’m awkward around Ronnie Nooney—the Englishman my should’ve-been-ex wife Susan is now “seeing.” (Yes, the same Ronnie Nooney of The World According to Ronnie Nooney).

Clifford gives me a very stern look with his pale green eyes and says, like a first grade teacher that’s uncovered a lie: “I think we both know that isn’t true.” He turns back to the monkey bars.

I want to ask him: who are you?

A woman in a white dress with blue flowers wheels a stroller past me on the black-top. I cup my hand and give her a nod, and after she passes, I look down at the baggie. Upon further inspection I realize the baggie is mostly seeds and stem, not much “flower” as we used to call it, but enough I figure to roll a joint. It’s like a kind of magic. Not magic exactly, but I’ve been harkening back to better times lately (who wouldn’t?), and this little baggie is an emblem of better times—’96, ’97, Suze and I walking down Fifth Street at night, passing a joint back and forth beneath the plum trees. More than anything, though, I realize this is something to break up the recent monotony of pad thai from Thai King and a rental from Movie Madness (a Stallone kick lately). A little something from yesterday to help forget about today.

I slip the baggie in my pocket and head over to Cliff. He’s at the top of the monkey bars with a little blond girl. “We’ve got to get you to your mom’s.”

“Shake us first,” he yells back.

“Not with someone else on.” (I realize I shouldn’t shake him at all).

Cliff’s voice is so soft I can hardly hear him: “Would you mind terribly climbing down now so my father can shake me?” Would you mind terribly!

“Cliff you don’t rule the monkey bars. Now let’s go.”

Really I’d like nothing more than to shake him high up there. Let him hold on for all he’s worth, remind him what it’s like to be five—that fear inside of laughter—let him know in his blood that thirty-four will come sooner than he thinks.

He climbs down next to me. “Did you throw away the grass?”

This catches me off guard, and I fear he’s on to me. I tussle his hair, another thing he hates. “Why would I keep grass clippings?” He looks right through me. “If you beat me to the car we can get a frosty,” I yell and start running across the blacktop (clearly to avoid further interrogation). I look back just as I reach the foursquare grid to see Cliff calmly walking, palming his hair exactly the way Ronnie Nooney does when trying to control his nest of hair, like a Davy Crocket hat without the tail.

I walk the rest of the way to the car.

“What do you say to the batting cages Cliff? It’ll be fun.”

“Clifford,” he reminds me. Clifford rolls down his window. “I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“I have piano lessons.”

Piano lessons?

“Piano lessons?”

“Yes.” He looks at me like I’ve just asked him if the world was round.

“I never heard anything about piano lessons.”

“What’s wrong with piano lessons?”

“Nothing’s wrong with them. I just didn’t know.”

“I thought mom told you. Or Ronnie.”

I do a double-take. I swear he looks at me like he knows he’s under my skin.

“You know I don’t talk to Ronnie.”

“What’s wrong with Ronnie?”

This is an interesting question, and I take a moment to ponder possible responses (among others I come up with: nothing’s wrong with Connie—she’s a hell of a gal). “Nothing’s exactly wrong with Ronnie.”

Clifford sits with perfect posture in the seat and gives no response.

“Except of course he’s a vampire!” I make a ridiculous expression meant to be a show of fangs. “A real bloodsucker.”

Clifford looks at me stern as a gargoyle. “Vampires are something your mind wants to believe.”

He creeps me out a little these days.

Thankfully we’re quiet the rest of the way to Wendy’s. I order us a couple of Frosties, and as I get up to pay, I reach in my pocket for the five and out slip the grass clippings. Right there in my lap. The teenage girl with a greasy moon of a face looks at me as she reaches for the five.

“Why do you have the grass?” Clifford asks in a police officer’s voice.

I can tell she thinks this an odd question for my five year old son to be asking. She shakes her head in disgust. “Here’s your Frosties mister.”

I look at Clifford. “There wasn’t a garbage can at the playground.”

“Yes there was.”

“Here’s your Frosty mister,” I say. He shakes his head and takes it and faces silently forward.

I pull onto Powell and head the direction of 20th. Usually I’m struggling to try and get Cliff talking, but right now I’m frankly glad he’s quiet. I feel terrible as I realize this, but I can’t get to Suze’s apartment fast enough, and I speed through the thirty blocks.

I turn into the lot and honk as I park. A second later, Suze comes walking down the stairs. She stops at the bottom and waves. I nod to Cliff.

“Go on,” I say.

“Bye.” He leans over and gives me a tolerant hug, then slams the door. “Thanks for the Frosty.”

“See you soon.”

I am the sitter returning him to his family. I wave to Suze and pull away.

It isn’t long before my mind returns to the grass clippings in my pocket, and I drive toward 7-11 with an almost guilty sense of exhilaration. I am ready (as we used to say) to “burn one down” and forget about things a while.

The guy at the 7-11 counter looks at me a little funny when I set down the canister of Pringles and ask for some Zig-Zags.

On the drive home I’m thinking about things with me and Suze (something I’ve been doing a lot of the past couple months).

* * *

Things with me and Suze are admittedly a little complicated. We’re not exactly the 1-2-3 of marriage, reproduction, and divorce.

I often wondered while we were together, and still do if I admit it, what she ever saw in me. (I say this not as a plea for sympathy. I really wonder about it, and it’s something I’ve long since accepted). I wonder because in nearly every aspect of my life I realize I’m unremarkable. I am of an average height—5’ 9’’ an average weight—172 pounds. My hair is an average brown color, and I part it averagely to the left. My nose is of somewhat larger proportion. It has been said before that I resemble a young Jimmy Durante, which I generally do not take as a compliment. I am, arguably, of average intelligence.

Ours was like any other college romance. Together all the time, crazy about one another (we’ll just accept that for now), and before we knew it we were graduating, myself rather unremarkably, and Suze as valedictorian. In the weeks leading up to graduation, we had talked about what was going to happen next. Who knew, was what we decided. She was going to stick around and go into Pacific’s school of optometry. I wasn’t going anywhere, so we saw no reason why we couldn’t continue to rent our small house on Fifth Street. So, as she studied the inner workings of the eye, I decided to get certification to teach elementary school (God knows why).

Then one early spring day in 1999 she was pregnant.

She was pregnant.

We’d had plans for a while to go off camping with some friends that Friday, and she insisted that we “keep up appearances.” So we went. Those three days I scrambled to figure out a plan. If I’m honest with myself, I knew she didn’t want to marry me, which is why I’d never asked her before, even though we’d been together a little over three years. But here was reason. It was the thing to do.

We were sitting in a canoe in the middle of Clear Lake (water so named because even at its deepest you can see rocks and the blurred backs of trout). Yes, I had a ring in my pocket.

“Clifford,” Suze said out of nowhere.

“What?”

“Clifford.” She turned around to face me.

“Clifford?”

“If it’s a boy.”

“We’re not having a cat here Suze.”

“Clifford’s a good name.”

“For an orange Tabby maybe.”

“It’s better than Steve.” She was beginning to get a tone. I couldn’t tell yet if it was sarcastic or annoyed.

“Steve’s a good strong name, it’s—.”

“I know, I know. Steve Martin. Steve Sax.” Her tone was no longer ambiguous.

“Clifford?” I said.

“Cliff then.”

I thought about it. “Cliff’s okay.”

We left it at that. I aimed the tip of the canoe toward the far shore, in the direction of the spring that fed the lake. The sun burned the surface of the water so that it shined like tinfoil. Intermittently I asked myself what I was doing.

My friend Jonesy knew I was planning to ask her. He also knew I didn’t exactly have a plan, and he told me the spring was “wicked pretty.” I paddled. Suze leaned back against a life jacket propped against one of the seats. I’m telling you she was stunning: with her hair slicked back, the mirrors of her sunglasses catching the sun, her bronzed shoulders made darker by the canary yellow swimsuit. She looked like she belonged in the pages of some magazine. And I’d noticed a new glow about her. Our friends commented on it. She told them she’d just been eating better and had started jogging. But I knew where it came from, and my knowing that made me look at her with a renewed passion. The psychoanalyst will tell you that’s because I knew she was carrying my seed, my legacy, that I saw my mother in her or something equally ridiculous. It simply changed the way I saw her. There was a new layer to everything.

I clunked the canoe against the sandy shallows and got out, hauled it all the way to the shore. I helped Suze out and followed her down the trail that cut through the pine and thick undergrowth of fern and salmonberry. Red Crossbills clung to pinecones and called kip-kip-kip through the trees.

We hadn’t gone three hundred yards when Suze stopped. I drew even with her just as she asked: “Is that a dead otter?”

We had reached the spring, and there, floating in water blue and clear as glass, was an otter who’d seen better days. There were faded cans of beer in the pine needles at the water’s edge. Cigarette butts like fingertips. The otter was beginning to sour.

Suze turned immediately back down the trail. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Is it the baby?” I called after her like a jackass, but it was the first thing that came to me, trying to save the moment.

She looked at me, and I was pretty sure it was the otter.

About the middle of the lake I stopped paddling (because I felt there was a real danger of my arm falling off). We slid a few seconds and then began to drift with the wind. Suze was quiet as the lake. I knew something had been bothering her all day (actually a lot longer than just that day), so I wasn’t exactly surprised when she turned to me and said: “What are we going to do.”

It didn’t sound like a question.

It was all I could think to do. I reached in my pocket, looked into her frantic eyes, clearly anticipating what I could be reaching for. I got down on my knee (not an easy thing to do in a canoe) and opened the box, held it out. “Marry me.”

I thought she was going to cry (or jump out of the canoe and make a break for it). She turned away, facing the peaks of Three Sisters, and put her face in her hands. She shook her head and made a deep sigh. All in all, it wasn’t the ideal response to such a question.

“What are we going to do,” she said again. I suppose that was the day the decision was made to raise a child from separate homes.

And really, I was fine until Ronnie Nooney showed up (with his sturdy teeth and depth of understanding, the smug way he makes you think he’s both sympathetic and friendly to the world). Until he showed up and began “staying over.” Then, well, there was someone to measure me against. I would be like choosing a wormy apple over a slice of apple pie. Fine. It was never anything I really believed could happen anyway.

But it had never occurred to me Cliff might have a choice to make as well.

* * *

Home, I’m trying to remember everything I ever needed when smoking dope. Of course there are the snacks. A stereotype, sure, but that’s because enough morons like me have had the munchies so bad we could eat like rhinos. I find the Pringles, a half a bag of Oreos Cliff has lost interest in (he likes éclairs now of all things—what five year old likes éclairs?), and two bottles of Heineken.

Music. This, I remember, is important. I go over to my records, and as I look at their thin spines another wave of yesteryear crests. There’s no decision to be made: The Wall. I’m 26 again, 27, sitting with Suze or Jonesy in the living room of our place on Fifth Street listening to Pink Floyd. I almost feel at my shoulder for hair I cut in the fall of ‘97. I switch on the turntable and drop the needle on side one. It is the crackle and whisper of time being turned back.

I carry the Pringles and a beer to the coffee table. Seconds later, as I’m crumbling the dope (dope!) onto the Zig-Zag, then fumbling to roll it, the drums and soaring guitars begin. By the end of the first song I’ve got it rolled and decide I need to stop the record, remembering we used to wait for it to kick in a bit before playing music. It’s all coming back.

The first toke burns down and makes my head light. Used to be smooth as syrup going down, but that was years ago I realize. Finally I exhale. I take another toke and hold it in as I look around the house. I’m almost surprised not to find a tapestry, or the plants Suze used to be crazy about (plants everywhere in those days). There’s just the one little spider fern, withered-thirsty, unimpressive as August dandelions. The walls look extra bare. Just the silver framed print of the 1987 Mt. Hood Jazz Festival (which I didn’t go to—I just liked the picture of the black piano collecting snow), and on the wall across from me there’s the Little Debbie calendar. Cliff, before he was Clifford with éclairs, liked the little girl on the box and he got the calendar in a box of oatmeal pies. He begged and begged for me to hang it somewhere, so I put it on the side of the fridge.

I smoke half the joint and nub it out on the sole of my shoe. I walk over and drop the needle on the record again, head back to the couch to wait. The waiting. It’s all coming back.

Just as I begin to think Cliff probably found a bag of ragweed, the drums and soaring guitars start all over, only this time with deeper texture. I haven’t listened to this in years, and it starts my memory to loop. All of a sudden, I can feel the loveseat I’m sitting in. I can feel the worn tweed grooves on my fingertips, can feel the slouching cushion give way, take me in so soft I almost feel afloat.

This isn’t ragweed.

All of a sudden I’m focused on the music again—on the guitar and drum static. I focus until it’s an airplane, until it sounds like it’s just outside the windows—a stray crop duster bound for northeast Portland, for 912 Alameda Street, lost all control, needles spinning in wild reverse.

Then the song ends, and the plane gives way to a baby crying, which I can tell you is a different thing altogether.

Roger Waters sings: “Momma loves her baby, and daddy loves you too.”

I’m in an impressionable state of mind, and the line returns me to my own story.

His voice changes, and I’m snapped back: “If you should go skating on the thin ice of modern life.”

I twist open a Heineken, walk over and lift the needle and set it back down carefully in the flat space between the grooves. A baby cries. I lift up the needle. The record stops spinning as I return the arm to the cradle.

I stand up. It’s clear to me that I need to do something else. When things go bad, there’s always kitchen basketball. I head into the kitchen and take the ball from the top of the refrigerator. About five months ago I put this up for Cliff. It’s a Trailblazer’s hoop with a big plastic backboard, and I nailed it into the wall above the doorframe. Cliff never exactly took to it. It came with a small rubber ball, and the first day we used it, Cliff knocked a glass off the table and stepped on a few shards barefoot. While I picked the shards out with tweezers, he screamed, and I begged him not to tell his mother. After that he was a little gun shy when it came to hoops.

I take a shot from the free throw line taped on the floor. The ball is at least two feet short of the rim, and it bounces into the living room, lands on the couch. By the time I’ve made it there, I’ve lost all motivation for free throws. There is my other beer, and there is the record player. I can always feel sorry for myself.

After listening to the song at least seven times (while demolishing a can of Pringles), I have picked up and dialed the phone almost before I realize what I’m doing.

“Good evening.” Only Ronnie Nooney answers a phone like that.

His voice, that accent, usually just annoying, makes me clearly angry.

“I need to talk with Suze.”

“Hello Ed.”

“I need to talk with Suze.”

“She’s busy at the moment with Clifford’s piano lessons.”

It feels as if someone else is talking for me, a guy with an attitude. I’m a ventriloquist’s puppet. “Well this is important Rhonda,” (I’ve never called him Rhonda to any actual person). “Be a doll and put Suze on.”

“Pardon me? Are you drunk Ed?”

Out of nowhere I’ve suddenly affected the voice of an Englishman. “Why no Ron old chum, why ever would you ask such a bloody thing?”

I hear a click, but it’s not a hang up. A second later I hear footsteps on the hardwood and then mumbling, like someone’s got their hand over the receiver.

“Are you drunk?” Suze asks.

I can’t resist telling her. “Better.” Perhaps this is an error in judgment.

“Jesus. When Clifford told me about grass clippings—.”

“What could I say?”

“Tell him what it is and throw it away.”

I would never have done either of these things in a million years. “It all happened so fast.”

There is the silence of her breathing on the line.

“Would you have done that Suze? Honest?”

“Of course I would. I need to go.”

“Right, piano lessons.”

She catches the sarcasm in my voice. “Clifford hadn’t told you.”

The English accent is back. “Why no, Clifford hadn’t told me. Clifford tells me quite a little these days.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

This I know is a reasonable question.

“I need to go.”

I want to keep her on the phone. “You remember, right?”

“What?”

“Fifth Street. The plum trees. Pink Floyd. Jonesy. Remember Jonesy?”

“I try not to.”

My train of thought has derailed. I start thinking about Cliff.

“I have to get off now,” she says.

“Did you know Cliff doesn’t like Oreos anymore.”

“Goodbye Ed.”

“Oreos—.”

Click. For a moment I sit dumbfounded on the couch staring across the room at Little Debbie.

Then it occurs to me that I own a car.

As I drive, it’s clear that I have no business being behind the wheel. My mind is a lost child. I return to the wisdom of Ronnie Nooney. (Yes, I’ve read the book).

He has some thoughts about exes. I’m referring of course to chapter seven in The World According to Ronnie Nooney, where he has cleverly divided us into categories (Steve Stalker, Donny Disbelief, and Harry Hangaround to name a few). The strict Nooneyite would call me a Harry Hangaround.

There is a honk. I look at the dash to see I’m doing eighteen miles an hour in a thirty-five. I turn off the music and roll down the window, sit up in the seat.

Harry Hangaround’s the guy who can’t let things go. He’s the guy who can’t accept the fact that you’ve moved on. He’s the guy who feels “masculinely threatened” by your current partner. He’s the guy who, even five years later, is still “waiting for the rainbow.”

But what if he’s the guy who happens to be the father of your child? Even Ronnie Nooney (with his Grand Canyon of understanding) doesn’t have a chapter on that.

An interesting thing is happening to me. I feel a fever just under my skin, which I am slowly recognizing as real anger. I recognize it as the kind of anger you know is misdirected (you really know it—which is what makes it real and a little scary). Suddenly I’m Harry Hangaround gone bad. Harry Hangaround masculinely threatened and pissed off. Harry Hangaround on a mission to learn the genesis of his son’s fondness for éclairs. The blocks slide by. I grip the stick shift like it’s a Louisville Slugger. (Though in my right mind I know I’d never actually do it), I keep picturing Ronnie Nooney on the ground at my feet—his perfect nose bloodied like a rose.

Before I know it, I’ve come up to Suze’s apartment. I park in a dark patch along the street. I see her lights still on. I can hear laughter from one of the apartments. Cars slow and squeal for the light on 33rd and Hawthorne. I see late June fireworks in the distance. My anger seems to have subsided some (as if it were being fired by the Corolla’s pistons), and I begin to think about exactly what I’m doing here.

Like a toothache, more of Ronnie Nooney’s philosophy returns to me. I’m recalling something he says about the role of the “current partner.” (The role of the current partner! Jesus how can Suze or any of the thousands of people in this city buy any of his dookie, as my grandfather used to say). He warns the current partners of the world against confrontation, that it can only lead to problems. But he says there are certain cases where confrontation cannot be avoided—for example if a Stan Stalker or a Donny Disbelief were to show up at your partner’s residence uninvited and unwelcome. He cautions emphatically against physical confrontation, unless IT IS A LAST RESORT (I remember he punctuates this with about two thousand exclamation points).

I’m remembering exclamation points as I step out of the car.

As I walk across the lot and look around at the houses with shadowed windows, a vague yet firm paranoia begins to settle in. I quicken my pace and look up at the steps to Suze’s apartment. It is then I notice someone coming down them. I stop, thirty feet away, just on the edge of lamp glow, thinking perhaps I’ve not been seen. Ronnie Nooney, however, is walking directly towards me like he’s got ex-radar. I think for a second about running down the street, but thankfully grow a spine and stand my ground.

“Good evening Ed,” Ronnie calls out to me, still walking with real purpose fifteen feet away.

“I’m here to see Cliff.”

He’s five feet away. “I’m afraid not right now.”

He’s in mid-stride as he goes for me—.

I see it all happen with the slow motion of an out-of-body experience. His forehead pops my nose like a tic, and I flail backward, screaming the scream of a twelve-year-old girl who’s broken her ankle ice skating. As my head hits the pavement, the world snaps off.

“Ed.”

I wake to the light slap of Ronnie Nooney and feel myself wince like a beaten dog. I see my blood on his face. “We’ll need to get you to the hospital,” he says.

I feel almost hung over.

“Really, Ed. I’m terribly sorry, but I believe it’s broken.”

I gather myself, trying to recall my anger. “Not until I see Cliff.” I say this with all the vinegar I can muster, but my voice is feeble, and it feels as if my nose has been removed, and a hot wind tunnels through my face.

“It’s best that doesn’t happen tonight.”

“I can see my son,” I say, but there’s no force to it.

“Not tonight. I’m sorry but Susan would rather not tonight.”

His voice is as sure as a preacher’s. It is suddenly quite obvious that the situation is over, and the epic pain of my nose, the resulting sobriety, and his voice cause me to lose all will. I cave into agreement. He pulls me up by my collar and leans me on his shoulder.

“I can manage.”

“I won’t let you drive right now. I’m over here.”

My eyes blur as I walk to his beige Taurus. He comes around and opens my door.

I get in. He gets in and starts up the car and adjusts the vent so the air conditioning is blowing my way. “How’s that?” he asks.

The cold air is a miracle for my nose, but I say nothing, partially because of anger and partially because blood is draining into my mouth.

Ronnie Nooney reaches behind his seat and hands me a sweatshirt.

I don’t take it right away.

“Please Ed. Better this than my seat.”

I take it and hold it up to my nose as we pull away.

“You go to Kaiser, same as Clifford and Susan?” he asks me.

I nod beneath the sweatshirt.

We drive a ways down 33rd before Ronnie Nooney says: “It may seem hard to believe right now, but I really am very sorry about this.”

It doesn’t feel like I’m supposed to say anything.

He looks at me. “Really.”

“About breaking my goddamn nose?” I gurgle as best I can, but my anger sounds to me like a playground child’s.

“Of course. That’s not the kind of person I am.” He gives me a look I can tell is meant to be genuine. “However, I knew if I didn’t gain control of the situation, things could get ugly. For everybody. And nobody wants that.”

I gather the ‘everybody’ is referring to Cliff, and it suddenly makes me wonder how I’m going to explain this.

Ronnie Nooney merges onto I-84 at about twenty miles an hour and takes a cell phone from his pocket. A second later: “I forgot to ask. Chardonnay or merlot? Right. See you soon.”

He looks at me as if what he’d just said were a code I knew. “Susan doesn’t know you were there Ed.”

I’m sure my confusion is obvious.

“I had a feeling you might show up, so I was watching out the window. I saw you and told her I was leaving for wine.”

My mouth is now full.

“I don’t see any reason why she or Clifford should have to know what happened tonight.”

I am amazed and more than a little relieved. All I can manage is a nod.

The taillights are watery as we crawl down the interstate, and I am now freezing. Ronnie Nooney turns the music up just enough for noise, and I can’t concentrate enough to make it out.

Just as we pass the exit for Johnson Creek Boulevard, Ronnie Nooney turns down the music. In the silence, I can feel him build towards something. Finally he says, “You know Ed. I really do care for both Suzan and Clifford, and I don’t plan on going anywhere. You’re his father, and I can certainly appreciate how difficult this must be, but we really must sort this out. I’m afraid it’s just something you’ll need to understand. Do you suppose you can do that?”

Searching for words, I swallow the blood in my mouth.

judd mcdonald