III - When Randy’s Marriage Died (and He Lost a Referral)
A Story for Anxious Times
Chapter 3
Before I tell you about the rest of the day when Jesse’s life stopped being what it was (terrifying) and started being something different, I need to tell you how Randy got to where he was. Specifically, how he got to be standing behind the counter at 1:37 PM on a Wednesday having just unlocked the doors of Bo’s Coffee for a crying man in a suit, ready to give him free coffee before praying for his father.
In order, the reasons are love, divorce, and a clogged toilet.
Despite the divorce being the penultimate both in terms of importance and chronology, I’m going to start with it for reasons that will become clear later.
Randy was not actually a roofer. He had never worked full-time in manual labor, though he did have an amateur interest in pottery. He had spent differing amounts of time in four or five careers, depending on how you count (he counted a year he spent in a multi-level marketing system trying to sell vacation packages, his ex-wife did not; I agree with his ex-wife, but in fairness to him I’m accounting for it here). The most recent, before barista at Bo’s Coffee, that is, was car sales. He was good at that. He sold Hondas for a family auto group in Omaha, Nebraska, averaging about $70k a year in take home pay, plus commission and bonuses. He was married to Margaret, a nice enough and witty enough lady to be considered delightul to anyone at the dealership who met her, but who by that time did not want to be married to Randy any more (in fact less) than he wanted to be married to her. Their marriage had the slow form of cancer that could have been treated if either one had been willing to disrupt their lives just enough to demonstrate actual care for the other, but it turned out that having separate interests and separate careers and separate bank accounts meant no less than what the adjective “separate” means. And so the will to take a week off work, go to the beach together, and spend time talking to each other just wasn’t there.
Not that different from Margaret, everyone liked Randy from a distance. Incredibly different from Margaret, he committed daily acts of rage. He had been brought up too well to hurt human beings without just cause, so his were performed in the basement of their suburban Omaha house (4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and enough square footage that they could never see each other if they so chose, which they very much so chose). It was a purple punching bag that he hung from the basement ceiling just opposite the washer and dryer, and he would inflict damage on himself by beating his knuckles raw while he washed his socks, underwear, and t-shirts (Jesse would have been surprised to know it, but in those days Randy used to have all of his work shirts and pants dry cleaned). Sometimes in the middle of the night, too. He would beat the thing until he was drenched in sweat, take a shower in the hopes he could stop being angry up there in the warm water since he hadn’t been able to down in the basement, and then pass out on the couch, usually watching TV, angrier than ever. There’s a common misconception that letting rage out somehow makes it better, as though anger is a gas and we are boilers. It doesn’t. Rage is more like heroin; it destroys the user and does more and more damage when you indulge it. Randy was always angrier on the couch than he had been in the basement. And less happy, too. Hurting himself down there was pleasurable in a way that Nick at Nite wasn’t.
They fought at times, but the aroma of their marriage was disinterest, and so fighting was even disappointingly sterile, and cold. The last time, Randy had just finished delivering a new sedan to a pleasant, short, retired engineer. Randy had a phenomenal delivery presentation, all in an effort to get referrals. He touched all the car’s most desirable features, worked in two or three tried and proven one-line jokes, and slipped the brochure with the dealership’s service center info, five of his business cards, and a free car wash card into the hand of his customer as he gripped with his other hand and gave a warm, gameshow host smile.
Margaret had called Randy to tell him he’d left the garage door open. He’d then told her he’d done it on purpose just to bother her, and she’d hung up on him before he could hang up on her. He didn’t think he had left it open, but he also didn’t care about that. What he did care about was that the woman he’d married neither respected nor loved him, and so he went outside to the smoker’s area, right in front of the dealership since smoking in Nebraska isn’t as much of a cultural sin as it is elsewhere, and lit up a Marlboro Red, inhaled, and punched the front wall of the dealership with everything he had.
The retired engineer he’d just finished handing over the new car to was at that moment slowly pulling by in his brand new Accord, staring at Randy confused as he nursed his broken right hand and shouted the “f” word in that rich, baritone, voice Jesse would later be soothed by.
Breaking your hand because you love being respected too much is more or less as fun as it sounds. Randy could no longer be his charming, big guy self (preciesly because that was not his self) and was red-faced and even teary-eyed when he opened the door to the dealership and lumbered into the showroom. Immediately Lou, the young finance guy, knew something was wrong and walked the other way under the pretense of needing something from the spare conference room no one ever went in. Randy looked left and right with a bizarre, angry and bewildered look, as though he were both insulted and confused by this rapdily swelling chunk of flesh at the end of his right arm. He snorted out like a frustrated horse and walked to the men’s room, in the back of the showroom by the service center, flinging open the men’s room door so hard that it banged the wall on the outside and shook the drywall. If Lou the finance guy had been in his office on the other side of that wall he would have jumped, but he was still in the spare conference room pretending to read something on his cell phone, so he only heard it enough to wonder how much longer he’d have to wait in there now.
Randy was glad no one was in the men’s room, because he still had sense enough to be embarassed. He walked to the sink, grabbed a paper towel (he was a germophobe), and turned on the cold water. He ran it over his knuckles, which bore some of the dust of the wall outside but weren’t bleeding. Randy’s hands were leathery after hundreds of hours assaulting that punching bag in his basement.
His head was down for the first minute. His eyes were closed as he tried to hold the rage down, rage that was like a squirming tomcat, hissing and claws out and muscles firing in every direction. Then he looked at the hand, just a hint of purple starting to show under his tan and tough skin. And then he looked up, wanting to see his eyes in the mirror, but instead saw Jerry right behind him. Jerry, who had his number better than anyone in the world. Jerry, who played no games and had all the things Randy wanted, if they were real, which reminded him that he had always told himself they weren’t. He breathed in deep, looked back at his broken right hand marinating in the off white basin of their fairly nice men’s room in their fairly nice car dealership, and decided he had nothing to say. And Jerry was the only person he could think of about whom his own speechlessness didn’t make him at all nervous.
Jerry was in his late fifties, had smooth, simply parted dark gray hair, glasses, and was almost as big as Randy. But because of the fact that he was usually smiling, and the fact that he listened better than most people talked, his bigness wasn’t registered on your internal Richter scale the way Randy’s was. Randy walked into a room full of men and they squinted and cracked their knuckles. Jerry walked into a room full of men and they sat up straighter.
They both knew these things, and they both knew Randy would accept whatever Jerry had to say about however much he saw. Which is why it surprised Randy when he didn’t say anything about the rage, the punch, or the souvenir imprint he’d given to the wall just outside via the bathroom door. He just came silently and stood next to him at the sink, without making eye contact, and said, “Can I take a look?”
Randy would’ve either made a joke or blown off any other man at this dealership, and that included Mark, the hotshot GM who loved to fire saies reps and tell victory stories to his girlfriend afterward, but for Jerry he quietly crossed his right arm over his body and even tried to spread his fingers. Unsuccessfully.
Jerry looked at them intently, his eyes thoughtful but not revealing much of anything, tilted his head towards his own left shoulder so he could better see the index figner. Randy was actually impressed, because the punch had landed poorly, and that was indeed where he had the most pain.
“I’m going to drive you to the hospital,” he said with the same trim, sensible tone it seemed to Randy he always had (which was not quite the case, but close). And that was the way it had to be said, because it didn’t even occur to Randy to object. It didn’t even occur to him that he had the right to object. In a way familiar to Jerry after many years of being a good man, he was a father to Randy right then, and nothing more needed to be spoken. He gently pulled Randy’s muscular frame away from the sink, reached over himself and turned off the water (without getting a paper towel, but Randy supposed nobody was perfect), and went over to the door Randy had just used to commit violence against the naive and innocent navy blue wall outside. He pushed it open, stepped out and held it there for Randy, and then guided him towards the front door of the dealership just on the other side of the showroom. Mark the GM got up from his oversized desk inside his all-glass office when he saw them walking towards the front door. He had the formal instincts of a man who likes to be seen and heard bossing others around, and so he knew solely by body language that they were leaving work. He stepped into the showroom with his best combative walk, his light brown suit and perfect dark hair reminding Randy of a young Don Johnson. But Jerry didn’t seem to notice him for more than was long enough to raise up his right hand towards him and say sternly and loudly, “We’re going to the hospital; nothing serious.” And Randy was shocked to see that Mark, for reasons that clearly confused even him, said nothing and slowly walked into his office and sat down at his desk. It was a solid thirty seconds before he muttered a swear, mad at a power he didn’t understand, much like a nine-year-old boy who trips the first girl who makes him wish he were a man.
Jerr’s car was clean, but not as clean as Randy expected. There is no correlation between the cleanliness of car and life. It was a BMW, and Randy already knew that because car salesmen always know what their peers drive, but he remembered now it had surprised him when he’d first noticed it, and he’d figured there had to be some story there. Jerry seemed to be such a homespun and substantial guy, and it was hard to imagine him being materialistic. Or maybe he was shallow for thinking you had to be materialistic to drive a BMW. He was having too many thoughts for also having a throbbing hand, and they were already pulling out of the parking lot.
“You don’t need me to tell you,” Jerry said, not actually nodding towards Randy’s broken hand though something in the tone made it feel as if he did, “that that’s not a good solution.” He was wrong; Randy actually did need someone to to tell him that. But it did marvelously spoil any tension, and both of them smiled, looked at one another, and then laughed.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Randy said, exhaling as he looked back out the window as they passed the shopping mall down the road from their dealership. “You ever just want to beat something to death?”
Jerry gave a bit of a shrug and then answered, honestly enough, “It’s been a while.”
“Yeah,” Randy said, slowly, indicating that was exactly what he expected. Jerry didn’t ask anything, which made Randy want to talk more. “I just hate her, Jerry. I hate my wife so much.”
Jerry grimaced a little, but didn’t look shocked. No one at the dealership knew much about his marriage, not so much because Randy was secretive but because he didn’t really think that much about his marriage, and you don’t talk about what you don’t think about.
“She’s difficult. She doesn’t understand money, she listens to her crazy sister about everything from politics to how to do our kitchen. And I’m sorry, Jerry, but-” and he didn’t finish his sentence, not so much from a privacy concern as from exhaustion.
“And what do you do?” Jerry asked. There was no pride in his voice, but it wasn’t wholly harmless, either. It felt like a punch in the shoulder from a very good older brother.
Randy at first acted like he didn’t know what Jerry meant. Then he exhaled, smiled a defeated smile, and looked at him as he drove, pleased to see that he was smiling, too. “I never think about her,” he said. He was going to add an insult, but couldn’t bring himself to.
“She just-” But Jerry stopped him by raising his hand, sort of like he had with Mark, for two reasons. The first was that they were pulling into the hospital. The second was that Jerry knew what all good men know, which is that the things that were killing Randy weren’t out there, but right here in this car. Specifically right behind his breastbone.
And so they walked into the hospital talking about something very important. And they continued talking all the way through the visit as the doctor treated the hand that would one day wrap around Jesse Henderson’s in prayer for his father’s life on the day he died.