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By Root 334 0

noon, the upstairs doorbell rings. It is Miss Blake from down the street. Miss Blake goes by her maiden name, as she has outlived her third husband, a Supreme Court justice, by thirty years, and has very little personal affiliation with so distant a past. It is she who has, by virtue of her seniority among the other widows on the block, taken on Lewis as one of her many philanthropic projects. Every summer she chooses a house on the street that she will argue needs painting. These are two-story brick townhouses, and so the outside painting consists mainly of window frames, eaves, and doors. She does not ask their occupants’ approval or even warn them about the person they are so unexpectedly about to spend the season with. Lewis is therefore kept occupied during the warm season, as she calls it, so he can live comfortably year round. It is up to us to find the money to pay him. She has brought him lunch. I open the sack and there is a sandwich, an apple, and two cold Budweisers.

“Lewis likes beer,” she whispers clandestinely, “hope you don’t mind.” Him drinking on the job, she means.

“Well,” I answer a little apprehensively.

“Oh come on!” she scolds, “He’s a veteran, you know.” On her way back down the street, she calls the squirrels out of the trees one at a time for a little treat. She knows them all by name, talks to them in clicks and whistles, and they answer her call. I’ll be damned if I don’t understand what she’s saying to them. “Mama’s baby want a grape?” “Does little darlin’ like raisins?” “Would little sweetheart have some nuts?” I close the door and pop one of the beers on my way up to the roof to find Lewis. Sam grabs the apple, pours some fresh drinking water into a mason jar, and joins us.

“I was in love once,” Lewis reminisces over deviled ham. “It was just after the war. We lived together until I discovered she was a lesbian. Honest, I didn’t care. I loved her anyway. After you’ve killed a lot of people you don’t care much about that sort of thing. You just like people for who or whatever they are, but her girlfriend wouldn’t have me. A shame, though, because I kinda liked her too.”

As a sideline to our business producing audio masterpieces, we manage a country music band. Jimmy Carter is president and anyone with a guitar and a buckskin jacket can make damn good money here in the Capital of the Empire playing for the transplants from Georgia and the South. Rural Virginia and Maryland have a country music following. The band has a huge urban, suburban, and rural fan base. The best of most worlds. The players are really just a bunch of hippies from New York and the D.C. area playing what they call kick-ass country music. At the height of the disco era, and before the Punks and the New Wavers take over, outlaw country has an authenticity that gives it a brief alternative appeal. One band member is a Berklee College of Music grad, and his complicated arrangements, along with the music theory and history he imparts to the others, make every performance something to look forward to.

On two different occasions, aggressive, overachieving males will leave high-paying media jobs to join our company. We advise them not to do it. They could be of much greater help to us by staying at their jobs, tossing us their table scraps, and spreading the word of our efforts to their contemporaries. We are desperate for the help and expertise they could bring, but we know the pitfalls of being self-employed. They don’t.

From the safe distance provided by company expense accounts and big salaries, these men have been spoiled by union-negotiated health care and the prestige of having a big-time corporate appellation attached to their names. They will take no direction, no suggestions, brook no demands or criticism. They are driven by a false confidence, a form of hubris, stemming from the mistaken impression that they are indispensable. For them, the romantic status of being independent, of replacing the corporate master with a mastery of one’s own, has a seductive appeal. And once set free, they will be incapable of being