Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

It was snow­ing pretty hard and I was dri­ving with one eye open. Not another car in sight, I never could under­stand how a per­son lives in a place where other cars are up on you all the time. I like my space. I like other peo­ple hav­ing their space too. I was so blitzed that I was prac­tic­ing, in my war­bled louder voice than the crack­ling of the rock on my radio, the speech I would give to the world about the enhanced safety and inher­ent supe­ri­or­ity of one-eyed dri­ving. There I was, on national tele­vi­sion, pros­e­ly­tiz­ing about a future where you didn’t so much as start a car with­out a patch on one eye. We’d be a nation of pirates, with­out haz­ard, per­fect dri­ving records for all! And then I made it into my park­ing spot. And then I man­aged my way out of the car. And then I found the keys. And then I made my way into the build­ing. And then smart me, I’d left the door unlocked, thereby sav­ing myself another war with the key­chain. Inside it smelled dif­fer­ent, like pinecones in a drug store. I fig­ured my nos­trils were just bent from too much time in the bar and I didn’t turn on a light. Light would be too much. I col­lapsed onto the couch, mur­mur­ing myself to sleep with the one-eyed dri­ving speech I’d by now per­fected. In my dreams, my celebrity was instan­ta­neous, my pres­ence on the list of impor­tant thinkers of this cen­tury a fore­gone conclusion.

Brett, not that I knew his name yet, screamed when he saw me lying there on his couch. His hair stood up like fur. You could tell he’s one of those guys only at ease when he’s got his gel in. He wore a bathrobe that revealed some­thing about him, a qual­ity that would get his ass kicked in the bar, a yearn­ing to be an old man, hunched in ter­rycloth. I was awake and cough­ing and I pegged him at thirty-four and I wanted to ask him to close the blinds he was open­ing but I knew bet­ter. His girl came out next, wear­ing noth­ing but a t-shirt, her hand on her throat and he had his arm around her right away. I liked them right off the bat, this young old man, this need­ful social worker type gal.

Because they weren’t the kind of small brains who kicked me out and called the cops, I just started talk­ing a blue streak, telling them about yes­ter­day at the diner, the girls that stiffed me, the bar last night, the way my songs never turned up on the juke box because some col­lege kids kept stuff­ing it with quar­ters, the way I drove home with the one eye. They laughed a lot and Brett asked what my songs were and then he dug up CDs and he played me my songs. Some­thing about being here with them did call up a low-lying sad­ness in me, as if some­how I was sup­posed to be telling this story at an AA meet­ing, as if some­how the world wasn’t doing me right, giv­ing me this kind and tol­er­ant cou­ple, my songs play­ing finally. I’d been drunk. I could have killed some­body. But my songs sounded good and Brett cooked up eggs and bacon and I fig­ured, maybe bad deeds bring good things. Brett and Shelly drank juice out of the same cup and it wasn’t like one was being nice to me to appease the other’s polite­ness. They both meant it, they were alike, kind, not like the trapped he-she com­bos I tend to at the diner.

The next day, I saw Brett in the mall with a dif­fer­ent gal, clearly his wife. I stopped short. He grabbed his kid’s hand and his face bleached out and the wife was study­ing some piece of shit jumper in the win­dow and he didn’t say any­thing to me. I don’t think I ever saw a per­son look so sad and now I got why he was in such a rush to be old. I kept walk­ing down the cor­ri­dor toward the food court, dazed, feel­ing as if sud­denly every­one in Amer­ica was speak­ing a new lan­guage for no rea­son at all and nobody would so much as teach me a word of it. So much for the future I’d been plan­ning on, so much for the way I had seen it all so clearly. Brett and Shelly, me and the no doubt won­der­ful man they’d set me up with, the four of us play­ing board games, suck­ing back cans of light beer, some­times in their apart­ment, some­times in mine down the hall, stum­bling home softly buzzed or some­times crash­ing on each other’s couches, our inside joke about how we all met always good for a laugh. I’d felt so at peace when I arrived at the mall, hav­ing con­cluded that my con­demnable one-eyed drive had been my lit­tle way of test­ing the gods, dar­ing them to give me some­thing good, some­thing to sober me.  And they had given me kind­ness in the form of Brett and Shelly. And maybe, I had thought, this is how you bring good folks into your life. When you’re weak, you crawl into their house think­ing it’s yours and you lie there like a Christ­mas present that Santa left in August, because Santa was drunk, dri­ving with one eye open, his sleigh swerv­ing about, shiny wrapped pack­ages falling through the night into neigh­bor­hoods, onto gravel.

Car­o­line Kep­nes is a TV writer liv­ing in a Los Ange­les' Franklin Vil­lage, where it's all about roasted chicken, used books, cin­na­mon cof­fee and late night happy hours. Her sto­ries have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Dogz­plot, Eclec­tica, Eye­shot, Mon­key Bicy­cle, Word Riot and Thieves Jar­gon. In 2004, she won the Hem­ing­way Resource Center's Short Fic­tion Con­test. Her biog­ra­phy of Stephen Crane is avail­able on Ama­zon, though it is intended for lit­tle chil­dren. She grew up on Cape Cod and started out in New York, cov­er­ing boy bands for Tiger Beat.