Penny Dreadful

1.

Oddie awakens in the dark.

“Five oh seven,” he says, reaching for his phone. He opens the face to check the time. It’s 5:09 a.m. Lying there, Oddie laughs. “Ha-ha.” The sound of his own voice echoing in the empty room with the half empty bed is depressing. Still, he laughs again. “Ha ha.” Intellectually, he knows this will improve his mood, what with the release of various happy chemicals into his brain. Realistically, he feels like a moron. Still, it’s a trick that his friend Q taught him the other day. ‘I can control the first sound that comes out of my body each day,’ said Q as he did his 10,000^th pull-up, his broad back and carved black abs shining in the afternoon sun at North Hollywood Park. Oddie had stood there, trying to take in all of Q’s knowledge, the stuff about meditation and the Fourth Dimension, how humans were put here to become Gods and what did he want to be, a human or a God?

“A God,” Oddie said, but he didn’t sound any more convincing than his laugh sounds now.

“Ha.”

It sounds as stupid as ever, like most of what comes out of his mouth.

“I need to learn to shut the fuck up,” he says to the ceiling.

Then he gets out of bed.

2.

Mornings are the same as before his wife moved back to Mississippi. He still gets up at 5 a.m., makes coffee, rolls a blunt, takes a book into the can and reads until his mind is gone with old, unhappy faraway thoughts. He’s reading Keegan again, the only thing that makes sense when he fucks up. He reads about Agincourt. October 25, 1415. Those lumbering men in steel. The cagy and murderous archers. The sky filled with 5,000 arrows every ten seconds. The sound like volcanic rocks exploding onto a sea of obsidian. Crash and crash again and the horses die and men fall in the mud and are killed by a knife thrust into the groin. There’s no good way to die and that’s a bad one indeed, a slow death on the French soil, thirsty, your only friend the man who comes and finishes you off. How many fortunes changed hands on days like that, when a man would give all he owned to be spared a mortal blow? Lords reduced to serfs to spare that noble head a braining.

Thoughts like these, things that he’ll never do or see keeps Odysseus Smith going through these wifeless days and nights. He looks up from the book, looks around the bathroom. Everything in here was chosen by her. The double shower curtain, white and red. He was lucky to have any shower curtain before she came along. The linen closet, full of linen. He had one set of sheets and one towel when she came along. Scented candles, rare incense, an extra case of toilet paper. All of this was from her and he threw it away like junk mail.

3.

He finishes the blunt on the drive to work. He teaches history at a high school in Chatsworth, far northwest Valley, porno town hard by a horse owning community. The connection is obvious, a world obsessed with the grossly endowed male member. And yet, thinks Oddie, most girls will tell you too big ain’t so good. Makes an average guy feel better as he pounds his pud.

Meanwhile it’s all fast action on the freeways all the time. Oddie puffs and putts along. Her car that she bought ten years ago brand new then gave to him when her mother gave her a bigger and better car, the one she loaded up and left in, taking two dogs, one cat and a heartbreaking look. Watching somebody you love walk out of your life is the second worse feeling in the world. The first is hearing somebody is dead.

Oddie speeds along the 170, sticking to the slow lanes, staying out of the way of blazing motorcycles and roaring big rigs and everybody and their mama is in a hurry. He’s not. The only good thing that has come out of this separation is he’s never late anymore. In fact he’s become somewhat obsessive about being precisely on time. The staff meeting today after school. Great. Anyway, it starts at 3:15 and Oddie will be sitting there at 3:!2, then 3:!7, then 3:20, then 3:21, watching as guilty face after guilty face walks in holding food or a Coke wearing that ‘sorry but don’t look at me gaze’, the one the kids use when they don’t know an answer to a question. If I’m not looking at the teacher then the teacher can’t see me.

The radio is boring. Oddie punches ‘play’ on the CD. Lucinda Williams. She left this too. And by the way, she has a name. Say it man, say her name. Penelope. God, just saying it is like hari-kari, like barbed wire through the guts, like a body blow. Oddie advances the tracks to number 7, ‘Down.’ Kill me Lucinda, kill me now. Cut my heart out with that guitar of yours and feed it to me. Lucinda plays awhile then she starts to sing. She says you can’t put the rain back in the sky. She says you can’t force the river upstream. She says that you know exactly what she means. She says there’s no way she’ll ever take you back. She asks if you’re down with her, babe, down with that.

“No,” says Oddie, tears running down his cheeks. “No babe, I’m not, I’m not down with that. I’m not down with that at all.”