CHAPTER TEN

Ring-a-Ding Ding

On New Year’s Eve he sat on his bed in his skivvies. He ignored the gluten-free eggplant-and-mushroom casserole his mother had left in the refrigerator for him, stole the key to his father’s Chevy from its peg near the back door and had made a run to Burger King. He hoped Charlie wouldn’t mind that he borrowed the family car without asking first. Regina and Charlie were ringing in the new year at a Native American powwow on the summit of Mt. Umunhum, the western peak of the Santa Clara Valley. Regina went to reconnect with Mother Earth with the help of an Aztec shaman she followed on Twitter who organized the event. Nate suspected Charlie went because he hoped to score some peyote.

Nate bobbed his head to Aerosmith singing “Dream On” through the headset clamped over his ears and sang along with Steven Tyler’s falsetto repetition of the title line while he scribbled random words and drew crude cartoons on a yellow legal pad. He ripped the page out, crumpled it and tossed the ball of paper to the floor where it landed among dozens of crumpled doodles, random words, thoughts and dreams.

“Yeah, whatever.”

He wanted to shut down his brain but it wouldn’t go quietly so he stretched out on his bed with a notepad and a pen to see if what spilled out might give him some direction but came away with nothing to show for the effort. His plan for getting his shit together didn’t stretch much beyond returning home and hunkering down until he pulled out of the funk. Tomorrow. Maybe the next day or next month, sooner or later. Whenever was soon enough.

He leaned back against the bed’s headboard and stared at the ceiling. How hard would it be to find a copy of Raquel Welch’s famous fur bikini poster from the movie One Million Years B.C.? He had tacked one to the ceiling when he was twelve and spent his teen years waking up to Raquel every morning. What a great way to start each day. What else could he do to recreate the room he’d had as a teenager? Wouldn’t that be a kick? Such good times he had back then, and once again he took inventory of his favorite points in his life he would relive if he had a chance.

“I’m not obsessed, right?”

“I’m what you might call a nostalgist. A retro-naut.”

That’s how he had once explained it to Woody. Maybe someday, if Lady Muse ever returned, he might write that into a story. He tapped the pen against his teeth. He’d call it…

He’d call it Mulligan.

He pulled the yellow pad onto his lap, still hampered by having his left arm in a sling, and he began to write.

Our hero, uh, Nate. Our hero Nate, mid-fifties, ruggedly handsome in an aging baby-boomer sort of way, is beaten down by life. No wife, no home, no job, no prospects, he survives a suicide attempt and takes refuge from the mess his life has become by moving back home with his parents, lovable but ditzy former hippies.

Stumped. Where it would go from there? Maybe it was a shitty idea; it wouldn’t be his first and hardly his worst. Either way, it wouldn’t go anywhere without a leading lady. That kind of story required a Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts-type love interest. There were only three significant leading ladies in Nate’s past. Julie, the girl who got away in high school, his wife, Valerie, the girl who crushed his heart like an empty beer can and didn’t even bother to put it in the recycle bin, and Eppie Johnson, the girl who, to Nate’s vivid imagination, altered the course of history.

Prom date Eppie.

Epiphany Alice Johnson to those who risked a serious verbal smackdown by using her given name. If Nate needed a scapegoat for why he’d failed to marry Julie Cooper and live happily ever after, it would be Eppie. But he never wanted a scapegoat. He knew it was his own damned fault. No scaping to be done, just one goat there.

Julie was the girl Nate and two-thirds of the senior class absolutely knew he was going to ask to the prom, but he wound up going with Eppie instead. He heard Julie had gone so far as to buy the gown she never got to wear and that tears ensued. Months later, she said she had forgiven him, but Nate never forgave himself.

He looked at his watch. It was an hour before midnight and he had a date, sort of. Ring in the new year. Ring-a-ding ding. Nate friended Eppie Johnson on Facebook once upon a time and checked her page occasionally, but hadn’t reached out to contact her in years. Life had become embarrassingly shitty and the thought of whining about that in public was something he didn’t want to vomit on anyone.

Eppie, on the other hand, was a blabbermouth, cheerleader, rabble-rouser and star of the social media universe. From her grandchildren’s birthdays to her recent hysterectomy, no detail was too personal to share. She hadn’t changed a bit, smart and wickedly irreverent, still living in San Jose, where she’d raised three perfectly above-average children and headed up the Human Resources Department at their old school district. Since nobody from their apathetic graduating class could generate enthusiasm for a real reunion, Eppie had taken it upon herself to create a Facebook group of former classmates on the site. Randy, George, Pattie Clarke and the Waggoner twins. Eppie had a bevy of former classmates among her legion of followers. It seemed to Nate that she had kept in touch with so many and had what he imagined was a thick, digital dossier of gossip to track the status of everyone.

Now it was New Year’s Eve and she had set up a virtual video party on Google Hangout to celebrate. By eleven thirty, he had put on a clean shirt, combed his long, gray hair and pulled it into a neat pigtail. He even shaved before he settled into his father’s leather Barcalounger with an iPad tablet on his lap, its camera pointed at his face and a tall floor lamp three feet in front of him and a quarter-angle to the left in a Speilberg-esque attempt to light the picture properly. He hadn’t spent all those years hanging around movie sets for nothing. Eight faces in individual boxes with various backgrounds filled the screen.

“Oh, my God. Evans, you scuzzy hunk. What a surprise,” Eppie said when he saw his own face pop up on the screen to join the others. Since everyone else had been in touch through Eppie’s Facebook group for a few years, they took turns catching him up. Nine classmates sharing their past thirty-plus years, mostly for his benefit. Most of them, like Eppie, still lived in San Jose, or near enough that they could have held this little party in person. Nate got a twofer from Gerry and Shirley Summers. They married right out of high school, and, still married, they wrestled with the web camera on their computer so that first one and then the other was featured on the screen, kibitzing when they were not.

For his part, Nate deflected questions with vague answers about his stalled career as a Hollywood scriptwriting legend and glossed over the years he’d spent teaching English at the community college to fill in the gaps between sales. Married? Divorced. Yeah, been there. Done that.

Teasing and banter continued through the stroke of midnight. The talk took them on frequent trips down memory lane. Nate got a glow from the journey.

Remember who had the coolest car?

Remember how Lisa Lyttle and Bobby Hurst went steady all four years at Mt. Hamilton High and everyone thought they’d be the first to get married? It turned out Bobby was totally gay.

“Bobby Hurst? Quarterback and captain of the football team Hurst?”

How about Senior Cut Day? Half the class came down with the flu and tried to get better by spending a day at the beach.

And how, if you were a pretty girl on Allen Schmidt’s good side, you could go into the Dairy Barn when he was working and get a milkshake just for a smile.

“If the boss wasn’t looking.”

Nate settled deeper into the chair. The living room hadn’t changed much, so familiar and so comfortable as if he had returned to a place that was as close to a cocoon as an adolescent could have. Nate absorbed the scene; except for the disconnect by conversing online instead of in person, he could be seventeen again. Once again, his imagination tickled him.

“What if?” it asked.

So he Frisbeed the question he had put to the geezers at Ginny’s Church of the Holy Brew weeks earlier.

“If you could go back, back to high school, and do it all over again, would you?”

The score was three for, two against, and one “What, are you kidding? It was the worst time of my life.”

“In a heartbeat,” Nate answered when they turned the question on him before his brain went into overdrive.

Holy shit! How hard might it be to recreate those days? He could do that. He would start with finding a copy of the poster of Raquel Welch to hang again on the ceiling. The more he thought about it, the funnier it got. It wasn’t a long-term solution, but recreating his youth, at his age, would keep him distracted for a few months until life stopped beating him like a redheaded stepchild. It would be a giggle and he hadn’t had a good giggle in forever.

“Okay, guys,” he said. “Something’s come up. But let’s get together soon, maybe we can throw a real party just like we used to. Eppie, I’ll be in touch.”

He flopped down on his bed with his notepad and began scribbling with more focus this time, plotting how he would recreate those days. Or, rather, how his fictional character Nate would do it. He used his own miserable life for the backstory and his dream of getting his mulligan for Fictional Nate’s motivation. The plot thickened.

He would write out a plan of action in a story form and then act it out. Script first, and then perform. It seemed more coherent than a simple “to do list” that he was likely to ignore. That was his story Mulligan, script your life before you live it. If he had done that the first time he wouldn’t have been such a screw up. It was obvious now, he was just one of those people who needs a dress rehearsal.

By God, he hadn’t felt this good in a long time. Tomorrow would be New Year’s Day and things were turning for him. Mulligan. Maybe he would get an honest-to-God usable script from it, send it to his agent or anyone else who might be interested in something like Grumpy Old Men meets Back to the Future—minus the Delorean time-travel hot rod. Well, maybe not. Who cares? If it didn’t amount to anything? Hey, there was nothing wrong with living in the past—as long as you stayed in the present.