From Iceland with Love (part 2)

Today Jerry West will go to see a doctor in Minneapolis.  He will have to say, Yes, I know who Jerry West is, and, No. No relation.  He will also have to say, I played basketball as a junior in high school, but I wasn’t any good, and, Actually, I always preferred baseball to basketball anyway. Before all that happens, the CHECK ENGINE light will illuminate on his dashboard.  Before that, he will throw the television remote against the floorboard heaters with enough force that the back of the remote will fly off and the batteries will be ejected.

In short, he will no longer be able to convince Laura that going to see the doctor in Minneapolis is okay.  But right now it is just past midnight and he is trying to read Into Thin Air in bed without the light from the lamp bothering Laura.  He knows he is a decade behind the curve with this one; his colleagues have all told him so.  If he were to be terribly honest, he would admit that he only purchased it because he was tired of feigning interest in golf.

His boss and some other colleagues were always talking about fades and slices, draws and eagles.  Jerry knew nothing about these things.  In fact, he had only swung a golf club a handful of times.  He hated the game, and he had a set of unused women’s golf clubs in his home office to prove it.  So when the topic of mountaineering came up last week at lunch, he knew he had found his in.  He could impress them all with various minutia about the disaster on Everest; he could point out all the ways—in hindsight—they went wrong.  But the only thing he could think about as he read about the hypothermia, the dizzying effects of the high-altitude, and frost-bite that works its way through the sturdiest boots and heartiest wind-proof jackets and mess tents—the only thing at all, that came to his mind as he lay in his bed listening to Laura gently snore beside him—was how fucking stupid an idea it was to try to climb a mountain that juts five miles into the clouds.  In Nepal.

It began to piss him off, and he put the book down.  Turned out the light.  He knew tomorrow (he thought of it as tomorrow because he had yet to fall asleep, but it was really today) would not go well.  He didn’t know yet about the television remote or the CHECK ENGINE light, but, of course, he knew about the doctor’s appointment in Minneapolis, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.  And it couldn’t be rescheduled.  He turned on the fan and pulled the covers up to his chin.

Jerry?

Huh?

I love you.

I love you, too.

Do you need to have the fan on?

It’s not blowing on you.  Why does it matter?

I can’t find my earplugs.  The fan makes too much noise and I can’t sleep as it is.  First with the light.  Now the fan.

You know I can’t sleep without the fan on.

Fine. But now I’m not going to sleep and I think I’m getting sick as it is.  It’s fine.

Silence.  (In the silence, Jerry thought about the schedule he needed to finish for work to make sure that there was adequate coverage for the upcoming weeks.  No matter how he worked the schedule people were bound to bitch about having to put in a few extra hours.  Lying in bed, he didn’t have to act like this didn’t bother him.  He told himself he would take extra care to think about which time slots fit worked best for each person.  He would be proactive.

He thought about the chili he made that evening.  Even though he had ground the dried chili peppers himself in the coffee grinder, the chili didn’t have any kick.  He wondered how he could get the right balance of heat next time.  Then he remembered some of the recipes called for chocolate. That wouldn’t provide the heat, but it was certainly something to try to deepen the flavor.

He thought about the home run Rivera gave up in the top of the eighth inning.  Grand slam.  Only the second he had given up in his career.  And he had already walked in a run, too.  What was he doing in that game anyway?  They had the lead and Joba had loaded the bases, but it was a game in mid-May.  Why didn’t Girardi let Joba work out of the jam he had created?  Jerry thought about the fact that he knew the ball was gone from the sound Kubel’s bat made when he made contact.  No doubt about it.  Rivera knew, too.

He thought about his meeting with the Faribo townspeople tomorrow [today].  What an inconvenience it was that he had to go all the way up to Minneapolis for a 7:45 am appointment only to turn around and rush back.  And for what?  So he could sit and listen to the businessmen and businesswomen of Faribo heap praise on Harry Brown’s for selling x number of cars in the past 50 years?  So he could eat warm potato salad and drink warm lemonade in a banquet hall full of professional bullshitters?)

Jerry probably would have gone on thinking a lot of other things, but he was interrupted by what Laura had been thinking during the silence.  He wasn’t a mind-reader.  Not even close.  He would not have given a second thought about what Laura was thinking during the silence had she not spoken.  He wasn’t trying to be rude.  He wasn’t ignoring her at all, really.  He thought their conversation was over when she said, It's fine.

From Iceland with Love (part 1)

Haldor had just gently swiped the paintbrush over the last remnants of graffiti covering his storefront sign, wiped the brush clean on the paint can, and capped the half-empty touch-up can tight.  He did not, contrary to the graffito that frequently appeared on his business, “HANDLE COCK ALL DAY,” though he could understand where the misconception came from.  It was a hazard of his profession, and he chalked it up as such.  Someday though, he would earn the respect of his new neighbors.  Someday, the uncultured rabble of Husavik would quit the spray paint and, perhaps, bring him a steaming cup of coffee and bid him good morning.

It was beginning to get to him.  Not so much the fact that he had to spend his morning painting over fresh statements on the hanging sign or, worse, scrubbing the words from the stone monument near the street.  He didn’t really mind having to perform these tasks every morning.  They gave him something to do; they gave him purpose.  After all, there wasn’t always a whole hell of a lot of work that had to be done to keep the museum presentable.

He had long since categorized and catalogued all of the specimens that adorned the shelves.  He had meticulously handwritten the descriptions, often including not only the genus and species but the method of acquisition and, more often than not, an anecdote or two about either the specimen itself or the donor gracious enough to gift these valuable pieces to a fledgling museum on the north coast of Iceland.  Truth be told, the bulk of the collection, and all of the laminated description signs, wired 3-ring notebook indices, and framed letters signed with American names willing to make post-mortem donations, came with him in a moving truck when he relocated from Reykjavík six months earlier.

All he had to do once he arrived at the decision to plant himself in Husavik (a decision based more on the fact that he had almost circumnavigated the Ring Road) was rent studio space and decide upon a layout, both of which he accomplished relatively quickly.  The place looked great; it was exactly the way he wanted it inside—the newer most intriguing specimens placed strategically near the entrance to attract passersby.  The swinging sign he brought from his old location in Reykjavik required a little effort to hang, and, of course, the stone sculpture needed to be placed properly—he though of it like the equivalent of a blinking neon sign—in order to be successful.

With all of that accomplished within the first week, he was ready to open the doors to the public much sooner than he anticipated.  And he didn’t anticipate business to be this slow.  So he knew damn well it wasn’t the fact that he had to repaint or rebuff for a few hours every morning when he strolled to work from the room he rented behind the Anglican church just off the main road.  Those actions became a welcomed distraction.  A minor inconvenience that served to give his life meaning.  What bothered him was the graffiti artists’ utter lack of originality.

Sure, the culprits had started off strong: “Haldor’s Handjob Habites,” had been his personal favorite, more for the strange linguistic joy he got from the odd mixture of his decidedly Icelandic name juxtaposed with a strange American English colloquialism juxtaposed with a bastardization of French he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around.  Did the hoodlums think they were calling his museum a house of hand jobs? Wasn’t habiter French for “lives”?  He guessed he could see their meaning.

He had since seen them all.  All of the derogatory terms and phrases these greenhorns with a penchant for red spray paint could conjure:

FAG

FAGGOT

FAGBANGER

QUEER

QUEERIE

QUEERBALL

QUEEN HALDOR’S MAGICAL COCKPORIUM (he did admire the effort, here)

WINK

WINKY

WANKER

COCK GOBLER

COCK HANDLER

            Etcetera, etcetera, until the whole lexicon of pornographic euphemisms ran dry.  After nearly a month of new and sometimes relatively witty slander appearing every morning, the monsters decided on a simple sentence that had been repeated each morning for the last four and a half months:

            HALDOR HANDLES COCK ALL DAY.

            There was never an exclamation point.  They never forgot to include his name.  There was never a word misspelled or altered in any way.  At some point he began to think that the miscreants were washing off the paint he applied fresh each morning, but that was impossible.  The paint was always dry before he closed up each night.  As far as he could see, the perps made a decision to repeat that phrase ad nauseum until they ran out of red paint.  

It’s as if the bastards knew this would irk him more.