kindred spirits*

This is another character sketch based on another of Melanie's boyfriends... :D Perhaps it will turn into something more? 

*

Mike was an easy read, something with baseball in the title. He was appropriately patriotic, and anti-patriotic; a protestor of the government and a lover of his rights. If you’re eighteen, it’s your responsibility to vote. Or join the military. Or both. Whatever you do, don’t get married right out of college and expect to be happy. Mike was this kind of man. 

It surprised me to learn he was an English major with a stomach full of poetry that he occasionally rubbed, as if his body was a magic lamp, and he was the genie, stretching to fill the room with wonders, and his three wishes? To write a book about the origin of Blues music. To meet Clark Gable. To convince Clark Gable to direct a movie based on his book. But this wouldn't happen, he admitted, and when your fifty-seven, you don't dream anymore. I learned a lot about the Blues from him, although most of the poets he solicited I had never heard of, except for Bob Dylan, of whom I cheerfully approved. 

Mike had started off his career as an English teacher and a basketball coach, Corbit and I will make the play, not ‘me and Corbit’ and then started building houses when he was  no longer comfortable in his own, with Marney, his overweight wife, Emily, his anorexic daughter, and even Matthew, who ate pizza everyday and listened to Coldplay in his dark-and-do-not-enter room. They all left him eventually—for the neighbor, for rehab, for good, and all he had left was a two-hundred dollar hammer and a shrewd mind, sharp as nails. He started building houses on the lake, and soon millionaires were paying cash for his charming designs: floating furniture, the sewing-table vanity, a two-story kitchen. 

Mike considered himself a humanitarian as well; he spent his extra time fixing up crazy wheelchair Dee’s rotting trailer home, evading her inappropriate sexual advances, and despising the local churches for their missions to Mississippi and their donations to Africa when Dee was right there. Her bathtub had rotted through her trailer floorboards, and there were holes in the roof. The gas stove would be next to hit the ground, and then poof it would be over. That trailer would burn like a napkin. 

Mike wasn’t sure how much Dee understood when he told her she needed to keep an eye on the stove. An eye was all she could keep on it, probably; the rest of her was strapped into a motorized wheelchair and buried in fat fat fat. Mike had no idea what Dee ate, or where she got her money, or how she spent it, other than on Christmas decorations, and Thanksgiving decorations, and Halloween decorations, and most recently, Valentines day decorations. She dressed a teensy sugar maple for every season, and the tree looked embarrassed, like a ten year old in frilly socks for Easter, or a clip-on bowtie. Dee looked forward to holidays with relentless pleasure and whatever money she had. Mike wondered why. She didn’t have a job and she never received any gifts. No visits from out-of-town children or caroling Sunday school classes. Her reasons were mysteries wrapped with with crazy eyes, and a rancid grin.