Equilibrium

Brief Bio – Jim McGarrah’s poems, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary magazines including After Shocks: Poems of Recovery, American Journal of Poetry, Barcelona Review, Bayou Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Connecticut Review, December, Deep South, Elixir Magazine, and North American Review, among others. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of six books of poetry, including two award-winning books, Running the Voodoo Down and When the Stars Go Dark. McGarrah has also written a memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace that won the Legacy Nonfiction Award from the Eric Hoffer Foundation and three more books of nonfiction. His mystery novel, A Tattoo to Die For was released in the fall of 2022. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a finalist twice in the James Hearst Poetry Contest. McGarrah is also co-editor of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana. This personal essay “Equilibrium” first appeared in his memoir entitled The End of an Era released in 2010 by Ink Brush Press and is soon to be re-published in a new collection of essay and stories called Drinkin’ My Baby Goodbye due out in early 2024.

                                                   Equilibrium

In the dictionary, fate is defined simply as predetermined events. Nothing gets explained about who determines those events or if, when they happen, the predetermination of some entity is for positive or negative effect or has any other esoteric agenda. Consequently, that has never been a good enough explanation for me, as I’m sure it hasn’t for countless other people who consult palm readers, tea leaves, animal entrails, stars, or gods. It’s too broad, benign, and bourgeois for my taste. I believe nature has its own sense of balance, an equilibrium worked out in the way of some physical law, particularly the law of physics that universally commands each action to have an equal and opposite reaction until life finds its center like the bubble on a level. I came to this insight by reflecting on circumstances over a course of years based on how certain events in life hit me.

When my mother took me to Jimmy Coomer’s house for his fourth birthday party, I borrowed his tricycle and pulled a cork gun from his white-knuckled grip. Trying to pedal away from his screams and my mother’s quick temper, I went over the curb as the sidewalk ended and the street began. The cork gun rammed into my front tooth and snapped it off at the root. Fortunately, it was a baby tooth and another one grew in its place. Well, not exactly in its place, but rather slightly to the left, leaving me with a gap between my two front teeth. The gap generated many cruel remarks through adolescence but has since become useful. It’s a perfect width to spit through, and a woman’s nipple slides easily into it.

At nineteen, a spent bullet struck me directly over the heart. My squad patrolled the outside perimeter of a small village called Gia Le. The hamlet lay in Thua Thien Province, Republic of South Vietnam, nestled between Hue and a huge army base camp a few clicks from Phu Bai. We were in charge of the night sweep. A huge moon, like one of those dots that bounced over song lyrics during the Mitch Miller show on TV, hung above the rubber trees. I think it must have been the sparse clouds floating under it that gave me the sense of it bouncing and fascinated me so much that I stood on the trail staring upward when the firefight erupted at the army camp in the distance. Everyone else took cover. Lead fell like raindrops through the leaves, and something stung my chest. When we got back to the compound, I held a lantern close to my chest and ran my fingers over the red welt, bitching to the sergeant about how bad the hit stung without fully appreciating what kind of hit it could have been and I had avoided.

I could go on for hours discussing the hits I’ve taken at one point or another over the last few years, but a short listing will give you the idea and save a lot of time. I took a tax hit from the IRS once for unreported income. They refused to believe anyone could live on the small amount of money I claimed to have made. After my first divorce, the ex-wife’s lawyer smacked me with his legal fees. Once, a bartender broke a beer bottle over my head because I thought he was gay and said so. It isn’t a crime to be gay, but evidently, he felt otherwise. I’ve been hit by a car while in a crosswalk, butted by a Nubian goat, pecked by a parrot, finned by a catfish, punched in the face by a huge woman, and struck by a tree limb that was struck by lightning.

Maybe I’ve just been a person who is genetically predisposed to get in the way of the motion of life. Consider my most ambivalent hit, though. I use that term ambivalent because, while all of these hits had a negative impact on various parts of my body or psyche at the time, they were minor and taught me very little about equilibrium. However, I have always been of two minds regarding the results of this following hit. On the one side, I remember the pain vividly. On the opposite side, I remember the exquisite pleasure that accompanied the pain. Neither was possible without the other, and without their symbiotic interaction, I could never have learned two important lessons in successful living. Being a bit of a pessimist, I already assumed that if something wonderful happens, duck. On this day I learned that the reverse is true as well.  If something horrible happens, keep your head high because something good will be along shortly to balance the scales.  

In 1969, the first few weeks after I had returned to the college life interrupted by war in 1967 and before giving my body and mind over to drugs at said college, I tried, really tried to behave in what I believed might be a normal fashion, even though I no longer had any concept of normalcy. I got up at sunrise and took my morning run in a concrete drainage ditch that paralleled the highway in front of the frat house and eventually led out through the cornfields into the vast nothingness of the Midwest. This was the only habit that the Marine Corps had disciplined me to regard as necessary for my sanity. If I ran to exhaustion all my urges to kill something every morning, then I could be relatively sure that the professors, dogs, cats, pigeons, children, and retail salesclerks who came into my personal space would live through the day.

The daily run being an innocuous activity along a smooth and empty concrete path, I never really considered taking a hit from anywhere. In my mind there were no hits available anywhere in the vicinity, and believe me, with my history of taking hits, you can rest assured I thought long and hard about possibilities.

On this morning, an occasional car rolled along over county Highway 664 carrying children to school and parents to work. Grain trucks hauled winter wheat to the local mill, and coal trucks chugged by toward the power plant. Sparrows and crows watched me from telephone lines. One hawk hung in the blue sky. The air smelled of timothy and clover and tasted like sunlight. All was right in my world.

 About two miles into the run, right at that point where the body says stop you’re killing me and the mind says don’t be a wussy, a rumble grew behind me. It began as a tentative request for my attention, an unsure whisper in the movie theater of my mind. The further I ran, the louder the whisper became. First, it evolved into a steady drone, and finally when it was too late, a hysterical scream. Turning my head over my shoulder and looking toward the sound, I wiped the stinging sweat from my eyes and thought of Satchel Paige’s famous words, “Never look back; something might be gaining on you.” The ditch appeared empty except for a black spec, which seemed to be nothing more than a sliver of dirt in the corner of my eye. I gave it no further thought and pushed my body on through the wall of discomfort familiar to all experienced runners and into the peace called the second wind. 

 Had I been more alert to my outside world, rather than the inner one, I would have noticed that the black spec was fast becoming a dot, then a ball, in harmony with the elevating sound level. Instead, I felt like one of those new military hovercrafts, the kind that floated just above the surface buoyed by jet streams of air, moving across the earth without ever touching it. My body surged with so much electricity and power when I caught my second wind, the whine seemed like it came from somewhere deep inside me, a caged primal scream of joy trying to get out. Then, I went airborne. Something lifted my entire body and drove it forward horizontally like an arrow whirring along parallel to the ground. The back of my bare legs began to burn. An unnatural weight rolled up my spinal cord and across the back of my head. When the fiend that smelled like smoldering rubber and diesel fuel left me, the force of its leaving pushed my head downward into the culvert and I skidded, depositing a layer of skin along the concrete in my wake. My forearms felt wet, and they were. So were my legs and part of my arms.

Bleeding and burned, I raised my head enough to see a giant tire wobble down the culvert in front of me. It staggered like a drunken sailor and finally toppled over, trembling and singing its way to a halt. A runaway rubber circle had hit me. Unattached, unencumbered by the weight of truck or tractor, it had sought me out like a missile as if I were an enemy of the state.

 Stunned, I sat up and surveyed the damage. Red streaked along the front of my shins, blood oozing from the singed capillaries like condensation from frigid pipes. My elbows and forearms were peeled as well. An impression of a tire tread skirted along the back of my left calf and up my thigh disappearing above the waist.

            “Oh my, I am so sorry,” said a sweet voice.

A young woman stood above me on the shoulder of the road. Shocked, I’d never noticed her arrival. Her back was to the sun and all I could see was the dark outline of a body silhouetted in the white light.

            “Help me up,” I said.

            “Oh, of course. I think I should take you to the hospital, but I’m not sure I can.”

She jumped into the ditch and, from behind me, reached under my arms lifting me straight upward with surprising strength. Pushing me gently up the concrete wall, she stopped on the gravel shoulder of the highway and pointed down the road to a wounded grain truck, a six-by we called them in ‘Nam because the rear axle had dual wheels. One of the wheels on the right rear was missing.

“I’m afraid to drive it like that,” she said, her emerald eyes moist with both concern and humor, “even though there’s hardly any traffic out here this time of the morning. That’s why I came this way. My uncle makes me drive that old thing to the grain co-op every week and it’s just too hard for me to handle.”

Remembering the strength with which she had raised me off the ground, the idea that the truck was too much for her seemed hard to believe. When somebody tells me early in a conversation something that seems unlikely, I regard him or her with suspicion for the duration. To say you can’t do something you’re obviously doing makes you either a liar, or incredibly unaware of reality.  So I waited to see what else my would-be assassin might confess. Nothing was forthcoming. She seemed genuinely distressed at my obvious discomfort.

Once she stepped away from the radiance of the sun, I got a better look at her face and, in all honesty, wondered how the sun outshone her. She had that freshly scrubbed glow on her cheeks so prevalent in Midwestern young women and freckles strategically placed across her nose, barely visible because of the light brown tan. Her lips were full and her long red hair braided into pigtails, as if she’d just stepped out of an old did you hear the one about the farmer’s daughter joke. Her nose crooked slightly at the bridge, but it was that slight imperfection that gave her great beauty, a beauty unlike a work of art, a real beauty, flawed and full of humanity. She breathed heavily, and her braless breasts rose and fell in firm cadence with her lungs. Standing with her long legs slightly apart and pouring out of cut off Levis, she maintained an animal balance like an athlete, and I was so stunned by the grace with which she pushed a strand of hair off her forehead that I forgot my pain for a couple of minutes.

            “You can drive it okay,” I said.

            “Are you sure?”

            “Yeah. The one good wheel on the right side will get us back into town.”

After she backed the truck down the shoulder of the road to the point of impact, I limped onto the running board and slid gingerly onto the vinyl seat. We drove to the university medical center in silence. She seemed afraid to say anything, as if any excuses made for the accident would salt my wounds. I said nothing either. Maybe I was afraid my voice would squeak in pain above the thumping and grinding of the broken truck, or that I had entered into some dream state and this wasn’t really happening, that it was merely a movie in my mind brought on by runner’s exhaustion.

Our arrival at the med center eliminated any doubt about the concreteness of my experience. It was full of snotty, wheezing, coughing, sneezing adults, crying children, white-coated lab techs, sterile receptionists, and the cloying odor of isopropyl alcohol. No dream could reproduce this infectious environment. While the girl waited in the reception area and glanced over the latest issue of Redbook magazine, the nurse, who might have been the love child of Eva and Adolph, washed my exposed flesh with warm water and antiseptic soap. She patted the raw areas dry, covering them with antibiotic ointment and gauze, although scraping the raw areas dry and burning them with acid describe my perception of her attentions much better.

“Does that hurt?”

“A lot.”

“Then maybe you should stay out of the way of tires.” She chuckled, as if the pain were a just reward for me getting in the way of life once again. Did she know about my history of taking hits, or did she just assume that, as a man, I deserved whatever I got?

When I came out of the treatment room looking worse than I felt, my rescuer and I walked slowly back to the truck. My flesh was on fire, and I wanted to get into my room where I kept a bottle of Jameson’s.

            “I guess I should tell you my name since I almost killed you.”

            “That would be nice.”

            “Jill. My name’s Jill, but my stage name’s Bunny.”

            “Stage name?” I said. She giggled. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

            “You seem surprised that farm girls might have stage names.”

I thought about farm girls having stage names and realized it did kind of surprise me. I didn’t know anyone with a stage name. Oh sure, I knew guys who changed their names on the spur of the moment in bars when they were trying to pick up women. My buddy Cornelius often became Lance Thruster, and once this Chinese fellow named Charlie Long introduced himself to the coed I was with as Hung Long. But usually, the idea of changing a name went along with having something to hide or being unhappy with who you were. I wondered if either of these reasons spurred her action because Jill was a nice name, and it seemed to suit her personality very well. I wanted to ask, but didn’t, while she helped me up the stairs and into my less than sanitary room at the less than sanitary frat house that had been my home pre-Vietnam and had become so again.

The room was mine alone because I had convinced the director of housing for my Sigma Phi Epsilon chapter that an unstable veteran of a bad war should not have to sleep anywhere near others. This arrangement also made the room barren. Other than a cheap reading lamp on a scarred table by the unmade bed, several dozen books compressed between two bricks on a low shelf that doubled for a writing surface, a wrinkled poster of Janis Joplin, a record player with a short stack of albums beside it, and a box of sandalwood incense, there was nothing in the room to make it seem more than a holding cell. The smell of dirty socks added to this perception, but I couldn’t spend too much time regretting my lack of hygiene or interior decorating skills. I had a beautiful, friendly young woman with two names in my room. Pouring her a shot of whiskey in a fairly clean Mason jar, I handed it to her and took a swig directly from the bottle. We sat on the edge of my unmade bed.

            “Well, to be honest,” I said, the lie rolling off my tongue like maple syrup, “I know a lot of farm girls and I never met one with a stage name. Are you an actress also?”

            “Not exactly. I’m an exotic dancer at a club on Frederica Street. I just help my uncle sometimes on the farm. It’s a poor farm, and he can’t afford hired help. The work keeps me in good shape for the dancing, and being in good shape for the dancing earns me more money.” She swayed slightly as she spoke, like a willow in a spring breeze, and I believed that if what she said were true, she should be a millionaire.

There was a gleam of promise in her green eyes that caused me to take another long drink from the bottle of whiskey. It was one of those drinks taken to combat shock and lower expectations. My expectations always tended to exceed my reality.

            “Is that like a dancer with pasties and tassels and g-strings and not much else?”

            “I think you’re catching on.”

            “Are you any good?”

She stood and walked over to my battered stereo. Sorting through the stack of albums on the shelf, this beautiful woman who had run over me with a tire settled on Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones. She flipped the switch and lifted the arm, setting the needle down on the whirring vinyl. I heard the opening chords of “You Gotta Move” scratching through the heavy air toward me. Her voice ran through me like I had just grabbed a bare electrical wire.

            “You be the judge.”

Her body became a feral river flooding the banks of my imagination, pouring over the room without restraint. She twisted, stretched, stooped, bounced, flowed, spun, and rattled toward the door. I reached for her.

            “No touching the dancer,” she said. “I’m just trying to take your mind off the pain.”

            “It’s working,” I panted.

            “Good,” said the red-haired exotic dancing farm-girl. “Thanks for the drink and thanks for not suing me. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

She opened the door and slid into the hallway. I struggled to my feet, forcing my body against its will to the doorway. By the time I got there, all that was left of my private dancer was the swinging door at the bottom of the stairwell.

After my body healed sufficiently, I spent many nights visiting every strip club, topless bar, and cheesy tavern in town, all to no avail. She danced in none of those places, and no one seemed to recognize the name Bunny, or her red pigtails. By the time it finally occurred to me that what may have been a thing psychologists call a waking dream, I had been through my G.I. bill check that covered my monthly tuition payment and several bottles of cheap bar bourbon, my body had healed and my mind has found that tenuous condition called equilibrium again.

I spent every morning for the next six weeks, regardless of the weather, running along the culvert on county road 664. No tires ran over me, although I kept looking over my shoulder hoping one might. I have accepted the fact that the chances of ever seeing Bunny, or Jill, again are almost non-existent. But if I do, I plan to thank her for the lesson she taught me about myself and fate. It’s the hope of taking a hit that keeps things interesting. It’s the possibility that keeps me getting up every morning and moving through life with a sense of curiosity and wonder, with expectation and just enough fear to feel electric on most days. Hope is the perfect balance for banality, the way to maintain equilibrium in times of great stress and pain. It’s the knowledge, to quote my old man, that “no matter how thin you slice bread there’s always two sides,” That’s something a lot of people never realize unless they’re fortunate enough to get hit by a runaway tire from a grain truck driven an exotic dancer.