Follow the Course!
Chapter Seven to the Novelette “Donkeyland Hooligans”
A Chick Evens, chapter story (Ref: 1964-1967)
“What Stories are remembered? Is it not those which people’s very souls are bared… in which life is not described but revealed?”
—Sherwood Anderson
It is true, unsaid or not, and remains true, that each person, each individual has to follow his own course in life—that, what is right for one person, is not necessarily right for the other. In other words, live up to your values, if you have any, because when you violate them, things get turned upside down often, you see life just doesn’t operate by a uniform code, or rules. That being said, Chick Evens was facing responsibilities of getting married at the young age of seventeen, to be married at the age of eighteen, to a girl eighteen-months younger than him, she was pregnant. He didn’t get tricked by the devil, nor by God, nor fooled by anyone; he just got lustful, and made a fool of himself and got a girl to have his baby (her name would be Darla). Oh, he asked for advice on what to do, but who can really give it after the fact? No one!
Now that the circumstances have been described, here’s how the story goes: Dan Wright (Crazy Dan, as we all called him in the old neighborhood back in the sixties), who lived off Jackson Street, at the far end of Donkeyland (Donkeyland is what the police called our neighborhood), was having a party one night: Doug, Ace, Roger, Mary, Sam, Nancy, Mouse, and Gunner, and just about the whole gang was there—now that I think of it, all drinking and all getting pretty drunk, nothing unusual, except it was at Crazy Dan’s house for once. And in an anticlimactic way, Barb tells Chick Evens—standing by the boiler room, “I’m pregnant, I’m real sure I’m pregnant, I haven’t had my period in two months!” (And to be fair, he knew it was his, even though she had a raw reputation—and that’s being kind.)
The mood in the beginning of their relationship was a tinge stoic —as it is now, with both of them, especially with Evens: for the most part, he’s in his own little world, to be frank, most of the time he’s in that world, perhaps afraid to come out of it, lest he hear that a second time this evening, and be driven out of it—and it dawns on him when he does hear it the second time, and when it becomes reality He just kind of walks off on his own, he feels like the decision to marry or not to marry has been taken out of his hands; he has to get married now it is the right thing to do, what else can he do. In a month or two they will talk about an abortion, but neither one can fully accept that, lucky for Darla. They know nothing about the intricacies of marriage, how can they, who would have taught them? Surely not the neighborhood guys, not his mother, nor her boyfriend, or his grandfather, they’re all busy working, trying to make a living, with little time for such things—so he feels. Can he settle down and raise a kid? This is foremost on his mind. If he says yes, he knows it’s a lie, if he says no he’s violating his values, so he feels, but more than he feels he thinks— ‘Barb is a flirt, too well known to too many people, it can’t last; she’s by far no virgin; it just can’t last,’ but it the value thing.
Barb is a non serious woman, and has little sharp-features to her, and a sharp tongue, no hair on it as they say; she says what she thinks, out loud. The two, now married, move into a house on York Street, out of the neighborhood, beside a factory called: Whirlpool, where he now has been working on the assembly line, working in the vacuum cleaner department. His instincts—which are always right on, pretty much right—told him he should not have gotten married, but of course we know he has now—it’s that value thing of course. And so these two, Barb and Chick, that didn’t seem to have all that much in common in the beginning other than sex, now married, are finding out, they even have less uncommon than before; I mean there is a lot of strife, and at times, long, very long silences between them.
Chick the more sensitive and perhaps aggressive, but for the most part, trying to mind his own business, Barb to the contrary, are living a shallow life, matter-of-fact, she now had started looking elsewhere for a boyfriend, and found one—evidently her needs in that area were much more than Evens’. How she found one was everyone’s guess back then—in the beginning, back in 1966 and ‘67, but rumor was (and it proved to be correct), her half-brother Mike, brought a fellow over one night, and evidently, she distracted his mood, affected his emotions (for a plan B in her life), and that was that: life changed for everyone involved thereafter, he would be the one she’d marry after her divorce from Evens.
One evening, Chick Evens had come home late—he had never cheated on his wife, not once, and discovered to his dismay a shadow running out the backdoor, down the back steps and off into the dark. That would be the man she would marry for twenty-years (in the long run, he’d get what he’d deserved; how true it is, what goes around comes around it’s just a matter of time, and what you take, will be taken from you), living out by Forest Lake, and buying clock after clock and winding them clocks up daily, making sure they were steadfast on the wall would be Barb’s life, and one day she’d get tired of doing that, and she’d get tired of him and do the same thing, leave him for a redheaded chap, twenty-years her junior, the same hair color, the same completion of her first husband except, the new lover would be much ‘uglier’—a quote from her own lips.
Chick Evens was thinking after all this, maybe he should be listening more to his intuition, his instincts, than following his foolish values. He said that to himself then, and would throughout his life—always in a low voice as if not to let the Lord hear him— (especially after too many trials and too many errors). But right or wrong— understanding his thoughts—right or wrong, he had to live with himself then and would in the future likewise have to live with himself, and could he? So perhaps the better choice might be is to: harness himself, meaning drive himself like a horse on a runway, keep busy, and forget marriage completely in the future.
Evens couldn’t answer his own questions, to be honest; he washed his hands of the whole ordeal, drove his white Plymouth Valiant straight away to the old neighborhood, he knew there was only one thing to do, and that was what he did best, knew how to do, immolating the neighborhood gang, and that was to get drunk, and stay drunk like all the men did in that Donkeyland, side street gang; It as the way of life there. And that is what he did do, until he went to San Francisco, in the summer of 1968, and to the war in Vietnam, thereafter.
But if there is to be a climatic point, or moral insight to this story, let it be this: he harnessed that so called horse by: sobering up, going to college, becoming a professional, and understanding: it isn’t what you were, or where you came from that counts at the end, but rather, what you become, turned out to be.
“Follow the Course,” dedicated to Darla Siluk
No: 573/written mid to late January, 2010 (sa)
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