Dougshit

This was originally published in “On the Precipice” 2017 issue, “Alone.”

I didn’t lose my wedding ring because I was robbed that delusionally beautiful night in October—the best month in San Francisco. Hungry bums roamed, needing an extra dollar or two, so the story of being robbed was plausible. I’d tell my wife that struggling against them would have been useless as their need for drugs would have transformed their strength, how they would rip off my Ferragamo shoes, take my pinstriped Zegna suit with my son’s garden trowel in the inside breast pocket, yank off my Rolex watch, steal my wallet, keys, iPhone and wrench the gold wedding band off my finger. I would stagger for help in boxers and undershirt. Easy to imagine is easy to believe.  

 Oh, don’t think I didn’t give myself a little dusting up, I had to make myself fit the story. I frazzled my hair, rolled in the powdery dirt under the pine trees. I couldn’t throw my stuff away, especially not the game day shoes and suit. So I found a lonely spot on the Presidio Golf Course with the white lines signaling “ground under repair” where underpaid greenskeepers wouldn’t care that there was a fresh pile of dirt. That’s where I used the trowel to bury my suit wrapped around my shoes, watch, wallet, keys and phone. I threw the trowel into one of those ballwasher trashcans near a teebox.

“You look like you’ve been playing with Dougshit.” My wife didn’t so much as look at me when I got into the car, and, even though I shivered more from fear than from cold, there’s no way the thought of sharing her fur-lined ski parka crossed her mind.

“Don’t call him that.”

“Whatever. Did you get it?”

I had spent so much time crafting my story around the loss of the wedding ring that I thought she’d ignore the rest. “Don’t you even care about what happened to me?”

She gave me a hard stare that she employed when she wanted to imply I wasting her time. “You already said. Robbed by bums, they stole everything, even the ring. But the job, did you get the job?”

In an effort to earn myself a little more time, I recounted the robbery in even more vivid detail. I described those awful dark mouths, mouths that were so black it seemed impossible that anything, especially sound or words, could be emitted from them.

“Give me the truth.”

With the tip of my thumb, I rubbed the white ring where my wedding band had been. I hadn’t taken it off, even through all this, in ten years. “They said they’d call.”

“Tyler Daniel Logan.” She said as if it were a pointed epithet. She leaned away, into the turn and spun the wheel of our shiny black SUV. “You fucking fucked up, didn’t you?”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t get the job.”

This was the start of another one of my stories.

I, until recently, was actually able to provide my family with the lifestyle that my wife and I, if not enjoyed, showed everyone else that we enjoyed. I worked for a swanky advertising agency in downtown San Francisco and was able to put the designer clothes on my wife that she increasingly demanded, after being inspired by the Hollywood starlets in gossip magazines. We bought a house, no money down, one of those new developments outside the city, terracotta everywhere, Spanish tile roofs. Even when the market went under, I laughed it off and bought us both brand new, matching black Cadillac Escalades. It didn’t matter because I still made the big bucks.

We even had enough money to get help for our son, Douglass.

Doug was a strange kid, you could never get a clear look at his face, he always kept his head looking at the ground, searching for “treasure” and so the defining characteristic was his rambunctious head of black hair. It seemed that no matter what he did, wore hats or got haircuts, it would always tangle up while he scooped up the dirt in the yards. He certainly didn’t fit the vision of what we thought our kid would be like. Catherine had wanted a perfect child, with straight long brown hair, a beautiful smile and table manners. Who wouldn’t want that? But what we got refused to shake hands with anyone if he wasn’t carrying a trowel. These eccentricities could bring out her nastiness, reified into a thin surging vein like a worm escaping the storm-wetted earth, and she couldn’t handle it. There was no mystery for me about heredity. He just displayed an even more concentrated dose of what she had. It’s not like it was Doug’s fault, part of the problem with these mental diseases is that they inhibit the ability to adapt, to overcome obstacles.

Sometimes he committed unpredictable acts, like the time when Catherine asked him to stop digging up the front lawn and he troweled up a glob of the neighbor’s dog’s peanut buttery poop and slung it at her obsidian Escalade. It splattered all over the door, the handles, the window. Catherine sharpened her gaze, bit her lip and then unfurled it as if it were medieval trebuchet. She launched her petname at him, Dougshit, that day. I should have stopped it, but I was so fed up with the situation, her complete retreat from anything that wasn’t directly her fault, the kid driving me nuts even more, because it’s not like I came home on days with enough patience to handle a laconic kid with a particular taste in gardening tools. I just left and took the car to an automated carwash that vaguely reminded me of the Arc d’Triumphe I always see in the photos of actors on their love-y Parisian vacations in those gossip magazines that my wife loves.

I sat with the radio turned up loud, even though I couldn’t hear what I was listening to, and yelled and yelled.

When I returned, I thought I had blown it all off. But I called out in the house, called Catherine and Douglass, and neither of them answered. I heard a faint tapping and followed the sound through to the living room where our French doors opened into the backyard. Standing outside, tapping the glass with a trowel, stood Douglass alone. I rushed to the door, and picked him up.

There is something about hugging someone so much smaller than you, the way you can completely encompass them, physically shield them from the world, and in that moment, you understand that this smaller person becomes the real, physical center of you.

Catherine said she just needed a break, that he could pass hours digging, and she was just taking a short walk. She proceeded to harangue me about my lacking sense of duty to my family. I screamed at her that if she didn’t need so much shit, I could work less which would allow me to do more, and if she wanted this stuff, she better shut the fuck up and pick up her son. I remember that I made sure I didn’t say our son, leaving it hang out there, I was blaming her for how the kid came out.

Feeling guilty for my actions but still righteous, we enrolled Doug in the Fertile Minds Academy. At the new school they allowed him to play and be with people that were capable of dealing with Asperger’s and, as much as this kills me now, weren’t embarrassed by him.

Sure, it wasn’t the best emotion to have about our child. But with the help from Fertile Minds, we were able to regain some sanity. Douglass was left with his childproof gardening tools to dig up the lawns and he would spend hours doing it, the teachers leaving him be because, in those environments, out in the trees searching for buried treasure he was friendly with the kids, would share his trowel even show them a thing or two about the proper way to dig a hole which mostly just involved filling it back up again when you are done with it. Do you have any idea how much the school cost? But you know what? Whatever makes the kid happy, I said. And what kept him happy and out of our hair, made us happy.

People knew we would go to all lengths to get the best care for our family. The success of Fertile Minds and the positive attention inflated our egos to dangerous proportions, especially Catherine. She had a few friends with whom she fundraised for the Autism Speaks foundation and she was always the center of attention because she made things look so good, so easy and she brandished her jewelry and name brand handbags in front of anyone who had enough saliva and taste to drool. And with Doug, she paraded his case as a symbol of her compassion and dedication like it was a rare accessory, a crown of bejeweled sympathy.

Not that I should be exculpated from any of this. I used to own half a closet full of shoes. Gucci, Bruno Magli, Prada, J.P. Tod’s, Ferragamos. I had variations of the same shoe in multiple colors. And the suits, they were all coordinated, same thing, name brands, with silk ties and Egyptian cotton shirts. The game day uniform was the black Ferragamos and the striped Zegna suit. I didn’t mess around, because if I was going to spend all of my paycheck, which I most assuredly did, then I was going to look really fucking good.

Clients want to see that Armani tag on your suit jacket as you hang it on the back of your chair at a lunch meeting. They want to see that you pay more for your shoes than a round of golf at a prestigious golf course. It’s the image that they need, and Catherine and I were a perfect team.

After events that would go late, Catherine would drop me off in the morning to get my car. As unforgiving and impetuous as she was, Catherine was, well, is beautiful. She has mirrored black hair and big, mocha eyes. Dominant traits I’m told, and she used them for exactly that. Domination. When the clients saw her, these white-haired dirty old coots, the same guys that could spend hours telling racist and misogynistic jokes, they spoke in softer voices, inside voices as mothers would say. They opened doors, kissed her hand when she introduced herself, laughed at her jokes, bowed their heads graciously. Catherine ate it up. If there was anything she was truly good at, it was performing in the spotlight. I think that’s the reason that she always wanted the best stuff, she thought herself just as magnetic and dramatic as any actress out there. It was her way of helping me look the part, to start living my dream.

Since we made it out of Sacramento, I dreamt of taking over a big advertising agency in New York. San Fran was big enough for a time, but I wanted glory. I wanted the corner office, the influence. I wanted to be the next David Ogilvy. In San Francisco, I had already climbed almost to the top of the ladder, and was poising myself for that jump, for a big position, and to really matter.

That was before the Tractor Fuckup.

The day of the Tractor Fuckup, we had a fight before I even left the house. I told her I was going to be home late for the John Deere event. Not our most glorious account, but a big enough piece of business that would hold us over even in the tough times. Not only did they do a lot of print, online, and television media, but they hosted expensive events in the outskirts of San Francisco and near their bigger offices in Sacramento. Tractor pulls, demonstrations, test-drives, and cookouts with the red and white checked tablecloths. Single barrel bourbon and triple distilled whiskeys. But what got her so upset was not the late return, but the leaving early.

 Had this coincided with her days to pick up Douglass in the afternoons from Fertile Minds, then it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But that day I was scheduled to do it (my days were Wednesdays and Fridays) and she threw a shitfit. She thought it unfair that she had to pick up Douglass three times a week to my two.

If both of us were working, I would have understood that. But her days seemed like an endless spa retreat outside of the fundraising for the Autism Speaks foundation, and even that was more of an attempt to show off her clothes and be in the spotlight.

At the Deere Event, under the shade of an old California oak, I chatted with my top client. Charles Bilson was a slow-walking man, whose broad shoulders connected directly to his head and squinted at you as if you were prey. Gruff as he was, he had things in line and enjoyed wading through bullshit. He loved to fix things and would always start his advice by pouring you a drink of his single barrel bourbon and saying “Well, hell…” before giving you his perspective.

Talk of marketing strategy veered towards life, and I told him the Dougshit story and how my marriage was hurting because we couldn’t find places to take him. Charles, never one to rush his words, squinted in another direction.

“Well, hell, Charlie Junior there woulda played with your boy, good spirit that one.”

I couldn’t help but feel a humid, electric jealousy like a thunderstorm in me. I saw a young boy with a wide smile, running around the area by the display tractor, dressed in his cowboy best. That was the type of boy Catherine and I wanted, without worry and defect. I bet he’d only been to the doctor on the day he was born and that’s it.

“But Doug struggles to socialize unless he has his trowel, even at fancy dinners.”

Charles poured me another drink, a stiffer one.

“You know, Tyler Daniel, our whole line o’ product is geared around digging and tilling God’s soil. He’d fit right in here.” He tipped his bill and smiled.

Never in my entire life did I want to punch a man more than then. It took some time to gather myself, but I told him that he didn’t quite understand the complexity of our child.

Charles pulled me inside the ranch house after that, brought me into the dining room with all the catered goods. The attendees, all dressed in western garb, chatted merrily while I stewed about the whole conversation with Charles. After dinner, I split from the group of men, still unhappy. I carelessly jumped onto one of the tractors that they had used for one of the demonstrations. I had never driven one before, I mean, really, who has? But I wanted to try, figured I should, the exact backwards logic that goes in after too much drink.

I loved it.

Cranking the gears around and lowering the tills and I went around the demo site, furrowing the ground. It wasn’t fast, but you could feel the slow steady power of actually doing something. Seeds could have been planted in the soil right behind me and I would have been a part of a harvest in the fall. There would have been more than just the money and clothing. My work actually showed progress: tangible, direct, positive progress, where I’m creating more than visible persuasions for goods of varying value. I turned to watch the rows of furrows align out of the tire tracks and ant hills, so assuring and mesmerizing.

I’d like to think what made me lose awareness was truly enjoying myself, if only for a brief moment, that it wasn’t the drink or the jealousy. But it doesn’t matter. I veered into a fencepost, though that could have been easily forgiven. What mattered was the fence itself cresting like a wave and crashing on Charlie Junior as he hid from some boys in a game of Hide and Seek.

I remember imagining—no, hoping—that Charlie Junior would suffer brain damage from the top railing hitting his head and then Charles Bilson would know my pain: a handicapped child. He would know how limiting it would be, and the shame in sometimes hating that child for those very limits.

As it unfolded, it was just a broken femur and a lost job.

I became a pariah.

My story, comically to others, spread far beyond San Francisco. My job was to gain trust and to communicate clearly between a firm and the client, and I had drunk drove a tractor into my client’s kid. It didn’t take long, as prideful as I was about my image, before I stopped the humiliation of the interviews. With the outstanding facts of my Tractor Fuckup, I wasn’t gaining any traction.

Bills amassed quickly and, in a desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy and be forced to move back to Sacramento, I sold off almost all of my things. Catherine didn’t sell a thing, since I was the one to fuck up, I was the one that would suffer, not her. Though it got so desperate she looked for a job too.

At first, I couldn’t believe how quickly she landed a job for a former competitor.

But it shouldn’t have surprised me. She had had unmistakable success fundraising at Autism Speaks and her (and my shared) desperation not to have to return to Sacramento. I knew how she could work a room, the trebuchet lip that would release those strong words, before they became so dark and critical. Back at UC Davis, she convinced a whole basement full of our cinema friends of the implausibility of a film solely based on the choice of plastic bags used in a suffocation murder. It was an argument that made sense, and she sold it with pure charisma and conviction. She was better at it than I ever was.

Catherine made a show of working, coming home to talk about all the ideas she had for her clients, how she was going to completely revamp a company’s identity, reshape the brand to fit the true audience. She brought home a paycheck big enough to stave off bankruptcy, but not for long, and she really held it over my head that I couldn’t get a job.

Seeing divorce in Catherine’s eyes, I again called the clients that I had once made amazingly rich, hoping to get on the client side. No dice. I sucked up all my pride and called up Charles Bilson at John Deere, to offer the most contrite apology possible, to salvage the remaining speck of my ad guy image. Not surprisingly, the secretary remembered me and told me that he was away even though I knew he was there. So I asked to leave a voicemail. I told Charles’ machine my whole story, the desperate and sad truth. It was cathartic to apologize for everything that I did to him and his family.

I avoided the shame of it all by hanging out with Douglass. We woke up extra early in the mornings, evading the pomp of Catherine’s morning routine, and walked to school together, stopping to dig along the way.

Slowly, Doug began to make improvements, not even needing to always take his trowel to school, although he wouldn’t let anyone look after it besides me. So I became the guy that went everywhere with a trowel in my pocket. Sometimes we swung by the same parks that Fertile Minds would frequent, just so Douglass saw old friends. He even managed to have small conversations with them. I could barely contain my joy at seeing something like this develop. While not all the time, Douglass occasionally looked people straight in the eye, he even began to order his ice cream straight from the clerk.

Catherine called to have me switch pick up days. “I don’t know how I could pick Douglass up after work.” She said, completely overwhelmed. “I can’t –“

“Don’t worry. I’ll get him,” I said.

“Are you… uh, that’s great Daniel. I really… it’s just…”

“Not a problem, Cath.”

While my hope for rebuilding our life built up, so did the bills. Catherine believed that since she was working she could spend even more than before.

So I took Douglass out of Fertile Minds Academy. And it fit me. I enjoyed my days so much more, I even daydreamed about the life changes we could make—downsize the house, move to a slightly less expensive part of San Francisco—though I couldn’t ever imagine convincing Catherine of this.

 “That is not work, Tyler Daniel,” Catherine reminded me. “That doesn’t pay the bills. That doesn’t change the sacrifice I’m making to keep this family afloat while you buy ice cream. You need to get a job or else.”

Out of options, with divorce on my horizon, all I could see was an abyss.

I don’t know why Charles Bilson called back, but he invited me for a drink one night. I accepted immediately. Although I had to tell him that since I didn’t have the money or the trust for a sitter, I would like to bring Doug to the Bilson’s home.

Doug and I rode the bus out to the outskirts of Sacramento, to a community where the homes were wide and flat and there wasn’t any terracotta to be seen anywhere. Charles’ wife’s rose bushes were astonishing, but I worried about Charlie Junior and what his state would be like.

Charlie Junior, as kids his age sometimes do, had a short, strange memory and didn’t blame me so much as he blamed the fence. He spoke to Doug in that plangent, straightforward voice that kids have. Doug showed him his trowel and not two seconds later were they running outside to dig up Mrs. Bilson’s rosebushes in the front yard. It made me happy to see that Charlie Junior’s bones and joints were functioning well, that he could smile but mostly that he had the ability to make Doug smile, too.

“Mr. Bilson,” I said nervously.

“Since when did I stop being Charles?” he swirled the ice in his drink.

“Uh, well… you know… the tractor …”

He put the drink down, the ice clinking to a stop. “Well, hell, I’m gonna be honest. I was mad, didn’t know what you did to the boy there. But he’s okay now, and I realize that I may have overreacted…”

“Overreacted? I can’t believe you didn’t kill me.”

To this, he laughed. “Couldn’t decide which machine to use. But I know you, and you may have been a bit mixed up, may still be, but you’re good in the end. Can’t say that about everyone, you know?”

I only nodded.

“Look here, our business is strong and we’re loyal. That said, the new agency leans on us and I’m not sure they’re sturdy enough for us to lean back. They might need some help.”

The rest of the conversation was a blur of fast heartbeats, slurred speech, and drinks. We stayed the night there and the next day I ended back at the house, with a happy Doug under my arm, trowel brandished, to tell Catherine.

She stood at the granite kitchen counter, going over the bills. When I told her she wasn’t as enthused as I thought she would be, only menaced that I better get the job. Remembering a time when I was responsible for working and affording our life, I sympathized.

The morning of my interview arrived. I awoke with purpose, and I felt lucky. In my closet I had saved the last of my good clothes, the Ferragamo shoes, the striped Zegna suit. I showered and shaved, making sure to clean my nails, which had become so dirty with my daily excavations with Douglass. I planned to take BART to the office and I waited out on the doorstep, breathing in deep lungfuls of dewy air for the wet winter I wanted to pretend wouldn’t come.

But then I became unsettled by the memory of Doug at the back window, rapping on the windowpane with his trowel and how small and alone he looked. I turned and again saw Doug, in the flesh, up in the dark of morning tapping on the glass. Immediately, I opened the door. He offered his trowel, and with a munchkin smile said, “good luck, daddy.” I don’t get a whole lot of talk with him and so I kissed his forehead, scooped him up to feel the centeredness of hugging him. I put Doug back down and told him to go back to bed. But he wouldn’t turn around, and I couldn’t help but think that I was abandoning him. I tried to explain to him that what I was doing would help the family get back together, that we had bills to pay and I needed to get a job to pay them.

The interview with the advertising firm was short and direct. They clearly had kept abreast of my work and my downfall and when they found that I didn’t have any questions, they told me that they would keep me in mind. This was a speech I had given before I would send the hopeless interviewee off into the world to never be thought of again.

Disheartened with no transport, I walked aimlessly while thinking of all the ways in which my family would be better off without me. I went to the Golden Gate Bridge. I know it sounds trite to say that it called to me. I wondered how it stayed so miraculously perfect orange, the structure confidently rose out of the blackness of the brooding Pacific.

I walked through streets and parks, past the affluent and the penniless, spoke to no one and no one spoke to me. I didn’t belong.

I walked out on the bridge before stopping and gazing inland. Then to the blackness of the bay water. I thought of how peaceful that blackness looked.  I corkscrewed my wedding ring off my finger and stared at it for a moment, tried to understand the wear, figure where the gleam went and how a perfect circle could represent something so imperfect. And then I chucked it off the bridge and saw the spin of the ring, and its diminishing glimmer as it disappeared into the ocean. And then I wanted to follow it.

But a painter walked by, with a grey and black paint brush mustache and bridge orange splattered all over his crunchy, once white overalls.

“Must take a while to paint it,” I said, stupidly.

“All 365 days,” he said, in an even, friendly voice that told me he’s said this a million times.

“All Year?”
            He nodded again, and I thought I saw a smile underneath his mustache, given away by the raise in his cheeks and the spark in his eye.

On the walk back, I made up the mugging story to salvage my marriage and my family. The story about the bums mugging me would suffice. Sure, it was a lie, but it was a lie so vividly transparent that it made me think of a weird thought, I remembered that argument Catherine gave to those cinema students. It was only a tidbit of information that when suffocating a person, make sure to use a clear bag, because people will grab for the neck, but if you use a dark bag, people will tear it open so that they can see again.

Catherine accepted my story, but not the vision she could still see: the interview failure. Which crushed me, but worse was I had to tell Doug that I had lost his lucky trowel.

I took him to a store to buy the best trowel that money could buy, but forgot I didn’t have my wallet.

“It’s okay, I can still find treasure with my hands,” he said.

When we returned, there was a note on the granite counter tops, from Catherine, saying she was leaving me, leaving us. Apparently, she couldn’t stand my careless attitude for her, epitomized in my failure to get a job.

Rudderless and without any semblance of knowledge on how to break this to Doug, I remembered where the trowel might still be and asked if he wanted to go find some real treasure.

“You know where treasure is?” he gleefully asked me.

We walked a long ways to The Presidio Golf Course and strolled through the pines, Doug searching for every sign of treasure. His enthusiasm enraptured me, he scrutinized every person on the street. I saw, over his shoulder, a homeless man, with unwashed skin, a thin frame, bad posture and wearing a soddy suit I hoped wasn’t mine. Doug waved at him, pure and simple. The homeless man smiled back, broad and white. While I thought about that man, we walked straight out on the course with the air of superior purpose that can only come with a treasure hunt.

I saw the ballwasher on the teebox, the one that was only a few yards from the ground under repair, and the white lines that marked our treasure. I held Doug, stared straight into his brown eyes and showed him where the trowel and the treasure were. He asked what kind of treasure and I didn’t have the heart to tell him, only let him loose.

He dug as though he were trying to save someone buried alive, pure and ferocious. I just sat and watched him, enjoyed his pleasure and when he pulled out my bundle of clothes he came back, presenting it to me like it was something he made for me on Christmas.

“Don’t you want this, Doug?”

“You need it more.”

I slapped the dirt from the suit. “Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

In that moment, I couldn’t have loved him more.

I unraveled my suit, took out my wallet, watch and phone, still with some battery left. I rushed for my messages and the ad firm was the first one.

“Mr. Logan, this is Chester Holloway from Holloway and Luther Advertising.”

Please.

“We regret to inform you that the position you applied for has been filled. Good luck out there.”

Doug searched for meaning in my face.

“You okay, daddy?” he quietly asked.

“Yeah, Doug, I’m okay.”

But Doug wasn’t sold. I could see that Doug was starting to realize what had happened. He was too clever. So he rushed to the suit, digging through all the pockets. He absorbed too much not to know that all this was my stuff. Sure, there could have been a suit similar but not the phone and wallet.

“No more treasure,” he said.

I shook my head and held him with my free arm, while I deleted the message from the phone.
            “We’re not going to see Catherine again are we?” he asked plainly.

“No, buddy, were not.”

“I like digging with you better.”

I held him close, on the verge of tears. The second message started automatically, it was Charles.

“Don’t know what you think of working back in Sacramento, but I thought I’d offer you a spot on the marketing squad. I’m sure your lady wouldn’t like that, but it’s something.”

Doug and I walked straight for the bus station. I couldn’t help but think of living back in Sacramento, of going to work and looking forward to the picnics and the tractor pulls. I could see him digging through the earth, pulling up plants and finding treasure. On the bus, we sat by the window so we could see as we crossed over the Bay Bridge, and climbed over the mountains. I held Doug closer in a joyful silence and he touched my finger, rubbing the white band of skin that was already starting to tan in.