Chapter 5

 

A DAY IN THE LIFE . . .

 

 

The alarm never rang.  Larry opened his eyes and looked at the clock on his VCR.  Nine-oh-two.  He nearly leapt out of bed and remembered it was Saturday.  He lay back down and tried to return to sleep.  It wasn’t going to happen.  He looked at the glow of the TV.  “What the hell was I watching,” he said a bit louder than he wanted to as he watched two rubber encased fisherman snag what seemed to be a two-foot trout.  He picked up the remote and began flipping through the channels.  It was the normal Saturday morning fair.  A few cartoons, some sports pre-game show, a teen version of a newsmagazine.  He stopped at an infomercial showing a pan that looked like a wok but was steaming lobster over an open flame.  He couldn’t believe that people actually bought the crap they sold on these shows and decided he’d change the channel as soon as they showed how little they were charging for the device and what ‘freebies’ came along with it.  The phone rang.  He muted the TV, practiced his helloes, and picked it up.  It was the office, who else.  He smiled as he was informed of the most recent major catastrophe only he could prevent.  “Just have them use the Men’s room until the plumber gets there.  I don’t know, have someone stand outside the door.”  Damn, he’d missed the price.  He flicked off the TV and closed his eyes.

 

The rest of the week had been fairly uneventful.  Geri had called about ten-thirty to let him know that she was home and that her mother was fine.  Still shaken, but fine.  “I’m really sorry about missing our date (alright, she said ‘the movie’, but he remembered it as ‘our date’).  I appreciate your understanding.”

 

“That’s okay.  Maybe next week.”  He was looking at the rose.

 

“Sure, see ya tomorrow.”  Click.  Larry listened to the dial tone for a few seconds before finally replacing the phone in its cradle.

 

An all-day client meeting kept Larry’s mind occupied for most of Wednesday.  He was horrible at these things.  He sat like a lump, cleared his throat every time he spoke, which amounted to about three times, and laughed politely at the appropriate moments.  Mark had given up commenting to Larry about his behavior.  It had been over a year since Larry had heard, “What is it with you?  You’re great on the phone and freeze up in person.”  There was never an explanation.  This was one attribute Larry was unable to figure out about himself.  He was so uncomfortable off his home turf, which, oddly enough, was his office, not his apartment.  During lunch was the only time Larry let his mind drift to thoughts of Geri.  Twice Mark had to snap him back into the conversation.

 

The rides home were quiet.  Geri had planned a month ago to take some time off to go to Vegas with friends.  This left Larry without a passenger or pleasant conversation.  The rain had continued through the week so his attention had to be more focused while driving.  He couldn’t provide the necessary concentration to hold a conversation with himself.

 

As he lay in bed, he tried to review the plans of the day.  His mind kept drifting back to that new cooking device and wondering both what he could use it for and how much it would cost him.  He turned the TV on again but it was after nine-thirty and the new breast-enhancement product was being displayed.  Larry laughed.  He thought, again, about ordering them and gluing them to a wall in his bathroom.  “Just for fun,” he once told Vinnie.

 

“Time to get up, time to get up.  You look kind of drowsy; in fact you look lousy.”  He sang the words to himself but could almost hear the voice of his father.  How many Saturdays was Larry greeted with that little ditty in the morning?  He turned off the TV and got out of bed.

 

The trek to the kitchen was not an easy one.  He staggered over a shirt, maneuvered around a pair of pants, and nearly tripped over his shoes sitting in front of the chair.  He picked up the half filled soda bottle from the table, drank what was left in one swallow, and tossed it in the trashcan next to the refrigerator.  He looked back to peruse the living room.  “Maybe I should clean this place today,” he said as he saw two days worth of junk mail spread across the couch.  “Yeah, right.”  He turned and opened the freezer.  He retrieved a small bag of ground, vanilla (artificially flavored) coffee.  He measured out an exact tablespoon of coffee into the filter of the one-cup-only coffee maker his mom had sent him.  He covered the coffee with sugar and shook a little more coffee from the bag.  He poured the appropriate amount of water into the basin of the contraption and turned it on.  Almost immediately he could hear the sound of the water dripping through.  He returned the coffee to its rightful place in the nearly vacant freezer.  He considered filling the empty ice-cube trays on the bottom shelf of the freezer for just a moment and then closed the door.

 

Now for the most difficult decision he would have to make today.  He opened a cabinet that was chock full of mugs.  His most recent count was one hundred and fifty, but that was just a guess.  He had counted the front row of the bottom shelf and multiplied it by the number of mugs deep the cabinet was.  This times three, the number of shelves, and added half that many for the mugs that were double stacked.  His time at home was never as precious as at the office.  He selected an oddly shaped mug featuring the proclamation, “I LIKE YOU, YOU’RE WEIRD”, from the middle shelf.  It had been a Valentine’s Day present from one of his ex-girlfriends.  At the time he received the gift, it was filled with cinnamon hearts and was attached to a “BEST BUDS” balloon by a black and white ribbon.  “How appropriate,” Larry had thought at the time.  The hearts were long gone and the balloon, no longer filled with helium, resided somewhere in the back of his bedroom closet.

 

Larry had started his fascination with mugs around the time he had moved to California.  He was always going to one tourist trap or another (“I love this shit,” he had told his companions, referring to the numerous attractions they would go to when visiting him) and felt a mug was the souvenir of choice.  He rarely wore hats and T-shirts faded over time.  “Plus, they’re functional.”  Who was he really trying to convince?  Every time a member of his staff went some place he would wish them well and, “bring me a mug.”  Lori, whose vice was baseball caps, would complain about what a bitch mugs were to pack and would, on occasion, bring him photographs of the mugs she’d seen.

 

The red light on the coffee maker went out.  It was done.  Larry covered the bottom of the mug with creamer, shook in what may have been a teaspoon and a half of sugar, and poured the coffee on top.  He picked up the spoon that was nearly pasted to a napkin from last week’s coffee, and stirred the mixture.  He sipped.  “Mmm, just right.”  He carefully placed he spoon back on the napkin, returned to the living room, and sat.

 

Without looking, he felt through the myriad of remote controls on the table next to him and pressed a button on one of them.  The TV was on.  He sipped at his coffee.  After running through all the channels twice, Larry was convinced that there really was nothing on.  He reached for another remote, turned on the middle VCR, and rewound the tape.  “Let’s see what I taped this week.”

 

Larry sat through almost six hours of the usual fodder he recorded each week.  Three sitcoms (two of which he had been watching while recording them), a TV movie that ripped off an old British vampire film, and the latest installment of a science fiction show he only kind of liked, but felt he needed every episode for posterity.  Unfortunately he hadn’t seen the show in five months; fortunately it took him three minutes to figure out what he had missed.  Or is that the other way around?

 

He fast-forwarded through most of the commercials.  He had this odd habit when he took a break, most commonly to make another cup of coffee or to retire to the bathroom, an obvious necessity.  He would forward through the commercials and then stop the tape, rather than use them for what they had been intended.  Every so often he would pick up a pile of mail, leaf through it, and toss it back onto the couch for later disposal.  “I’ve really got to clean this place up,” he would reiterate every time his toss was short, landing the mail on the floor in front of the couch.  At the end of the science fiction show he checked the counter and saw that he still had just over an hour of tape left.  He rewound the tape and noted ‘1:00’ on the spine of what he hoped was the right box. 

 

As the tape rewound he once again flipped through the channels.  And once again there was nothing on.  Sixty-seven channels of garbage.  He watched the preview channel for ten minutes until it lost its appeal.  Larry walked over to what three days ago was a neat stack of videotapes, but now appeared more like a small hill.  He dug into it for a favorite movie he hadn’t seen in four years.  After swapping the tapes, he started the VCR and returned to his chair.  He got comfortable during the prerequisite FBI warning, making sure to read it in its entirety (you can never be too careful).  Half way through the credits, he stopped the tape, bored.  He watched the preview channel for a few more minutes then started the tape again.  As the ‘Directed by’ credits faded out, he once again stopped the tape.  “This isn’t gonna work.”  He turned off the VCR, then the TV and headed into the bathroom to take a shower.  Larry knew that there was only one thing he could do to stop his boredom.  He needed to go buy some CD’s and maybe another movie or two.

 

While showering, he began to think about Geri.  “I hope she’s having a good time.  I hope she remembers to get me a mug.”  He started laughing as he rinsed shampoo from his hair.

 

Walking into the living room and zipping up his pants (“Am I losing weight?”), Larry saw the pile of videotapes in the corner.  He remembered something.  He took his wallet out of the pants he had worn yesterday, dropped the pants back on the floor and found one of his credit cards.  Sitting on the chair, he dialed the number that was on the back.  “I should write this down someday,” he thought.  “If this thing is stolen, I won’t have the number.”

 

The voice of an unattractive, fifty-year-old, mechanical woman spoke apathetically to him.  For five minutes she talked him through a maze of options in order for him to ascertain the amount of money he had available for purchasing a new videotape shelf.  “Next month,” he thought as he hung up the phone and replaced the card in his wallet.  He put the wallet into his back, left pocket and picked up the pair of pants that lay on the floor.  What must have been six dollars in change dropped to the floor.  He picked up the coins and placed them in his back, right pocket.  He removed his keys and put them in his right front, passenger-side, pocket.  Finally a handful of crumpled bills of various denominations was pushed into his driver-side pocket.  He grabbed his watch from the top of the television and put it on, checking the time.  As he sat down, he looked at his watch again, forgetting what he had seen the first time.  He pulled on his shoes; still laced from the last hundred times he wore them (“Have I ever untied these?), stood up and headed out the door.  As he heard the door close and lock behind him he checked his pocket to make sure he had his keys.

 

It was a beautiful day and Larry had already wasted half of it.  One of the things he really liked about living in southern California was the day after it rained.  The skies were blue and, other than a few wisps of white high up, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  The air had an aroma that Larry could only equate with the smell of his newly laundered clothes when he was a kid.  “The top definitely goes down today,” Larry said to himself as he approached the car.  As he was about to unlatch the hooks that held the roof in place Larry decided on another course of action.  He took an empty plastic grocery bag from the back seat and filled it with the paper and tapes that had been accumulating.  He popped open the trunk and threw the bag in.  As he was closing the trunk, he caught a glimpse of a box that seemed out of place.  It almost looked like it belonged in his office.  Then he remembered how it got there and made a mental note to bring it upstairs, one of these days.

 

Larry drove to the nearest car wash he knew about.  It was packed.  This did not come as a surprise; everyone got their car washed after it rained.  Shit, out here, everyone got their car washed if the sun came up.  He debated the necessity and then pulled into the lot.

 

Forty-five minutes later, Larry’s car shined in the sunlight.  He tipped the guy who had rubbed it down and thanked him.  The man smiled vacantly as Larry drove to an adjacent parking lot and stopped.  It took him only two minutes to get the top down.  He stepped back and looked at the vehicle.  “Cool.”

 

Larry headed to the record store.  It wasn’t really a record store, he thought to himself.  This place hasn’t sold a record in years.  He briefly remembered trying to explain what a ‘45’ was to one of the younger members of his staff.  “Oh, right,” she had responded when he likened it to a CD single.  Just before he pulled into the parking lot, he saw a sign for the freeway.

 

“What the hell.”  He went straight through the light, missing his turn.  It took him a few seconds to turn off his turn signal and looked in the rearview mirror at the car behind him, slightly embarrassed.  At the next light, Larry took the opportunity to fish through the glove compartment for a particular tape.  It was a conglomeration of pop songs from the seventies and eighties that Larry felt had to be played at top volume.  He looked at the label that was beginning to come off the tape and saw the word ‘Freeway’ in his indistinguishable scrawl.  “This is it.”  He popped the tape into the stereo and aimed the car for the highway, speakers blaring.

 

 

An hour later, Larry was driving up the coast.  Driving up or driving down, it often confused him.  For most of his life, Larry lived on the East Coast.  He knew he had to travel east to get to the ocean and when he drove north, the ocean was on his right.  He knew that the Pacific was west and that driving north meant that the ocean would be on his left, but it was still an adjustment he had to make.  He realized this mostly when he was giving directions.  He’d have to repeat to himself, “ocean west, ocean west.”  He saw the water as he looked to his left.  Yes, he was driving up the coast.

 

Larry had no destination in mind when he had passed the record store.  He just new he needed to drive.  It cleared his head.  He was void of thoughts of cleaning, thoughts of work, thoughts of Geri.  He just drove and listened to his tape, which had just begun its second cycle.  The sun was nearing the horizon.  An odd image struck this easterner as he saw the reflection on the water.  Though it had started getting cooler as day started to turn to night, Larry didn’t stop to replace the top.  He rolled up the windows and put on the heater.  This was a trick he had taught himself when it used to take twenty minutes to put the top on his old car.

 

He was alone, swallowed up by the scenery, not a care in the world.  The music played on.

 

About a mile further up the road Larry spotted a convenience store and decided to get something to drink.  It was the first sign of civilization he had seen for awhile, apart from a passing car every so often, and his solitude began to dissolve.  He started to think about where he was, what time it was, whatever happened with the Women’s room at work, and Geri.  He pulled into the convenience store’s parking lot, turned off the engine, and sat.  “I wonder what she’s doing right now,” he thought.  Probably having a great time.  “I wonder if she ever thinks about me.”  This was a typical thought of Larry’s.  Not just with Geri, but with every female he had ever been interested in.  Even during the two years of his engagement he wondered what Joanna was thinking about when they were apart.  The image of an empty room once set up for a wedding ceremony, now oddly vacant, entered his mind.

 

Larry and Joanna had never reached that stage.  It was well over before they even considered setting a date.  She was supposed to join him in California.  He’d get settled in, start working, and then she’d follow.  He knew, however, that was never her plan.  She’d let him get out there, start a new life, and then fade into the background.  He remembered thinking as he boarded the plane if she would even bother letting him know.  There was a part of him that imagined the phone calls would just stop one day.  He could picture letters he had sent returned to him, “No Such Addressee.” 

 

She was more civil than that.  She broke it off with a phone call.  Granted, she called him at work, interrupting a meeting.  But she had called.  “I can’t leave my family.  I’m really sorry,” were her last words that day.  She couldn’t leave Mommy was more the case.  Never before had a woman he wasn’t interested had such an influence on his life.  But it was for the best, he had guessed.  Larry had to laugh when he received another phone call a week later, again at work.  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”  He could hear the tears.  He could also hear that she was quite drunk.  “You were so good to me and look what I’ve done to you.”  This call, he knew, wasn’t scripted like the first.  This was the Joanna he had seen only a few times; when they were alone together, out of the matriarchal sphere of influence.

 

It was all for the best, his mom told him a few years later.  It had taken that long before Larry could discuss it with his family.  After the initial phone call, he had sat down and written letters to each member of his family, telling them the news.  Each letter had ended with the same request, “It’s over, it’s behind me, I’d rather not discuss it anymore.”

 

“You probably would have ended up divorced, anyway,” Mom again.  It wasn’t bitterness; it was love. 

 

And so here Larry sat, once again wondering if he was ever in Geri’s thoughts.  And, of course, the ever popular, “Does she feel anything for me?”  He got out of the car to get something to drink.

 

Though it had only been a few minutes since Larry had entered the store, it had gotten fairly dark when he returned to the car.  And cooler.  He looked at his topless car, glanced at his watch, and thought about the long ride home.  In five minute the top was back in place and he was on his way.  As soon as he got on the road, he turned off the stereo.  The feeling he had on his way up the coast was gone.  Now his thoughts were tuned to what he had to do when he got into the office on Monday.  He cursed himself as he remembered the proposal that he had let sit on his desk for the past week.  He considered stopping at work on his way home to pick up his notes so he could finish it over the weekend.  The traffic he merged into on the freeway convinced him differently.  “I’ll just have Stacy handle the meeting and take care of the schedule, close my door, and do it.”  He quickly realized how selfish that would be and made plans to go in tomorrow.  It’s quiet on Sundays, no phone calls.

 

Though it only took an hour to get home, it seemed like an eternity.  He tried to clear his head on the drive, he even turned on the radio a few times to an oldies station he liked, but it didn’t work.  The events of the past week, the past year, his life, kept playing in his head.  When he finally opened the door to his apartment, it was seven-thirty.  “Now what am I going to do?”  As if an unknown force controlled his actions, the response came quickly as he kicked off his shoes, stripped off his pants, and dropped in his chair.  The TV was on instantly.

 

Larry, once again, flipped through the channels.  He happened upon a sitcom from the mid-eighties.  It was one of the great mysteries of the universe.  He had only seen the show once before it was cancelled, yet every time he caught it in reruns, it was the same episode.  Larry was sure there were more episodes than this one, after all no network in their right mind would buy a show that only had one.  He smiled and thought of all the TV he had watched during the eighties.  Maybe his initial conjecture wasn’t far from the truth.

 

There was a slight pain in his stomach and Larry heard it grumble, loudly.  He hadn’t realized it before, but he hadn’t eaten anything all day.  He went to the refrigerator and took in its emptiness.  “Not even a slice of provolone.”  He began to think of his options.  He could go to the store and buy something or stop at a fast food place.  Neither option sounded very good.  If he went to the store, it meant he might actually have to cook.  Fast food was easier however, in either case he would have to get dressed.  Now if he ordered something, a pizza for example, he would only have to pull on a pair of sweats when the delivery guy came to the door.   Another problem.  Though more in line with his laziness, he couldn’t eat a whole pizza.  “Breakfast!”  Here was the obvious answer.  He went back to his chair and began thumbing through the phone book, which was conveniently located under the table with the remotes.  After finding the number for the “restaurant nearest you” he picked up the phone.  “But I don’t want pizza.”  He dropped the phone on his lap, the book on the floor and returned to watching TV.

 

“What a stereotype I’ve become,” Larry thought as he sat in his chair, dressed only in a T-shirt and boxer shorts.  “All I need is a cigar and a beer and . . .” He began to scratch himself.  The phone rang.  He muted the TV and lifted the handset to his ear.  “What’s the crisis now?” he thought to himself.  “Run out of toilet paper.”

 

“Whatcha doing?”  It was Geri.

 

“Uh, nothing,” he quickly removed his hand from the source of the itch.  His face flushed.  “Hey,” gaining his composure, “how’s Vegas?”

 

“How was Vegas is more like it.  I just got home.”

 

“I thought you were staying till Monday.”  He was now back in control.  Well as much control as he could muster while speaking to her.

 

“Yeah, well, I almost left last night.  My roommate lost all her money Thursday and she’s been moping around ever since.  It just wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be.”

 

“I’m sorry to hear that.”  And he swore he’d never lie to her.

 

“So now I’m home.”  There was an awkward pause.

 

“How’s your mom?”

 

“She’s doing good.  I stopped to see her on the way here.  She told me to say hello.”

 

The pain in his stomach wasn’t from hunger this time.  “Her mother knows about me?”  He didn’t know what to say.  “Well, uh, Hi,” he improvised.

 

“So, um, listen, did you still want to see that movie?”  Did he hear a slight shake in her voice?

 

“Yeah, sure,” he reached for a newspaper.  “I was thinking Wednesday after work.  You know how Mondays tend to be crazy, and well you don’t usually work on Tuesdays, so I thought Wednesday would make sense,” he knew he was beginning to babble.  “It’s really up to you, I have a fairly open schedule.  I mean if you want to wait till Thursday that would be . . .”

 

“No,” she cut him off.  “I mean do you want to go tonight?”