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The Watchman

I had not seen Reid since the eighties when he was a student of Kant, became a lawyer in the firm of Wotila & Kafka, and had married the daughter of the Connecticut State Senator, Vinnie Minicam.

We ran into each other on a rainy Saturday in July in a Boston mall. I had not recognized him because he had changed. Gone was the beard, the commitment to any moral imperative, truth, justice – only the way of his American success story.

Instead, Reid appeared androgynous, autonomous, and asked me in no uncertain terms to be anonymous after this meeting.

I was ready to oblige him, when he started to nervously laugh. We walked into the Four Leaf Clover Saloon and ordered beers, and I knew he expected me to commiserate. I put my hand on his shoulder, which he promptly removed.

“We were both searching, Reid.”

“I found out I was miserably suited for the bar, except this kind. I had a miserable marriage to Nancy whose father promised me a vague future appointment to the Supreme Court, so happy was he to see her married. She couldn’t have children because of her ‘wildness,’ as he put it. As if that mattered to me.”

“What mattered?”

“I thought it was the working class virtues, you know, something absent from the suburbs. I had once joined a progressive lawyer’s guild.”

“Was it Nancy that turned you away?”

“For a bright T.V. anchorwoman to join that gnostic cult and believe she spoke to Enoch and aliens to give away half her fortune…”

Reid orders another beer. His face seemed so much thinner, no longer ruddy and full. He looked down with large gray eyes. He was wearing typical yuppie gear.

“It’s always money, isn’t it, Reid?”

“No, it was worse than that… Enoch told her in his church that she too was an alien… a descendant of a lost type of Amazon warrior who were the golden gladiator men of their time.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I’m serious. And she started to work out in the gym and developed her muscles, took steroids, to the point… now hold on… she tried to convince me she was a man in another life, before the Flood…”

“This is antediluvian, Reid.”

“And she is now wanting to go public as a drag king.”

“Not Nancy the Sunday School girl…” I said, banging the pub table.

“Her dad pays me a salary just to watch her… and she never sleeps… And she blames me for the marriage break-up because I’m not an esoteric, erotic gnostic like her. I’m just passé.”

“Isn’t she in therapy?”

“It won’t help her. Bipolar.”

I put down my beer.

“So it’s useless to talk to her? I know she liked me. She dated me before you.”

“Everything seems dated, even meeting you today. But all the hairy situations, right about now, at seven tonight, she is going to be interviewed on “Thirty-Six Hours” by Dr. Larry Flowers.”

“You’re kidding me… the mother of talk shows… interviewing Nancy…”

“She’s in New York now. Look up and live.”

I pick my head up, glance at channel four, and see Nancy in a space helmet telling Dr. Flowers of her landing in a space ship near the Yale campus. Reid puts his head down.

“You never know.”

He signals for me to leave the bar alone. I walk out in the rain; the heavens never seemed emptier. It’s even hard to concentrate driving home.

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