The Minor Outsider by Ted McDermott

Author:Ted McDermott [Ted McDermott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780993506215
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2016-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

23

For his birthday, Taylor bought tickets to a John Prine concert being held in a university auditorium. Lots of lost-looking elderly people were there and Ed was nervous the entire time that he was falling for something, that John Prine was actually a hack, that to enjoy himself would be to be duped. He sat with Taylor in the balcony. In the row in front of them, a pretty college girl consoled the overweight woman who was probably her mother and who cried the entire time. He imagined that the mother’s husband had been a huge John Prine fan, that this was one of her husband’s defining enthusiasms, and that he, her husband, was dead. He wondered if Taylor would cry if he died and she heard a John Prine song.

He decided to take the woman’s grief as confirmation of the music’s authenticity. But why does sadness make something true? He tried to think of a counter example and thought of children. Children laughing and playing in the sun. A photo of his sister as a little girl, with a little girl’s bangs and holding a toy, ignoring the camera. Maybe that’s why she was so photogenic: she could ignore that a picture was being taken, that she would be seen in this moment forever, a fact that contorted most people. He loved his sister but she made him sad. This felt like a failing of his. He knew he shouldn’t pity her but how else could he place himself in relationship to her? Could he admire her? He couldn’t confide in her, for example. He knew the answer—that he should just love her—but that was too simple. Sentimental, almost. Anything true is complicated. Also, as with the crying John Prine fan, sad.

Taylor put her head on his shoulder in the dark theater and the song ended and everyone clapped and the pretty girl held her mother, who sobbed silently. After the inevitable encore, Ed wanted to stop thinking, so they rode their bikes downtown to the VFW.

When he’d first moved to Missoula, the VFW had been a dive bar. As more people like him had started coming in to take advantage of the cheap drinks and the authentically blue-collar atmosphere, however, they’d added taps of local microbrews and raised their prices and hired hip young people to bartend and started charging a cover on nights when bands were playing. On this night, though, they had karaoke.

He ordered a well whiskey and later, when he was sufficiently drunk, he signed up to sing “Margaritaville,” ironically, and when his friend Allison, the gutter punk who’d hosted the party where people shot air guns and who now taught at an alternative preschool, heard it was his birthday, she gave him a pin that had been affixed to her jean vest. The pin read, Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. The quote was attributed to Edward Abbey. He liked the quote but immediately, reflexively anticipated his father’s response, should he ever see the pin affixed to his son’s jacket or backpack.

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