Non Sequiturs: Faulty Openings to Never-Consummated Narratives
I.
Of all the splenetic yuppie gin joints to walk into, she had to walk into the one that sat just below the apartment that I had been renting, for however long it had been since I got the boot from the large Modernist house where my family and my former life and ½ of my considerable net worth still lived. Black pencil skirt and gray fitted jacket, unbuttoned with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, white blouse with a high neckline, encircled in a weird ruffle pattern, clicking and clacking across the bar room floor. I almost spit out my drink when I she sat down and I noticed she had a sidearm holstered inside the jacket. I knew I was going to jail, or to fall in love, and, at that moment at least, it didn’t matter which . . . .
II.
Rudy Petrochsky came to work the first day of his apprenticeship, having spent his mother’s meager savings on a large butcher’s knife and a thin white apron. He was 13, and often hungry. For the next three years, he worked on finding the right tendons in breaking cuts of meat that he ached to cook and consume. For the next ten years after that, he worked on finding the correct way to cut with and against the marbled grain of the meat, to use as much of it as could be used in correct proportions and with a felt sense of honoring what the word “meat” really meant. He began, on special nights, to take some of his work home with him and merge with it. For the last 10 years in the shop – during which time I was conceived and came into the world as his first-born son – my father began to travel out to the modest farms from which he sourced his meat. He deemed it the butcher’s prerogative to direct how the animals should be fatted in the weeks before slaughter. It was an auspicious time of his life, right before he came to realize that the increase in the amount of control he seemed to wield over his life and over the lives of those around him was not an incremental improvement on his lot in life, but an illusion the puncturing of which was going to be very painful indeed.
III.
By September’s third funeral, our man in Poughkeepsie began to try to take stock. John Black had been with the force for one-third of his life, detective for one-fifth. Walking up to the doors of strangers with news that was sure to rip a hole in their lives wasn’t getting easier, but it wasn’t getting harder, either. He came to see himself as a little bit of an enigma, which was far afield of what he knew himself, at heart, at be. The sense of foreboding had dissipated, sure, but increasingly he came to feel an affirmative thing going on to – like more than just familiarity at slipping into a role. Like he had been appointed to report to parents that sometimes being a stupid college kid with a penchant for experimentation was not a phase to age out of, but a fate to die into.
Sometimes a mistake was more than a lapse in judgment, even by someone whose station in life should have afforded at least that. Sometimes a mistake was the end, and it began to seem like that was so emblematic of what he knew to be true, that someone of his station – someone who had seen and heard what he had seen and heard – almost had an obligation – a calling, for shit’s sake – to continue be the bearer of the news.
IV.
As far as being a heretic goes, Sean Rafter was ahead of the curve. With a jailbird dad and a Stoly-saturated mom, he had essentially left to his own devices as soon as he graduated out of diapers. He ascended to the kind of freedom that other boys dreamed of, but would not have condoned if they felt its real heat. But he learned and he got on. By 13, he had grown tired of institutionalized culture and the bilious mass-marketed gruel that it offered, so he stopped going to school. By age 17, he had grown tired of the pre-packaged “rebellious” culture that was offered in its wake, which seemed like just a smaller tribe with more painfully acquired signals (the permanence of tattoos, the seeming permanence of withdrawal). So he stopped having the friends he had.
He kicked himself loose of context and, not knowing any better, he found that the best, most expressive thing he could do didn’t involve breaking the law, or sticking his middle finger in the air, or getting blotto for days at a time. The most militant form of resistance that he could find – and the antidote to the cold hand of fear that he felt gripping his heart at night – was actually something quite simple: red or blue or green paint, on a stretched out canvas, underwritten with belief.