2002-11-26 - 11:53 a.m.
Johnny Part II
In the weeks and months following his encounter with the soup lady, Johnny�s life took a vitriolic turn. His left eyelid inexplicably began to spasm. Coffee made him feel tired. His favorite wool sweater � the one given him by Galway Molly, the whiskey princess � developed a hole in the left sleeve that he decided he couldn�t fix; it died a pathetic death in the garbage can (Johnny did not throw rose petals in the dumpster on its behalf). Two women agreed to go to dinner with him, and though he could have easily settled down with either, he thought, neither one noticed. Second dates did not follow, leaving Johnny to spend his evenings alone in a neighborhood pub, getting drunk with the balding bartender, or taking long walks in his neighborhood, where he never noticed the last names on the mailbox.
The traffic, the free market economy, the noisy neighbors and their late night screaming, even moving his fingertips up and down onto his crumb-covered computer keyboard at work started to make Johnny restless. Piles of leaves on the ground appeared like lids hiding dangerous traps that he might fall into and never emerge from. He worried about tripping on the curbside and landing face-first, breaking his front teeth.
One night in haste, he grew frustrated with the one-pound bag of processed cane sugar that he bought in another city, in another year. It seemed the bag would never empty, so he threw it away half-full. Later on, it would join the wool sweater he sorely missed, and the feelings for Galway Molly that went with it, at the dump on Highway 68.
Tossing the sugar struck him as sensible; it seemed he always had a cavity brewing in his mouth. Yet in past years, Johnny would have never done something so rash. He would have held onto the sack for years until it was gone, or at least sped up the process by letting some sugar spill vicariously onto the floor. But never a wholesale disposal � it was too dramatic.
Though his work did not suffer, Johnny found it harder each day to lock himself up in the law library, under the fluorescent lights, and comb through enormous tomes searching for technicalities. There were enough technicalities in his own life to occupy him. At the base level, he was tired of being himself, and wished he could be someone else for a while � maybe the woman with the peppy Jack Russell terrier who walked past his window each morning, or his boss, who was hot-tempered and demanding but regardless had gotten a woman to marry him. How did these people around him own dogs, get married, feel at peace with the world? How did they do it?
�How can I get a dog to marry me, Sammy?� Johnny asked his bartender-therapist one night.
"What's that, Johnny?"
"Oh, uh ... I want to get married. But not to a dog -- to a woman." He immediately knew the statement was corny and poorly phrased, but he didn�t care anymore about keeping up what was left of his �appearances.� Maybe he was just tired of trying so hard to do everything correctly, even though the fear of failure exhausted him even more.
�Geez, Johnny, I dunno,� said the bartender, whose name was Sam. �Look, I see you coming into this place and you talk all right to the other customers, but you always look so damned tired you make me want to throw this wine bottle right on the ground.� And with that, he did. The sound of shattering glass startled many who were sitting at the bar, but none more than Johnny, whose recent troubles also included a pronounced skittishness that sometimes made him look like a kangaroo.
Sam laughed loudly. �See, nobody got hurt, except that poor bottle.�
�Well, someone could have dranken that wine!� Johnny responded, a little put off by the violence. �I probably could've.�
�Well, you can�t save everything, Johnny. Sometimes you can�t even save yourself. But you should try. You really should try.�
�You�re right,� Johnny said wearily. �But the problem is, I don�t know how to. I just look around me and become overwhelmed.�
�Overwhelmed? What for? You�re not a bad-looking guy. You�re not balding, at least not yet. And you�re good with jokes. You have a job. I don�t see what the problem is, except whatever you�re head is doing to make you feel this way. You�re not one of these depressives, are you?�
Johnny thought a moment about the bottle of Zoloft he had once owned. It made him sick to his stomach, so he had to stop taking it or else risk an embarrassing accident on the bus to work. For a few years the bottle of pills sat on his mantle, the head of his little fox-shaped pencil sharpener buried inside it (the fox was made in China and wore a forlorn expression). �Nah, I�m not depressed. Not like most people are.
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Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse. � Lily Tomlin |
