The second in this series, performed originally at Ray's Tap on Chicago's northwest side by five writers, Summers included. She is a frequent contributor to THE2NDHAND.

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People say that there wasn't really anybody who really knew Bob.

His father had hated his mother, and his mother had in turn hated him. As luck would have it, he'd married a woman much like his mother, and being himself a lot like his father, things progressed predictably. His friends were nothing to speak of, present company excluded, I'm sure. He had one brother, who he was fond of saying had the face of an ass and an ass to match.

I know all of this, because on a sweaty summer afternoon in 1987, I married Bob in the lower level of City Hall, exactly 30 minutes before our marriage certificate expired.

It was a few months after we got the LaSabre, but we took the Milwaukee bus all the way to the Loop anyway. Bob said he had never seen so many ugly people in one place at one time as there were that day on the Milwaukee Avenue bus. He said if it weren't for my redeeming the average, the entire lot of them would be arrested for mooning just looking out the windows. He was sweet like that. It was our third attempt. The first time, we were sent away when Bob told the clerk he hoped I'd talk less than his wife in Schaumburg. The second time, we were removed by security when Bob asked if it mattered that we had the same whore for a mother. People have told me I should have known then that things would never work out. The ceremony took about four minutes. I wore blue.

We didn't have rings. We didn't tell anyone we were going. Afterwards we went back to our apartment above the Pasieka Bakery and talked about what color hair our children might have, argued about whether we should get a dog or a cat, and drank three bottles of Blue Nun and a six pack of Old Style between us. When I woke up, he handed me a note that said,

"I have never wanted children, and pets die too soon. But I would like to be alone with you, for a very long time."

Bob was always writing notes: to me, to himself, to no one in particular, to everyone at once. They said things like: "drink more water" and "not so much salt all the time, you" and "just buy some new socks." They also said things like, "what if they had liked me" and "I will someday tell them I think so" and "You have completely misunderstood me. Again." Some were written neatly on lined tablet paper while others were scrawls on whatever was at hand, a bit of paper towel, the corner of a menu, a shred of butcher's wrapping. I found them on tables and countertops, in cabinets, under furniture, between the pages of books and the paper, and above all, in his pockets. I was surprised to hear they found him with a backpack. When I knew him, he would have fit that stuff, all of it, the chopsticks, the gum, the notebook and pens, the sharpie, the matches, the tea, the receipts, plus the bag of Cheetos and the Banzai Energy Drink they never found, in his front breast pocket and still found room for a handkerchief.

Bob's health started to go downhill soon after we married. He ground his teeth and spoke tomes in his sleep. He was listless, blank, and affected. The sleeping pills he started to take, combined with the alcohol and the chain-smoking, weakened him and he seemed to be urinating more and more, even after days without water. And then there was the depression, and the weight loss. His productivity declined, and his output was uneven. There were far fewer notes. He seemed to just waste away.

On the day he left me, he handed me a folded piece of notebook paper that said, "I can't do this. And trust me, you don't want me to try." I thought it was bullshit. I screamed at him that I was happy to know that "alone with me for a very long time" equaled roughly six weeks. I told him I was taking the LaSabre. But I couldn't find the keys in his fucking pockets. In the end he said he would drive me anywhere I wanted to go. I told him he could go fuck himself.

Even recently, Bob called me sometimes, when he was drunk, when he wouldn't remember the next day. Sometimes he had been here, and he complained about the new patronage, the too-loud college kids, some asshole with a laptop. But sometimes he just told me about his bus rides, down Milwaukee Avenue, all the way from Avondale down to the loop and back again.

PART 1
PART 3


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