THE GARAGE ROOM by John C. Hampsey
I am in the garage room again . . . a place lit by an old strange bulb that never seems to burn out. Up in the ceiling – globular, dusty, fragile-looking. In twenty years I’ve never replaced it.
At nearly 1 A.M., the room is cold, because it is December in central California. But I don’t want to put the space heater on since it uses too much electricity.
I plan on having a cigarette – because no one smokes inside houses anymore – and brandy, and to experience time that feels like it is my own.
I turn on the old radio that used to be my mother’s. It plays nondescript FM jazz. And I know I need to work on my daily list for tomorrow, Sunday . . .
The small pad of paper sits on the white metal washing machine. It needs to be written upon . . . lined up, as it is, in just the right position. But I mix a brandy with water first, at one third/two thirds ratio. And then begin pacing, like my father used to do across our living and dining rooms, his bourbon highball sweating on the marble mantel. But this similarity happens by accident, because I pace from the garage room out into the courtyard and back, connecting the outside world with the inside in a way my father never would.
Sometimes I check the cracked thermometer hanging by a nail on the redwood fence to see what it’s really like outside, then turn back toward the garage room.
The five-minute news comes on at the top of the hour that I don’t want to hear because it breaks in too much. And that I do want to hear because I want to know what’s going on.
Later on, there is the TV that sits high on an old dresser from my boyhood bedroom, even though I know the TV will result in time frittering away during the very seconds I am watching.
A dog barks from across the street, that I try to ignore. I could close the garage room door so I won’t hear it, but then I would be cut off from the outside and there would be no passing back and forth.
The woman who owns the dog is “crazy as a loon” my neighbor Don says, and she has too many boyfriends for a woman in her fifties. But I don’t care about that, but only about her barking dog, and the anonymous nasty letters she sends to people in the neighborhood she doesn’t like. But never to me. Because I look at her in a way that sees right through her. Like when I asked her to clean up the junk in her front yard one time, and she immediately stashed it behind a half-assed lean-to wooden fence.
Her dog ceases, but I know he will begin again. And I wonder if the neighbors ever hear the low woof-woofing inside their sleep.
The pipe is wrapped in foil behind a piece of Mexican pottery on the shelf. After examining it, I decide there is enough to light. Sometimes I am wrong and there isn’t enough to light. So I end up smoking ashes and nothing happens, and the turnover never begins.
This time there is something – I can see specks of brown inside the gray ash. And a few seconds later I can see the smoke in the thin courtyard air funneling toward the fence and the moon between two brown persimmon leaves, and drifting toward my old neighbors next door who always sleep with their bedroom window open. But they wouldn’t know what it is, unless they always knew what it was and never said anything. But one time she did mention smelling cigar smoke in the late night air. And I said nothing, because I wanted her to think I smoked cigars.
Eight oyster shells, my daughter collected one time, bleached white from the sun, line the top of the fence. They seem to turn whiter in the sharp moonlight, and whiter still . . . until they blur together and try to change positions. I look away because I know I am worrying too much about the oyster shells, and head back to the garage room to light a cigarette.
I forgot to dump out the ashtray from the night before, so I have to make my way through the courtyard gate, across the driveway, to the other side of the garage where the garbage cans stand.
Leaning against the stucco wall, barely visible in the dim electric light filtering through the persimmon tree, is the wooden pallet-platform I made for my daughter when she wanted something to tap dance upon. It was a rough job, because I am lousy with a hammer. But she was too young to know the difference.
I have never been handy, just like my father was never handy, so he hired men he didn’t know to fix everything.
As I dump the ashes into the grey can, the glass ashtray slips from my fingers flying into the darkness, followed by the shocking noise against the concrete pavers. Someone will hear that, I think.
I kick with my foot until I feel the ashtray which is surprisingly whole and sitting against an old blackened four-by-four next to the garage wall. I meant to get rid of the moldy four-by-four because it is filled with termites, but it didn’t fit inside the garbage can labeled Green Waste.
Kneeling down to pick up the ashtray, I can’t help thinking about the dry-rot termites that can fly miraculously when it is hot with the Santa Ana winds, right through garage walls. So the infested wood must be gotten rid of. I could just throw it some place, but I’m not sure where.
In the garage room, I light my cigarette and set the ashtray on the washing machine at just the right angle against a little ridge in the lid. I move it a couple times because it isn’t right. Then it is. But I move it again because it still isn’t right, telling my hand to just let go. But the ashtray will never be right unless I am able to think myself away.
I puff on my cigarette and try to ignore the ashtray, but it still isn’t right. So I move it a few more times, still thinking – termites . . . worrying about them inside the walls, seeing their small white bodies asleep inside the sluted wood, because they must sleep sometime . . . and the soft termite flesh always winning out somehow against the dense hardness. And I don’t want to look for their droppings, turning into sawdust feces you can never quite sweep away.
I start to work on my list, but hear the dog barking again. And a few minutes later I am wishing I had put gloves on before picking it up, because a single termite can crawl inside your finger if you stay still too long. So I try not to feel my hands as I carry the rotten four-by-four down the street under the silver light coming from the streetlamp on the corner. There would be more shadow coverage on the sidewalk, but I don’t want to walk under the arbutus trees where the spiders hang down into your face when you least expect it.
It is a short walk and there are no cars. But then one comes along, like it always does, at the last second, quickly from the top of the hill. So I hoist the wood beam onto my shoulder to look more natural, like I’m doing something I’m supposed to do at 1:30 A.M.
The car passes without noticing me. So I regret putting the wood on my shoulder, because the termites could drop onto my back, and the spiders can crawl with tiny weighted feet.
I run the last few steps and then flinch-toss it into her front yard beyond the fake fence, not caring about the noise because I can race back to the garage room. But it is too late for that, because the dog’s barking is closer, and I can actually see the gray-white Husky staring down at me from the deck above her garage.
I remain still, not sure if I should run because the dog could jump down and chase me, and remembering a college student one time, afraid of another neighbor lady’s dog . . . a nasty German Shepherd owned by a skinny blond woman in her thirties named Mary Lou. She was divorced from her biker husband, but he still stopped by whenever he wanted. And she had a five-year-old daughter no one ever saw.
His rented house stood on a point of land jutting into a lake 12 miles away from the college where the rest of the students lived.
Once, near midnight, he stood on the tip of the point calling for his lost dog, a black Labrador. His voice was louder than need be, and that is why Mary Lou appeared and yelled from her back steps – “do you want to come in for a brandy or beer?”
She kissed him hard in the kitchen so he knew there was no going back, her lips thin and milky tasting. And as she led him up the steep wooden stairs he wondered where her dog was, and why there was no brandy or beer.
In her bedroom, she took off her shirt and rubbed chests with him like she was avoiding kissing again. Her nipples were elongated, which seemed strange to him. And as she stepped away to remove her pants, her skinny body appeared boyish in the faint moonlight coming through the window.
They lay on top of the bed rather than under the covers, so he was cold. And he couldn’t find his way into her because she wasn’t helping, but only lying on her back completely still. He wished he could leave, but that would disappoint her more.
A few minutes later he was resting his head across her sunken white stomach and could feel her heavy breathing. Maybe she is having trouble with my head here, he thought. But she didn’t push him away.
Her dog finally appeared outside the door, pacing back and forth like a wolf. He’s not allowed into the bedroom, he thought. Unless it’s me who’s not allowed to leave.
He looked up at Mary Lou for an answer, but she seemed to be sleeping.
The dog’s pacing made no noise except for the clicking of his nails on the hardwood, and everything else was quiet except for Mary Lou’s breathing and the bare tree branches brushing against the window from the cold October wind. After a while he, too, drifted off.
When his eyes flicked open he was ready again. Her eyes were still closed, but she touched his face with her thin fingers like a blind person would, and opened her legs to him.
He moved inside her easily this time and turned her around, and was with her a long time . . . until she whispered for him to finish. At the final moment he wanted to say something, but didn’t.
They both turned on their sides, and in the quiet he thought he could hear her dog padding down the stairs. I’m free to leave now, he thought.
Then another noise – a hand dragging across the hallway wall – and she was at the door.
”I can’t sleep, Momma. I heard something.” And her mother, with eyes closed but forehead strained – “Go back to bed. I’ll be there in a minute.”
He waited a while before raising his head, but the daughter was still staring at him through the lighted shadows. A moment later her long hair fluttered away into the grayness, and she was gone.
The woman said nothing as he rose to dress, even as he touched her shoulder, cold outside the covers, in a gesture of goodbye.
He tried to be as quiet as possible on the creaking stairs, and that’s why he didn’t see the German Shepherd until he reached the bottom. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, silhouetted against a single fluorescent light from the stove, the dog stared right at him, tilting his head just a bit.
He paused, considering what to do next. And then rushed for the door, the dog jumping after him. And they ran together down the gravel driveway through the unfamiliar darkness like they were playing a game, the German Shepherd not even barking.
When the dog cut him off at the bottom of the drive, he turned and ran back the other way, and headed into Mary Lou’s garage. The dog skidded past and stopped, but didn’t enter the garage, just like he didn’t enter the bedroom. And the dog patrolled back and forth across the wide opening for a long time, like he had done in the hallway, before finally disappearing around the corner of the garage. He’s waiting for me to come out, he thought. But I can wait too.
And when the muddy light of dawn began to drop all around, he slowly stepped outside and the German Shepherd was nowhere to be seen. He probably left hours ago, he thought. He knew he didn’t have to stay to keep me afraid.
Then he ran wildly, his legs weak and disconnected from his body, through the stand of trees between their houses where soft masses of damp leaves twisted his ankles.
As he approached his house, sweating in the cold dampness, he could see his black Labrador through the morning mist, waiting for him, curled up asleep by the front door.
Guitar music seemed to be coming from her house that I never heard before. Maybe because her house is set back behind an enclosed courtyard, or maybe because I have never been so close. And thinking – the deck is definitely low enough for the dog to jump, with his one blue eye and one green, that sometimes turns blue, too, the neighbors say.
Stepping backwards, thinking about not being afraid, the dog still stares and tilts his ears, yet isn’t barking. His head drops a bit like he is trying to sharpen his view, and the other eye starts to turn blue, which should be impossible to see in the near-darkness.
As my heel touches the street he starts barking again, like I had tripped an invisible wire attached to his throat. But his barking is thinner and higher than before, as if the wire is too tight, or maybe he is thinking about not being the crazy lady’s dog anymore . . . and he will tell her in his Husky voice that is was me who left the rotten chunk of wood, it was me who . . . and she will write a letter with evidence, because she will have fingerprints from my cold hands on the moldy wood, because I didn’t wear gloves . . .
His high barking seems to echo into the surrounding houses as I reach the middle of the street, still walking backward and still watching his dimming eyes, turning yellow now . . . and the music, coming from some other house where people are awake and watching from their night window.
I turn to run, looking back just once to see the Husky landing in her driveway – he had jumped after all, his body flattening from the impact and then straightening quickly. But his Husky paws stop at the curb because she told him never to leave the yard alone. And he always listens.
I race up the hill, into my driveway and through the gate, and back into the garage room where I mix another brandy and water and try not to feel guilty about liberating the termites into someone else’s yard, where an old gray Husky sees everything.
After lighting a cigarette, I look down at my list for tomorrow. There is still just one word near the top – Sunday, and then nothing. I move my hand toward the pipe, then draw back . . . in the winter the priests were always there at Sunday dinner . . . my father staring across the table with his head down and my mother stooping over to whisper something . . . I can feel her breath on my cheek, warm and smelling of roasted meat, because it is Sunday dinner . . . When the priests leave she whispers again, her breath warm on my cheek again, asking me to please kneel down with my father and her and my sister for the priests’ blessing. But I don’t want to kneel beneath their black priestly hats and watery eyes that are not really looking at me when they touch my head with soft red palms, saying the words in Latin – “Benedicat vos omnipoten Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus” . . .
There are footsteps in the driveway. So I move into the breezeway and peer through the slats of the wooden gate. It is hard to see anything, though. I want to put on the driveway lights, but then they would see my feet beneath the gate.
A few moments pass and I don’t hear anything, making me wonder what the hell I am doing with my face up against the damp wood and my eyeball swelling through the crack of blackness.
I could open the gate, but I worry if someone really is there. And I could kneel down and look under it, but that’s not something I would do. So I fasten the fake lock, that anyone can twist open with one finger, and walk backwards into the garage room. I want to return to my list on top of the washing machine but keep thinking about the eight inches under the gate where everyone can see. And that’s why I sometimes place a ten-inch board across the opening with a heavy watering can propped against it that I have to remove every time I want to open the gate and go out into the driveway.
A group of drunken college students are walking down the hill. I can hear their over-loud voices careening into the houses, making it hard to concentrate on anything else. If I open the gate and ask them to quiet down, they will say fuckyou, and one of them will urinate on my Spanish Sage. By the time I move the board and watering can and unlock the gate, he will be gone.
A possum used to come under the gate and into the garage room while my back was turned to watch TV. And I never saw him until he waddled right past my foot making me jump and scream fuckyou. But the possum didn’t care, not even after I got the broom after him. He hid behind the bookshelves and refused to leave until I went to bed. Which meant I had to keep the garage room door open all night and the possum could do whatever he wanted while I was sleeping. In the morning, it seemed like the possum was never there.
But he kept coming back because possums, as solitary creatures, always make the same steady rounds through the same yards every night, under the same fruit trees in the same order. And that’s why it’s so easy to trap them, like I did one time using some moldy cat food.
The next day I drove the possum to the other side of the campus and let him go. But he came back a few nights later, under the gate and into my courtyard and past the camellias and under the plum and persimmon tree. Because he needed to visit the places he is used to.
So I trapped him again and drove him away again. And he came back home again. Until finally, he got tired of finding his way back because there really was no paradise for him inside the courtyard. And things always ended up the same. So it just wasn’t worth returning anymore. Unless maybe a rancher shot him.
After that, the neighbors called me the Great Possum Hunter, even though I used a trap and never hunted anything.
I reach for the pipe, but pull back and pour another brandy and glance at the cartoon clock on the wall I gave my daughter one time. It’s stopped because the batteries are dead. I forgot to replace them because I forgot to put it on my list. I have no watch either, because I won’t stop fussing with something on my wrist. Although I would like to wear the old watch my father gave me, with the cracked brown leather band and gold face that says sixteen jewels.
People always tell me I don’t care enough about time. But the real problem is I think too much about time.
The pipe is still on the shelf above the garage sink. But I need to get organized first . . . my wife telling me one time that I could spend an entire lifetime organizing the hell out of nothingness . . . while my mother whispers from somewhere about being more responsible with time.
I finally re-light the small wooden pipe that a friend gave me years ago when he said he couldn’t smoke anymore because all he would do was think about death. So now I have to think about the death-worry, inside the garage room where there would never be any violent jerking away, but rather a gradual fading from all things familiar . . . like fruit spoiling right before your eyes . . . the exanimate world slowly discoloring, flesh wrinkling over old hair and the cucumber rotting in the refrigerator drawer you don’t open anymore.
“Go to bed, asshole!” I want someone to say. Like an old girlfriend once yelled after she woke up in the middle of the night and I was still on the back porch of my apartment drinking a brandy. Because the inside is about health and safety, she believed, and the outside is a dangerous unseen . . . with the yellow light of the garage room somewhere in‑between.
But I don’t want to go to bed yet because there is still brandy in my glass and a chance to think about the things that happen when you aren’t doing anything. They smuggle themselves in somehow . . .
Like my neighbor Don who walks around the corners of his property to make sure everything is still there, and that nothing has happened he doesn’t know about; perhaps a stone missing from the top of his garden wall. And that is why he goes to bed with his front door open. And why he found a college student asleep on his kitchen floor one morning. Because the kid thought he was inside his own house, even after he woke up.
The overhead bulb makes a static noise like it’s about to burn out. When I look up, it seems fine. When I look away, the black spots appear inside the garage room air, and the brown floating finger shapes rising upwards that seem real until I touch through them. And that’s how I fall into the trap again, and have to tell myself to keep looking away, all the while wondering who exactly is doing the telling.
I light another cigarette, because no one is coming to send me to bed. I consider turning on the TV, but decide to wait because the five-minute news comes on the radio again, telling a story about a man in the Middle East who came home to find his house turned to rubble.
A few minutes later, I lower the radio and step into the courtyard to listen for the crazy lady’s dog barking. But there is nothing. The Husky must be sleeping.
Back in the garage room a chill sets in. So I turn on the electric heater, not worrying about the money.
Overhead, the single bulb dims for a second, and then is fine. I want to look up at it, but I don’t want to worry about the light bulb anymore.
John C. Hampsey’s stories and essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Arizona Quarterly, and Sou’wester.