Tom spoke to him: "Don't you remember me? Falls North? Class of '81? I've been gone from the Falls for twenty-five years. After high school, I moved away: college at Stevens Point for a year. A total bust. I was on the rugby team."

Tom exhaled some unenthusiastic desperation and turned his eyes toward the YMCA building. Through the glass foyer, he could see people inside the Y, an older man who appeared to be a custodian moving toward an inside door with a set of keys and opening the door and stepping into the room beyond it. What horrors the custodian faced in there!

Tom suddenly knew that twenty-five years of adult life had amounted to nothing; he was right back where he started; but he felt no rage.

The dead man's tongue seemed to reach upward from his mouth and into the air as if trying, in a last heroic boylike gesture, to entice a snowflake to land there.

"Look at you acting like a kid," Tom said. "That's the problem with staying in the Falls. You never grow up if you don't leave."

So Tom began telling it to the dead man: He had done some growing up all right. Flunked out of Stevens Point mostly because of rugby or because he didn't give a shit about rugby in the first place. Rugby was just something to do while he looked around for something else to do instead of college, because he believed, as college students throughout the ages had, that college sucked ass. He moved on a drunken whim that following summer to Fort Lauderdale and worked for three years as a bar back and oyster shucker at a seafood and beer-bucket place called the Oyster Cellar where the waitresses wore checkered tablecloth tops and Daisy Duke shorts and smoked menthol cigarettes and complained nonstop about fat customers pinching their asses. One day, when his hands hurt so badly from shucking oysters and loading cases of Budweiser into ice tubs, he decided he'd been participating in the restaurant business, why not figure out how to run his own joint? He took out a student loan and attended Florida Culinary Institute in Miami, which turned out, considering the almost-twenty-year successful run his restaurant had in Asheville, to be a brilliant move. FCI taught him the shit he needed to know: how to cook, to design, to do the books, to manage the people, to make things that aren't all that hip seem hip, et cetera. After he graduated from FCI, he scoped out potential restaurant markets around the country and got lucky and got a bank loan to open a wood-oven Italian place in downtown Asheville. Couldn't have gotten into the market at a better time, either, right at the very instant Asheville started becoming the town where the blue money in the southeast went for vacation.

Tom had to stop talking.

An SUV appeared in the parking lot entrance, with a minivan directly behind it, and they pulled into separate stalls. From each vehicle a woman in a stocking hat emerged, and both women slung gym bags almost simultaneously over their shoulders, not registering each other, adopting stiff, strutlike strides toward the door where their eyes were fixed. Neither of the women registered Tom and the dead man. Tom was so shocked the women didn't notice the dead man that he held his breath for a long time, to the point where he could feel small twingy pains in the middle of his chest. He released the breath through his nostrils, and it formed funnels of condensation that spread downward toward the dead man and dissipated into nearly imperceptible crystals over his nose and mustache and lips and tongue.

"See that?" Tom said. "Those women don't care if you're alive or dead."

Tom proved it.

He said his wife Marissa had waitressed at his restaurant first year it was open, become hostess the second, and married him the beginning of the third year, when the business was starting to take off. They had the kids, Stephanie and William, bam, bam, in successive years thereafter. Tom, needless to say, for business reasons, if anything else, had his vasectomy early. So when he was in his mid-twenties, Tom already had the plumbing disconnected, the kids, the hot North Carolina wife, the growing business, the cool friends, and so on, and on weekend nights, people waited in the street outside the restaurant for over an hour before they could come in and be seated. Tom talked about the nature of marriage, the way it dissolved with comfort and time and having kids and owning a business and experiencing, as we all do, a deteriorating life. Love in the long version, like life in the long version, involved getting used to a situation where you didn't pay attention to what the other person did because you knew that person would always be there. Once you knew, what was left but doom?

When Marissa finally left him for her Pilates instructor, Tom drove to the banks of the French Broad River in Asheville and gazed to the west at Pisgah Ridge looming over town, 4200 feet above sea level and wreathed in the most elegant of mists, and he decided he would have to move back to the Falls, where at least there were no mountains and therefore nothing to look up to. Now he was back in the Falls, and his eyes did not gaze upward, and nobody knew who he was, and nobody cared what had constituted his life.

"You don't remember me?" Tom said. The dead man most assuredly did not; his tongue was sticking out; his breathmaker was kaput; the guy hadn't a worry in the world.
"Then fuck you. I hope your funeral sucks."

Tom did feel better. He had to admit it. He noticed, for the first time in three weeks, that he didn't feel all that cold.

He strode confidently into the YMCA and took the steps downstairs to the locker room and changed into his gym togs and made his way to the exercise room where he shuffled on the elliptical trainer for thirty minutes and on the Stairmaster for thirty minutes and on the NordicTrack for thirty minutes. To cool down, he did thirty minutes easy walking on the suspended track over the basketball court. When he was done, he went to the locker room and took a fifteen-minute Jacuzzi and a sauna and a long hot shower, and on his way out he paused at the bubbler and pressed its button all the way in and let the water arc into his mouth and rinse over his teeth. Then he drank deeply and decided, sure, he was going to be happy after all.

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7 comments about this article. Post a comment / write a review.

Recent Talkbacks ...

Posted by OMCreader on Oct. 1, 2006 at 9:32 p.m. (report)

Cozen Beguile said: Now that I think about it. I bet he took the money out of the dead guys wallet! Why else wouldn't you call the police? He did seam very interested if he grew up with the guy. I bet he checked for ID and saw it was a guy that he disliked. lol! PEACE!

Posted by OMCreader on Sept. 29, 2006 at 6:16 p.m. (report)

Jeff Jassby said: I see at least your humor hasn't changed. With every ending there will always be a new begining. Good luck, keep writing those books, hope you find your roots. Jeff Jassby Class of 81.

Posted by OMCreader on Sept. 27, 2006 at 4:07 p.m. (report)

Kurt said: Ok I read the terms and conditions. So am I still allowed to write that this article sucks?

Posted by OMCreader on Sept. 27, 2006 at 1:13 p.m. (report)

Chuck Hines said: Greetings from a midwesterner who re-located to Asheville 38 years ago. The midwest still has the nicest people, but Asheville, despite increasing traffic and other problems, remains a great place to live in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with whitewater rivers and lovely lakes and enchanting forests and the ocean just a 4-hour drive away, and with a temporate all-season climate. Our citizenry is very diverse, too. Every time I visit elsewhere, I return to Asheville and say, this is the best. Oh, I go to the YMCA here, as well, and just returned from a nice swim there. Long live the Y!

Posted by OMCreader on Sept. 27, 2006 at 12:07 p.m. (report)

Kevin said: I hope that when I die I'm found by some self-absorbed jerk who laughs at my typical cheesehead outfit. ( I want to die with some item of Packer clothing on my body) This auto-biographical story is just god-awful. Again, I ask the question - This guy TEACHES writing? Yikes!