Judges 5:27

And the tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell.

I have written the word Nicole on my hand because it is my little sister’s birthday & I don’t want to be the one who forgets to call home. Even though it is still very early in the day, I don’t want to be the one who forgets.

At break there are leftover sausages and French toast & I remind William that in twenty minutes we have to be in the Soundview conference room – a big open space with windows on two sides & chairs stacked against the walls for convenient use – because I know he is expecting to go run an errand when break is over. There is a woman down the street who is donating a wing chair & ottoman for our retreat center, all we need to do is go pick it up. But we need to be in Soundview at 10 o’clock because there is going to be free CPR/First Aid training for anyone interested. Two weeks ago when the sign-up sheet had gone up in the receptionist’s office & we all had found little slips of paper in our mailboxes alerting us that there would be free training, I had been the first to sign up. I had written my name in all caps with an exclamation point.

BRAD EFFORD!

These details were emphasized because it does not take much to excite me these days, & because if it takes a day of asking a rubber dummy if s/he’s okay, pointing & yelling at an imaginary someone to call 911 & get me an AED, breathing into its mouth & watching the rubber chest rise & fall, pushing with two palms on the rubber chest that feels too fake but condenses into ribs too real – if this is what it takes to miss a day of work, I am all in.

In the room at 10, the instructor is an average man. He is 42 years old (he tells us this very openly) & his crew cut is not behaving, it is swishing more to the left like I imagine mine might if I were to ever get a crew cut. He is a fireman, & he acts like one. He is very noble. His name is Tom.

Too quickly I realize I may be a little out of place, perhaps even out of my element here. Here in this room, there are five of us sitting in a loose semi-circle with two dummies lifeless on the carpet. William has chosen to get the wing chair & he does not show up for the training, even though we all expect him to & even Tom offers to wait for him. But he never shows up. Instead, it is only myself in a Goodwill t-shirt & Dickies shorts & a newsboy cap my mother bought for me at a wine festival too long ago for me to remember when, myself & Jim, April, Kris, & Sherylann. Jim & April are my bosses, are everyone’s bosses, they are The Bosses, like as if there were two Bruce Springsteens in one room. Kris & Sherylann are the next two in command. Because William has not showed up, I am in a room taking a CPR/First Aid training course with a fireman & my four bosses. My t-shirt has a picture of a cartoon bumblebee & it says “Bee…the best you can Bee!”

Oh, I am so out of my element here. Tom only aggravates this further by mentioning right from the start that it seems everyone here is upper management & so this would be a good idea to talk about what plans are in place should an emergency ever happen. He says this & I decide to smile & look around to accentuate the fact that this is all so ha-ha, that look at me & how out of place I am & how funny it is that he has just said this! No one else seems to have found it funny; they are all nodding solemnly, as if the consideration of a fire exit route was the culmination of their lives’ purposes. I am beginning to wonder if I will be thrown out when Tom discovers I am a fraud, that I am not any kind of management, that I am just the college kid who wound up here for the summer. When he finds out I ride around on a golf cart all day picking up debris that fell from trees & distributing linens, Tom will toss me out of the room. Maybe he will order me to bring them some coffee & water first. But then he will throw me out.

The other four have started introducing themselves to the group, well just to Tom I suppose, since we all know each other already, & my mind has gone into overdrive to think of some way to prove my spot in such an elite CPR/First Aid training group. I will say something clever, introduce myself with a fake title of importance. My name is Brad & I am the Associate Maintenance Manager. Or My name is Brad & I am the Assistant to the Maintenance Manager. I will say something like this with a solemn face of grave seriousness, but I will give a glance at Jim, who will chuckle softly because he is a very nice man who understands these things. He will say something equally clever & gesture to me, reasserting my position in this room. He will do this because even though he is almost 60 & he has no eyebrows, giving his eyes a dwindling coal kind of look, he is still a very dry & humorous man. & he understands.

“And you are…” & Tom the Fireman is nodding his head at me at the end of the semicircle & this is the first time I am even acknowledged as being here in this room.

“I’m Brad & I guess since William isn’t here, I sort of am representing the uh, maintenance department here. I guess I’m sort of a uh – “

“Brad is the only one here from 10 o’clock at night until 7 in the morning, so this is actually going to be most important to him.” Someone has said this, has confirmed my status in a way I wasn’t expecting. Jim. Thanks to Jim, ah Jim yes yes Jim thank you Jim, I can just get on with the show. I am the most important. Someone could have a heart attack in their sleep, at 3 or 4 in the morning, & because everyone else goes home to their families at 4 o’clock or 5 o’clock, only I would be there to help. The weight of a dozen or two dozen very old women is solely on my back. I am like the CPR Messiah the way I will master the art of the pulmonary. I am the Heimlich Jesus. Maybe I will make a shirt that says this, maybe someone will find that funny. I make a mental note.

Ever since the training started, I have been telling myself that I will make mental notes of everything, & will make special mental notes for anything that is especially mental noteworthy. I will write this down & I will turn this into a story of some kind because here I am, I am 20 years old & I am working at a Sisters of Mercy retreat & conference center & there are nuns who cannot speak because they have taken vows of silence & I am alone here every night with nothing to do but read & sit paranoid, & this is prime storytelling. I can turn this into a nice piece of work because I am a writer, I have always wanted to be a writer ever since I would go to church with a spiral notebook & think of elaborate stories but not have the drive to actually write them all out, so instead just ended up with entire spiral notebooks full of underlined titles & maybe two or three opening sentences. I was the master of opening sentences; I sometimes dreamed that the opening sentences would be all I would need. I have since read Amy Hempel’s story called “Housewife” & I realize this has already been done.

But this training, this training is so average. I am expecting something to happen that I can turn into typed words later, something completely outlandish or milk out the nose hilarious, but if you have ever been to a CPR/First Aid training, then you know. There is an American Heart Association DVD & there is a rubber dummy & there is a plastic face shield that you must place over the rubber dummy’s mouth to give him/her mouth-to-mouth. Tom says the word “nipples” one too many times so that it isn’t funny anymore. We are all too at ease for anything interesting to happen. Tom mentions that sometimes a “patient” will release fluids from their oral cavities (he uses very technical terms, Tom. Sometimes I find myself filtering everything through two or three layers of twentysomething vocabulary just to get his gist), but that this is completely normal, perhaps expected. I consider raising my hand to ask Tom the question I want to ask, but think better of it. Instead, I wait until there is a lull in, & I ask Tom if a patient has ever puked into his mouth while he was giving them mouth-to-mouth. Tom is not phased.

“No. I don’t do mouth-to-mouth. Unless my wife or one of my own children ever needs it, I don’t do it.” I think Tom is a little afraid of germs.

He mentions that there are Hepatitises A through Z these days, & that we should invest in a face mask in case mouth-to-mouth emergencies arise. He even hands out masks that we can try out for ourselves. Instead of strapping it around the dummy’s head, I strap it around my own. It is the kind of mask that people wear in hospital beds when they are unconscious & living on quiet, puffing oxygen machines. I am trying to be serious one minute, comical the next. Maybe I will be the Stand-Up Heimlich Jesus. I consider more t-shirt possibilities.

~~

Even though we have been training most of the day, by the time we get out it is only 2:30 in the afternoon, so I decide to mop the dining room. It is a task that I know takes me about an hour, that I know will make me completely drenched in sweat & tired from lifting all those blue vinyl-plastic chairs onto the tabletops & off again. It is something I only do maybe once a week for these very reasons.

Passing through the kitchen, I say hi to Steve the Chef, who I heard from William had sliced his finger open while hurriedly finishing up dinner last night. Steve is white haired & he has the teeth of a Brit, but he is also a huge man in every way. He is probably seven or eight feet tall; he talks like he is a twentysomething, like me. Walking through the kitchen, I notice the thumb of his left hand is swathed in a bandage & cast in an alarming splint.

“Yea man, you know I just didn’t realize what time it was & suddenly I realized & it was like Oh Shit & I was just cutting parsley man, & I just sliced the fucker.”

“Stitches?”

“Only three. But you see man, it cut through most of my nail.” He demonstrates with a phantom knife how one might feasibly cut through their own thumb’s nail while deftly cutting parsley for dinner. I am enthralled by this man.

Later, while I am mopping, I can hear Steve retelling the story to Jim in the kitchen, though he is telling it in a way one might tell it were they talking to the Executive Director of their place of business, namely minus all the swear words. I am thinking that maybe Jim has come down from his office to hear the story because this might be a case of insurance or worker’s comp or something adult like that. I sometimes pretend like I am very schooled in these types of issues. This surely cheapens Steve’s tale of gruesome bloody horror considerably, all these underlining presumptions of adult things.

Jim stops by the dining room where I am mopping.

“Did you hear about Steve’s finger?”

“Yea, it sounds pretty gruesome.”

“It’s too bad we didn’t get our First Aid training yesterday, huh?”

Because our training did not involve anything about bandaging wounds, Jim is implying that we could have given Steve CPR or maybe the Heimlich for his wounded thumb. Do you see what a hoot this man can be? He is our boss, but he can be a hoot sometimes too.

~~

I am walking along the Boston Post Rd., walking directly into traffic so that should any driver not see me, I will at least see them. There are no sidewalks in Madison, except downtown, & I have to resort to walking along the shoulder. But I have my headphones on & there is music playing & I am going to go downtown & look for a new book to buy & it’s hot, it’s brutal, but if I stay in the shadows of the trees I will be okay.

~~

Downtown Madison is exactly how one would picture a place called “Downtown Madison.” It is one two-way road with coffee shops & realty places on both sides of the street & the parking spaces are angled, half-filled with BMWs & other smaller cars. I think that SUVs have finally started to go out of style, there are boys skateboarding in the empty parking spaces. There is one movie theater that shows two movies at a time. I have not heard of either of the movies it is showing this week; movies are too expensive anyway.

At Willoughby’s, which is a coffee shop that I haven’t tried yet, I get one of the pumpkin cakes sitting behind the glass & say “For here, please” & sit down to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Then the door dings & there are these two kids who walk in, one of them has a faux-goatee & a Mohawk that is too long & not gelled; it sits like a mink throw, laterally over his scalp. It’s a hideous thing. His friend is taller, more angular, “the goofy one.” They act like they are expected. Who could possibly be expecting these kids? They are doubtlessly in high school, they are maybe 17 or 18. These kids in flannel shirts & skateboarding shoes, they throw themselves into a couple of chairs, Mohawk throwing his arm casually over the back of the chair. The girl behind the counter who is infinitely tall for her high school age & has starkly blonde hair & thin, dark eyebrows & oddly sized freckles, she pretends like she is coming over to the tables to clean them, but she stops by the two boys.

“Hey.”

“Wassup.”

“Not much juschillin you know.”

“Fireworks are cancelled, did you hear about that shit? There’s a thunderstorm warning, so we can’t do the fireworks anymore.”

“Thunderstorms? Shit, we can still drink though, yea?”

“I donno, yea, the fireworks are just postponed until tomorrow. We can play pong though. Sarah’s got a ping pong table. We can get some balls & plastic cups.”

“Hell yea. I’ll school your asses. I wasn’t shit at that game til that party at John’s house, I got really fucking good.”

These kids. Jesus, these fucking kids. I am trying to be calm here & calmly enjoy my coffee here & I just wanted to read my new book here. I find myself smiling at these kids, pretending like I am reading. Whose generation is this? These are not my people, these kids who make sport out of alcohol & have not read a single book since school got out. These fucking kids. I am probably only two or three years older than them, but I feel like I am maybe forty years old. These kids are throwing parties & getting drunk & -

“Yea, but what about her mom?”

“Nah man, her mom never comes downstairs.”

I want to call their moms. I will stand up & put my coffee cup down, & I will, with my book in my hand, this very intellectual book that Robyn suggested I read, I will go up to them & I will say something very clever & demeaning to them. They won’t understand what I’ve said until I am already out the door, & they will be so thrown off by someone their own generation, their own age, telling them off that they will be forced into intellectual conversation. I will save these kids. Maybe I will give them my book. No, I will keep my book because there are three of them & only one book. But maybe I will read them something from the book, just to prove the point that books are good, are fruitful & can break your heart or fire you up or completely floor you. I have read maybe ten pages of this book, but already I see something I can throw at them:

“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”

These kids will have no clue, no fucking idea what hit them. Then I will gather up my headphones & my iPod & my sunglasses, these big outdated monstrosities that I discovered in the housekeeping closet weeks ago, & I will just leave. Maybe, before I go, I will flick a quarter to the counter-girl & say something like, “Keep the change.” No, that doesn’t even make sense.

But maybe I will do it anyway, if it will help make my point.

Mohawk is telling some story that apparently they have all heard before, about how the too-tall, outsized freckly counter-girl this one time, after a party, man she just couldn’t hold it, we were like one fucking house from her house, we were like right next door man but she couldn’t hold it, she just threw up everywhere, man. They all think this is a very funny story, they all think they can be Stand-Up Jesuses, maybe Stand-Up Beer Pong Jesus or Stand-Up Mohawk Jesus. I cannot stand these fucking kids.

One block away, away from the coffee shop, I call Nicole because it is written on my hand & I have willed myself not to forget. She is eleven today, & I make the same joke anyone older than someone else on that someone else’s birthday makes:

“What are you, like nine?”

“Noooooooo. I’m eleven.”

She thinks her brother must be the biggest stupid person that the whole world of stupid people has ever seen, like ever. Maybe I should tell her I was only kidding. She probably knows. It is a five minute conversation; they are going to see a movie tonight at home, & I am at a gas station about to buy water because it is on sale.

On the walk home, I play a game with the songs on my iPod where even though it is on Shuffle, I listen only to two possible choices:

Either

A.) Very Good Songs By Very Mediocre Artists

Or

B.) Very Mediocre Songs By Very Good Artists

It would probably not be a very fun game in other times or places, but on this walk home it is really firing me up. I listen to “Ruby Falls” by Guster (A.), “Across the Night” by Silverchair (A.), “Path of Least Resistance” by Modest Mouse (B.), “Passive Manipulation” by The White Stripes (A.). “Hotwax” by Beck comes on next, & it is one of those songs where I don’t know all the words, but I know what all the words sound like. Every now & then, I trick myself into thinking I know the words, though, like when he says “flashdance ass-pants” & “I get down, I get down, I get down all the way.” I know those words. I act like those are the only words in the song. Those & “karaoke weekend at the suicide shack.”

Oh, & the clouds. I am going to write about the clouds when I get back. Maybe that will be the first thing I will write about, & then the rest will be a sort of inverse-flashback told in first-person narrative type deal. The clouds while I am walking, they are distended & broken into manageable chunks. I cannot place my finger on what they look like. That’s it. They look like putting half & half in coffee, the way it separates & floats. I will write that the clouds are like floating milk in my coffee. That will be nice imagery, something people can relate to. I will not write that they are horribly discolored because my sunglasses are tinted dark orange & it is not so bright anymore that they are necessary, but I am wearing them anyway because they make the clouds look more wrong. I will not write that because that is not interesting to people & I only want to write about what is real & interesting, not just what is real.

I want to write about the little notecard-sized note that April Lee has on her desk in the receptionist’s office. It has a smiley face on it, with the words “Don’t Forget to Smile!” I want to write about it because it looks handwritten, it is definitely not something pre-manufactured. It is something more akin to a mental note, to remind April Lee that she must be smiling because this is her job & this is her role & here, see your purpose? Your purpose is that you must not forget to smile. You must answer the phone & redirect the calls & sort the mail after William picks it up from the post office. And you must not forget to smile, Don’t Forget to Smile!

Perhaps I will write about that, & I will write about the kids, those fucking kids, & I will write about Tom & the dummies, & perhaps even I will admit that I went to a coffee shop today just to read a book & that it was worth mentioning. & perhaps it was.