Down There

-Overture-

Brody stands at the screen door watching Dave swing his leaf blower. Dave wears a hoodie, cargo shorts. Gloves, but no headphones to protect his ears. He swings his leaf blower like a scythe, mean and purposeful, and once going never sets it down.

Brody’s spent the past five summers watching Dave do his thing with the leaf blower—chase debris and smoke butts and bubble gum wrappers around the yard for hours at a time—and by autumn, this very time of year, he’s so over the high-pitched drone he could strangle Dave with his own extension cord.

Brody’s always told his wife, Janelle, there’s something wrong with Dave. The man has some kind of disorder. But of late, Brody’s come into a compulsion of his own.

He lowers his hand, muttering something, and scratches—down there. Whenever Dave drags out the leaf blower and starts in on the yard work, Brody can’t help himself. He scratches. It’s like one bad itch triggers the other.

Janelle says Brody’s looking for an excuse to dodge time at the keyboard whenever she catches him snooping on Dave. She knows this new project of his is giving him fits, and the leaf blower is a convenient distraction. But if she knew about the itch—which she doesn’t, because Brody hasn’t copped to it yet—she might be a tad more sympathetic.

He scratches again.

The itch and the leaf blower are two different things. One is obviously not the cause of the other. Not directly, anyway, because how could it be? Yet when the leaf blower kicks up, so does the itch, and when the itch kicks up, forget it. The day goes straight to the dogs.

Nobody needs to tell Brody he’s imagining things if he believes the leaf blower and the itch are somehow mysteriously connected—he knows he’s imagining it—but like he says to the guy he sees in the mirror each morning, Try telling that to my balls!

“Brody, honey?”

Brody glances over his shoulder. Janelle’s managed to edge up behind him without his noticing. She’s standing there with a cigarette scissored between her fingers, arm bent at the elbow. “What are you doing?”

Brody gestures with a lilt of his head.

Janelle gives a glance through the screen door, turns back with a mildly scolding smile. “I thought we agreed you were going to leave that alone for a while?”

“You agreed,” Brody says, “not me.”

The smile hasn’t left Janelle’s face. “Go to work, honey-bunny,” she says. “You’ll feel better.” The cigarette finds its way to her lips. She draws on it and expels the smoke from the side of her mouth. “That song’s not going to write itself, you know.”

Brody hangs his head and shuffles his slippers. He knows she’s right. He’s got the fight song to finish, and Hawthorne will be stopping by anytime now with the new lyrics, and the chancellor has already blown up his inbox with emails all starting the same way, Not to bug, but how’s the composition coming—

“Go to work,” Janelle whispers with an easy smile. “You’ll feel better if you accomplish something.”

Brody, not wanting to argue, steps away from the door. What Janelle doesn’t know is that he already feels better. Or will, when Dave scares up the little note he sailed into his yard this morning while the rest of the block was asleep.

The hallway clock lets go a series of reverberating gongs, and he sees the time and says to himself, she’s right. He’d better get going. It’s a quarter to ten, and he’s got all kinds of work to do. He won’t be able to record anything until numb-nuts shuts down his blower, but he can still get on the phone and start scheduling the talent. Work up the arrangement for the sing and the instrumental.

He takes one last look at Dave’s yard before retiring to the shower. The tiny paper airplane is still there, stuck in the barberry hedge that curls around the side of Dave’s house. He’d like to stick around to see Dave’s face when he reads what’s written on the wings, but Janelle’s right, he’ll blow his deadline if he doesn’t get a move on.

“I’m off to a nail appointment,” she says. “I might do a little shopping after that. Can I get you anything while I’m out?”

Brody glances again through the screen door. Scratches surreptitiously. “How about a stick of dynamite? I’ve got a few things that need blowing up.”

“Sure,” Janelle says in an ice cream voice. “I’ll use that coupon from Ace.” She treats him to a wink. “I think there’s a special on blasting caps, too.”

*

Half an hour later, Brody’s sitting at the keyboard. He sighs and tinkles a couple of keys. Picking up his pen, he stares at the ink-blotched manuscript and begins to make little black squiggly notations at the top of the page. There’s headway at first, real progress. But as the pen nib crawls its way across the sheet, he’s suddenly forced to stop and scratch again.

The school “fight song” he and Hawthorne are working on for the local college is putting up a pretty good struggle of its own. In part because Brody keeps thinking of it as a “fight” song when he should, as Hawthorne has pointed out a million times, be thinking of it as a “spirit” song.

Schools don’t have fight songs anymore, Brody. Fight songs are a vestige of white male aggression. The idea’s to lighten up and enjoy the game. It’s not about winning and losing, okay? It’s about participation. Camaraderie.

Pussies, Brody thinks after listening to Hawthorne’s sanitized homily on esprit d’ corps. Pussies and pansies. That’s the kind of kids who’ll be running this miserable country in ten years. Our grandfathers jumped out of airplanes to kill Nazis, and these guys, these little college winkies with their man-buns and nose rings, need a ‘safe place’ because words hurt. Jesus.

He pushes back from the desk, puts down his pen. Rises and begins pacing the room, looking to give himself a little headspace. He visualizes a waterfall cascading into a clear mountain lake. Snow falling on boulders. But it all goes to shit because he can still hear Dave’s goddamned leaf blower. Yeah, okay, it’s barely audible. But that’s not the point. The point is, it’s there, and even if it is undetectable by the human ear his goddamned testicles seem to have no problem picking up on it, and they’re going bananas.

How do you expect me to keep my fingers on the keyboard, he’d like to say to Janelle, if I can’t pry them loose from my balls?

Madness! All madness! The more faint the leaf-blower’s whine, the more desperately consuming the itch becomes, and right now it’s a goddamned prairie fire raging down the canyon. Nothing but scorched earth in its wake. He’s trying to stop his fingers from searching out the flashpoint, but he can’t, he just can’t. The more vigorously he scratches, the more it makes matters worse.

*

So … so … so … finally he can’t take it anymore. He has to do something, and what he does is to race out of the studio and bound up the stairs to the bedroom where he hauls down his chinos and plops on the edge of the bed and begins digging. He digs and digs and digs. All with a mind to show his freewheeling cojones he means business this time.

But the offending organs aren’t getting the memo. The itch only comes on stronger.

-Intermission-

It, the affliction—whatever it is—first presented itself after Brody’s otolaryngologist prescribed a month-long regimen of amoxicillin for a chronic sinus infection. The antibiotics did their work clearing the snot from his head, but afterward he was left with a horrible, embarrassing itch.

Online research suggested the rash was a side-effect of the antibiotics. But Brody wasn’t entirely convinced. He’d had sinus infections before, taken antibiotics before. So if this malignant visitation was the result of some goddamned pharmaceutical side effect, why the hell had it never happened before?

He’d been too embarrassed to talk to anyone about it. Even his doctor. And he was still convinced its suppression and control was a matter of self-discipline. Deflection, and good hygiene. He wanted his nuts to see the hopelessness of their insurrection and understand they couldn’t win this war, only prolong it. But with his crotch completely aflame for two solid weeks, and the deep red rash spreading with each new day, he knew he was losing ground.

He could beat this thing, he told himself, but only if he could find a way to tough it out. Close his eyes and go Zen on the motherfucker. Self-discipline hadn’t worked so far, nor the other stuff. But while his prospects looked bleak, he hadn’t yet given up hope.

When they were first dating, Janelle used to joke that his dick had a mind of its own. Turns out, she was wrong. Turns out the real masterminds were the gonads.

-Entr’act-

Brody waddles over to the dresser with his trousers around his ankles. Jerks open Janelle’s underwear drawer and starts pushing things around. He rummages until he finds a half-used tube of thick white goop called Vagisil, which he immediately opens and smears on his junk in optimistic globs. Meanwhile, the whine of the leaf blower is coming high and hard through the bedroom window.

He’s just finishing up with the ointment as the doorbell rings. Grumbling, he hitches up his trousers, shoves the tube of goop into his pocket, and goes downstairs to the foyer where he sees Jim Hawthorne standing on the front porch.

Hawthorne’s a tall, birdlike man who wears round glasses with heavy black frames. He parts his long hair in the middle of his head and occasionally plaits it, leaving thick black ropes to hang like curtain pulls on either side of his face.

Brody opens the door. “Hawthorne.”

“Morning Brody.”

Hawthorne’s a white man, but he speaks in laconic Native rhythms. He also carries a business card bearing the mysterious inscription, Snake Oil Salesman. Hawthorne works in the marketing department at the community college, teaching advertising copywriting to juniors and seniors. But as the quote-unquote lyricist of the spirit-song project, he takes serious liberties with his office hours, leaving campus to wander over to Brody’s house whenever the mood strikes.

Hawthorne’s an okay guy, despite his looks. But his motives for showing up at the house are usually suspect, and embarrassingly transparent.

“Where’s Janelle?”

“Off getting her nails done.”

“Mmm.”

The professor’s smile fades a little as he wanders down the hall to the kitchen. He enjoys catching Janelle in her short robe when she comes downstairs for coffee in the morning, and the disappointment in his face is impossible to disguise.

Janelle thinks Hawthorne’s a perv, and says so to Brody every time he shows up at the front door. But she wears the robe anyway for the cheap pleasure of seeing the man in anguish.

Hawthorne pulls out a stool at the breakfast nook and makes himself comfortable. Brody stands at the counter, pouring coffee. “So what do you have for me?”

“I’ve been working on the rhyme scheme, trying to punch it up.”

“So you said.”

Hawthorne opens his medicine bag, a Buffalo Jackson Trading Company shoulder tote filled with student papers, candy bars, parking tickets, you name it. “Here,” he says to Brody. “Read this and tell me what you think.” He slides a heavily marked paper across the granite tabletop, but Brody, who’s busy fixing the coffee, only glances at it.

“Read it to me, will you?”

Hawthorne does, with gusto. Brody listens, but all he hears—and maybe this is his own fault, having started off the day off in a foul mood—is the distant but high-pitched whine of Dave’s leaf blower. He sets down the coffee mugs, takes a quick swipe at his guy-parts when Hawthorne isn’t looking, then turns to him with a heavy frown dragging at the corners of his mouth.

“What?” Hawthorne says looking up from the sheet. “It’s the second stanza, isn’t it? It sucks. I knew it!”

Brody shakes his head, no. “It’s not the lyrics, Hawthorne. It’s that fucking noise. Can’t you hear it? This is why I can’t get anything done around here. It’s that goddamned leaf blower.”

Before Hawthorne has a chance to ask What leaf blower? Brody starts in, no holds barred, laying out the whole miserable situation in detail. There’s something wrong with his neighbor, Dave, he tells Hawthorne, tapping his temple. He’s got some kind of mental illness. Some sort of obsessive-compulsive thing that has him running his leaf blower for hours at a stretch, nonstop.

Brody doesn’t mention anything about the itch, of course, because he and Hawthorne are guys, and guys don’t talk about stuff like that unless they’re really really close—and even then, only if they’re really really really close. And anyway, the itch and the blower aren’t related, not in any true sense of cause and effect, so there’s no point in mentioning the affliction. It would only confuse matters.

“He’ll spend an afternoon chasing a single leaf around the yard!” Brody says. “Not just a leaf, but a single blade of grass! I’ve seen him do it, Hawthorn. I’ve seen him hunched over, harrying a dead cricket down the sidewalk into a storm water drain half a block away.”

Hawthorne’s listening, but Brody’s not sure he’s getting it—the essence of it. So he launches into a rant, shouting about how leaf blowers are the penultimate tool of the Selfish. How they pollute the air with their noise. Send dirt and debris onto other people’s property while wreaking havoc on the environment.

“Jesus Christ,” Hawthorne says. “Why all the drama? Why don’t you just walk over and ask him to quit?”

“Ask him to quit.”

“Yeah, quit. Just walk over and say, ‘Hey, Dave? Mind laying off the blower for a while? I’m trying to record a piece of music?’”

Brody smiles snidely through clenched teeth. “I’m afraid it would fall on deaf ears, Hawthorne.”

“Why? Because he isn’t as good a neighbor as you are?”

“Because he’s deaf, that’s why.”

“Deaf?”

“That’s right, deaf. Deaf as fucking Beethoven.” Brody shakes his head in despair. Grips his coffee mug with both hands to keep from scratching. “He’s got the same constipated face, the same hair. Same shitty attitude. He’s a piece of work, all right.”

Hawthorne doodles on the countertop with his finger. Sputters, and says, “Wow, deaf. That is not good, brother.” He looks Brody’s way, scrunching his face. “I wrote a video script once for an organization that advocates for the physically disabled. Some deaf chick on their board raised holy hell about it. Said I didn’t know shit about the humanly challenged. She almost got me fired.”

Brody cocks his head, unsure where this is going. A second ago they were talking about his neighbor, Dave, and his stupid leaf blower, and now Hawthorne wants to whine about some ridiculous video script he wrote?

“Yeah,” Hawthorne says. “It was about workplace compliance. Federal standards, junk like that. The client rejected the whole script because one of the characters was a mime. She told me deaf people hate mimes, Brody.” He turns up his palms. “Hate. Her word, man, not mine.”

Brody looks at him with a withering, half-lidded stare. “Everybody hates mimes, you dope.”

“Yeah, maybe. But if I were you, I’d keep my dukes up around this Dave character anyway. You never know what’ll set him off. The deaf can be a very unreasonable people.”

Brody’s had it. He’s heard enough of this nonsense. He doesn’t want to listen to any more talk about mimes or video scripts or deaf guys with grudges. He just wants the fight song done, so he can bill it, then get back to the real problem—the insane itch that’s taken his balls hostage.

“Okay,” he says, barely managing to sound polite. “I can’t have this conversation right now. It’s only making things worse.” He gets up, retreats to the sink and pours what’s left of his coffee down the drain. His entire scrotum is burning, the great itch crawling up and down his sack like an army of fire ants, and all he wants is to get Hawthorne out of the house so he can spend the rest of his wretched morning in solitude.

“What about the song?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“What about the new lyrics?”

“Leave them,” Brody says, grinding his crotch against the cabinet’s brushed bronze hardware. “I’ve got a sing scheduled for this afternoon. I’ll pencil the lyrics in and have a scratch track ready for you tomorrow.”

Hawthorne rises from his stool, concerned. “We’re on deadline, remember.”

“Stop by tomorrow,” Brody says, brusquely. “I’ll have it for you by 11:00.”

Hawthorne does nothing to conceal his disappointment at being shuffled out of the house. But when Brody mentions that Janelle will be around in the morning, working on some new poses for her yoga class, the old Snake Oil Salesman cheers up considerably.

They’re making their way down the hall when the tube of Vagisil falls from Brody’s pocket and skids across the hardwood, running up against the living room rug.

Hawthorne stops and looks at it, longer than he ought to.

“What?” Brody says, snatching the tube from the floor.

“Nothing,” Hawthorne says.

When Hawthorne leaves, Brody stands at the screen door until the man’s Subaru is long out of sight. Across the street, Dave’s still swinging the leaf blower, and for reasons only Freud and maybe Dante would ever understand, Brody can’t help but watch. Only it isn’t the two-word note he scribbled on the wings of the paper airplane he’s thinking about at the moment. This time, it’s something else. Something even more cruel. He’s imagining himself in the costume of a mime—striped shirt, double button waistcoat, white sailor pants—standing in Dave’s front yard, tormenting him with a half-assed Vaudeville routine. He’s wearing a top hat with a red flower sprouting from the crown. His face is made up in white paint, eyebrows and lashes smudged with heavy black stage grease.

Dave’s looking at him, unamused, as he does his “Stuck-in-a-Box” routine … “Pulling a Rope” routine … and the pièce de résistance, his “Walking against the Wind” routine. Dave’s got a very low tolerance for this sort of bullshit, just like Hawthorne warned, but Brody’s full on into it now, mean and purposeful, with no intention of quitting.

After maybe half a minute of this demented sideshow, Dave lowers the leaf blower’s long black tube and switches the power off, scowling as if to say, The fuck you think you’re doing? But Brody keeps going because he can’t stop himself. He pantomimes away like there’s no tomorrow, face full of happiness, elbow on an imaginary shelf, arm swinging like a gate.

With great care, Dave bends and sets the leaf blower in the grass. When he stands upright again, his hands are knotted into fists. Brody hasn’t been in a scrap since high school, when Danny Garaccio pounded the shit out of him in the back of a McDonald’s for kissing his girlfriend, Cecelia Donati. But rather than dial it back and give the guy a break, Brody puckers his painted lips into a cute, heart-shaped smile and bats his lashes.

This latest outrage absolutely infuriates Dave. So of course Brody piles on all the harder, daring the guy to take a swing. An endorphin rush of sweet revenge is surging through Brody’s limbs, wild and cathartic, and he can’t help himself, he laughs. Because, guess what? The itch is gone! Gone, like a fucking miracle at Easter! So Come on peckerwood! Bring it!

This is the moment when Dave—the real Dave, the one who’s still swinging the leaf blower—finds his way back into the picture. His head’s bent, and he’s working the bushes with his noisy machine when he suddenly spots the little paper airplane stuck in the barberry hedge. Only, then comes the twist. Instead of plucking the thing out and reading it, or crushing it into a nasty little ball and tossing it away, Dave smiles and sets it free on a gust of mechanized air.

Brody looks on, puzzled, as the paper jet sails into the sky. But what’s gotten to him isn’t the craft’s airworthiness, or its amazing ability to withstand a sharp gust to the fuselage without falling into a tailspin. It’s the smile on Dave’s face as he chases after it. Brody can’t recall seeing Dave smile before. Ever. Not in the five years they’ve been neighbors.

There’s something about the innocent expression on Dave’s face that upstages the act of reprisal, making Brody’s gamble for revenge suddenly seem petty and pathetic. It’s the look of a little kid. A little boy lost in his own imagination in his own fairytale world. The guy might be out there chasing a paper airplane around the yard with an idiotic grin on his face, but even Brody has to admit it’s kind of cool, if only in a stupid, juvenile, ball-scratching sort of way.

Dave doesn’t notice that his foot’s tangled in the orange extension cord. Neither does Brody until Dave trips and stumbles over the curb. He does what looks like a series of dance steps, and as he trips the light fantastic, the leaf blower wrenches loose from his hand and sails into the sky. Dave comes down hard in the middle of the street, and the leaf blower crashes on the pavement beside him. But as he rolls to a stop, arms outstretched on the tarmac, Brody can hear him laughing.

The guy’s lying in the middle of the street with a grin on his face, staring at the paper airplane as it glides to earth, and Brody’s watching him watch it. Wondering if maybe there’s more wrong with him than just a tortured set of ears. If maybe this leaf-blowing enfant terrible wouldn’t benefit from some kind of impulse inhibitor. Or a short vacay at the funny farm with a nice doctor and a great big bottle of thorazine. Still, despite his smug pooh-poohing of the incident, Brody can’t help but accept the truth. He’s jealous of the guy’s stupid naïveté.

Then comes the biggest surprise of the day.

There’s a pothole in the middle of the street halfway between the curb and Dave’s outstretched arms. This pothole’s been there so long the neighbors have given it a name: Mariana—as in, yeah, the Mariana Trench. Mariana is deep and wide, but hard to spot until you’re right up on her. Or in her. So when the distracted driver of the red SUV rounds the corner with his cell phone in his hand and abruptly hits bottom, he thinks, Jesus! Not again!

He hears the thumpity-thumpity-thump coming from the undercarriage, and figures, Shit! Tie rod! But it isn’t until he’s cursed the city’s lazy-ass road crews who do nothing all day but stand around leaning on their shovels that he decides to pull over to check the damage and discovers it’s Dave, not a broken suspension arm, he’s been dragging down the street.

-Exit Music-

Brody’s been quiet as a church mouse the entire evening. Janelle pushes back from her dinner plate and says they should do something nice for Dave’s wife, Claire. Bring her a ham or something. Brody agrees, of course, and she pours them both another glass of wine.

“Did Hawthorne ever stop by?” Janelle lights a cigarette, and touches the corner of her lip with a newly-manicured pinkie.

Brody blinks and looks up. He can’t shake the image of Dave, smiling, chasing the paper airplane. “Yeah,” he says. “He did.”

“Was he—”

“Here when it happened?”

Janelle nods.

“No. He wasn’t.”

She exhales, relieved, blowing a stream of blue smoke over her shoulder. “That’s good.”

Brody smiles a forlorn little smile. Says, “He left disappointed. He was hoping to catch you in your robe. He’ll be back tomorrow, though. He wants to leer at you in your yoga tights.”

Janelle laughs, relieved to see him joke. She doesn’t mention anything about picking up the antifungal cream at Walgreens for the secret itch he thinks he’s hiding from everybody, because what would be the point? He’s had a bad enough day. She’ll just swap it out for the Vagisil he made off with—which isn’t working and wasn’t ever going to work—and the next time he ransacks her underwear drawer, voila, problem solved.

She gets up. Crushes out her cigarette and takes their empty plates to the sink. “How’s the fight song coming? You make any progress?

Brody looks over. “It’s a ‘spirit’ song,” he says, folding his hands on his napkin. “Nobody calls them ‘fight’ songs anymore.”