THE ARBITRARY SCHEMES OF NAMING HUMANS

My mother named me after a bar of soap. When people ask, though, I lie. I tell them of a conception that took place somewhere on the Grand Strand. Sometimes I go for how it’s short for Roller Coaster. Most times when people ask my name, I get back, “Cost?” or “Cotes?” or “Coze?” and usually I plain say, “Yeah.”

I’ve never known my biological father, and unless I take some kind of DNA test and shove it in a database, I’ll never know him. My mother has it narrowed down to two or three men from her past. I’m not sure why she brought this up between my ages of about twelve and now—twenty years later—but she said, “I always took a shower afterwards with Coast soap, hoping to wash everything away so I wouldn’t get pregnant. My college roommate freshman year told me it worked. It didn’t. Maybe I should’ve been using Irish Spring, or Dial.”

Thanks, Mom. Sorry you dropped out of school.

I’m no authority in the realm of psychology, but the whole reason I never give a hundred percent—I’ve never been known to enter any situation full throttle, from jobs to relationships—might link back to my subconsciously wanting to live up to my name. Dial would’ve been a great name, I’ve always thought, but I’d’ve ended up working for the telephone company. Lava? Volcanologist. Dove would’ve made me either an ornithologist or pacifist activist, I suppose. Don’t get me started on Safeguard or Ivory. Lever. Zest.

I thought of all this, as I do about daily, while a nice woman named Summer Buck questioned me about my weak points, like they always do on job interviews. This occurred at a supervised group home for adult men suffering a variety of mental illnesses, situated in the middle of a subdivision, the two of us seated in the den of a five-bedroom place with a basement apartment. About six squeeze-top bottles of hand sanitizer surrounded us, on the end tables, on the coffee table, one right on the floor. Summer lived downstairs full-time. She looked like a cross between Queen Nefertiti and, I don’t know, young Lena Horne. I waited for her to belt out “Stormy Weather,” probably, but then got hung up wondering if her mother named her after Summer’s Eve, the douche that my own college roommate told me prevented unwanted pregnancies. I don’t know how many dates I went on, hopeful, a cardboard box of douche beneath the driver’s seat.

Ten years earlier I got pulled over for drunk driving—I wasn’t drunk, I passed both the roadside test and the breathalyzer when the rogue cop brought me in to the county jail. The cop parked across from a bar and waited. Me, I’d gone in there to buy some weed from a friend who never showed up. Anyway, I got pulled, I didn’t have any pot on me, I feared nothing, and the cop—this was a normal redneck sheriff’s deputy who looked, when I think back, a whole lot like any of those white supremacists who make the news lately, marching around with guns at various state capitol buildings—asked if he could search the car. I said, “Sure thing, Officer.”

If it matters, I drove a Subaru BRAT, which looked like a shortened El Camino. The car’s back bed wasn’t but about four feet in length, so to have sex in it would’ve meant both parties being cognizant of, and immersed in, the Kama Sutra. Women who date men named after bars of soap aren’t, I’ve found, of that ilk.

The deputy found the douche beneath my seat and pulled it out. He asked me if I were gay, for some reason. He asked me why I didn’t wear a dress. “This one them new highs you college boys discovered?” He shone his flashlight on the side of the box that offered up Ingredients. He said, “Vinegar something you college boys get into these days?”

On and on. I ended up blowing a zero. He took me back to my car, visibly perturbed, and took off before I had my second foot planted roadside there next to my car. Somewhere in all of this I misplaced my Summer’s Eve, and I assume, to this day, it’s in the evidence room at the Hampton County jail.

“Do you have an answer?” Summer asked me. I don’t know how long I’d zoned out. “What’s your greatest weakness?”

Look, this was for a job working third shift, taking care of men above the age of eighteen. I imagined that the residents had no viable caregivers in their lives. You know what I needed for qualifications? How to punch 911 in case of an emergency, how to dole out meds, and how to cook eggs and grits in the morning before the first-shift workers came in and took these men off on a short bus to their day jobs at a state park with horse stalls, mucking them or whatever, among other activities. The job I applied for meant mostly sending the men back to their rooms should they start roaming around between SportsCenter and the Today Show, then doing breakfast. I’d have a partner. Some kind of Lutheran do-gooder association ran this entire operation. I’d have time to read, or do crosswords, or consider my past foibles, or contemplate suicide, or look for a different job.

“I hate that question,” I said to Ms. Buck. It’s as if I wanted to not get hired. It’d happened in the past, a lot. “No offense, but, really, what’s the answer? If I tell you the truth, it’ll nix my chance at this job. If I lie, like everyone else, I’m going to say, ‘My weakness is that I care too much about human beings,’ or ‘My greatest downfall happens to be that I work so hard I don’t have time to sleep.’ I’m sorry, Ms. Buck. I just don’t have an answer for that question.”

She smiled. She looked down at her sheet of questions. “I know what you’re saying, Coast. You wouldn’t believe, over the years, the answers I’ve gotten. Hell, I could’ve quizzed the pope and he wouldn’t have compared, in terms of holiness and indefatigability.”

Indefatigability! Who uses that word in everyday conversation? I said, “Well. I guess my weakness is, I’ve never been able to keep a job for more than a couple years,” like an idiot. I said, “My own mother reminds me daily that I ruined her life. So that’s one of my weaknesses, I guess. I ruin people’s lives.”

Summer Buck laughed. She said, “I got a brother named Buck. Buck Buck. He said his life was ruined by my father insisting on that name, just in case Buck grew up with a stutter.”

I said, “Buck Buck” just to try it out in my mouth. “Buck-buck, buck-buck. Or a chicken farmer, calling his flock,” I said.

She pulled her head back and smiled. She said, “I tell you what, I hold some grievances about my own name. Do I look like some kind of white girl in a teen movie?”

I didn’t know how to respond. What was the politically correct, racially sensitive thing to say? If I said no, she might come back asking me if I thought she wasn’t good enough to be a white girl character in a movie. If I said yes, she might think I had vision problems. I said, “I’ve never seen a movie.”

Summer Buck led me to the kitchen and said, “The boys will be back in about an hour. You need to meet them. I want to make sure you’re comfortable in their presence, and they with you. Meanwhile, show me that you know how to make breakfast. These guys aren’t like the character in Rain Man. You won’t be dealing with men who can count cards, or toothpicks spilled on the floor. A couple of them either can’t talk, really, or choose not to do so.”

I noticed hand sanitizer bottles on the kitchen counter, atop the refrigerator, next to the backsplash on the stove, on both sides of the sink.

I graduated college at the age of twenty-two with a useless degree in Film Studies. I probably could’ve gone to graduate school had I not made pretty much flat Cs, the occasional B, that one A in, of all things, Shakespeare. Before announcing my major, maybe I should’ve gone to a doctor to see if I suffered from anything on par with narcolepsy. Oh, I can talk about the first and last ten minutes of about every movie ever made, but my desk ended up with an indentation of my face from the hour, hour-and-a-half in between. As for Rain Man, I didn’t know what she meant. Me, I could only talk about a car being delivered via crane during the opening credits, then Raymond Babbitt getting on a train to go back to where he belonged.

I said, “Yeah.” I opened the refrigerator. “How’s about an omelet, Ms. Buck?” I said, “Toad in the Hole. Scrambled. Is there a waffle iron here?”

She shook her head. “Over the years we’ve had residents who suffered from self-inflicted injury syndrome. You’ll notice the glass-topped stove. Sometimes one of the boys might see a red-hot eye and place their hands on it.”

I wasn’t sure if she should keep calling them “boys.” I wondered if it was a test. I said, “Well, then I can’t promise you a perfect entrée. Normally I cook on either a gas Wolfe stove, or a Viking. They’re my favorite. I’m a very good cook.”

Then I squirted hand sanitizer into my palms, thinking it might be another test. Summer Buck said, “We try to tell the boys not to stick their hands down their pants front or back, or pick their noses, and then touch us.”

I realized that maybe I needed to see a doctor to test me for some other kind of syndrome besides narcolepsy. I understood that my voice changed to that of Dustin Hoffmann’s character.

Summer sat down at the kitchen table, a normal wooden, rounded table without sharp edges. She still held my resumé. “We received about a hundred applications for this job, Coast. Most everyone had a degree in either Special Education or Psychology. I called you in just because I thought you might be an interesting person to meet. I mean, well, also to take the job.”

I couldn’t find any butter in the refrigerator. I said, “Do you have any butter or margarine?”

Summer left the room, then came back with a half stick of Land-O-Lakes. She said, “I’m sorry. No, I guess we don’t. One of our boys here—well, all of them—masturbates frequently. We ask that they be inconspicuous about it. Of course they don’t know that word, but we try to tell them go do things beneath the sheets, you know. Anyway, I’ve worked here for three years and have found butter, Wesson Oil, toothpaste, and soap bars underneath the sheets of Mr. Mike. He’s our oldest client and only speaks in German. I forget his background. You’ll meet him. It’ll sound like he just wants to say the number nine, but he’s actually, we figured out, saying no in German.”

Summer placed the butter back in the refrigerator, which I thought wasn’t the correct thing to do. But I said nothing. Well, no, I said, “Hair, Butter,” but in my mind I meant Herr Butter.

Summer said, “These are no-stick pans anyway.” She said, “Tell me about these other jobs you had. I can’t imagine you’re making them up.”

I got hung up on her using the word “inconspicuous.” Indefatigable and inconspicuous. I said, “Well.”

She said, “With your degree in Film Studies, have you been planning on making a movie?”

The true answer to that was no. Hell, I didn’t even plan on writing reviews. I guess, down the line, I thought I might be able to work for some kind of advertising or video firm that specialized in PSAs, if there was such a place in the Carolinas. I said, “Yeah, I’ve been taking kind of blue-collar jobs while working on a screenplay, you know, getting a feel of things.”

Here’s my resume. Worked in a Budweiser warehouse; painted houses; worked for a landscaper; put up and took down For Sale signs for a real estate agent friend of my mother’s; sported a hazmat suit and cleaned up moldy houses; worked for a caterer; drove an Uber. There might’ve been some things in between that I didn’t mention. In all those years, the only thing I ever wrote, really, was a list of ways to kill myself without having to buy a gun. I don’t want to make any kind of If/Then propositions, but during those times I had girlfriends of a sort, though they probably won’t admit it now. Get a job, quit a job, lose a relationship.

Summer Buck probably didn’t mean to do so, but she stood up straighter and—I’m sure unintentionally—throbbed her pelvis my way. She wore rust-colored pants I’d thought about buying at Hamrick’s there inside the outlet mall. She said, “I have dreams of doing something else, too. Forget about making breakfast. I can tell you know your way around the kitchen. Let’s go downstairs and I’ll show you where I live. There’s a good chance I’ll quit, and you’ll take my job.”

I didn’t say, “That’s not going to happen.” I didn’t say, “There’s no way I’m going to live below the ‘boys’ for a long period of time.” I said, “Uh-huh.” I said, “What do the neighbors think of this place in the middle of their subdivision?” because I’d read something about pissed-off empathy-lacking neighbors and Zillow prices.

We walked down some carpeted stairs. Summer said, “I didn’t think I’d be doing this, so I didn’t clean up. Excuse the mess.”

I followed behind and tried not to imagine what it would be like to slide into bed with her, believe me, unmade bed or not. Also, I couldn’t get “Life is bare/Gloom and misery everywhere/Stormy weather/Just can’t get my poor self together” out of my mind. I thought to myself, do not say or do anything that might be considered inappropriate.

Then I backed myself up the stairwell and into the den. I don’t want to say I pulled off a near-perfect moonwalk, but when I touched the doorknob a spark flew off big enough to catch the carpet on fire had I not stomped it out.

At the beginning of the great Wim Wenders–directed movie, Paris, Texas—written by Sam Shepard and adapted by L. M. Kit Carson—the character Travis Henderson, played by Harry Dean Stanton, walks across a desert for about five minutes, then passes out in a cantina. That’s as far as I got, there in a special seminar class called Films of Abandonment. But I saw enough of the opening to know that I kind of looked like Harry Dean Stanton already, and that I’d dressed for the job interview in much the same suit he wore. Plus I wore a ballcap to hide a scorched part of my scalp that happened at The Warped Cue two nights earlier when I tried to pull off this bar trick that involved a shot glass and a match, didn’t think things through, and bent my head down without moving my hand out of the way.

“Where’d you run off to?” Summer said, as I still toed out what I imagined was a singed mark on the indoor-outdoor carpet. “Did you freak out and think I was going to molest you down there?”

I shook my head no and started to lie about claustrophobia, but then the door burst open and five men came through the door, all of them looking as if they’d been drugged mercilessly, blank-faced and slow-trudging. One guy kept saying, “He did it again, he did it again, he did it again,” while giggling in between.

The guy I figured must’ve been Mr. Mike said, “Gesundheit!” and then “Schnitzel!” He smiled at me, then bowed. He said something, slowly, that I found out later was the opening line of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, that one that starts off “Lord, it is time,” and then goes right into how Summer was immense.

“Did you boys have a good day?” Summer asked, speaking as if to a cornered wild possum.

No one answered. They didn’t make eye contact.

I said, of course, “Hey, fellas!” like that. I thought it might be the correct thing to say. “Hey, boys!” I said, like an idiot. Every one of these men wore faded, near-non-blue Levi’s. They looked as if they emerged from a cocklebur and milk thistle field.

They walked into the den, then stopped at the entrance to the kitchen. Well, the first guy stopped, and the others ran into him, boink-boink-boink-boink, like in one of those slapstick movies, I imagined, that I’d never seen. Evidently boink-boink-boink-boink doesn’t work during the first or last ten minutes of a movie, but I imagined it.

Summer held up her right arm. I should mention that this was a sleeveless shirt she wore. When she raised her hand, it didn’t look unlike the sturdy section of a merchant ship’s crane. I’m talking Summer’s arms looked like rebar covered in flesh. Was there a Universal weight machine set up downstairs, or a group of Nautilus machines, a plain row of dumbbells?

I’d kind of made up my mind that I didn’t want to deal with these men—I wasn’t sure that I had the constitution for such things, having fouled hands touch my body so much in the middle of the night that I needed to glaze myself with antibacterial gel. But, also, I understood that I wanted nothing more than to deal with Summer Buck, even if it meant only ten minutes at the beginning of my shift, before she went downstairs to sleep, and the ten minutes after she awoke, to find me cooking breakfast.

She said, “Say hello to Coast. What’ll y’all think about his being part of our team?”

They said nothing. They looked down at my shoes. One of them held the back of his pants. Another one—the “He did it again, he did it again” dude, who I found out later suffered from echolalia, and had seen a cartoon something like two weeks earlier wherein a character said such a thing repeatedly—pointed at nothing on the ceiling. Me, I found it necessary to say, “Who wants to go outside and play ball? Come on! Who wants to go outside and play a game of catch?” as if I spoke to the dog I owned back when I was a kid.

No one wanted to play with me. They wanted milk and Fig Newtons, for that happened to be their routine every day after stringing beads or whatever they did. Summer said, “You know what tonight is? Pizza night!”

Listen, she looked better than a mix of Queen Nefertiti and Lena Horne. Summer Buck transformed and glowed as if a mix of a black Mother Teresa and, I don’t know, maybe one of those other Supremes who deserved more attention. I thought to myself, you need to go home and look up synonyms for “smitten” and “useless” and “obsessed.” I thought, out of nowhere, how I wanted to go write film reviews of Cleopatra, Roots, The Sound of Music, godawful The Birth of a Nation, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Occurrence at Owl’s Creek Bridge, Django Unchained, and Dolemite. Those men stood in line, smiling as if they understood my attraction to Summer Buck. At that moment I thought about how I needed to get my shit together and make some movies of my own, Film Studies major that I was. I thought about how I needed to make College of the Foothills proud, finally, of a graduate who did something other than become a dental hygienist or H&R Block accountant.

To the boys she said, “Yes or no?” She said, “Look at this man and give me a thumbs up yes, or thumbs down no.”

I think I might’ve closed my eyes in prayer. They say that if you imagine or envision something hard enough, it’ll happen. I kind of went off on a tangent wondering who, in history, closed his or her eyes for a period of time and visualized World War II, the Plague, every hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast, a couple of our presidents, Polio, that one spacecraft that blew up with a teacher on board, slavery, World War I, the Titanic sinking, the Spanish flu, Heaven’s Gate, bell bottom pants, the designated hitter rule in the American League, Caddyshack II, diphtheria, Taco Bell, and pet rocks. Oh, in my mind—this hadn’t happened to me since I stood in a drugstore at age sixteen, looking at all the bars of soap—I thought about Mount Vesuvius, New Coke, non-alcoholic beer, Carhenge, Jell-O salad, Kmart, Olive Garden, I-95, Texas hold ‘em, flat-roofed houses, DDT, the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space, the movie Glen or Glenda. I’d seen the beginnings and ends of both those films.

One of the men grunted, cleared his throat—it was the echolalia man—sang out an odd high-pitched noise that ended with “Hee-haw!” and I imagined his either nodding up and down, or sideways.

Finally, Summer Buck said, “That’s exactly how I feel, boys.”

Then I imagined us downstairs in the basement apartment, how we would name our first child Purell if a girl, Lysol if a boy. I opened my eyes, got in line with the men marching into the kitchen, and thought about what toppings I’d want, should I stay for supper.