READ THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE CONTINGENCY MAN

                                                ONE —

 

YOU’VE BEEN GOOGLED

 

Vanity surfing, v.t. to search for mentions of oneself over the internet; to determine the relative significance of one­self by conducting an inventory of citations over same; To gauge one’s worth by how often one is Googled: to have one’s iden­tity searched via the web: as in, “Google ergo sum”, I Google therefore I am.

 

Madeline has been unable to arrive at an accurate diagnosis, despite decades as a member of her family. Life used to be so much simpler before she started reading everything she could get her hands on from the American Psychiatric Associa­tion. But now that she has taken that plunge, she feels compelled to come up with a snappy, astute, two word definition derived from a Latin root. It would at least sound more elegant than just saying, “My family is crazy” and leaving it at that.

After all, who doesn’t make the claim that they have the craziest family around? Certainly Roger, Madeline’s husband did, the first time they met. He hastily withdrew that boast hours after he married Madeline. She had tried unsuccessfully to keep her relatives well hidden away until after the big day. She had seriously considered the idea of hiring a crew of drama students to pose as family members. But when her plans fell threw and her family learned about the wedding, the jig was up.

Luckily, Roger did not make a mad dash out of the church. By then, he was in too deep.

The closest thing that Madeline could come up with was ‘toxic narcissism’. Certainly her brother Walter’s pattern of grandios­ity, desperate need for admiration, and sense of entitle­ment was straight out of a textbook. But how could that ex­plain the voices in his head? The delusions? The megalomania?

    Then there was her sister Jillian, the failed Prima Donna. She was a classic case, with her constant demand for attention, praise and admiration worthy of an Oscar-winning actress. This is despite any noteworthy achievements. Her biggest acting role has been playing a near-dead crash victim whose corpse was later found in the emergency room hallway, untreated. It was a tri­umph, of sorts, since Jillian got to die on Prime Time, albeit with an oxygen mask hiding her features. The perpetual ingénue has been waiting to be discovered now for fifteen years, and is unwil­ling to face that her moment is past. In Roger’s words: Jillian is a woman crippled by high self esteem. But this overlaps with other troubling symptoms involving impulse control, (particu­larly involving Daddy’s credit cards), and histrionics, the unique combination of which has thrown a wrench into Madeline’s attempts at easy categorization. Yesterday, Roger decided to disturb the tranquility of Madeline’s cocoon with a little proxy ‘vanity surfing’. The news that references to her antiques expertise were all over the Internet was not greeted with glee.

“You have fans!” Roger had gushed, perplexed that Madeline did not share his excitement. In the dusty world of antiques, being a known quantity was more than a few notches be­low rock stardom. Still, someone out there is watching, and this gives her pause. In fact, it gives her chills. Maddy, (as she is gener­ally known to her friends), has made an art of being invisible, of being more noted for her table settings than her dress. Unlike her two siblings, Walter and Jillian, she has learned to coast, to float through big events like some kind of nondescript floor lamp that fills up a neglected corner of the venue, so that its ab­sence is not noted as a gaping hole. But once filled, that previous­ly gaping hole does not incur any notice.

Maddy has too much self-loathing to be a narcissist. In fact, as the big-four-oh approaches, she has developed a terror of the camera. This is highly uncharacteristic of her family.

No handy two word diagnosis can come close to the real­ity of dear brother Walter. At one time, he was merely quietly crazy, enjoying his presumed paranoid schizophrenia the way one would indulge a spoiled but powerless child. Imagine you’re Napoleon Bonaparte? Affect a French accent. Think you’re hearing voices? Point to the many instances in a Steven King novel where the voices turned out to be real. But no more. Walter has discovered the Internet and a whole new potential for making waves.

Maddy has walked around in a haze dreading his next incur­sion into the public consciousness, tidal waves stirred up in that vast ocean of people. And happily for Walter, some of them be­lieve anything they read on the web.

Conspiracy theories abound on the net and Walter is firmly behind most of them, provided they supply him with a forum for voicing his patently insane opinions, which can then be confirmed by other, equally unbalanced individuals. Following her husband’s revelation of her own presence on the net, Maddy has made a nerve-wracked exploration of the latest citations on her brother. The experience has left her shaken and stirred. The end really is near, (end of Walter’s non-hospitalization days). Or at least Walter’s absence from an evening news special report. The most remarkable thing, she notes, is how whole groups share the same crazy manias, how there are entire radio networks and a subculture dedicated to every possible fringe of thought and unsubs­tantiated rumor. Currently, Walter’s drift from run of the mill ‘end is near’ proclamations has lead him right into a stew of conspiracy theories.

Why, oh why hadn’t he kept up with the medication?

Thank God I changed my name when I got married, thinks Maddy. When first told of this decision Roger was flat­tered. He considered that it was because his fiancée was a traditionalist, a WASP through and through, right down to a Sil­ver Jubilee tea set and vintage King George serving platter. Only later did he realize her real motivation to become Mrs. Roger Graydon. One day, in the not too distant future, she’ll be watching the national news when her brother’s goofy mustachioed head will pop onto the screen. Beneath his carrot-topped cranium an on-going stream of captions will describe the by-now famous nut­case’s affront to national something or other, which precipitated the storming of his compound à la David Koresh.

Name change or not, she still suspects that some ace reporter, some crack, fresh journalism school graduate will ferret out the con­nection. She just can’t shake the fear that one morning it will happen. There she will be: emerging in all innocence onto her front porch to retrieve the paper, shrouded in one of her sister’s cast-off Kimonos complete with baby spit, hair uncombed and last night’s mascara forming little lace patterns in her crow’s feet. And a hoard of crazed cameramen and television tabloid journal­ists will pounce on her like a school of sharks in a feeding frenzy. Shoving a microphone into her face before she’s even had a chance to brush her teeth. Asking her if she had ever seen any signs of serious megalomania in her brother when she was grow­ing up. Funny how nobody ever asked that question when she actually was growing up. Nooooo. It’s only when it’s too late that they call for the men in white jackets.

And thirty-eight years of dedicated skulking and hiding under rocks and hoping she won’t get noticed will all be for naught. She knows she’s not the only one in her family who feels this way. Her father echoes her concerns. Walter Senior sincerely regrets nam­ing his first born after himself. He has taken advantage of his grandfather status and his enormous height and hearty build to em­ploy instead the sobriquet of ‘Big Daddy’. Safely ensconced in a Florida RV park for the winter, he still fears the day when a con­nection will be made between father and son.

* * *

He called her just the other day.

“I woke up this morning with this numb tingling in my foot,” Big Daddy said. “I thought, Jesus, is this it? Is this a stroke?”

“But it wasn’t...” Maddy had unfortunately been cast in the role of free psychiatrist to the family, or at least ‘sane person at large’. At least in Big Daddy’s case, the calls were not collect.

“Of course not. Would I be talking to you now?” he snapped. “I just slept funny, that’s all. But you never know... People here are dropping off like flies. The county morgue gives fre­quent flier miles. The day before yesterday I got a letter from your brother and that just about gave me a heart attack on the spot...So you never know.”

“Please. I don’t want to know what he said,” Maddy inter­rupted. She felt it was best. She had followed his career from a run of the mill spiritual seeker to a doomsday prophet, (pre-millennium), and then, following the disappointing lack of Armageddon at the change of the calendar, he had made a turn in the road.

He is no longer waiting for the second coming, he is the second coming. Or at least, that is what they now suspect is the delusion of the hour.

“He has followers,” her father allowed.

“Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” she wailed.

“No. I think their names are something like Jane and Clare and Alexis. I can’t remember the rest.” Secretly Big Daddy blames his dead wife, a failed actress and one-time tone-deaf lounge singer, whose own obsession with capturing the limelight had caused her in later years to plan a funeral that eclipsed both a re­cently deceased senator’s and the local archbishop’s. He is still recovering from the excess five years after lung cancer claimed his putative Prima Dona.

He remembers his wife visiting her future grave site, tomb­stone in place, dragging her intravenous drip and urine bags along on their hospital dolly, still smoking through a hole in her tra­chea, to see and lovingly stroke her freshly-installed imported pink granite headstone, chiseled to exacting specifications, with a heart-rending epitaph chosen by herself with tremendous care (end date pending). She had ensured that a makeup artist be en­gaged, since getting around all the tubes running out of her posed some difficulty. A coterie of camera-toting rela­tives had been press-ganged into attending the unveiling of the monument. Her favorite champagne, Veuve Clicquot, was purchased for the oc­casion. She had insisted that a professional photographer shoot hundreds of pictures of her crouched devotionally in front of her brand new headstone. Even now, when he closes his eyes, he has a vivid picture of her with a bouquet of flowers that would rival any bride’s, (Madonna lilies, ivory rose buds and babies’ breath spray), smiling, instructing self-same photographer in her throaty, guttural, mechanical half-voice: “Make sure...gurgle, gur­gle....you get my good side...gurgle, gurgle...cough, cough.”

The most amazing thing was not this little vignette, it was the willingness of her family, cowed by decades of her obsessive self-love, to play along, to hire the photographer, to seek out the pro­fessional makeup artist for this phantasmagoric charade, to pre-order the headstone so that she could enjoy beforehand the thea­trics of her own demise. It was their zombie-like willingness to point and shoot when bidden.

Afterwards, Aurora lovingly placed the morbid photo­graphs in her very own leather-covered book of remembrance, which she would pull out and press upon unsuspecting visitors, who were dutifully coming to check on the patient. It was only the casual acquaintances who greeted the festive headstone shots with alarm and awkward silences, as Aurora forged on with her pic­ture showing unaware of their eyes darting around the room, seeking escape.

* * *

But we digress. For now, let’s examine the two sane survi­vors of Aurora’s life-long roller coaster ride, shaken and scarred though they may be. Let’s return to yesterday’s call.

“Please Dad. No more. I’m already dealing with Jillian’s cra­ziness.”

“She’s there?” Now he really was getting out of the loop. So much the better. As long as Big Daddy keeps those checks com­ing, he hardly ever hears from Jillian. On the one hand, it is just as well. On the other hand, the rate that he has to keep the checks coming is alarmingly fast.

“She was. She drops in on family life whenever she feels her ovaries pinch. She thinks its useful to hear some screaming kids and witness a few fights so that her career will stay on track.”

“What career?”

“Don’t ask her that question. She’s so certain stardom is around the corner, she organizes her own entourage...sort of.” Maddy sighed. “She telephoned collect to ask me to pick her up at the airport. There I was wrestling my demonically possessed kids into snow suits and tearing out to the airport, only to discover that she’d called a half dozen other people to meet her flight. You’d think she was returning from a kidnapping ordeal in Afghanistan in­stead of a couple of months in Toronto. The only thing lacking was banners, not that she wasn’t looking around for them. Of course, maybe she needed that many cars to carry her luggage.”

“What do you think will bring her down to Planet Earth?” Big Daddy mused. In the background he could hear a low crash fol­lowed by the excited, awe-struck voices of Maddy’s two fiendish kids. They were either at war with one another, or in ca­hoots. Thank God he spent the winters away in Florida.

“I know one thing that would bring her down to earth, find­ing a husband, having two screaming kids, developing cellulite.”

“When’s that going to happen?”

“The day Jillian wakes up and spots the crows’ feet.”

“She has them?”

“Oh. Yeah...”

Big Daddy could detect something in Maddy’s voice, some­thing that had crept in once in a blue moon when she was a kid and her siblings were making asses of themselves cen­ter-stage. Was it triumph?

* * *

All Big Daddy wants these days is to be left alone in peace to enjoy the sunset of his life down here in The Promised Land, surrounded by sexually frustrated recent widows with expen­sive tints of silver to platinum blond hair and surgically restored, albeit wind-tunnel faces; women who were only too happy to Dutch Treat at the Early Bird Specials, provided they got his temporarily undying love for dessert. After decades that felt like a century married to a high-strung, witless prima donna, he has finally been mercifully set free by the tobacco industry.

Every day he gives thanks to God for the makers of Marlboro for these final, golden years of peace.

That and the fact that women in his demographic out­number eligible senior men twenty to one. It doesn’t matter that he has a gut the size of an overdue twin pregnancy and not a speck of hair on his mis-shaped, liver-spotted head, apart from the sad, scraggly pony tail that trails down his arthritic back like some­thing belonging to a half-dead dog. He has the one essential attribute for a single man his age: a pulse. Big Daddy is a player, at long last, with a virtual harem of blue-haired, cookie-making, lonely widows who have all come to terms with the fact that they have a greater likelihood of winning the New York State lottery as they do of nailing a new husband. He is a Geritol gigolo, a Via­gra-pumped Valentino. He is one happy rooster in the hen house, tri-focal Ray Bans, yellow lounge suits, white loafers and all.

These are the Golden Years indeed. Now if only his damn children would bug off.

Big Daddy is a man always just slightly behind his time. When he married in the mid- 60s, he was just on the cusp of the free love era. Seduced by Aurora’s curiously electrifying effect on people, and her great legs, he had given up his freedom in his early twenties. Shortly thereafter came the Summer of love, Spag­hetti Westerns, Acid Rock and most devilishly tempting, the film Easy Rider. How he dreamed of being that lone rider, striking out on the freeway like some latter day Man With No Name, living with no fixed address, stealing hearts and breaking bones. He im­agined himself to be Peter Fonda, only fatter, and homely.

Instead of the open road, he sold garden tractors for the mowing challenged, while all around him men were shunning the re­sponsibility of home and trading in their first wives on more high-octane pursuits. They were growing long hair even as he was losing his own. Big Daddy could never leave Aurora. The bond was too strong. She would have hunted him down and nagged him to death. He became resigned to a lifetime of appeasement.

So he dreamed every year of owning a Harley, a Hog, a stal­lion of the highway. And then, finally, when he was seventy he became a free man.

He is now free to do as he chooses, but too incontinent and arthritic to do it. The only way he is going to hit the highway is like a hermit crab, dragging his home with its handy toilet along with him. So he has acquired a floating bungalow, an RV, which his snooty fashionista daughter persists in calling a trailer. It is so much more than that: The Beaver Patriot RV has its own satellite dish, microwave- convection oven and two television sets so he can watch two games at once. And to assuage his guilt over burn­ing more fuel than a small country, it even boasts a few solar panels on the roof. It isn’t exactly a Harley, but the first time Big Daddy got into his Beaver, he was sold on its potential to give him back the freedom he had given up so early in life.

Not that his daughters look at it that way. Maddy and her husband are heartsick that once he left town they lost the free baby­sitting. And Jillian is mortified that he chooses to spend half his life in a trailer, instead of somewhere more accessible and closer to a bank. In the face of such fierce opposition, Walter Se­nior shoots back that since he is not going to get to be a burden to his children in his old age, the least he could do is be an embarrassment to them.

It is worth examining Big Daddy’s character in more depth. But to do so, one is forced to examine the character of his now departed wife, Aurora, who went to her final reward, cour­tesy of the tobacco industry. In her childhood, she had been raised by a stage struck , but lamentably homely woman who had enjoyed a brief career playing little ditties on the piano to accompany silent movies in the small town in which she lived. Once the talkies made their appearance, her career evaporated into thin air. What to do? As a woman past her prime, who had spent too many years gradually filling up a piano bench with her burgeoning thighs, her attention turned to little Aurora. The daugh­ter was constantly being thrust in the public’s eye. Her mother could not be shaken from the belief that little Aurora was destined to be the next Shirley Temple. As such she was dragged en­dlessly to photographers to pose for head shots, and encouraged to try out for the lead role, and only the lead role in any and all plays, recitals and promotional opportunities. No supporting role would ever satisfy. If one was offered, the high-strung stage mother would pitch a fit of epic proportions. Little Aurora devel­oped an insatiable thirst for attention as a result. She became a black hole of fragile self-confidence that had to be constantly shored up. In most instances, the charm of her magic wore thin at an alarming rate. But for a few years past her pseudo-Shirley Temple stage, she could ‘work a room’ with decent proficiency. While it was true that her singing talents were rather limited, she was able to turn her personal life into a veritable opera with all the hyperbole and overblown emotions one would expect of Puccini.

Just as she was reaching end point in her lackluster career, she met the young and promising Walter Yarwood. He was entranced to meet a woman who seemed so breathtakingly con­fident in the public eye. (His selfless mother had been decidedly mousy. Initially, Aurora seemed a refreshing change of pace.)

Poor Walter Senior. Poor Big Daddy. His own father had been a deeply committed, dry, dour upright man of the cloth, a mi­nister who deliberately chose the path of most resistance, and deemed it holy. His mother was unfortunately a saint. A retiring sort who was always ready to lend a hand to church bake sales, pro­viding her own lovingly made scones and clotted cream. A daughter of the British Empire, a member in fine standing of the Monarchist League, who was always ready to honor, to worship, to serve, to step aside, to curtsey, to bow and to scrape. Her subser­vience was a lightning rod for her son’s adolescent discontent. He wanted to cut loose from moral constraint and couldn’t understand why she didn’t also.

How different Aurora seemed! How exciting! Whenever she entered a room, she seemed capable of realigning the earth’s magnetic pull. For a man as schooled in the minutia and aggrava­tion of ‘deep in the marrow’ humility as he had been, the sight of Aurora resetting everyone’s agenda was wildly stimulat­ing. He fell. And when Walter fell, it wasn’t just a passing fancy. He took a nose dive. He went down in flames, like a World War I plane that brought him to the ground a broken mess, and well be­hind enemy lines. So deep into a hostile frontier that there was no escape.

Mark Twain once wrote that it is ‘Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.’ Aurora never understood that saying. Once she was no longer the fairest one of all, she had nothing to fall back on but her failed post-Vaudevillian bag of attention-grabbing tricks, which she employed at every opportunity, with her completely undeve­loped mind. She couldn’t pass up the thrill of sounding off on topics about which she was completely uninformed, and taking people’s shocked reception of her inopportune statements as proof of her ability to dazzle. And yet. She was able to make everyone dance her tune, to turn toward the camera please, and smile as if they meant it. To perform on cue. It was her great gift. Her every conversation began with the words, “Do you want to do some­thing for me?” And surprisingly, a lot of people did.

Walter learned quickly how to live a parallel existence. How to practice selective deafness. How to fall asleep in the face of a crisis, and leave other people to mop up the mess. The one sav­ing grace in all of this was the fact that Aurora’s attentions were eventually taken up by her daughters. First, briefly by Made­line, who proved to be noncompliant, bookish, and rather timid. Second by the more malleable younger sister who got with Au­rora’s program like a duck to water. Soon a baby boy was born, Walter Senior’s namesake, to take along, applaud and covet the li­melight.

Once Aurora’s focus was elsewhere, Walter and his elder daughter were able to form their own little team, gradually distanc­ing themselves from the endless dance recitals, singing lessons and photo opportunities that swirled about them like a carou­sel. And Walter Senior was able to retreat, once again, into the quiet, almost monastic existence he had experienced as a child, visiting with his plainer daughter, the same kinds of antique shops and flea markets and church socials that, in his childhood, he had reluctantly visited with his intensely royalist mother. Father and daughter, Walter and Madeline, became like a pair of potted plants at family gatherings, there but not there, visible to the naked eye, but unremarkable. Compliant in body, but not in spirit.

Now all Big Daddy wants can be found in a trailer park overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Ponce de León was right. The fountain of youth can be found in Florida...only in a little blue pill. The only fear Big Daddy has is that, with his daughter’s constant demands and seeming inability to land a big fish, he might spend the rest of his life having to support her in the manner to which she has unfortunately become accustomed.

Unless...no that is too scary to think about. He is haunted by the inelegant and all too frequent warnings of Madeline. “What are you going to do Daddy, if Jillian cleans you out? What are you going to do Daddy, if you go broke before you croak? To avoid that sorry fate, Walter Senior would do anything to see some rich sucker hog tied to his little darling. But wouldn’t it be impossible to find someone sufficiently flattering to Jillian’s ego who was at one and the same time clueless and rich? Could such a person exist?
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