Short Stories 2nd Place: Kessler Keeps His Clothes on at the Party by Joyce Kline
There’s a dingy plastic above ground pool but Kessler keeps his clothes on at the party. He’s sober now so he’s aware of—or rather, has been made aware of in no uncertain terms—the countless humiliations his family and ex-friends have endured on his behalf, so he sips Coke, behaves himself.
A venomous spider’s nest in a thorny hedge of brain cells. That had been his addiction, tangled and impenetrable, seducing him with a seemingly free pass to just do shit. Now, without drugs or booze, without indiscriminate fucking and raging wild-ass shit disturbing… well, he hasn’t felt this awkward since he was a pimply teenaged virgin.
He can’t stay here all night leaning up against a wall, so he pushes his way through the crowd towards the narrow galley kitchen as if he has a purpose in mind.
Dammit. The kitchen doorway is blocked by a drunk blonde arguing with a scruffy, beanpole boyfriend even more sloshed than she is. She grabs at the sticky countertop to steady herself, sending an army of amber glass “dead soldiers” clinking. With haughty superiority she slurs, “Tha’s just your pot calling my pedal black.”
Beanpole Boyfriend manages, “Don’ be such a fuckin’ bitch.”
Uh oh. For sure now the argument is going to escalate—it always does. God knows he’s learned that much. Kessler imagines his sponsor Al advising the couple.
“Take a deep breath and count to ten, the both of you.” Al’s small but he’s bristly and doesn’t take shit. Still, he knows how to talk a person down. Not down like band mates trying to jolly you along enough to get you through a gig, but way down to things that make you confess, squirming—OK, crying like a baby—till, miraculously, you feel clean and peaceful inside.
The decibel level is way up now and people are shouting to be heard over the band’s shitty base line. His ears will be ringing all night. Must be getting old to even think of that. Maybe if he hangs just outside the kitchen for a bit, Drunk Chick and Beanpole will move on and he can retreat to some relative quiet.
To distract himself from the din, he studies the crush of dancers moving in unfamiliar ways to tunes he hasn’t kept up with. Their hands, pumped full of youth, are still vein-less and tendon-less as rubber gloves. It’s not boasting to say he’s a great dancer, but how can he join them without looking ridiculous? He’s ancient. Last decade. It’s finally happened: he’s no longer cool.
Bottles clash in the kitchen. As predicted, the kitchen couple’s repartee has heated up. With great dignity, Drunk Chick sneers, “Fuck you,” to Beanpole and teeters out in her ridiculous heels, cursing and wobbling like a bobble head, splashing her drink on Kessler’s sleeve as she more or less aims herself towards a sympathetic girlfriend across the room.
“Fuck you, bitch!” Beanpole Boyfriend pushes past after her, splashing what’s left of Kessler’s coke onto his brand-new jeans, but Kessler only mutters, “Real nice, asshole.” He’d kill to be able to bellow it out and charge after the jerk, but what fun is a fight when you’re sober?
Instead, he walks back out through the weed-pocked yard and flops down in a badly painted plastic lawn chair. It creaks ominously but resigns itself to his sorry ass. This place is crap, a long way down from the mansions he used to party in, but still…oddly comforting. Reminds him of the parties of his own youth: hand-me-down furniture, awful early bands, a familiar skunk smell in the air. Maybe he can get a little contact buzz, or will he have to confess that to Al, too? He sighs, looks up, and sees a faint scattering of stars struggling to be noticed through the polluted air. A world so big. That had been the sky of his prairie childhood—clear, clean, jeweled with countless magical possibilities—barely discernable now but still there, Al promises, if he follows the Steps, takes inventory, makes his amends….
And shit, he’s had to make a piss load of those! Mom and Grandma (lies and petty thefts—some not so petty), the guys in the band (lost gigs, hotel damage and more lies), puny Arthur he’d bullied in Grade 2 to avoid being bullied himself, nice Miss Aldous in Grade 7 English.
“You’re my future poet laureate.” She’d actually said that—at least, he’s pretty sure she did. Then puberty hit and everything slid sideways as he morphed into a boneheaded idiot, butting up against his own best interests, squandering all early promise on anything pointless, rebellious or careless.
“Why did I do that?” he asks, and Al tells him the big book has the answer—he needs to write a “searching and fearless moral inventory.” Kessler hasn’t written so much as a fresh lyric for years, but he’s desperate enough to try and, sure enough, flashes of insight switch on like motion sensors one by one illuminating his way down a dark corridor. When he reads the finished inventory aloud, Al thumps him on the back.
“Good work, man. But you got to forgive yourself, too.”
Now that his eyes are used to the darkness, Kessler spies a couple on the ground under the trees at the edge of the lot. They’re talking too low to hear, but the way they’re leaning towards each other with their eyes laced Kessler knows the rest of their bodies will soon follow. A burr starts sticking somewhere inside his ribcage: Julie. He’d never even said goodbye. Party music’s still crashing behind him, but he’s lost in the past now, grinding up against her narrow hipbones.
“I think you could ruin me for other men.” Jesus, the honey in those hazel eyes when she said that! The memory triggers a montage both pleasurable and painful as the head splitting orgasm that followed taking on her challenge. He’s time traveling again, slow dancing her straight from laundry to bedroom, swing dancing her over his hip at a party, teaching her kid Tyler how to bust a move at Tuck’s wedding.
Squeals and laughter erupt from the house and he turns to see what’s going on. Framed by the glass doors, the party is an orange rectangle of warmth in the darkness. He’s outside looking in while inside people are having fun with people they’ll go home with. People they’ll fight but hang onto, be content with, and be there for. The glowing picture window shrinks till it seems miles away, unattainable, a vision that eludes him and that he has no idea how to enter.
He’s sliding into a comfy hot tub of longing now, but imagining Al’s sardonic, “Wah, wah, poor me,” switches off the swirling self-pity he’s massaged himself with, unchallenged, for decades. Truth is, he wasn’t hard done by. He’d pushed her away because he couldn’t stand the way she’d loved him so damned tenaciously, so incomprehensibly.
“Just tell me why…because I don’t believe you really love that woman.”
“I only sleep with women I love.” The words are an echo that stabs each time it comes back to him. How could he have been so smug, so superior, so stupidly self-congratulatory flaunting so outrageous a lie? The minute he said it her eyes narrowed—no honey there now. When she finally spoke, her voice could have been scraped off the bottom of an iceberg.
“Well, that is a crock of shit and we both know it. Not for one second did you think about me when you had unprotected sex with her. All you could think about was your cock and that’s not love, Ray. Not even one little bit love.” She stands up, looking down on him for the first time.
“I am going into the bedroom of my house, locking my door and I want you and all your shit gone when I open it tomorrow morning.”
“C’mon, Julie. You don’t mean that.” But she’s already walking away. At the bedroom door she hesitates, hand on knob. Almost pleading, she turns back to him, tears in her eyes.
“If it was just me I could bear it, but there’s Tyler. I can’t let him grow up to be like you.”
Kessler’s left speechless. This wisp of a woman just gut punched him so bad he can barely breathe. It isn’t until he hears the soft click of her lock that rage kicks in and he makes as much noise as he possibly can, ranting and cursing as he hurls things into a gym bag before slamming the front door behind him hard enough to make the wall shake.
He sighs…She’d been right, of course. Amber turned out to be a fucking nightmare, high or drunk 24/7 but, that being what they had in common, he could hardly refuse to party with her. Not even halfway through the tour they were fighting non-stop; by the time they reached Kamloops the guys were sick of both of them and made him dump her. At the end of the tour they dumped him, too.
By now the party’s wound down. In the quiet crickets chirp rhythmically, urgent as bedsprings. Slumped in the lawn chair, he stretches his legs out, exhales, and a quote floats back to him from before he dropped out of college, something about the only true revolution being not in starting something new but in repairing something old.
He’s on the brink of figuring something out, but what? He’s already a revolutionary, always has been.
“Who’re you kidding, you lying fuck?”
Kessler’s inner voice no longer resides safely in his head—it’s leapt down his throat, packing his chest with steel wool, taunting him with guilt. Revolutionary? Ha! Stoked with beliefs plagiarized from movies and TV, hadn’t he really been more of a rebel with a grievance than a cause? When had he ever been brave enough to stand stock still and admit the truth if it tarnished his image or, pettier still, his self-image? Some revolution!
The phrase vibrates like a plucked string.
For the first time in ages a swell of melody lifts him, bearing a flood of lyrics. The lawn chair creaks as he sits up to better catch the wave.
It’s not the miraculous “spiritual awakening” Al has promised will one day wash over him. It’s just a song, but a whole story’s in it: wee hour dregs of a Labor Day party, night chill cueing heedless summer’s end, two people struggling to stay together, the revolution that will require.
He didn’t bring his guitar but he doesn’t need it; he’s nailed the “hook.” Instead, he pulls out his battered cell and sees an older Kessler in its dark, crazed glass.
Julie will be out there somewhere. Google can find her.
His screen lights up.
