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GOOD WITH CHEMICALS

For Gabriel in five years

by Derrick Harrison Hurd

August 2011

I can’t help but laugh out loud as I am racing through the rain, dressed in my best Winter Clothes (and carrying my trusty backpack), to Keary’s cute little car parked facing me across the parking lot in front of the apartment. Pawing for keys in my pocket with gloves on my hands utterly delights me.

The whole scene delights me, everything about the suddenly fabulous life I am living, better than any other time I can remember

I think to myself, “where have I been all my life,”

I don’t need anything I don’t have, I don’t want anything I don’t need, and I am grateful for the whole lot. I even get a big charge out of this routine run for coffee and toilet paper and maybe even a donut.

I am leaving behind an apartment that I love, knowing I would come home to it…loving the little car that that I am about to drive in this romantic rain through the fabulous Virginia countryside. I got nothing on my mind but joining the rest of the world on its ordinary way through this ordinary day.

It is in this jubilant and celebratory frame of mind…a kind of blind gratitude…that I see Eric’s truck idling in the parking lot half a block away.

It is obviously his truck…exactly the kind of truck you’d expect him to drive.

I know it by sight and I look for it hoping it to be every truck I see. I had really never expected to see him again, and certainly not on a happy occasion, but I never stopped looking all the same.

I do that with a lot of things: I look for Keary’s hair thinking it might just be on top of the best mind I will ever come this close to; listen for Jamie’s laugh when he knows everybody’s happy; or when someone shows up heroically when no one else shows up at all, like David.

In looking for Eric’s truck I am looking for something else I love: a challenge. The kind of cause that is supposed to have been lost; and the people that everyone else gave up on.

I have been lost, I know how it hurts. I have been given up on, and I know how it disempowers. So, my looking for Eric is neither sinister, nor even so hard to understand, it is simply the obvious attraction to a really interesting challenge…and maybe a little…the danger.

I see these things in crowds, in visions, and in the little stories I make up about the flurries of snow that blow off of the bare limbs of the trees; most of the time I am disappointed…sometimes not though.

It was his truck and I knew instantly, and it was Eric curled up in a blanket in the front seat with steam clouding up the windows as he shivered and coughed. Even through the steam I knew it was him, and I was glad.

“I’m so sorry,” he calls to me as I change direction and lope over to the window he has just lowered for me.

“For what?” I asked.

“Well…because last time I saw you,” he said, “you were calling the police to have me thrown out of your apartment.”

“Oh, that,” I said, “I can explain that.”

I could explain it (thankfully) and I could tell he was receptive to getting some kind of explanation for some pretty crazy talk. Mostly he just seemed to be glad that I hadn’t felt like he owed me an apology…which he didn’t and I wanted him to know why.

“I didn’t call the police,” I say, “I called our friend and told him that if he wanted you thrown out that badly he was going to have to come down and do it himself…or call the police and have them do it, because I wouldn’t.”

He brightens up, “Oh yeah…that IS what you said.”

“So see…I was on your side,” which was definitely half true. My friend who wanted him thrown out (of his house, after all) had a side too…and although I was not yet fully familiar with that side…I was definitely half on it.

“So...you didn’t tell him that you were afraid I was going to kill you?” he asks.

“Well yes, I did say that,” I respond and have to think about it for a minute while I take a draw in the cigarette that Eric has produced and lit for me and which is now perched carefully in my gloved hand, “I agree… that was a little over the top,”

He looks at me with an expression that is just shy of gloating and says, “then I guess you’re right, I guess I don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“Want breakfast?” I ask him, “I’m going to MacDonald’s.”

He smiles widely, “you like a MacDonald’s breakfast too, huh?” Eric smile is the equivalent of a Masonic handshake.

“Want to take my truck?” he asks, but he is still awaiting trial on his speeding ticket…for going at least 65 (on the speed-trap sheriff’s radar gun…in a parking lot. I can’t get enough of that story, but it makes me leery of riding with him.

Also the rear window on his side of his white redneck banged up four by four Chevrolet 2500 with the extended cab…is missing. He notices that I am looking at the stream of hot air that is pouring out of the hole and says, “I got a piece of wood for that somewhere.”

“I’ll drive,” I tell him, “you can navigate.”

I’m a good driver but I can’t find the road I live on, I have twice lost the car; and everything looks exactly alike here…winding country road over hill and dale, no sidewalks, quaint road signs (that are impossible to read unless you climb the pole it’s on); stunningly beautiful sights in every direction…rhapsodic excursions in every direction…with the inevitable exception of the one that I am looking for.

“How did you get money for gas?” Eric asks me noticing that the gauge indicates a half a tank.

Last time we saw each other he was trying to convince me that panhandling in December was the way to go for guys like us. “You can make two hundred bucks a night,” he told me enthusiastically.

“Things have changed Eric,” I tell him, “things have really changed.”

On the way to MacDonald’s Eric starts telling me about his most recent adventure in survival, which mostly involved this frustrating conversation he had had with this guy who in the middle of a sentence would suddenly look up at him and bark, “who the hell are YOU?”

Eric tells me, “I told this guy…Hey…I was the one who picked you up from the AA meeting and drove you home to this place….I’m Eric, remember me?”

“How many times did you have to tell him this?” I ask.

“Just until he passed out,” he says, “he said I could sleep there if I drove him home, but I could see the bedbugs dancing on the cushions on his couch, so I ended up back in my truck…back at your place.”

I wondered how many nights he had slept in his car in the parking lot, in this freezing weather with a broken out rear window… outside the warm and cozy apartment that I had taken refuge in when he was banned from it. Why come back to the one place he knew he wasn’t wanted?

I wondered how many times I had done the equivalent of the same thing back in Los Angeles in those sad, sick, last days there.

“I had this girlfriend,” he tells me, “but I had to lock her in a closet a couple of times and so now she’s always telling everyone I’m crazy.”

“Go figure,” I say, and think to myself, next he is going to start talking about building bombs in our basement or something like that; something just a little more horrifying, something with more bite then domestic violence.

“I need a scientist,” he says, “yeah…you know…somebody who is good with chemicals.”