The tale of the drifting laborer and the cheat, the runner, the roommate, and all the others…
by: Steve S. Saroff
Drifting in the West, a five-hundred-dollar car, laborer’s clothes, and laborer’s hands. I thought of working in the woods or in a mine, but it didn’t matter.
It helps not to know much about me before Missoula. I grew up in L.A., but that was then, and since, I had been through things that had stuck. I had skills to keep moving. I knew how to weld, how to connect pipes, how to read blueprints, and I knew how to listen. I had seen people, been close to them, who didn’t have the skills to share stories, or didn’t try to avoid fights, and watching them helped me learn how to fit in. But I was a drifting laborer, and it is a hard thing to be twenty-three, to never have been loved, and to be absolutely alone.
Most days had events that accumulated like the broken concrete on job sites. But what I have tried to hold onto are the other kinds of fragments. Like these two: sixteen years old, running from East Los Angeles sprawl and anger, hitchhiking across Canada. Early spring, on the edge of a prairie town in the evening, and the thunderheads in the dark distance are flashing lightning. Then, twenty years old in Minneapolis, going into a convenience store in a wintertime dusk while outside two cops are leaning against the wall, drinking coffee from paper cups.
I won’t waste your time; I will tell you about Missoula and the girlfriends. The first was Helen. I was sitting on the hood of my car, looking across the Clark Fork River, drinking a can of beer. I had found a job but was done with it. By this, I mean that I was leaving town. Hard work for ten days, no woods, no mine. Instead, it had been the same pounding of nails and staying in the cheapest of hotel rooms. I thought I would head to Idaho next, and I was saying goodbye to where I was, the place, that river, that motel parking lot. Then a girl staggered up to me, breathless and panicky, and asked, “Will you drive me to the hospital?”
She had blood spurting from a cut on her hand and wrist. Some broken bottle, she said, by the riverbank. I got her to push down on the wounds and calmed her a bit. Told her it really didn’t look bad and said she would be fine. But she bled all over the back seat and the clothes I had piled there. At the emergency room, she was pale and couldn’t walk. I carried her in and then read magazines for hours while they sewed her up.
The nurse brought her out and gave me a list of things to do. Prescription drugs to buy and notes on changing bandages. In the car, night now, I asked, “Tell me where you live.” She started to cry and said that she had just moved out of her boyfriend’s and didn’t have a place to stay. There goes all my ten days’ cash for another motel room with two big beds.
Helen. She took a few days to calm down, then was embarrassed, started calling me her “hero,” and asked questions about everything. I tried to keep her talking, tried to keep her depression at bay. But there’s more. She had long, dark hair and eyes like I’ve never seen. High cheekbones and thin hands. I stayed on one bed. She stayed on the other, and just before my money ran out, she got more from her parents, paid me back everything I had spent, and rented herself an apartment. It was the end of her summer break from college, and she was fine again, the bandages getting smaller.
She said, “Move in. Let me take care of you for a while.” This all happened, this movie-like chance that started me on a different kind of road.
She cooked omelets, baked loaves of warm bread, and sewed curtains for the windows. I got a simple job of pushing a vacuum around and would rush back each afternoon to see her. She gave me things she collected from thrift stores. Odd lamps and a polyester sports coat, just to laugh together at how funny I looked in it.
I brought her things too. Bottles of olives stuffed with garlic from a small Italian grocery store. A wooden coffee grinder with an iron hand crank from a yard sale. And wildflowers from the hillsides, which she put in a thrift-store vase in the middle of our small, perfect, thrift-store table. The table with the two matching chairs, one of which would be smashed, swung hard onto the floor when everything fell apart.
She also gave me warmth and daytime touch. She’d pull her shirt off, the white T-shirts she wore, happy, giggling, and tugging at my hands. Me just barely in the place, the door hardly closed. “Let me take a shower first,” I said, and she laughed and asked, “Why?”
And in the dark, too. My solitary nightmares that come at four in the morning. Gasping. Awake. I am lying by a highway side against a barbed-wire fence. So young that the barking dogs are terror. So young that I’m hiding from police. So young that I am scared of the older bums who will beat and rob me. It is raining. I’m soaked and cold. But it’s just sweat, and the barking dog is down the street, and I’m not a fourteen-year-old runaway anymore. Instead, I am lying next to a girl who has told me, “Wake me whenever you want. Hold me whenever you need.” I am warm and safe, waking from my nightmare and reaching across the bed’s darkness. Heartbeat going from panic to peace. Falling back to sleep with her.
To grow with her. To travel to the places she talked about. That is what I wanted. I would meet her parents and impress them with my devotion; this was the plan. She and I were drunk in the kitchen. Drinking wine from a bottle that we were passing back and forth. She had invited friends, and it was a simple party. Then she said, “I’ll say, ‘Dad, meet my boyfriend. He vacuums,’ ” and the fun evaporated because she was laughing and her friends were laughing, and it was hilarious to them.
I was sweeping dust in a palace, doing my time before having my chance, but I couldn’t see it. All I saw was that it was impossible. I was the janitor at the local convention center, and she was a rich man’s daughter.
One of those friends of hers that night at our party was an art student who left little drawings of butterflies on the wall next to the front door, and signed, “Love you, Stewart.” Then Stewart was coming by, visiting her while I was working.
I had my faults then. I still have some of them now. There were times when events and crowds were no fun. My clothes never mattered and never fit well. I had trouble with dishes, and they stacked up until there were no more clean cups. And sometimes I yelled, that was the worst. But I was mostly clean, happy, and there.
So when Helen asked me, “What do you want to do with your life?” Instead of saying, “Maybe I’ll go to college and become an engineer,” I answered, “I have no idea. I’m here in Missoula with you. That’s enough amazement for now.”
But when I asked her, “Are you having sex with Stewart?” she lashed back, “How dare you insult me. It’s you I love.” And I believed her, because I wanted to believe her.
I came home early with good news, mid-morning, the sun streaming through the windows, and I walked through the unlocked door. They were there in the middle of the floor. She was on top of him, her back to me, so he saw me, but she didn’t.
I walked past them. I didn’t see what she did. I went to the table. To sit down? To put the new flowers in the vase? To tell her that the hotel had just given me the good job of being their mechanic? But instead, I picked up a chair and swung it back to the floor, and it came apart in splinters everywhere.
I would like to say that I left Missoula then and finally went to Idaho, but I didn’t. I would like to have written the title of all this just as “Missoula,” but I’m stuck with “After,” which may be where you started reading. Helen was my first girlfriend, not just in Missoula, and sometimes I wonder where she is, what book she might be reading, what she is wearing. I think of these questions to soothe the same nightmares that have haunted me all my life since first running away. I still think of Helen best for what she did best: she calmed and gave me peace. But mostly I wonder if she ever thinks of me.
The second girlfriend happened quickly. I went to the campus. I found a large cafeteria and introduced myself to someone who smiled at me. Then we talked and listened. And it was the same for the third. And the fourth. The same. Over and over. But it was never seduction; the loneliness that we shared was equal. And though none of these small conversations had much depth, I told no lies. True, I was looking for what I had known with Helen, but is that so wrong? To hope for happiness again, and to keep looking for what might last.
I began making a lot of money soon, doing other things, and years started going by, and the girlfriends held my hand in the dark, and I held theirs as well.
There are more sparks and more craziness. There’s Brett, a runner, who lives in a big house with roommates and is stoned all the time but still manages to take a daily run to the top of Mt. Sentinel. I try to keep up with her, and she brings me back to her bed, her ancient record player, and her collection of Grateful Dead music. And we didn’t really talk. But when I told her that it didn’t make sense to keep sleeping with her, she pushed me away and ran faster than I had ever seen her run.
Later that evening, my phone rang, and it was Brett, and I answered. She yelled, “Listen, listen, listen!” Then there was a bit of quiet, then over the phone she screamed, “Did you hear that? I’m pulling the hair out of my head.”
This could have been darkly humorous, except that she explained she was also sitting in a bathtub, superficially cutting herself with a disposable safety razor. One of the roommates heard the yelling, broke through the locked door, and took care of her. Then I spent an anxious month until the same roommate called me to say that Brett was with another guy and that she had stopped “hating” me. I asked the roommate what I had done wrong, and she said, “There’s no such thing as casual sex,” which was such a true thing that I was silent and thought about trying to drift again. A few days later, though, the roommate, Christian, knocked on my door. She became girlfriend ten, and I became boyfriend eight. We told each other these numbers, laughed, and were both relieved that some sex could be close to casual.
All the while, Missoula grew. Espresso bars, restaurants, music venues, and the pressing of strangers that follows consumption.
Once, this place was the West, unknown and perfect. Now, there are miles of box stores on the town’s edge and daily flights to big cities. Once, there was Helen, who went to the river to kill herself, and then chose me to save her. I could touch that. I could see what to do. Now there is Girlfriend Twenty. Not crazy, not even wild. We share breakfasts. Sometimes at her place. Sometimes at mine. We drink our coffee, scroll on our phones. She sometimes sighs and searches for a window to stare out of, and I do nothing then, having no idea where she wants to be or how to reach her. We will probably leave each other soon.
And until then, when I can’t sleep, I get out of bed. I go into the kitchen. And do what I’m doing now: write, and wonder why certain moments become the memories that last, while all the others fade.
Steve S. Saroff is the author of the literary novel Paper Targets. His short fiction has appeared in Monkeybicycle, The Jewish Fiction Journal, The Examined Life Journal, BULL, and earlier in national magazines, including several stories in Redbook. Follow his writing on Instagram @steveSaroffWords.
