by Max Tullio
“That’s not the quote,” I said to Chuckles.
I was told to be nice. He’d just gotten adult braces. But he was always misquoting things, and I hated that.
Uncle’s was mostly empty, like any bedroom-town bar on a Wednesday. There was the homeless guy who lived under the freeway and smelled like patchouli. Annie, who’d been hot in the ’80s and had since lost several arguments with plastic surgeons. And us. Me and Chuckles.
Chuckles had a couple hundred bucks on the Packers. Cash left over from a forged insurance statement about the braces, even though I told him that probably wasn’t how it worked. We’d gotten bound together again after I washed out of L.A., spit back by the surf and sent skidding all the way to landlocked Ohio.
It was a bad time to make movies, they said. People weren’t going to theaters. The recession. The crash of ’88. That part made me laugh. My papa stood in soup lines during the first crash. I was standing in an asbestos-ridden bar, drinking fly-ridden brown liquor. It felt worse somehow.
The script went like this: boy meets girl. Girl is secretly CIA. The U.S. is fighting a covert, non-violent land war in Africa for resources. Boy is a Red Cross missionary trying to fix the third world. Girl believes nothing changes without infrastructure. Boy finds out her real job is stopping highways from being built in Zambia. They fall in love.
Too political, they said. Promising start, maybe.
I hadn’t gone to Oberlin. I’d just grown up here, which is a real difference if you know. But the L.A. types, all transplants themselves, treated me like I had. Liberal-arts try-hard trash.
“First down!” Chuckles yelled.
The Packers were reinvigorated since Favre, and Chuckles bet on them whenever he could. Or whenever his second wife stopped doing it for him. She was a nice girl. Younger sister of a loose girl with buck teeth who’d been a year ahead of us in school. I’d already forgotten her name.
I would’ve felt bad for Chuckles’s wife if I wasn’t so busy feeling bad for myself.
“Jim Beam. Rocks,” I said.
The bartender poured it, sloshed it across the bar, didn’t look at me. She’d long ago decided to hate the townies, even though she was probably an Oberlin alum herself. Her eyes gave it away. Too curious. Last time I was here, I’d taken pleasure in having escaped. But now I’m merely an honored guest turned back to client. Like the reverse of when the princess kisses the frog.
I should kill myself, I thought, if only I had that kind of courage.
Judd Nelson had been interested for a while in the lead role. I told him he was wrong. I stood firm. It needed class. Someone like Tim Robbins.
He never read it. That was as close as it got.
I’d taken an apartment above the old theater downtown. You couldn’t sleep until the marquee glow finally bled out into the Ohio air. On the right nights, you could sit on the roof and taste coal drifting in from far-off factories.
“Oh, fuck me,” Chuckles said.
The Packers turned it over. Chuckles started slapping his knees, pulling at his hair.
“You should’ve written a football movie,” he said. “Nothing’s more heartbreaking than football.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”
“What’re you gonna do now that you’re back?” he asked.
I killed my drink before answering. There wasn’t enough bourbon left to stall properly. My mouth stayed dry, anyways.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’d you do when you got back?”
“Shit,” Chuckles said. “The army discharged me. I hadn’t been anywhere else. Plus the money goes pretty far here.”
“Well, it did…” I said.
“I just need Favre to turn it on,” he said. “Then I’m back.”
Chuckles rapped the bar with his knuckles. All four of them. He’d told me the story plenty of times. Always wrong in a new way. A truck during training. His hand crushed. His wedding finger ripped clean off. It hurt, sure. But he made more money selling the pills than taking them.
“I guess I’m just gonna get busy dying,” I said.
“That’s funny,” Chuckles said. “Real funny. You should’ve wrote a comedy.”
It occurred to me I was already in one. I just wasn’t the writer. I was a character. Another fuck-up. Another dropout. Another man missing a finger. Another townie in an undergrad tome to wasted dreams.
And that wouldn’t sell.