Memory Wires

Memory wires tripping, things percolating to the surface of the trash pit I suppose passes for a mind.

It’s 1982. I’m attempting suicide by alcohol. A three-tour Vietnam vet, a discharged Army Ranger sitting next to me in a bar, turns and asks if he can ask a personal question. I sort of sober immediately, questions require thinking and I’m getting drunk to stop thinking. But I respect this guy who’s told me stories that cause his nightmares so I allow I’ll answer him honestly.

“Are you gay?”

He said no one he’d talked to could ever remember me dating a girl, or spending much time talking to one.

I laughed and explained that I’m an incompetent creature barely able to focus on breathing and walking at the same time. Somewhere along the lifeline I’d decided it was best for me to do one thing well in my life and at that moment being a drunk took all my attention and most of my meager income (tobacco and books took what little was left of my cash.) I assured him I liked females and at some point would probably sober up and turn my attention toward one of them, or fishing, archery, gardening, marijuana or something other than alcohol.

The Ranger, having once been surrounded by 5,000 NVA and living to tell me about it, eyed me thoughtfully then suggested I was either the smartest man he’d ever met, or the craziest. I suggested we go with crazy as it would be easier for both of us. We left it at that, only the memory of that moment has other plans.

Out of the alcohol haze days drift faces, females who somehow made impressions on me in spite of my efforts to ignore them. The Dancer (because I remember that most about her- a cute blond, petite, lost in a tune, eyes closed, swaying and spinning, possessed by the music) approached me as I sat on an ice chest alongside a river. I don’t recall how I got there, but the beer was cold, the music rocking and the crowd mostly people I got along with. The Dancer was not someone I had exchanged a dozen words with prior to that day; though she was usually at whatever gathering I turned up in. She was a friend’s squeeze, easily ignored if she wasn’t dancing.

She surprised me when she asked if she could sit next to me. Befuddled, there were plenty of lawn chairs and logs to sit on, I squoched over (squoched is one of DW’s hillisms) and she sat down. While I was still struggling with the idea such a woman would want to sit beside me she asked me where I was from.

At that time I’d been a good 15 years trying to be like everyone around here (well, not everyone, just those my own age. And not everyone my age, just the less respectable ones.) I’d lost most of my proper pronunciation of English words, had taken to the local slang and alcohol with a vengeance. How the hell did she know I was from elsewhere? She said she’d seen me with a book. She hadn’t seen anyone else from here reading a book. (Damned books! I haven’t been able to shake their obsession with me.)

So she starts asking me where I’m from and how I got to this place. The storyteller got hold of my alcohol-loosened tongue and away I went. She giggled, “oo”ed and “ahh”ed in the wrong places, but I was on a roll and figured she’d had as much to drink as I. When I finally wound down and opened another beer she giggled as she stood up.

“My boyfriend was right.”

I gave her a puzzled look (my usual look when dealing with people, women in particular.)

“He said if I was going to take a hit of LSD I should get you to talk to me. ‘Jack is one hell of a trip.’ He said. He was soo right! Thank you.”

I’ve yet to fully grasp the reason why that memory keeps pestering me.

The Daughter (her father was a West Virginia coal miner in the 1940s and 50s) still puzzles me to no end. Was she bored, lonely, checking to see if I was human, or challenged to strike up a conversation with me? She was another friend’s squeeze that I’d avoided talking to. I don’t know how she got by the “mad dog” vibes that radiated from me when I was seated at my table in a crowded bar seeking some release in what would eventually be the emptying of the thirtieth beer bottle of the night. The bikers of that time had dubbed me Madman (something related to my having eaten beer bottles) and left me in peace. Why was this female interrupting my sloshing into the haze?

I sighed and nodded when she asked if she could sit at my table. The bar was packed three or four deep and I had the only table that wasn’t fully occupied. She introduced herself with a smile and I promptly told her she’d just wasted her breath as I’d not remember her name because she was of no interest to me. “Me” being on a downhill slide and not sure I wanted to slow, let alone stop for anyone foolish enough to step in front of me.

 Her smile broadened as she suggested she might make an impression on me if I’d give her a chance. I shrugged. “Have at it if you’ve the time to waste.”

Ga! We must have talked for three, four hours. She started out with the music the band was playing, Steppenwolf, which most of the younger bar crowd did not recognize and moved on to her journey from a coal town to this place. I learned more about life in a coal company town (from a girl child’s perspective) than I have in any of the books on the subject I’ve picked up before or since meeting the Daughter. She held my attention so well my beer bottles kept getting warm before I could empty them.

When I spoke of standing in a schoolyard waiting for the approaching Air Force jet to break the sound barrier as it passed overhead she talked in turn of sitting on a hillside overlooking the mine entrance, counting the white faces as the men trooped into the hole as the sun was rising. Later she returned to the hillside to count the black men who emerged into the light of the dying day.

“Do you know how it feels to count 25 men walking in and only 24 walking out? To sit in panic as you look for some detail that identifies your daddy? To cry in relief to see him among the living and to sob with your friend when it’s her dad who will never walk again?”

“We were all on welfare. But cash money wasn’t allowed in the company town. No, the government assistance came in the form of sacks of flour and such. Cash money would allow us to escape. We were slaves. There is no other word for it. The company owned us and the government let them.”

She told me of the first real mattress she ever slept on. “It was so comfortable I could barely close my eyes for the pleasure of it.” It was the front seat of a company car the mine owners had had winched up the mountain so they could tour their holdings. It was also the first car she’d ever seen. Her daddy pulled the seat out of it and gave it to her after the owners had abandoned it; it not being worth the expense to ease back down the mountain and no one in town having cash for gas, or any place worth driving it to.

When I asked how she’d gotten out of the town she sat up and looked at me as if bracing for some form of condemnation. “I saw how things were going. The girls getting pregnant before they were fifteen. Marrying boys who had no choice but to go down in the hole. I didn’t want to end up like that. I manage to avoid becoming a mother until a hiker, an outsider, came walking through the town. I was seventeen when I seduced him and got pregnant. He took me off the mountain.”

It was two weeks before I saw the Daughter again. We happened to pass in a grocery store. She nodded and said “Hello Jack.” I nodded in turn and said her name. We each walked several steps before we stopped and turned to face each other. She burst into laughter.

“I must have made an impression. You remembered my name.”

I smiled, a rarity in those days. “I guess you did.”

I can’t recall ever talking to either woman after those conversations. I often wonder what became of them.