A Calling for Charlie Barnes Read online

  “What do I need these clowns for?” he asked from the passenger seat after I climbed in and shut the door. “They’re a bunch of crooks anyway. I know this idea inside out. I don’t need a damn bank. I just need to put it online. Let people look at it for themselves. If they take to it, great. Beats going hat in hand to a bunch of fucking schoolkids.”

  By March of the new year, his doctors determined that he was strong enough to start chemotherapy, four unfortunate months behind schedule. By then, the website for Chippin’ In had gone live. Not particularly warm or attractive—in fact, profoundly ugly—and almost purely functional, it required daily upkeep and administration, which he outsourced to a company in India for a mere nineteen bucks a month. He shrugged.

  “Not exactly a life’s calling,” he concluded.

  48

  It preoccupied him: everyone had a calling. It depressed him: he had not found his. It gave him hope: he might still do so before he died.

  In the days leading up to his first round of chemo, he spoke to Barbara about it while I eavesdropped from the other room. She might have reasonably suggested that it was too late for him to find some calling in life, that he stop with the pipe dreams and focus on gaining his strength back, but she was quite solicitous of the old man and asked what a calling might look like for him. Was it spiritual in nature? Did it involve travel, or education, or activism? It was only then that he revealed he had three ideas in mind: divorce mediator (for which he already had the tagline: “A Fair Hand … Always”); a journalist of some kind, preferably on the opinion page; or a toy developer. Conceptor? He didn’t know the exact term or career trajectory. “But,” he said to Jerry the next day, “you get the idea.”

  “Why not a fourth?”

  “Tell it to me,” Charlie said. “I’m eager to hear it.”

  “General manager of the Chicago Cubs.”

  As condescending laughter rolled into Jerry’s apartment from distant locker rooms, golf clubs, and corporate perches of the imagination, Charlie recoiled.

  “If you’re just going to laugh at me, Jerry, to hell with you.”

  We had arrived at his walk-up an hour earlier, a run-down hovel on Chicago’s West Side, only to stand on the stoop for twenty minutes pressing the buzzer in vain. Jerry, asleep, or stoned, or coolly debating his desire to let us up, finally shot the bolt. I took one look at him, a big man in denim cutoffs and a soiled T-shirt, and thought, my God, even in winter!

  “Cold out here, man. What took you so long?”

  The timbre of annoyance in the old man’s voice told me we might be headed for a bruiser.

  “Buzzer’s on the fritz,” Jerry said. “Come on up.”

  The stairs were a minefield. “Watch that hole, boys,” he said, and a hole it was, passing straight through a middle stair on the first flight and into a dark abyss. Had a bowling ball done that? But no, it looked gnawed. Sawed? Who knows? I stepped over it and saw the sign in my mind’s eye: FAILED STAIRS, HALF OFF.

  As we climbed, every turn and transition to a new odor told of the distance Jerry had traveled from the one-time respectable suburban homeowner to the Dumpster-diving dropout with self-sabotaged credit. For Jerry, unemployment was the only principled stand in modern-day America, as the alternative was to work for rapists and thieves, which he would no longer do. His time was better spent diagnosing the power structures of neoliberalism via YouTube while reading deeply in his Eastern religion. The result was the radicalizing of a distinctly American monk: dropped out, plugged in, metaphysically enlightened but politically enraged. He was all tenderness one minute, all terror the next—a condition mitigated, when it wasn’t made worse, by his marijuana intake.

  Without offering me a reason, he had apologized for standing me up the night before the old man’s surgery. I’d tried to get him to join us for Christmas, to no avail. I kept encouraging him to talk to me, to unburden himself to someone who loved him unconditionally, but he was almost fifty years old and fixed in his ways, and I don’t think he gave a damn if I was in town or not. We reached the top landing and he invited us in.

  Jerry had owned at various times such diverse keepsakes as a piece of the Berlin Wall, brass bells from a Kyoto monastery, and Jim Croce’s acoustic guitar. He had owned birdcages and stone carvings of the Buddha, electric grills and full-length mirrors, matching furniture and a set of encyclopedias. Those days were over. With the exception of the kitchen table and a mattress in the corner, his apartment was bare.

  I had driven Charlie over there that day so that he could discuss dharma with his professor in Advanced Religion. To what extent was that just a pretense to see Jerry and to dispel the awful memory of the last time they were together, when they went at each other like wolves? That would have been a sour note to end on, and was perhaps why Jerry, with a regret or two of his own, had let us in.

  Presently, he said, “Why divorce mediator, Pop?”

  Naturally, the old man just shrugged. “I have a lot of experience with divorce,” he said.

  “Look, I’m impressed you finally read the thing.”

  “To be honest, Jerry, I’m not quite finished with the Gita yet.”

  “But you’re going about this all wrong. None of those things is your dharma.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because dharma isn’t what you want to do, or what you’d like to do, or what you dream of doing … it’s what you must do, Dad, without hope of personal gain. It’s duty … not bliss, or excitement, or even contentment.”

  “Well, what is that, for me?”

  “How should I know?”

  “How the hell should I?”

  “It’s your dharma!”

  “Oh, for chrissake.”

  They fell silent. Jerry rummaged around an ashtray for an old joint, lit it and inhaled. Such a profusion of pot smoke erupted from him a second later, it was like watching a steam engine leave the station. It put me in mind, for some reason, of Anna Karenina, and following that thought to its logical end, I concluded that Jerry combined the uncompromising Levin with the passionate Anna in a single soul—he was an idealist who would shake off propriety even if it meant suicide—but to the casual observer, he looked like nothing more than a drunken serf. Charlie gazed off, lost in his own little world. I sat mute and anxious. I saw the fight coming and wondered why on earth it was so hard for them to get along.

  “Tell me something, Jerry,” the old man finally said. “What is your dharma?”

  “Mine?” he gasped, before releasing more pot smoke. “What’s it look like?” he said. “To resist.”

  I suppose that was true in a way, but not, I thought, for the reasons Jerry believed. By organizing his life around Dumpster diving and YouTube and the withholding of rent from modern-day plantation owners, he was not resisting corporate America, the neoliberal crooks and the politicians who enabled their crimes. He was resisting Charlie Barnes. He was rejecting Charlie, sending back his insufficient love, his bungled attempts at parenting, and the disappointing example he set as a man in the world. It did not matter that, without a loving father inviting him to come live in the house on Vermilion Street one troubled morning in 1975, Jerry would have had no place to call home and no family to belong to. He was not especially grateful. His main concern was not becoming the old man. But a son’s revolt against his father usually ends in parody, and in Jerry’s case it had the perverse effect of delivering him more quickly to the fate he hoped to avoid. Jerry had bowed out of work, society, the hidebound world and all the exacting rules by which it operated, all in order to avoid the old man’s fate. But bowing out was a Barnes special. He was Charlie Barnes, though he was blind to it.

  “But I have news for you,” he said to us both. “It’s time I made a few changes.”

  We carry around ideas of people in our heads, fixed ideas of their character and firm predictions of how they’ll behave, what they’ll say before the hour is up and the facial expressions they’ll make that will unaccountably get
under our skin. We tell stories about them that never vary, never improve, then confirm that our ideas are accurate every time we get reacquainted. I expected Jerry to do everything I predicted he would do that day: sit back, smoke pot, spoil for a fight. Above all, take exception to everything Chuck said. Brook no opposition, provide no comfort, give no ground. He’d be in no great hurry to leave for brunch, either, which was yet another reason we were there: to take him out to eat, be a goddamn family again, grateful that the old man was still around to break bread with. Well, sure enough, that came to pass: we would not sit for our meal until noon, by which time I was peckish and annoyed. But there was also this little revelation that he needed to make some changes. He confounded me that day, Jerry completely confounded me.

  “Fact of the matter is, boys, old Jerry needs a job.”

  “A real job?” Charlie asked. “Or a job in Belgium?”

  “A proper job,” he said. He frowned, sat back, plucked at his T-shirt so that it fell more favorably over the belly. “What the hell have I been doing these past few years? What is the point of living like this?”

  He gestured around at the hovel.

  “What about the rapists and thieves?” Charlie asked.

  “A man still has to make a living.”

  “Do you mean it this time? Or are you still pulling my leg?”

  “Look around you, Pop. This is no way to live. So the world doesn’t deserve me. The world doesn’t deserve many of us. Is that a good excuse for becoming somebody else’s problem?”

  These extraordinary words stunned his audience of two. They were just so unexpected from such a hard and resolute man as Jerry. Was change really possible in one such as he? Perhaps we shouldn’t have believed him. This was, after all, the same man capable of lying about living and working in Belgium. Regardless, tears welled up in the old man’s eyes—big fat happy mothers that sprang to the surface out of nowhere. He was prone to emotional upheavals after his surgery, but it was a special relief to know that his son would have health insurance again. And all of Jerry’s spiritual drive had curdled into complaint over the years and turned him into a big grouch. Well, here was some of that original spirit again.

  “Where is this coming from, Jerry? This sudden reversal and … sudden insight?”

  “Some of it comes from Jake.”

  “From me?” I said.

  “Sure, you. Some of the things you said to me the other night at the bar—”

  We had in fact managed to get together at last, after he stood me up three times running, and though I make it a point not to drink, we drank like brothers that night, as good brothers must from time to time, and had us a heart-to-heart.

  “I heard you that night,” he said now. “I heard you loud and clear.”

  I couldn’t believe that whatever I said to him in a drunken stupor had really prompted him to make an attempt to turn his wayward life around. Did it ever work like that? More likely it was his living conditions: no working buzzer and no furnishings, and a hole in his stairs. It was diving into Dumpsters, the toll that was taking on his body. He was gaining weight, his asthma was getting worse. He dropped in to the ER as others do the post office. It was not having the insurance necessary to cover the cost of a trip to the ER. It was driving that van of his. No one in his right mind would get behind the wheel of that van. If it were me, I’d have found work just to be done with those ratty-ass denim cutoffs.

  “And I have thirty days to make these changes,” he said, “because in thirty days, I’ll be homeless.”

  “Homeless?”

  “Got the eviction notice yesterday.”

  There it was, the real cause for a return to the workplace: an eviction notice.

  “Jerry, don’t you know in a million years I could never let you go homeless?”

  “I couldn’t live in Barbara’s house, Pop.”

  “But it’s my house, too, son. It’s your father’s house, where you always have a place at the table.”

  “And a pillow to lay my head?”

  “Damn right!”

  “Sorry, Pop. Can’t do it.”

  “You’d rather be out on the street?”

  “In this weather, you bet.”

  “It’s March!”

  “Well, then, just imagine how nice summer will feel.”

  “Oh, Jerry, don’t be an ass.”

  There was a long pause. Here it comes, I thought. The bruiser. They will come to blows and end in a single bloody heap.

  But in a development more remarkable than his decision to get a job, Jerry did not escalate, or insist on having the last word. He changed the subject. I couldn’t believe it. When it first dawned on me that it was taking place, I was nearly moved to tears. He might have simply been evading further discussion of living at 105 Rust Road, but he was also showing the old man respect. There he is, I thought, the deferential, expansive, sweet-natured Jerry I’ve always most admired. That particular individual has never made an appearance in these pages.

  “It was wrong of me to lie about going to Belgium,” he said. “I had no right to remake reality for you like that. I was writing you off, Pop, with that lie, washing my hands of you … and I never want to wash my hands of you. I need you. I owe you so much. I was worried I was going to lose you. Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry we got into it like we did.”

  “No, I’m sorry, Jerry. Some of the things I said to you that day …”

  “That was my doing, Pop. You didn’t need me showing up with another damn copy of the Gita. You needed some compassion, and I had to taunt you about Jimmy Cayne.”

  “I deserved that,” Charlie said.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry I didn’t visit more often when you were in the hospital. As Jake pointed out the other night, I can be full of dumb pride, and more than a little self-absorbed. I let all these stupid resentments from childhood hang over us. What’s the point of that? Forgive me,” he said. “Let’s start over—what do you say?”

  Charlie, who loved nothing more than a second chance, shot up and threw his arms around Jerry, who hardly had time to react. He returned his father’s embrace while struggling to right himself. Finally on his feet, the chair tipped over. They hugged in the middle of that bare and happy room, that awful room.

  When they finally broke off, both wiping away tears, my father said, “You won’t have any problem finding something.”

  “I don’t know, Pop. It’s not like anyone’s hiring at the moment.”

  “You’re brilliant, Jerry. You have advanced degrees.”

  “I’ve been out of the workforce awhile now.”

  “This is America. People are always hiring somewhere.”

  We went to brunch. Before our coffee arrived, Charlie walked across the street to an ATM and withdrew what he could and came back and handed it to Jerry. He tried to take out more after our brunch was over, but his card was declined.

  “Hold it,” he said as we were dropping Jerry back at his apartment.

  He removed the Rolex that I mentioned a long time ago, on page 13 or 14, the sole authentic item in a collection of fakes, which both Jerry and I associated with him from the start of time, and offered it to Jerry in the back seat. He was done thinking about his calling for the time being, that’s for damn sure. Jerry thanked him but refused to accept it and got out of the car. On our return to Rust Road, the poor old man had to pull over. He put the car in Park on the highway shoulder and wept for his son and I could do nothing to comfort him.

  One morning six weeks later, ruined, wrecked Charlie Barnes emerged from the house on Rust Road to retrieve the newspaper. The Tribune arrived at the end of the driveway tightly sheathed in a skin of blue plastic, a bitter contrast to the cells inside him that the chemotherapy drugs had reduced to so many bloated water balloons, thin sacs of poison on fire that, when popped, poured into his veins and pooled like toxic lakes throughout his body. With every heavy step, he felt like Dead Man Sloshing. Now he sloshed unhappily down the drive toward the aforem
entioned paper, which looked about ten miles distant and which he would not have the energy to read that day … and on his slog back, there was Jerry standing against the garage door in his cut-offs and T-shirt, a single duffel bag at his feet. It was reminiscent of that morning so long ago when the boy had run away from his mother’s house into his father’s arms—or onto his porch, anyway. He had been reluctant to knock on the door that morning, too, lest he wake Charley Proffit of Peoria, Illinois. Now it was Barbara Ledeux he might wake, which made him doubly reluctant. But Barbara hadn’t kept Jerry away. He had lost his apartment. He had sold his van. He had swallowed his pride. He simply had nowhere else to go.

  49

  The reader can imagine how much Barbara enjoyed a second child showing up at her house, this one middle-aged, unemployed, and large. Jerry sang in the shower and snored like a bear. He was kind of hard to ignore. But she got no say in the matter, because anything more than a full welcome would have called into question Charlie’s claim that the house on Rust Road was his house, too. She might have owned it, might have paid its monthly mortgage, might have raised her two kids there, quietly sipping her morning coffee as I had observed her doing on the day of his surgery, but it was a sacred stipulation of their marriage contract that his children had the same right to call it home as she did, and out of deference to him, and out of love, the evil stepmother held her tongue.

  “I hope you know, I’m not drowning in debt,” Jerry said to me in passing one morning on the stairs. “I have several thousands socked away.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I’m just running a little experiment. Is it or is it not Charlie’s home, too? Will she or will she not abide one of his own flesh-and-blood children? What if I bring home a lady friend? What if that lady friend charges by the hour? So many outstanding questions, Jake. I suppose only time will tell.”