The Fantasy Years

BRANDON COULDN’T HAVE CARED less about the flustered, jovial voice on the radio at this moment. At this moment, Brandon was going through something much bigger and more real than anything Rush Limbaugh could say. Brandon was just at the point on his drive to work in his new Toyota when he really got going fast. Just at the point when the conversation on the radio seemed to carry him along. He was at the point in his routine of work, school, and his busy life when he felt like its momentum achieved a kind of flight. He turned off his radio to listen to the silence. He wanted to think for a moment about what carried him along.

How quickly he’d escaped the rut that had been his life in high school and afterward. Carolyn helped him. He knew she did. Yet somehow, in his darkest, drunkenest, most lost moments, he always knew there would be a Carolyn. How does life work that way? He wondered. What was that sense inside him? The inward knowledge. Unspeakable. Unknowable. But just there. Waiting.

It wasn’t just a matter of not hanging out with Shane and the other guys. He still hung out with them. He still drank beer on the weekends. Sometimes he missed the laziness of just sitting around, jamming to the music, drinking beer and getting high. He missed it. Yet he knew now why he didn’t live like that.

The life he lived now, the clear life he had lived these past months, had been waiting for him. It was waiting for him all along if only he wanted to reach for it. The whole glittering excellent experience of this moment, of the things he enjoyed so clearly now…It had been waiting for him all along.

Brandon could take joy now in regular living. In the here and now. The feeling of closing up the store at the end of the night: all the cash drawers counted and accounted for. Everything in its place. Weekends with Carolyn strolling around the mall. She’d ask for his opinion of a blouse or pants she bought and just waiting to see her emerge from the changing room drove him crazy with restlessness. He’d be dying to get to the record store. Yet, the look on her face when she bought something she liked. How it pleased her. How it pleased him.

An experience was as simple as that. Just like him driving in his car, feeling like he did now. Looking out past the business parks and the shopping centers on the road to the Blockbuster. Looking out across the land. Seeing the sky up above, shades of white on blue. The sun humming behind the clouds, turning their edges a glowing white. The birds keeping pace with his car only to turn away suddenly for an invisible reason.

What was the feeling? The great sense of connection Brandon hadn’t known since he was so young. What was it? He wondered. Then he turned the corner into the parking lot where the Blockbuster’s back office was and started thinking about the work day ahead of him.

“They say if they don’t acquit O.J. Los Angeles will riot again,” crabbed a voice.
“If they don’t acquit him, black people will be furious,” said another in Iowa.
“That’s like acquitting Charles Manson because his conviction would offend short people,” said someone in Virginia.
“Like acquitting Marion Berry because a conviction would offend drug users,” said a voice in Pennsylvania.
“Like acquitting William Kennedy Smith because his conviction would offend Democrats,” replied another.
“Like acquitting Ted Bundy because it would offend preppies.”
“Like acquitting the Killer Clown because it would offend clowns.”
“You see how far the politically correct, thought-police have gone.”
“They’re undermining our justice.”
“They’re destroying our culture.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“It’s maddening.”

The rising, opening feeling continued for Brandon the next morning. He couldn’t describe the feeling, if asked—the reaching out inside him. The widening, yawning happiness. It wasn’t just life with Carolyn. She was part of it. Definitely. But the feeling exceeded her. The feeling colored everything he saw: the orderly streets of 3-2 ranch-style homes, the jumble of roadside signage, the vast ribbons of highways and on-ramps, blackened by exhaust and still warm at this early morning hour from yesterday’s sun.

Talk radio voices yammered on his newly installed Bose speakers. Yet, Brandon didn’t hear the talk as he drove to class at community college. He thought about the indescribable happiness. The joy. The sense of a glimmering, shimmering life set before him and Carolyn and now the baby she would have.

He turned the volume down. He’d get used to the quiet soon enough, he realized, imagining a baby in a baby seat in his car. Brandon thought of his own father and a bolt of worry stopped his joy: He would be a better father than his dad. He would be a better father, because he wasn’t going to divorce Carolyn. He wasn’t going to be a parttime parent. He’d be a good dad. Brandon wasn’t going to divorce Carolyn because they weren’t married. Yet.

And he wondered if they should be married? Carolyn wanted to be married. She never said it in so many words. But he knew she wanted to be. Brandon didn’t want anyone to be able to call his son a “bastard,” either. Of course they’d get married. Of course they would. He just needed to tell her.

Brandon just didn’t want to make the mistakes his father made. He wouldn’t allow himself to. Outside the car, the morning clouds rolled across the horizon, in billowing empires of pink and peach riding through the rich morning blue. He took a sip of his coffee. There was no where else he’d rather be at this moment. Something eternal braced him, calming his mind, and his heart. But how did he know he’d be a good father?

Another kind of joy lit up the Dittoheads on one November morning.

“You heard the news?” a gleeful voice in Maine asked.
“I heard the news on the radio driving in to work,” said another.
“So you heard the news this morning?” a voice in North Carolina.
“The American people have spoken,” replied another.
“They have spoken.”
“The biggest single mid-term gain for forty years.”
“It’s like Reagan in 1980.”
“Like a modern New Deal.”
“Like a New Deal from the Republicans.”
“Because the New Deal was like socialism.”
“But the Contract with America will be like Freedom”
“Newt Gingrich will be like a FDR.”
“And the Contract with America will be like our answer to the so-called Great Society.”
“Because the Great Society was like Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward.”
“And the Great Leap Forward? That was a big leap backward for China.”
“Just like how Hilary’s book on healthcare is like the Little Red Book. Even its cover was red.”

The joy was real. It was victory. The underdogs had triumphed over the corrupt overlords of Congress. Now a Republican majority, respecting the wishes of the American people, would cut a righteous path for the world to see.