Universal Love (Love is in the Stars)
Story Sentence: Asperum ducit ad amorem (A rough road leads to love)
Once again, I have to thank Randi for inviting me to participate in her
St. Paddy's Day event
. I guess she is a glutton for punishment. I hope this one meets the spirit of her challenge. (
Surfing with the Alien
) I think I'm kinda pushing the envelope a bit. I struggled with whether to put this in Sci-fi & Fantasy or Romance. Either one worked, but I settled on Romance.
Story:
Forty-three-year-old Arvin Hayward sat alone, ensconced on the same tattered bar stool He always chose every time he came to this watering hole. He didn't know why he still did this to himself. Was it atonement or punishment? Probably both. He had to pay for his failures as a husband, father, and a man, he supposed. This was his fourth trip to the dump he found himself in tonight. Arvin had only been inside the bar for about fifteen minutes and halfway through his first Jack and water when he vowed to himself, this time would be the last. Of course, he had promised the same thing to himself on each of his previous visits too.
Not coincidentally, tonight was the third anniversary of his acrimonious divorce being finalized. The divorce itself wasn't really that difficult, just the usual arguments, because He and Auburn didn't have much and Arvin didn't want anything, beyond out. It was the bitter taste of the sense of failure that it left him with that hurt the most. He never should have gotten married in the first place.
His first time in John's Place in Fremont was four years ago. That's when he saw his wife and his replacement getting busy in the corner booth behind him. He knew what he was going to see when he walked in the door. He even knew why, but it still cut him. Shouldn't Auburn have at least felt bad? Maybe even apologized to him?
When he walked up to their booth and sat down Both looked surprised, but not shocked. Neither of them offered the standard, 'it isn't what it looks like' excuse. His replacement never even took his arm from around Auburn's shoulders. She simply asked him what he was doing there. Auburn calmly stated. "Well, now I guess we can quit pretending." That was that.
It was to get worse though. A few days later he discovered he'd been replaced as a father too. That one hurt him deeply. To be honest, though, he didn't blame the kid. He really wasn't much of a father to his son, Campbell, or Cam as Arvin called him.
Arvin was an over-the-road trucker. As such, he was gone sometimes two to three weeks at a time. When he was younger, he would try to be home more, but as time went by and he and his wife drifted further apart, it was easier to be gone. His son was simply collateral damage.
They argued back and forth for a couple of months about trivial things, both trying for a pound of flesh. Then the lawyers haggled for a couple more. Finally, six months after that, their divorce was final. He didn't even have to pay child support. Auburn snidely told Arvin that it was because she didn't want any reminder of him in her life. Arvin was a broken man. That piece of paper just reinforced to him what a loser he was.
They should never have married in the first place. They were from different worlds and had their own aspirations. Auburn was a cheerleader with a 4.0 GPA and a full scholarship to Cal, and he was nobody going nowhere. He just wanted school to be over. All they had in common was raging hormones. They had discovered sex together during their senior year of high school one late night at a drunken debauched beach party. She was two months pregnant when they graduated. She never went to Cal or any college for that matter. They both felt they had to do the right thing. That's what their parents told them anyway. It was perhaps the worst advice either of them could have ever received.
He never really blamed Auburn for divorcing him. His still simmering anger stemmed from the case Auburn hadn't said a word to him. She had, in fact, moved into her lover's house, with Arvin's son while he was gone on the road. Then the two of them moved back home when Arvin was in town. He asked her once, why, during the divorce process. She just shrugged her shoulders mumbling something about him being a father. In the end though, what did it really matter? It was done.
After that, Arvin was just gone. 364 days a year, gone. He was home one day a year. That was for his annual one-day visit to this bar to reaffirm in his mind what a loser he was. He never tried to see his son again. A year or so ago, he received papers in the mail requiring his signature so that one Clayton Davis-Anderson could adopt one Campbell Hayward. Arvin never even finished reading the documents. He just found the signature line, signed, and dated it. He put the papers in the enclosed pre-stamped envelope and dropped them in the mailbox. He then went and got shitfaced for three days straight. End of story.
In his drunken haze Arvin remembered something his dad used to tell him when he was growing up. "Son, whatever goes wrong in life, you only get three days to feel sorry for yourself. After that, it was time to get on with it." So that's what he did. Arvin didn't feel sorry for himself any longer, he was too pathetic for that. He was just empty. He could best be classified as being among the walking dead.
The only time he felt any peace at all was when he was on the road. Driving somewhere in the middle of nowhere, without another vehicle in sight, was when he felt the most comfortable. The peaceful solitude of watching the country roll by his windshield drained his anxieties. It was probably the only thing that kept him from blowing his brains out.
For sex, rare as it was, he used Lot Lizards. When he couldn't stand using his right hand any longer, Arvin always chose a Lot Lizard that couldn't possibly be lying about her age. And, one who didn't look too disease-ridden. That wasn't always easy to do on both counts. Lot Lizards were pretty much the lowest rung on the totem pole of hookers.
He had a friend once, who got caught up in a sting operation at a truck stop outside of Boise. He got busted for solicitation. Arvin asked him how he let himself get mixed up in that, and the guy told him the Lizard was so pretty he couldn't resist. Arvin said, "Well, then you deserve to get arrested for being stupid. There are no good-looking Lot Lizards! You should have known she was a cop."
Still lost in his misery, Arvin took a couple of more sips...
"Hey, handsome, buy a girl a drink?"
Arvin gave a little laugh. "What? Are you straight out of a 40's true crime noir film?" Arvin used to love old movies as a kid growing up. A good escape he supposed. Still, he was different than most in that respect. While his pubescent brethren were jacking themselves off to Jane Fonda workout videos on cable and Jamie Lee Curtis movies, he was doing the same to the 1960s-type 'bombshell' movie sirens.
He smiled knowingly when he saw her. He could tell she used to be pretty, a couple of decades ago. But life as a working girl had taken its toll on her. She even had a narrow-jagged scar from the corner of her mouth to below her jawline. Her heavy makeup couldn't hide the scar, or the effects of a lifetime working the streets. Her mottled face was pockmarked and had several wrinkles. He guessed they were more from a hard life than old age.
She didn't exactly smell bad. More like mothballs maybe? Or an eclectic mixture of several scents? Arvin wondered how many different john's cologne, aftershave, and sweat were mixed in with her liberally applied cheap perfume and God knows what else. It would probably take a good chemist several days to break the odor down to its basic elements. That thought made him shiver.
