Breakfast a la Mayberry

[Arroyos]

Breakfast a la Mayberry


“It was just a dream,” Slummings was explaining to Mayberry over breakfast. The hospital served a mean bowl of oatmeal, he discovered, along with some stiff pancakes, frozen waffles, tired-looking scrambled eggs, and sweet rolls dripping with some sort of white goop. Slummings had been afraid to ask, but all around him patients scarfed them down. Mayberry, Slummings noticed, had one on his plate, along with a bowl of mixed cereals.

He was about to ask why and how Mayberry mixed his dry cereals, when the Yuma GM said, “Just don’t tell them about it.”

“Tell them what?” Slummings asked, having lost the thread of the conversation. “And them who?”

“About your nightmare. They take great stock in nightmares.”

“What, they’ll interpret it all Freudian-like?” Slummings chuckled.

Mayberry shook his head while swallowing a spoonful of what looked to Slummings like Wheat Chex and raw oats. “Unh uh, they’ll send you to Therapy.”

“Okay,” Slummings said, putting down his spoon and wiping a bit of oatmeal out of his beard, “what’s this therapy thing you keep mentioning? And how’d you get three or four kinds of cereal into one bowl?”

Mayberry looked up, milk leaking from his smiling lips.”

“And why?” Slummings added. “Isn’t one cereal good enough for you?”

Mayberry tried to cover his mouth, but he was laughing, and bits of cereal sputtered out. More milk leaked into his beard. He chortled aloud. The orderly stationed at the cafeteria door looked their way to see what was so funny. What he saw was two old men with cereal and milk in their beards, a common sight at breakfast in the Camarillo State Hospital. The orderly turned away.

Mayberry held up a finger until he finished laughing, swallowed, and said, “Cereal first, therapy … well, later, much much later.” He wiped his milky beard with a paper napkin. “You made a good choice with the oatmeal,” he pointed at Slummings’ bowl. “They fuck up everything else. The eggs are overcooked, the pancakes baked into bricks, the waffles … well, what can you say? They’re frozen. But they don’t do anything to the cold cereal, which makes it—along with the oatmeal—the most reliable food on the menu. But dry cereal gets boring. If I had to face a bowl of corn flakes every day, I wouldn’t get out of bed. So I mix ‘em. Wheat Chex, corn flakes, bran flakes, raw oatmeal, maybe some Cheerios. Add sugar, raisins and milk, and it’s just interesting enough to get me to drag my ancient ass down here in the morning. Oh,” he said, picking up the dripping sweet roll, “and this.” He took a bite. The white sauce spilled onto his beard. “This,” he said with his mouth full, “may be the sorriest excuse for a sweet roll you’ll ever see, but the sugar frosting will get your heart going!” He took another bite and more frosting dripped into the white hairs of his beard.

“And therapy?” Slummings asked, watching the frosting dry on his breakfast companion’s beard. White on white.

Mayberry swallowed, then used two fingers to wipe some of the frosting off his beard and stuck it in his mouth. He smacked his lips and smiled. “Usually I leave it there for a mid-morning snack.”

“Therapy?”

“Yes, well, just like ‘scrambled eggs’ is a euphemism for whatever rubber product they serve for breakfast, ‘therapy’ is a euphemism too.”

Slummings waited.

“For electro-shock therapy,” Mayberry finally whispered.

Slummings’ eyes opened wide. He started to say something, but Mayberry shushed him.

“Why are we whispering?”

“You never know who’s listening.”

“What do they care if we discuss—”

Mayberry’s finger came up as a warning.

“— the you know what. What’s it matter to them?” Slummings nodded toward the orderly at the door.

“To the staff? Not at all.” Mayberry leaned over the table to get closer. “It’s the patients.”

Slummings didn’t get it and it showed on his face.

“Some of them get a little, uh, crazy if they hear the word.”

Slummings started to laugh, repressed it. “Patients in a mental hospital get a little crazy, you say?” He covered his giggle with his napkin.

“Crazy, yeah, but like mad, like out of control, like …” Mayberry looked around. “Like violent.”

Slummings’ eyes got big and he sat back in his chair and looked around the cafeteria. What he saw were old people in the middle of the room, mostly women, talking and chewing the morning sweet rolls, frosting dripping down their chins. Old men seemed to sit alone along the walls, staring into their coffee or chewing strips of tough bacon. In the alcoves along one wall sat a few young people in some sort of uniform, gray with name tags sewn above the front pocket. Custodial staff, he wondered?

No one looked violent, so he asked. “Who?”

Without looking up from his cereal bowl, Mayberry whispered, “Behind you. Don’t turn around.”

But Slummings did, and he met the stare of a man with a full head of hair, a clean shaven face, and a scowl that would silence a barking dog. Slummings spun back to face Mayberry and said, “Him?”

Mayberry’s eyebrows rose and he gave the slightest nod.

“What’s he doing here?”

“He lives here.”

“But,” Slummings nodded toward the rest of the room, “everyone else …” he said, expecting Mayberry to fill in his sentence.

“Old.”

“Yeah.”

“Like you and me,” Mayberry grinned.

“Except …” Slummings did the slightest nod toward the man behind him. “Is he still staring at me?”

Mayberry looked over Slummings’ shoulder. “Yup.”

Slummings gulped. “Can we just go?”

Mayberry smiled, “Nope.” He pulled several papers from his pocket and spread them on the table in front of Slummings. “What’re you angry about?”

Slummings didn’t recognize the papers or the question. “I’m not the one who’s angry,” he said, doing a head nod toward the man behind him again.

“He’s always angry.” Mayberry tilted his head to get a different look at Slummings. “Are you always angry?”

“What? No. Why? What are these?” Slummings said, pointing at the papers.

“Your email.”

“My what?” Slummings looked at the papers. They appeared to be printouts of email, but his name didn’t appear on any of them. On the very top of each page, he could make out a name. “They’re your email, apparently,” he pointed to the name.

“To me, from you.”

“No, I never sent these.”

Mayberry pointed to a line appearing in all the email and read it aloud. “‘Your owner is angry at the moment.’ I get one of these every couple days. So, what’re you angry about?”

Slummings took a closer look at the email. “I didn’t send these. I’ve never sent you an email in my life.”

“Really? It says from the Yuma Arroyos. From the Arroyo’s owner. That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but …” Slummings was at a loss. “Honest,” he said, “I never emailed you. I don’t email anyone. Phone or text, maybe, but not email. This is from someone else.”

“Someone in the front office?”

“Must be.”

“Roberta emails me regularly,” Mayberry said. “These aren’t from her. Anyone else there with access to the club email account?”

“I don’t know,” Slummings said. “I’ll find out.”

“So, you’re not angry at me?”

Slummings looked up at Mayberry. He smiled and said, “No, man, no way.”

“You didn’t want to fire me?”

“Oh, yeah, I wanted to do that, but it wasn’t personal.”

“Firing me isn’t personal?”

Slummings shrugged. “You weren’t there. I needed—I need—a GM who is. I was trying to fire someone I didn’t know, someone I’d never met, someone I thought …” Slummings let his sentence taper into silence.

“Was crazy,” Mayberry finished the thought. Slummings nodded, chagrined. “You still think I’m crazy?”

Slummings shook his head. “Not at all.”

“So what am I doing here?” Mayberry asked, grinning. “That’s the $64,000 question, right?”

Slummings nodded. Then he leaned forward, conspiratorially. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m not sure I want to leave.”

“What? Now you do sound crazy.”

“It’s peaceful here.”

“Except for the guy behind me,” Slummings said, then turned and discovered, yes, that guy was still there and he was still staring at Slummings. He turned back to Mayberry. “He’s still staring.”

“He always stares. It’s nothing personal, Slummings. Like being fired.” Mayberry winked.

“Touché. Still, he’s creepy.”

“He’s practically comatose. He’ll sit there like that, staring straight ahead, until a loud noise or something startles him. He doesn’t know where he is. Hell, I’m not sure he knows who he is.”

“And you like living with people like that?”

Mayberry took a deep breath. “In here, he gets taken care of. His … eccentricity, if that’s what it is, is tolerated. He eats, he sleeps, I’ve even heard him laugh. What do you think it’d be like for him out there?”

Slummings had no idea. But he knew the world would not be kind to man who stared, unblinking, at everyone. Slummings knew the world out there wasn’t kind to anyone. Except maybe the very rich, he thought, and he realized that that was a brand new thought, one he could only have thought since he himself became very rich. “Okay,” he said, “I get it. This place is kind to people like him. But you could manage just fine in the real world.”

“The real world?” Mayberry guffawed. “What makes the outside world realer than this world, huh?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, you mean I could survive in the cruel world outside. But I don’t want to just survive. I like living in a kinder, gentler world. Look, Slummings, you may not understand this, but this hospital, for all its faults, makes it possible for guys like him and guys like me to live in whatever world we imagine. See?”

Slummings thumbed in the direction of the man behind him. “You think he’s imagining a better world?”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I do when I’m not eating breakfast with all the many guests who visit me.”

Slummings couldn’t tell if Mayberry was being sarcastic or not.

Mayberry grabbed the edges of the table and leaned very close to Slummings, who leaned back in his chair as far as he could go without bumping the table of the man staring at him. “You are the only visitor I’ve had breakfast with in all the years I’ve been here.” He slumped back down in his chair. “You’re only the second visitor period.”

“Really?”

Mayberry nodded. “I spend the greater part of each day in my room, reading, managing your club, and imagining.”

“Imagining what?”

“Other worlds, other lives, other baseball teams I wish I’d managed. If I were a writer, I’d write stories. If I were a potter, I’d walk across the quad to the pottery shed and throw pots. If I were a bowler, I’d spend my days bowling—”

“There’s a bowling alley?”

“—or if I could stand television, I’d watch tv. But those things don’t hold my interest for long. The occasional movie, sure. An afternoon bowling when one of the guys needs a partner, okay. But—” Mayberry’s tone shifted. “Heh, you saw me umpiring a softball game, right? But what I want to do, what I dream of doing, of course, is playing baseball. Pitching, catching, chasing flies down in the outfield … But I can’t—too old, too slow, my back aches if I throw the ball more than a dozen tosses. No, what I can do, what I enjoy doing and what I’ve gotten really good at, is imagining baseball.”

“Imagining baseball?”

“Those charts on the wall in my room? They help me imagine the Yuma team. I read the summaries, study the box scores, keep the stats, and imagine myself in John Deere Stadium, seated in the dugout—”

“It’s Salt Lick now.”

Mayberry gave Slummings a bug-eye look. “Say what?”

“Salt Lick Stadium, that’s the new name.”

Mayberry slapped his thigh and cried out, “Say it ain’t so, Joe! Say it ain’t so!” Everyone in the cafeteria turned to look at him. Except the guy seated directly behind Slummings. He just stared through Slummings’ back, like a man with a vision.

When Mayberry stopped laughing, he looked at Slummings. “Really? The Yuma Arroyos play in Salt Lick Stadium? Whatta the vendors sell, salted peanuts and and ice cold salt water?”

Slummings waited for his breakfast companion to settle down, then tried to explain, but Mayberry was having too much fun. In his best circus barker voices, he called out, “Git your bone dry arroyos right here! Salt on a stick for a nickel!”

The orderly who’d been standing near the door began to walk slowly towards Mayberry and Slummings, but Mayberry waved him off with gestures promising no more outbursts.

Eventually Slummings could get a word in. “People like it. We had a contest to pick a new name—”

“Which you rigged.”

Slummings flushed. “I never— Okay, maybe, but … how’d you know?”

And even as he asked he knew the answer. Both he and Mayberry simultaneously said, “Roberta.”

They smiled.

“Smart woman,” Mayberry said.

“Sly like a fox,” Slummings said.

They sat in silence, Mayberry sipping his luke warm tea and Slummings considering going back for one of the frosting-slathered sweet rolls. He was about to get up and make the trek through the cafeteria line when Mayberry spoke.

“The hospital makes it possible for each of us to live in whatever world we imagine. Can you appreciate how … how soothing that is?”

“I thought you were gonna say ‘empowering.’”

“It is empowering.”

“I hate that word. It just means people with no power feel okay with being powerless.”

“Look around you, Slummings. We are powerless. We can’t leave, we can’t choose what drugs to take, we don’t even choose when we eat, or what, except to choose between dry cereal or oatmeal. We don’t even get to choose who our roommates are.”

“Sounds like prison, not paradise.”

“A bit of both,” Mayberry admitted.

“You just said no one visits you, and you’re all deathly afraid of this therapy thing, so why? Why live here, if you have a life and a job waiting for you outside.”

Mayberry smiled. “You offering me my old job?”

“Apparently you never left it.”

“You came here to fire me, didn’t you?”

Slummings started to deny it, then shrugged. “I thought about it, yeah.”

“Yeah,” Mayberry said. “So what changed your mind?”

Slummings shrugged. “Don’t know. The charts on your wall, maybe. Or realizing how much Roberta has kept you in the loop. Look, I had no idea how involved you still were. Roberta kept your secret, if that’s what it was. I thought you were GM in name only. I was wrong.”

“Okay. Thanks for that.”

“So will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Take the job.”

“I already have the job, Slummings. Why can’t we just continue like we’ve been doing for years now? Only you and I can, you know, communicate.” Slummings was shaking his head. “Occasionally. Only as needed.”

“No, that’s … Fuck, I don’t what it is but it ain’t the way a ball club should be run.”

“Who says?”

“I say. And it’s my ball club.”

The two old men looked into each other’s eyes. The guy at the table behind Slummings, the one who’d been staring a hole through Slummings’ back, suddenly rose and very noisily pushed his chair back under the table. Then he put his plate and silverware on his tray and picked it up to carry across the cafeteria to the conveyer belt that automatically delivered dirty dishes to the dishwasher. But he stopped on his way, at the table where Slummings and Mayberry sat in silence, and, leaning over Slummings, said, “He ain’t gettin’ outa here, pal. And neither are you.”

“What?!” Slummings snapped around to look at the guy, but he had turned away and headed across the cafeteria. Slummings shouted after him, “Whatta you mean?”

The guy stopped and turned to look at Slummings. “You don’t get it, do you?” Then he laughed and resumed his stroll to the conveyer belt, humming a tune as he went. Each table he passed, nodded or hummed along. Eventually, he began to sing lyrics:

I was thinking to myself
This could be heaven
This could be hell

Another patient seated near Slummings and Mayberry picked up the tune, then another, and all across the cafeteria patients began to sing or whistle or tap out the rhythm.

Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place, such a lovely place
Such a lovely face

One of the women serving food in the cafeteria line stepped into the eating area and began to sing in a lovely voice that surprised Slummings and made Mayberry hum along with the song.

Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave …”

[Borealis]

I dong know why I was so slow to read this - but so fabulously crafted, with undertones that makes one knowingly smile! As always, BRAVO!!

[Arroyos]

I dong know why I was so slow to read this - but so fabulously crafted, with undertones that makes one knowingly smile! As always, BRAVO!!

Merci. You and the other PEBA readers keep me going.

[Sandgnats]

Bravo Bob! Slummings is epic.