Jason Chambers: As promised more than a week ago, here is Jonathan Evison’s previously unpublished short story Rollie vs. Them. I’ll save any commentary for afterwards, and just let you get on with it.
Rollie vs. Them
by Jonathan Evison
Rollie Morgan was drunk. The sort of drunk that Marvelous Marv, hunching slightly in the adjacent stool, tapping his unlit Tareyton in five-four time atop the sticky bar, had come to refer to in his companion as “Foghorn Leghorn drunk.” Tonight, for the fourth night in a row, sixty-three-year-old Rollie Morgan was holding court at The Moon Temple, a queasily lit Chinese restaurant lounge populated with three television sets, a dozen bulbous, carbuncled red candle holders, and the faint but unmistakable bouquet of deep fried fat and mop water. Doug, the proprietor, was about as Chinese as Dolph Lundgren.
Tonight Rollie Morgan was in full command of his oratory arsenal. His gentlemanly southern accent, replete with velvety edges, dramatic pauses, and dy-nam-ic intonations, did indeed sound like Foghorn Leghorn. His entire manner at this stage of inebriation was in fact cartoon roosterish, a state of affairs which Marv knew could not last much longer.
Marv was 318 days sober. Yet, he continued to attend the Moon Temple in large part to resist its charms. Some nights he ordered a vodka tonic only to leave it on the bar in front of him like a challenge until the ice dissolved and the fizz went out of it and dew drops formed on the outside of the glass. Knowing all the while that if he drank it, the fierce determination to win would come surging back immediately. But knowing also the boomerang effect that morning would bring, all the terror and madness and self-loathing.
Old Foghorn had just concluded elucidating what he referred to as “the inherent inferiority complex underlying the psychology of modern leftism,” before he deftly leveled the crosshairs of his recrimination upon the whole of industrialized society, arriving finally (right on schedule) at what he considered to be the patently unjust grounds for his dismissal by the Bar Association of Oklahoma eighteen years ago, an inventory of judgly misconduct which included partiality, intimidation, as well as a certain heinous and wholly unfounded allegation which Rollie refused to dignify.
Though he’d endured Rollie’s litany of grievances on at least three prior occasions, Marv nonetheless pretended to listen. Probably, he figured, because he felt guilty. The least he could do was listen to his bullshit. The R-man wasn’t all bad. Fucker was kind of funny sometimes. Dude was pretty smart, too. Smarter than a lot of guys.
But that wasn’t going to change anything. Marv had to go through with it. That is, if Rollie ever stopped talking.
“Negligence to perform administrative or discretionary duties?” Rollie pursued. “Perhaps. The erroneous but innocent exercise of judicial discretion? Maybe. But damnit, moral turpitude? Delinquency? Never! On what grounds? What about Stump vs. Sparkman? What about—”
“Last call,” said Doug, clearing the grease trap.
“But it’s not even midnight, sir,” Rollie protested.
“Yeah, well, I’m tired, and you’re giving me a headache.”
The trek down 45th found Rollie’s head lolling in slow semi-circles as he shuffled over the wet pavement toward the lights of University Avenue. His gray hair was disheveled. His tongue was a pork chop. But he felt good. The hard, bitter little pellet that lived in his stomach seemed to have dissolved like an alka seltzer, and his thoughts were reduced mercifully to a trickle.
Marv walked in front of Rollie with his head down and a slight hitch in his gait along the downhill grade, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his green coveralls. He’d grown to enjoy walking in spite of the pain. Though certain considerations had been granted in the case of Marv’s DUI, namely, the privilege to pilot the company van during business hours on company-related charges, Marv never abused this privilege.
He paused on the I-5 overpass, where he fired up his Tareyton at last, and exhaled deliberately, gazing out over the express lanes. To the south, the skyline sprung up crisp and jagged and eerily luminous. A steely glass metroplex teeming with complications. Too many angles, thought Marv.
Rollie stationed himself beside Marv and stood as still as possible, listing occasionally side to side in spite of his efforts. To Rollie the distant skyline appeared to be tossing like Chinese lanterns on the horizon. Just how he liked it.
Marv would’ve preferred it that way, too, though he was clear-headed now, acutely aware of the complexities closing in fast around him, as he poised himself on the edge of decisive action. Now’s the time. Gotta be now.
But the moment he set a hand upon Rollie’s shoulder, the nerve left Marv. For, in steadying himself, Rollie had placed a reciprocal hand on Marv’s shoulder, and suppressing a milky burp, gave it a squeeze.
Ah, man. Weak-ass bullshit. Fuck it. Tomorrow, man. Tomorrow for sure. Suddenly Marv felt talkative.
“Too bad there ain’t no market for lawn care technicians out in the middle of nowhere, man. Not black ones, anyway. You ever see a black guy in Kettle Falls? Hell no. But I’ll tell you what, R-man. If I had it my way, you know what I’d want?”
“M–hic-m?” inquired Rollie.
“I know it sounds like some shit from an HBO movie starring Morgan Freeman or some other sage-ass old nigger with a bad knee, but R-Man, I’m serious. A gentleman’s farm. That’s what the fuck I’m talking about. In Yakima, or some fucking place. I’d get rabbits. That’s the ticket. And goats, I like goats. Wouldn’t have no manicured lawn. Just let that fucker grow. Chicory, plantain, dandelions, whatever, just let it grow. Wouldn’t even mow that shit. Know what I’m saying?”
In fact, Rollie did not know what Marv was saying, he only knew that the world was spinning too fast. Without warning, he began retching over the rail onto the interstate.
“Aw, Rollie, man, you gotta watch that shit.”
Marv required only a cursory glance at the dappled expanse of lawn surrounding the Totem Lake Commerce Center, a sprawling glass edifice offering no relief from rectangularity beyond a negligible slope in its facade, before making his diagnosis.
“Fucking necrotic.” He was irritable already from having endured the apneic discord and steam engine force of Rollie’s snoring all night long, only to awake and find his sofa (to use Rollie’s expression), “sodden.” And if that wasn’t enough, there was Rollie running his mouth in the van the whole drive out to Totem Lake. His tirade practically reduced poor Jorge to tears by the time they arrived.
But Jorge was tough. A lot tougher than his periwinkle eyeliner suggested. “You want I can blast with fungicide?” he said, as the three of them surveyed the damage.
“Hell no. You can’t just throw fungicides at the problem, bro. It ain’t that easy. We got bad drainage. This shit dries out, gets compacted, then what? We’re back where we started. Or worse. This ain’t no carpet-bombing campaign, Jorge. This is a ground war. Aerate the fucker. And pull the plugs. That means you, Rollie. I don’t wanna see little turf turds all over the place.”
Jorge nodded, pirouetted on the toes of his ladybug boots, and set off in the direction of the van to gear up for the ground war.
Rollie groaned.
“What?” said Marvin. “What’s the matter? Shit, Rollie, you about a worthless motherfucker, you know that? I’m payin’ thirteen-seventy-five an hour, here. I’m shellin’ out payroll taxes, not to mention health insurance on your cracker ass, and all you can do is groan. Well, fuck it. You ain??
?t no judge on my clock, understand? You ain’t been no judge on nobody’s clock in over fifteen goddamn years. So, stop bein’ such a prick. What business you got talkin’ to Jorge like that? He don’t hate America! He ain’t no collectivist, whatever the fuck that is! He ain’t lowerin’ nobody’s standards! Dude works his ass off! Got higher standards than you do! Hell, you just a broke-dick old cracker with holes in his stomach. Mowin’ lawns for this broke-ass nigger. Shit. What do you got to say for yourself, now, your honor? Huh? I can’t hear you.”
What vexed Marv more than Rollie’s insufferable bitching and haranguing and proselytizing, more than the drunken recitations of Rimbauds “A Season in Hell” delivered at two a.m. outside the Food Giant, more than all his weak-ass victim bullshit and alcoholic unwillingness to improve his situation, was the fact that not only had Rollie proved himself to be a reprehensible worker from day one, he’d demonstrated very little promise or hope for improvement in the three months to follow. He showed no desire to improve. Three months and Rollie still couldn’t top-dress for shit. He seeded in clumps, amended in gross disproportion. He inundated entire athletic fields to such an extent that Little League games were canceled. Nor, in spite of his avowed intellectual prowess, had Rollie exhibited any appetite whatsoever for the hard science of turf maintenance, not the slightest curiosity regarding the pathogens at work in the circular spread of ring spot, or the specific soil conditions favoring the spread of Magnaporthe.
And yet Marv still put up with him, still permitted him to jeopardize with each seedball, with each botched edge and stray divot, the hard won reputation of Marvelous Marv’s Lawn Maintenance
What does all this say about me? That I’m a nice guy? That I care? Yeah, right. Says that I’m as bad as him. Goddamn enabler. Sick fucking sober alcoholic manipulator. May as well be pouring drinks down his throat. Shit, pouring them down my own throat.
Certainly it wasn’t Rollie’s appearance which captivated Marv that afternoon on Broadway three months prior? Or maybe it was. His rumpled brown slacks and corduroy blazer looked like they’d been tossed on with a pitchfork. His fly was open. His right loafer was missing a tongue. There was a newspaper sticking out of his pocket. Yet, none of this stopped Rollie from projecting a regal bearing as he berated a panhandling teenage girl with indigo hair and a pierced lip for “futilely attempting to liberate herself from the psychological servitude of her own inferiority complex.”
When the teenage girl, referring to Rollie as “Hey Creepo,” suggested less than mildly that he “take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, and go panhandle somewhere else,” Rollie scarcely had time to express his outrage at this insolence before Marv intervened.
“Yo, man, what’s up? You lookin’ for work?”
Rollie and the girl both looked doubtfully at Marv, the former as though Marv were an agent of the left sent to entrap him, the latter as though Marv were some creepy black guy in coveralls holding an obscenely large sandwich.
A thorough visual inspection of Marv– his steel-toed boots, his green coveralls, and particularly the crinkle-wrapped leviathan in the clutches of his right hand (was that Genoa salami?)— sufficiently assured Rollie that no conspiracy was afoot.
“What, sir, would you be proposing in the way of prospective occupation?”
“Lawn work.” Marv narrowed his gaze, sniffing the air like a birddog. “Yo, you drunk?”
Rollie was incredulous. “I beg your pardon, sir. Only momentarily discombobulated. More to the point, what might you be proposing in the way of compensation?”
“Thirteen.” Who the fuck talks like that, Marv wondered.
Rollie kneaded his chin briefly. “Thirteen, you say. Yes. And would that figure be commensurate to hundreds or thousands? Months, or weeks?”
“That’s hourly, Hoss.”
“Yes. Hourly. I see.”
“If you’re any good, I’ll bump you to thirteen-seventy five. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Seventy-five. Yes. Well. There remains the question of benefits.”
“In three months, if you last that long. One day at a time, Hoss.”
“Hmm. Yes. Well, perhaps there are certain benefits I might enjoy sooner.”
“Like what?”
“Might I be so bold as to inquire whether that is Genoa salami?”
What inspired Marv’s charity that particular day, after all of those rainy morning crawls past the Millionaires Club, peering out between squeaky wipers from the warmth of his van at the dispirited collection of drunks and migrants gathered there to solicit an honest days work? Why in the past had Marv never succumb to the possibility of giving one of them a break? Why Rollie? What insane impulse had taken possession of him the morning he offered Rollie Morgan thirteen bucks an hour, half a sandwich and the use of his shower, an ever-expanding sphere of privilege soon to encompass Marv’s sofa, his socks, and his wallet? Was it really owing to the fact that Marv had to prep and prime the entire Interlaken Sports Complex by four o’clock? That due to mitigating circumstances involving Jorge and his cousin, Marv found himself minus his two best men that day? Or was it only Marv’s fascination with the human contradiction that Rollie seemed to embody: an eloquent bum, a wino capable of bombastic verbiage and unfaltering elocution. Dude talked like Shakespeare. Smelled like a wet loaf of bread. Pretty funny shit. Didn’t seem to be hurting nobody. Yeah, all right, see what happens.
And what happened? You took him in, fed him, put him in some coveralls, bought him some boots, got him an iron-on patch that said Rollie, tried to teach him a trade, gave him a chance to elevate himself. And you began to listen, sorting the bullshit from the other, began to recognize the crushing defeats, began to recognize the weakness in the face of adversity, and pretty soon you began to glimpse the broken man behind the cartoon rooster. And from there you began to delineate in your imagination the days of Rollie’s life, first backward and then forward, all the folly and estrangement and victimhood, and only then came to understand the breadth of the man’s alcoholism, only then recognized the fierce, alert look of the hunted that burned like blue ice in Rollie’s eyes. You knew those the eyes so well, eyes you saw regularly around folding-chair circles, peering out from behind Styrofoam cups through clouds of cigarette smoke, from lofts in Georgetown to church basements in Kenmore. The look that said I long to be free, even if it means giving up.
Indeed, you had seen this look many nights not so long ago staring back at yourself from the mirror. And you told yourself that no man is bereft beyond redemption, no matter how far he’s fallen.
And hadn’t Marv done his duty? Hadn’t he tried to steer Rollie toward the program? Hadn’t he taken him to a meeting on Capitol Hill, and another in Fremont? Hadn’t he told him Bill’s story, his own story, and a half dozen other cautionary tales? Hadn’t he talked about the boomerang, and making amends, and about surrendering to a power bigger than himself? So maybe he hadn’t pushed him hard enough, but it wasn’t Marv’s style to browbeat. He left Rollie to Rollie and minded his own shit. Rollie was guilty as charged. Rollie was a coward. Rollie hid behind booze and words. The two great deluders, the two things that profoundly alter our view of the obvious, that separate us from undeniable conclusions. One by misrepresentation and trickery, the other by lowering our standards in every way.
But hadn’t Marv, in rare moments, shared the intimacy of friendship with Rollie? At the very least hadn’t they become companions? Played pool, ate s
teaks, ogled women, complained? Hadn’t Rollie, despite his failings, accepted Marv unconditionally? Hadn’t Marv confided a great deal in Rollie when you added it all up? Hadn’t he confided all the fucked up stuff about saluting his father, all that moving around as a kid, all that self-pitying bullshit about deferring the football scholarship, only to blow out his ACL loading a truck in the desert of Kuwait, only to spiral into the madness of drugs and alcohol, to live every day with the terrible sense of yet another impending calamity? Hadn’t he confided all of that to Rollie at some point? And didn’t it all, in the end, sound a lot like the tale Rollie spun? The loss, the injustice, the bitter rage?
Fuck it.
And what about you Rollie? What have you got to say for yourself as you gather turf turds for thirteen bucks an hour and hope it doesn’t rain? You don’t really believe half your own bullshit, do you? Like all fast talkers, you’re running. You can dress fear up in a powdered wig and black robe, you can sit safely behind the shelter of an oak bar and preach about injustice, pound your gavel on the bar top until you’re blue in the face, cry contempt to whoever will pretend to listen. But you’ll only be sentencing yourself to the “psychological servitude of your own inferiority complex” in the end. Eventually you’ve got to look at the facts.
Exhibit A: The allegation. The purportedly heinous and wholly unfounded one. Maybe you fudged that. Okay, you botched it. But the pressure was eating holes in your stomach. You were drinking scotch and milk. You had a faux-Tudor with Greek pillars, a gambrel roof, and a Japanese garden to pay for, didn’t you? A little place in Cozumel. Why swim upstream, right? Graft is inevitable. What’s a few liquor licenses? A few construction permits? A trout stream?
Exhibit B: Janice. Was that really such a surprise? Really, was Janice ever the woman behind a great man? Wasn’t Janice more in front of the great man, leading him along like a horse to the banks of the revenue stream? I’m not dressing my children like bumpkins. I’m not sending my children to a public school. This old dining room is no longer functional. You can’t expect me to walk around town with no money.
Did you really expect Janice to hang around and sift through the rubble?
Exhibit C: Scott. He who endured you the least, two years, yet has the least to forgive you. Didn’t you just miss his twentieth? His nineteenth? His third, fourth, fifth, and sixth?
Exhibit D: Stephen. Everything his mother ever wanted him to be. The antithesis of you. Strong. In control. Even at age ten when you left him. Stephen to be continued. Eighteen years later. Which brings us to. . .
Exhibit E: Neurophysics for Dummies. That is, Stephen’s lecture at Roethke auditorium last March. Brilliant. No thanks to you. Stephen’s life was a masterpiece, what could he possibly begrudge you?
He didn’t recognize you, had no idea you were anywhere within two thousand miles. And you had the chance. You were even sober for the occasion, pumping his hand vigorously as you looked right at the bridge of his nose.
Fascinating.
Thank you.
Really. Just fascinating.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for coming.
Was that really enough, Rollie? Just coming? So why were you stuck like a deer in the headlights, unable to budge, even as Dr. Morgan turned back toward his lectern?
S-stephen.
I’m sorry, did you have a question?
I . . . just . . . I . . . I’m from Oklahoma.
Ah.
But that’s as close as you got, isn’t it, your honor? Go Sooners.
Okay, Rollie, congratulations, finally an impartial appraisal of the facts. No hung jury here. And it only took five minutes. A hundred and twelve turf turds. So what are you doing back at the van now, rummaging around for, when there must be five hundred more turf turds scattered about the Totem Lake Commerce Center? Why are you jumpy when you hear Marv’s voice from behind? What are you pretending to look for in there, under Marv’s seat?
“Rollie, man, I’m letting you go. I’ve thought about it, and there’s no way around it, so don’t start in on me.”
Marv was presently shouldering the additional guilt of having waited until five o’clock to cut Rollie loose in the parking lot of 7-11. This after Rollie had given him a full days work, albeit half-assed work. Even after Rollie had insisted on paying for the Big Gulps when he saw Marv go for his wallet. He bought the egg Mcmuffins this morning, too. Same thing at lunch. Wouldn’t let me pay for nothin’ all day. Dude was buttering me up. Ain’t gonna work.
Marv handed him the envelope. “That’s eleven hundred bucks. A little more than two weeks.”
Rollie took the envelope without comment.
“I don’t know, R-man, look, maybe it’s time for you to ask yourself, ‘what’s gonna happen to Rollie?’ Time for you to draw up a new game plan. You’d better figure something out quick. Whether it’s making peace with your people, or whatever. All I know is I’m letting you go.”
Marv almost put a hand on Rollie’s shoulder and gave him an encouraging pat, but he resisted the urge. Be strong. Crazy fucker’ll get by. Who knows, maybe the push he needs. Marv thought he saw a flash of the burning blue ice in Rollie’s eyes, but he couldn’t help that.
“Good luck, man.”
Rollie didn’t say anything, just rocked on his heels clutching the envelope.
Marv turned and walked toward the van. Halfway there, he turned back. “Yo, and thanks for the Big Gulp.”
And as Marv pulled away, Rollie issued a pointed little laugh. But at least it was a laugh. At the end of that laugh lay dread, and Rollie knew it, could feel it already, even as he clutched the envelope, even as he thumbed Marv’s credit card in his pocket, he could feel the pointy, angular complexity of the world closing in on him again from all directions. And he longed to be free of it, even if it meant giving up.
———————-
JC: There you have it. As always, really good stuff from JE. What I really like about his work are his characters. Evison manages to make the portrayal of Rollie’s downfall from a once successful family man to an alcoholic on the margins of society sad, yet keep his character very funny. I also think the structure in this one is something different from JE’s other stories – or at least those that I have read thus far. I especially like the shift about 3/4 of the way through, where we read the case against Rollie – the accusations and exhibits. Very forceful.
Thanks again to Jonathan Evison for allowing us to print it here.
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