Greenfield or Greenwood
By: Greg Freed
Phone on shoulder: not illegal then, though probably a rotten idea. One of those phones the size of a half-used bar of soap, actually quite hard to clutch between ear and shoulder without it sometimes flinging itself into the sunless trench between the seat and the door, the car’s unconscious.
I-64, Me and Robert. Me first.
Why were you in Wisconsin again? Why is a person, more generally, in Wisconsin?
-In my case, because my mom is getting ordained. I can’t speak for anyone else. Ordained, ordained. Is that the one where she becomes the Pope?
-Nah, just a Lutheran minister. In a shitty little town, but she likes it.
Well I mean you know me. I could never keep track between minister and pastor and priest and
-Right. You guys just have the one thing.
Right. And I’m barely us guys anymore. My mom had sort of a bat mitzvah kind of thing because she never had one because Conservative girls didn’t do that in 1950-whatever. Anyway that was the last time I set foot in a hall of worship.
-Wait is that what you were in town for? Yeah, sorry I missed you.
Back when I started driving on freeways I was not exactly a bold person and things like a city freeway interchange could really throw me. The first time I had driven through Louisville, I took an exit right after the bridge I thought was keeping me on the interstate and nearly hyperventilated realizing I was in an unfamiliar neighborhood in a city larger than my own. I don’t know what I thought would happen but the feeling was one of being permanently lost.
Robert and I both lived in Lexington but only met at statewide nerd camp after junior year of high school and then had been friends in a low-content, low-effort way for a decade. He had come out a year after I had, so that was something in common, and we had both studied Russian, and both liked dropping lines from The Women into casual conversation.
I was on my way, at the time of the call, to a PhD program that I’d flame out of in record time after falling about halfway apart my first winter in Chicago, the year I lived with a soon-to-be ex-friend who was falling slightly less apart and whose symptoms clashed with mine. One day a queen I knew who was trying on being blunt as an interpersonal style met her and said “so YOU’RE the lesbian” and she gave me a weary look that accurately foretold our entry into the hospice stage of the friendship.
No, that’s not right. I had already blazed out of the program when I was talking to Robert.
Had tried antidepressants, had driven back down to my parents’ house for the summer after the first disastrous year, stopping in Bloomington to see an old friend–also named Robert–who tolerated my advances, had spent the summer balancing out the side effects of one pill meant to help with another. I spent the fourth of July with Robert the FIrst, who was home, setting off grocery store fireworks on the driveway and it was the gentlest night of that year.
This time, I was on my way back to Chicago to cross the Midway that divides campus into the practical and the impractical, and get a practical degree.
My first year would involve a field placement at a supportive housing agency. I had been given the name of my supervisor who, bewilderingly, was someone I knew through (alas, or half-alas) online opera fandom.
I-65. Me and Jason, mostly elided.
We’re looking forward to having you.
-I’m looking forward as well. Well it’s been
-Oh but hey. Just briefly, do you remember that we’ve met? [a pause]
-Chenier in Newark? With Soviero and whatsisname? You were there with James.
For the nine months in which he was patient with an absolute novice in a job that sometimes mattered, we would end our dedicated hour of supervision, sometimes after talk of Klein’s depressive position or just how to fill out the “occupation” line in an assessment with a client who had sex for money, with five minutes talking about recordings and dead singers.
He would die somewhat young fifteen years later.
More Indiana. Listening to a mixtape I had made half of and given to a friend in Austin who filled up the second side with things that felt unreachably sophisticated, things like Chavela Vargas in late, gravely form, and Kurt Weil. Thinking about the awkward evening with Robert the Second, after dinner in Bloomington, where we had met in 1992 (me there for a language program; him doing a summer term because his parents were terrible people he had no desire to see.)
I hadn’t gotten any contact info for him at the end of the summer and spent days the next summer, when I returned, tracking him down. He lived either in Greenfield or Greenwood, which were both towns, beyond which nothing more could be known.
We ate at, oh probably Mother Bear’s, and then drove to, it turned out, Greenwood where I spent an awkward night beside him. We would drift 98% apart twenty years later when his problems were ones I didn’t know how to talk to him about without feeling overly involved and utterly helpless.
I-65, Me and the first Robert. Somewhere around an exit for somewhere named Franklin.
Which side of Indianapolis are you on?
-Darling, I am IN it.
Jeez, already? You drive faster than I do. So listen, we’re having lunch. get off the highway at Greenfield. I mean Greenwood. Certainly Greenwood. I think it’s the suburbs. We’ll find something.
-We both know from suburbs. I’m not too grand for that. iIf I beat you there, I’ll wait. You’ll beat me there. I drive like a dead person.
Greenwood. What did we talk about? Greenwood, and then the next part, the rest of the road.
Greg Freed is a psychotherapist living in Austin, Texas, and a new writer with a publication forthcoming in October, so he feels like he's riding the odds. Having spent a decade writing opera reviews and utilitarian nonfiction in the form of sentencing advocacy, he has worked compulsively, if not very practically, on short fiction, auto-fiction, and memoir in the subsequent years. Freed has lived in small-town Kentucky and Upper Manhattan and, like the writer in a Lorrie Moore story who wants her pieces to have something from every time of day in them, finds his stories overflowing with geography, something from every town.BlueSky