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part one of the story

The Picture on the Wall

Robert Collings

    Someone did me a very bad turn when I was in my youth, and I told my father the story. He did not seem surprised over my misfortune, and I assumed that he had suffered similar bad turns in his own youth and did not attach a lot of significance to them. My father was not the sort of person who went in for those father-son chats you see in the movies. He never said much, and he always seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts and his own problems. A few days after I had told my father about the wrong done to me, I was staring blankly out the window and I was startled by the sound of his voice behind me. He spoke in a quiet, understanding tone, which was rare for him. “Don’t try too hard to figure these things out,” he said. “No matter what you think life is really like, odds are you’ll be wrong.”
    I wondered about this snippet of abstract philosophy coming from my father and I stared at him, slightly bewildered.
    “Ever heard of Confucius?” my father asked.
    “Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” I muttered.
    “You know his proverb about revenge? It goes something like, ‘Before you start out on that journey of revenge, dig two graves’. It may not have been Confucius, and I may have muddled the words a bit, but you get the message.”
    “It’s a message for losers,” I said. “Like a lot of proverbs.”
    My father thought about this, and then he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “I don’t want you to misunderstand me. Christ tells you to turn the other cheek. The Chinese guy is just warning you what happens if you don’t.”
    I have never forgotten those words from my father. I will tell you the story about the bad turn done to me and what I did about it, and you can decide for yourself if the Chinese guy was right.
    When I reached my early teens I had no money. I had no money when I was a kid, either, but when you’re a kid, the lack of money doesn’t seem like such a big deal. But when I hit Junior High, I began to hear about things like ski vacations and trips to Disneyland and expensive sneakers and I felt left out because my family couldn’t afford those things. That’s when the lack of money really began to bother me. When I was fourteen I got a job bagging groceries at a local supermarket and this gave me a bit of an income, but I still ended up with no money. A pair of socks or a pair of underwear always cost you money and at the end of the day I was always in a negative position. I slogged away at the supermarket job under the crazy impression that my money problems would be licked by the time I graduated from high school. But by the time I graduated from Senior High I seemed to have less money than ever. My mother had died a few years earlier and there was only my father left to support me and my younger sister. Money was always tight for Dad, but he did the best he could and he didn’t make me pay room and board as long as I stayed in school. That helped keep a roof over my head. I ate mostly fast food and takeout meals so it didn’t cost that much to keep me around, at least as far as groceries were concerned. I was grateful for the free room and board and I only had to worry about buying things like my own underwear and my own socks, but I still had no money and it still bothered me.
    I had learned to live without the finer things in life, but what bothered me most of all about having no money were the junker cars I had to drive. I was still living at home after high school graduation and I planned to attend university in the Fall. I had driven a couple of junkers in high school, but the last one had given out shortly after graduation and I didn’t know what to do. The round trip to university would take about two hours, and I needed a car to make that drive. I could have taken the bus, and I remembered the words of my uncle when I bought my second junker car in high school.
    “Save your money for university,” he said. “That car is a stupid waste. You should sell the stupid thing and take the bus like everybody else.”
    I was not fond of my uncle. He was always in my face about things that my father would never mention to me. My father understood me in a way my uncle never could. In high school we all referred to the bus as the “loser cruiser” and I didn’t ever want to be lumped in with the losers on the bus. Still, my uncle may have been right in his own way. I couldn’t realistically afford another car, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to take the loser cruiser to and from university. Screw my uncle and all the naysayers. When the transmission went on my second junker car early that summer, I bought a third junker from the guy who managed our apartment building.
    This third car was the worst junker car of them all, so it was only fitting that it belonged to a guy named Joe who always walked around in an underwear singlet. I never understood how this guy kept his unshaven face looking exactly the same way, day in and day out, month after month. I wondered if he deliberately trimmed his stubble as some sort of odd philosophical statement about his life. It doesn’t matter anyway. He was an alcoholic with this black stubble all over his face and he sold me his car. The junker car suited him perfectly, and now it was being passed on to me. The car was a 1960 Zephyr Zodiac and I think he sold it to me for around $150. Try as I might to look stoic, Joe could still read the sour expression on my face when it came time to sign the transfer papers and hand over the money. “It’s all the hell you need, you know,” Joe mumbled as he counted the bills, as if this would somehow be a consolation to me. It wasn’t a consolation. I was only buying the car because I was determined unto death to avoid being lumped in with all the losers on the city bus.
    The car was going to get me to and from work for most of the summer but I knew it was only a matter of time before it, too, conked out in a last gasp of leaking oil and black engine smoke. I didn’t know what I would do when that happened, but like everything else in my young life I was only going to tackle the problem when it arose and not before. I hated that car. I avoided driving with any passengers and I was always apologizing on the rare occasions when someone ended up in the front seat. That was usually Gordie Zapp, who had been my best friend since grade three. Gordie thought it was funny how the floorboard on the driver’s side had almost rusted through. He was always making jokes about how I could push my foot through the hole in the floor and stop the car all by myself if the brakes ever failed.
    “Just a flash-in-the-pan set of wheels,” I would say to Gordie, pretending to laugh along with him. “Only temporary.”
    I will take you back a little. There was this girl I knew in high school. Her name was Carol Zimmerman. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and I loved her from the first moment I laid eyes upon her. This was in the school hallway when I was in grade ten. For the next year or so, the school hallway was the closest I ever got to Carol Zimmerman and even this was a rare thing. I couldn’t imagine ever walking up to her and introducing myself. There was never any occasion to do this, and even if the occasion arose, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to come within fifty feet of Carol Zimmerman. She was the sort of girl whose name we all used if we wanted an example of the ultimate girlfriend. “She’s okay, but she’s no Carol Zimmerman,” we would say. Carol Zimmerman was the trophy that we could never hope to possess, not even if we were guys with nice cars, which we weren’t, or even if we had any money at all, which we didn’t.
    Gordie Zapp was a funny guy. We sat at the back of the class in English 11. One day in class Gordie handed me a crude picture of a stick-man having sex with a sheep, or some sort of bizarre looking four-legged wooly creature. Next to the picture was another picture of a stick-man having sex with a stick-girl. Gordie had written “You and Pam Beasley” with an arrow pointing to the stick-man having sex with the sheep creature. He had written “Me and Carol Zimmerman” with an arrow pointing to the other picture. That was Carol Zimmerman.
    I did not like math in school and I only took Math 12 because it was a prerequisite to getting into first year Arts at the university. The math teacher, Mr. Olsen, assigned the seats out in a weird sort of alternate reverse order based on our last names. I was assigned a desk about half-way down the first row near the window. Class hadn’t started yet and I was watching the other students drift into the classroom. They all looked about as interested as I was. Then I saw Carol Zimmerman walk into the class. She glanced around and took a quick look at the seat map taped to the blackboard. I watched as she asked Mr. Olsen a question, and then Mr. Olsen nodded to the empty desk next to me. I then watched Carol Zimmerman walk down the aisle and take her seat beside me. She was so close I could have reached across the aisle and touched her. She made herself comfortable at the desk and then looked around the room. Then she fixed her eyes upon me. I was staring at her and she was used to this from everyone. She smiled politely and I nodded and pursed my lips into an idiot-grin. She was used to this, too, and she smiled again, this time a little broader so her teeth showed. Her father was a dentist or an orthodontist or something and her teeth were beyond perfect. She shrugged as if to say, “Well, here we are.” I tried to give her the same sort of casual look in response, and then I turned back to the textbook on my desk as if I had more important business to think about. For some reason, Mr. Olson was called out of the class to attend to something, and everyone sat around yakking it up waiting for him to return. I didn’t know what to say to Carol Zimmerman and I pretended to be busy with my textbook. I was flipping through the first few pages, and then I heard her seductive voice: “Your last name start with an ‘A’ or something?”
    I looked over at her. She was smiling at me, waiting for my response. “Um, no, it starts with a ‘B’ but I guess that’s pretty close...” I said.
    “I guess there’s not a lot of ‘A’ names around here, is there?” she smiled.
    “I guess not,” I said.
    “My last name is Zimmerman,” she said. “I always sit in the last row at the back of every class because of my name. And here I am in this class, right up front in the second row.”
    I was stuck for a response, and then she added, “Bob Dylan’s real last name is ‘Zimmerman’ did you know that? He’s really ‘Robert Zimmerman’...”
    I was staring at her again and I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “Are you any relation to Bob Dylan?” I asked.
    “Yes, I’m his mother,” came the answer.
    Carol had not hesitated with these words, and she stared back at me, straight-faced. She then broke into a laugh, and I laughed, and then Mr. Olsen came back into the room.
    I got to know Carol Zimmerman that year solely because of the seating plan in the Math 12 class. I did not associate with her outside of class, and the only other time she would ever acknowledge me was when we passed each other in the hallways. This was not as rare as it was after I had first noticed her in the tenth grade, but it was still too rare for me. She would smile and say hello and I would mutter something back and then fret for the rest of the day that I hadn’t said the right thing. I hadn’t the faintest hope in the known universe that I could ever take Carol Zimmerman out on a date, but she was always friendly to me in class and in the hall. I even liked how Gordie Zapp kidded me about my “girlfriend” whenever the subject came up. A joke like that was about the closest thing I would ever get to a real date with Carol Zimmerman, and I was happy even with that, which I thought was a sad commentary on my fantasy life. I didn’t care. Math 12 had become the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.
    Carol Zimmerman had this boyfriend, Woody Abbott. His real first name was Arthur and I don’t know why everyone called him Woody. I didn’t know the guy personally but he was also in Grade 12 and everybody in the school knew who he was. He was on some sort of Industrial-Tech program that was supposed to prepare him for trade school after graduation. He would not be going on to university, so he wasn’t in any of my classes. I think he wandered into my Biology 12 class once or twice before he transferred out to something else, but that was the extent of my association with him in the classroom. I’m not sure if he even knew my name or who I was, but I assumed that Carol must have told him at some point that she sat next to me in math. I remember passing Carol in the hallway one time and Woody Abbott was with her, and when she said hello I instinctively looked at him for a response and he just glared at me. It is an understatement for the ages for me to tell you that Woody Abbott was never going to become a close buddy like Gordie Zapp.
    I am tempted here to abandon the subject of Woody Abbott altogether, but he becomes a major player in my little tale of revenge so I will plod ahead.
    Woody Abbott was a big, hulking kind of guy with a scary reputation for violence. There were rumors swirling around about his penchant for fighting, and how he’d go to nightclubs and deliberately challenge bigger guys to a fight and then go out and beat them unconscious in the parking lot. I was told once that some drunken fool had challenged Woody Abbott to a fight at a house party and followed him out to the street, only to wake up in Intensive Care a few days later. I didn’t know if this was true, but it became part of the legend of Woody Abbott that was running through the school. Gordie Zapp liked to joke that I was going to “wake up in Intensive Care” if I became too friendly with Carol Zimmerman in the Math 12 class, and I got a laugh out of that. But I was always cautious about it, too.
    Woody Abbott dominated every group and every social situation he was in, and everyone just assumed that he and Carol Zimmerman were boyfriend and girlfriend because he had money and drove a nice car and no other guy dared to go near Carol. I never asked her about this when we talked in Math class because I feared she would tell Woody Abbott about some innocent thing I had said, and he would then make a point of seeking me out in order to beat me into Intensive Care. When Carol talked about Woody Abbott it was always in a way that suggested she didn’t like him all that much but she tolerated him because it was the most convenient thing to do. It was well-known that Woody Abbott was insanely jealous of Carol, but none of us thought we had a shot with Carol anyway, and we all knew we’d likely end up dead if we even made the most feeble attempt, so his jealousy never became much of an issue.
    Aside from his association with Carol Zimmerman, the one thing that baffled me the most about Woody Abbott was how he could ever afford the beautiful new cars he drove. Maybe his friends knew this, but I wasn’t a friend and Carol never brought the subject up. Woody Abbott would drive to school for a month or two in a brand new Roadrunner, and then for no apparent reason show up in a shining new GTO and drive that around for another few months, and then it seemed like there was always a new car after that, usually a better and more expensive car than the one before. The last car I remember Woody Abbott driving around was when we were all in the last few weeks of grade 12. This car was a glistening black 327 Chevy Nova SS with wide tires and chrome disc-brake wheels and a four-speed Hurst shifter on the floor. I went through every form of jealous regret short of crying myself to sleep because I didn’t own a car like the one owned by Woody Abbott. Carol had mentioned to me that Woody Abbott worked overnight at the Delmonico Bakery for a few part-time shifts a week and made pretty good money, so maybe that’s why he could afford the down payment on these cars. She never went into any detail and I never asked. Still, it seemed incredible to me that Woody Abbott could switch so quickly from one car to another, and none of us could ever figure it out. Woody Abbott had the most beautiful girl I had ever seen for his girlfriend, and the most beautiful car I had ever seen for his car, and in my eyes he had everything.
    I’ve told you about the rusted Zephyr Zodiac I bought the summer after graduation from high school. That car was the polar opposite of anything Woody Abbott would drive, and I was mortified by the thought that I might be stopped at a red light one day and that surly Woody Abbott would suddenly pull up alongside me in his Chevy Nova with Carol in the front seat beside him. In my lurid fantasy, Carol would stare at me with a mixture of pity and sympathy before the light turned green, still trying to be nice but sickened at what had become of me so soon after graduation. The light would change color and the two of them would tear off down the street, leaving me clunking along far behind them in my pathetic rust-bucket of a nothing vehicle. Even the thought of riding in the loser-cruiser was better than this nightmare, and I was always careful when I drove the rust-bucket that summer to keep a keen eye open for any shining new Chevy Novas on the road and avoid them at all costs. That aside, I figured that after graduation I would have nothing more to do with Carol Zimmerman. School had ended and Carol was going off to some expensive college out of state in September. I assumed that Woody Abbott would find a spot in some technical school that would teach him to be a bigger, meaner sonofabitch than he already was, and both would simply fall out of my life forever.
    August rolled around, and I had been driving the rust-bucket Zephyr for over a month. I would always pretend to laugh along with Gordie Zapp when he made his foot-through-the-floorboard jokes. I had been working full-time that summer and I was trying desperately to scrape up enough money for my first year university tuition. I can’t remember what day of the week it was but I was not working the next day. My sister was staying with relatives that summer and I don’t know where my father was but I remember I was home alone. The phone rang and I thought it might be Gordie wanting to go out for a beer.
    “Hello?” I said.
    There was a pause, and then I heard a familiar seductive voice: “Is this the math genius?”
    I thought it was Gordie playing a trick. “Nice try, fool,” I said.
    “Oh, I don’t think I’m such a fool,” said the seductive voice. “Aren’t I speaking to the math genius?”
    “Who is this?” I stammered.
    “Bob Dylan’s mother,” came the answer.
    It was Carol Zimmerman, phoning me. There was a long silence as I collected myself, and then Carol said, “Did you just have a major heart attack or something?”
    I was still stammering. “Oh, I’m alive, I just, I just...”
    “You’re just surprised that a girl these days would have the nerve to phone a guy up for a date, is that it?”
    I still couldn’t get the words out. “Well no, I don’t – I can’t – I mean, this is nice, I – “
    “Does River’s sound okay?”
    River’s End was a local pub that had become a popular hangout when they lowered the legal drinking age the year before. My first thought was that I would be forced to give Carol Zimmerman a ride to River’s in the rust-bucket, and I was scrambling to think up an excuse.
    “Well, you see, my car’s in the shop...” I began.
    “No it isn’t,” Carol said. “And you don’t have to drive me anyway. I’ll meet you there in an hour. Does that work for you?”

    “In an hour...?”
    “Yes, sixty whole minutes. See you then.”
    “Okay.”
    “Bye.”
    “Bye.”
    That was the conversation. I think about a minute or two passed while I still held the phone to my ear, and I was finally brought to my senses by the ongoing drone of the dial tone. Carol Zimmerman was waiting for me at a table near the bar when I got to River’s. She gave me a big smile as soon as I entered and waved me over. I must have arrived just as she sat down, because I knew there was no way this girl would ever be able to sit alone at a bar for more than a few seconds before some hopeful moron would plop himself down beside her and start making his moves. I could see that a couple of the guys near her table were getting all ready to go over and give it their best shot, but they backed off when I sat down. Carol took all of this in stride because she always knew exactly what the guys around her were thinking. She knew what they would do and say from one moment to the next, and she possessed a sublime confidence that she could control all the action around her with a word or a smile or a simple motion of her hand. Naturally, she knew that I would be on time. She also knew what I would be drinking, because there was already a pint waiting for me on the table.
    “I ordered that for you,” she smiled. “Is that okay?”
    Yes, it was okay. Before I could say another word, Gordie Zapp came out of nowhere and sunk down in a chair on the other side of Carol. I’ve told you that Gordie had been my best friend since third grade, and I thought he was a funny guy. But when Gordie got around women he became a different person. He always reminded me of a dog at a picnic. A dog at a picnic sniffs and humps and has no shame, and Gordie Zapp had no shame. No matter what the situation was, and no matter who was there, Gordie would always zero in on the girl of his choice in any sort of gathering and then immediately start chatting her up in a sort of non-stop, hypnotic monotone that he thought would lure them into seduction. I’d seen him pull his whispering act a thousand times before, and the calculating deceit of it all just drove me crazy. Funny thing was, the phony routine sometimes worked, which just drove Gordie on to what he hoped would be bigger and better conquests.
    Gordie gave me a brief hello when he sat down, and then he inched his chair closer to Carol and turned his full attention to her. He made some comment about how he and Carol both had last names that started with “Z” which always put them into the same home room in high school. He then started in about what a shame it was that they never really got to know each other because they always seemed to be seated close together, either in home room or in class. When this didn’t seem to interest her, he lowered his voice to a perfect hypnotic cadence and began to talk about “personal relationships”. This was a subject I had heard him use before with other women he was trying to impress. Gordie was certain his whisper-banter would work with Carol just like it had worked with all the others. He had just launched into his asinine monologue when Carol made a slight motion with her hand and interrupted him in mid-sentence. “Excuse me,” she said politely. “You talk about personal relationships, and it turns out we were going to discuss something personal here. Would you mind leaving us alone for a bit?”
    Gordie sat back in his chair and I could see the shock on his face. It was like Carol Zimmerman had just exploded a hand grenade in his lap. “Well, sure, okay...” he stammered. He gave Carol an awkward half-grin, but she didn’t say anything more. She just smiled at him. Gordie Zapp, my buddy forever, didn’t even look over at me. I watched him get up from his chair and make the long walk back to his seat at the bar. I hadn’t noticed him when I came in and this may have pissed him off, I don’t know. He was sitting at the bar with one of his football buddies, Drew Thompson. Gordie and Drew started to whisper together and they both threw the odd glance my way. They soon got up and left, and I thought no more about them.
    I had been worried about what I was going to say to Carol, but I should have known better. I have already told you that Carol Zimmerman possessed the uncanny ability to know exactly what you were thinking, and before I knew it I was talking to her as if we had been best friends who had not seen each other in ages and we were both eager to catch up. I found that the words just spilled out of me before I had the time to think about any of them. We talked about high school, and Carol suggested that we each make up our own “bitch list” of the ten teachers we hated the most, and then the ten students we hated the most. We went back and forth with this for the longest time. It was all gleeful gossip, terrible stuff, and we both laughed our heads off. We talked about our plans for school in September. I even called her “Mrs. Zimmerman” a few times as if she were really Bob Dylan’s mother. It was the same stupid joke over and over, but Carol always laughed like she was hearing the joke for the first time. I bought her the next beer and she insisted on buying the third, and it was when were into that third drink that I noticed Woody Abbott sitting alone at the bar, glaring at me just as he had done in the school hallway. He was sitting exactly where Gordie Zapp had been sitting with Drew Thompson. Unlike the pissed-off look that Gordie and Drew had given me, Woody Abbott was giving me the dreaded look that declared to the whole world that I would soon find myself in Intensive Care if I said one more word to his girlfriend.
    “Just ignore him,” Carol said.
    “Is that why you invited me here?” I asked. “Did you tell him we’d be here?”
    Carol and I had been joking only moments before, and she now looked at me with serious eyes and a slightly hardened expression that surprised me. “I don’t play games with anybody,” she said flatly. “Not with you, and not with him, either.”
    Just after Carol had spoken these words, Woody Abbott got up from his seat and walked out the door. He was only gone for a few minutes. Carol and I had gone from making jokes and laughing to some awkward small talk during the time Woody Abbott was away, and when he came back again and took his seat at the bar we both stopped talking. Woody Abbott had now abandoned the Intensive Care look. He was sweating and his face was flushed, as if he’d just run around the block at full-tilt. He was glaring at us with a broad smirk.
    “He’s up to something,” I whispered. “Look at him.”
    “I’d better go talk to him,” Carol said.
    “Don’t,” I said. “It’s what he wants. Don’t do it.”
    Carol rose from her chair. “Don’t worry. You don’t know him like I know him.”
    I watched Carol go over to the bar and exchange a few words with Woody Abbott. She wasn’t gone very long. When she walked back and didn’t sit down, I knew what was going to happen.
    “I have to go,” she said. “We had fun, we’ll do this again.”
    “Is that all it took? Just a few words with this guy and you’re outta here?”
    “It’s complicated,” Carol said. “I know, I know. I hate it when people say that.”
    “Then don’t say it.”
    I looked at her and she nodded. “He just found out about Helmut.”
    “Who the hell is Helmut?” I asked.
    She was looking over at Woody Abbott. “I told you it’s complicated,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
    I was sulking against my better instincts and staring into my empty glass. “You made short work of Gordie, anyway,” I said. “Taught him a lesson. You were a lot nicer to me.”
    Carol was unaffected by my attitude and she didn’t hesitate. “I asked you out because I think you’re a nice guy,” she said calmly. “I told you I don’t play games with anybody and I didn’t promise you anything. I know you’re ashamed of your car, and I didn’t ask you to drive me here. I never gave you the slightest encouragement that this was anything more than a couple of drinks between two friends who came here alone, and who’d leave alone.”
    She had been right about the promises. She had never given me the faintest hint of a promise about anything. But Carol Zimmerman always knew the exact ration of misery that she would end up spreading around, and to whom, so you can make up your own mind if that friendly phone call should ever have been made at all.
    Nothing she said was going to stop me from getting in a final dig. “You came here alone but you’re not leaving alone,” I said.
    “I told you,” Carol said, without any hint of apology. “It’s complicated.”
    Carol then walked out of River’s End with Woody Abbott and I was left sitting alone at the table.

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