Absolute Gentleman

A writer has his obsessions, his themes, that he continually comes back to in his work. The obsessions reflect what has been eating him from the inside out for as long as he can remember. He may find inspiration in a distant and snow-covered mountain; in the big beautiful lips of his first-born son; or in the experience of riding a horse for the first time outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and kicking the horse to go, not knowing the horse has stopped simply to take a piss, and that you had been kicking him hard for a good thirty seconds, which is a long time to be kicking a horse if you think about how long thirty-seconds of irritating pain can be, but invariably, he’ll come back to the things that bother him. Too many things have been bothering me for a long time, and things aren’t really getting better. Just ask the guy I’ve been seeing every Thursday for the last two years.

So when I’m in pain, in consistent mental discomfort, and my beautiful family’s existence can do nothing to help me, I find my church in the lives of imaginary people: literary characters, maybe, or real people whose lives I know nothing of, but I still choose to impose melodrama upon them. For what? To make me feel better about my life and my pain? I don’t know.

My wife helps me in my search to find these people.

That’s another one of the new cliché’s, by the way, isolating a line like it’s supposed to completely wreck you and send you breathing sighs of pity and exasperations.

I read a good biography of J.D. Salinger called Salinger: a biography by Paul Alexander, and in the first chapter Alexander recalls the time he sat at the end of J.D. Salinger’s driveway to wait for his daily jaunt down the hill to the post office or the grocery store. Well, Salinger comes down the driveway in this anticlimactic moment, but then Alexander makes up for it by describing the exact route he took to get there. My wife would read the directions from the book verbatim, and I’d drive us there, like we were little kids in search of treasure.

We were on our way home from my mother in-law’s house, nestled (another cliché) in the most beautiful part of the country I’ve ever seen, the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Before we even thought of chasing Salinger down, as we had little guidance aside from wispy memories and the remainder-pile book I had, I was compelled to stop the car near a house peculiarly close to the edge of the main road that runs through North Danville, Vermont. We’d driven past this house about a hundred times in the nine years we’d been together, and every time I’d have more questions. I figured she’d know, because this is the kind of town where everyone knows whether or not you had corn for dinner two nights ago.

There’s a barn in the foreground that housed some horses. The tons of snow they get up there had buckled the roof, and that’s saying a lot for a Vermont-made roof. The owner, I figured, didn’t take care of it like he should have. When I asked about it, my wife said that the worst part of it all was the hoof rot, that the horses were left to walk in a small penned-in area, and the surface was so muddy, so soft, that the horses hooves sat caked in it all the time, and this, in turn, caused what is known as hoof rot. The neighbors, which could mean anyone in a ten-mile radius, apparently were all in an uproar over this and had reported this owner several times to the appropriate authorities, whoever they were.

I cared more for the people inside, though, for some reason. Usually, I might have a little bit of disdain for people like these, but when my wife told me the man who owned the house, a husband and a father of two or three adult children, had terminal cancer, things changed. It’s so easy for me to make assumptions about people I don’t know, or people I do know, but haven’t seen in a while.

He has not emailed back in a long time, therefore, he must hate me.

No one has praised my work all year, so, therefore, they must want to fire me.

That house is in severe disrepair, a blue tarp covers a hole in the side of the house, and look: one of them drives a school bus for a living; therefore, I must be far superior to them.

You would think I’d know better, especially in growing up the way I did, what with the food stamps and the pea soup, and the crusty bread, and the hard government cheese…

And my father reminding me constantly, as we drove past nice houses on Long Island to get to Roosevelt Field to set up our flea market booth, that it was never about the outside of the house but who was inside.

But I’m angry. I’ve always been angry about the way things were for me when I trudged through the most formative years of my social and emotional development being figuratively kicked along.

I am not angry at rich people. I have no bitterness toward the privileged few. My anger seems to be with those who are down, the ones who looked like I did, with the hair sticking up and the dirt under the fingernails. I want them to get the fuck up and fight for themselves. I’m not even angry at them.

I’m angry with me.

My wife scampered up the woods across the road from this house to snap these photos two years ago. I told her I wanted to write about them, but I really didn’t have any idea what I was going to do with them. I had no idea, at this point, that we would find our way to J.D. Salinger’s house the same day.

There was a moment during my wife’s reconnaissance mission when I thought they were looking out their windows, that he might be standing at a window, stricken with cancer and resigned to the fact that it was probably another neighbor gathering evidence against him.

I don’t really know how to tell if a horse is being mistreated. In the old cartoons I used to watch a broken down horse had a concave back. This horse didn’t look too miserable to me, but I imagine the back of his legs could have been treated a little better.

I heard the cancer-stricken man had three grown kids, two sons and a daughter. I remember he had kids, because the story that followed that up was that they were doing well for themselves, that they were holding down regular jobs and making regular money.

My father has never had a nice car in his life. My brothers and I have always had better cars than he did because that’s the way my dad wanted it. It wasn’t something he ever mentioned, either. My brothers and I talked about it all the time.

I imagine him in his deathbed, home hospice down to their last day or two, because they are keen to such things, and set up in that top window so he can see his horses and he can see us. That one brown horse is looking right at my wife as she takes the picture, and if you scroll up to see the other picture this horse is in, he’s turned the other way and looking right at her.

What bothers me the most about this is the way this man could have felt as he was dying. He’s gone now, died in his 50s, I think, and he left his house like this when he died. That bothers me for some reason because if I knew I was dying and this was the way I was leaving things for my family, I’d feel like I completely failed in my duty as a man. I’m not saying it’s a rational way to think, but I know how disgusted my father was with himself when things got really bad for us. I remember coming out of the bathroom shower at fourteen and complaining to my parents that I had to wash my hair with a bar of soap. My father yelled at us for a lot of things, but he didn’t say a thing at that moment.

The horses aren’t there today. The weeds are all overgrown where they used to walk, so I imagine they sold them off and got a few dollars for them. I’m imagining that the family got rid of the horses like people get rid of boxes of clothes of those who have passed out of their lives. Maybe it was the money, that they could get a few thousand dollars for them. If it was the money, though, why didn’t they sell them off to repair the house a little? Maybe they kept the horses to spite the neighbors. Perhaps with all the complaining, some of the proper authorities paid them a visit, inspected the horses, and found that they were happy.