The Intricate Art of Making Old Friends

By Neil Hetzner

The Intricate Art of Making Old Friends is a story of the possibility of redemption. It is structured into four parts: A Friend in Deed, A Friend in Need, A Friend Retrieved, and A Friend Perceived.
In Deed: After finishing a stint in detox and six-months in a half-way house, sixty-four-year-old Mark Gleasoin starts a new job sorting and shelving books donated to the free library at the town recycling center. The alcoholic’s shakes are gone, but his old familiar emotions—rage, shame, remorse and resentment—remain.
Gleasoin’s rage erupts when he discovers Hodge Johnson, the center’s bulldozer operator, taking books from the library and burying them in the garbage pit. In retaliation, Gleasoin vandalizes Johnson’s pride and joy—an ancient Caterpillar bulldozer. A war between book savior and book destroyer escalates until Johnson learns the librarian is a newly sober alcoholic. Johnson, who once had six years of sobriety before drinking again, decides he might be able to get himself sober again by helping Gleasoin. An unlikely friendship begins to develop. Hodge shares what he knows about how an angry, defiant drunk can stay sober and Gleasoin introduces Johnson to the joys of reading. Over time each cautiously reveals himself to the other. It is only when Johnson suddenly disappears that Gleasoin realizes how important their relationship had become for him.
In Deed: A mysterious donor seems to be leaving messages encrypted in the contents of the boxes of books he donates to the library. The librarian learns the donor is Phil Hohner, a retired literature professor, who is deaccessioning his library because he is going blind. Hohner is the opposite of Hodge Johnson. Where Hodge was outrageous, Hohner is diffident. Where Gleasoin and Hodge traded stories of drinking adventures and debacles, Hohner shares his deep knowledge and appreciation of literature. Gleasoin thinks he may have found a replacement for what he had with Hodge until Hohner invites him for dinner and leaves Gleasoin thinking the professor may be offering more than friendship. Gleasoin backs off, but later regrets what his fears may have caused him to miss.
Retrieved: Gleasoin is nearly two years sober when he discovers how tenuous his sobriety is after a woman confronts him with how, decades before, he had abused her during a drunken escapade of which he has no memory. His realization of the possibilities of what else he might have done during his frequent blackouts causes the librarian to look back at how his wife, Serafina, and his daughter, Zory, left with no warning. He concludes he must have sexually abused Zory while in a blackout. Devastated by that realization, Gleasoin wavers between getting drunk or ending his life until a third option appears—sharing what he had done. After opening himself up, Gleasoin’s sobriety moves to more solid ground until Zory suddenly appears to tell him that Serafina is dying from ALS.
When Gleasoin visits Serafina he finds her disease is less progressed than he assumed. After the visit, Gleasoin is confused by what transpired over the few hours he spent with his former love. Serafina had been not only kind, amusing, rueful, and tender, but also angry, accusatory, bitter, and sarcastic. He is even more confused after Serafina tells him Zory is her father’s daughter, a very lost soul with a serious alcohol problem.
Perceived: When he receives a letter from Serafina telling him Zory is in a detox Gleasoin decides to visit his daughter to make amends. However, before he has a chance to see Zory, he meets Myrna, the detox director, who cautions him against having any hopes for forgiveness or reconciliation. When he does meet Zory, she angrily dismisses him. When Gleasoin tells Myrna that she was right, the situation is hopeless, she suggests Gleasoin stay another night in a way that causes Gleasoin to hope that with Myrna he may have found the friend he needs, or more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil Hetzner
• Release date: Jun 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005176877

Neil Hetzner

Neil (aka C.N.) Hetzner is married, has two children, and lives a mile from the edge of the continent in Rhode Island. Since his inauspicious birth in Indiana in 1948 he has worked as a cook, millwright, newspaper columnist, business professor, vacuumist, printer's assistant, landscaper, railroader, caterer, factory worker, consulting editor, and, currently, real estate agent. In addition to working, which he likes a lot, and writing, which he likes even more, he enjoys reading, weaving, cooking, and intrepidly screwing up house repairs. His writing runs the gamut from young adult futurism to stories about the intricacies of families; however, if there is a theme that links his writing, it is the complicated and miraculous mathematics of mercy.

Book preview

The Intricate Art

of Making Old Friends

Neil Hetzner

©2022

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Book One—A Friend in Deed?

Book Two—A Friend in Need?

Book Three—A Friend Retrieved?

Book Four—A Friend Perceived?

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mike Monahan for his artwork and Jeni Martin and Martha Day for their comments, criticisms, and corrections.

Book One—

A Friend in Deed?

June 2014

A sound he had been anticipating for a week, the high-pitched grind of a bulldozer moving from background noise to foreground threat, caused Mark Gleasoin to rush to the door of the Free Library of the Kingslund Resource Recovery and Recycling Center.

Stepping out into bright sunlight the librarian squinted as he looked left toward the source of the noise and witnessed the center’s bulldozer churning down the gravel road pulling a whirlwind of dust and exhaust behind. Anticipating what was about to happen, he about-faced into the library and tossed the books he was holding onto the nearest shelf before rushing back outside.

The librarian had been anticipating some kind of drama from the man who drove the bulldozer, but now, seeing just how fast the dozer was moving down the road, he concluded this was not that time. He thought the dozer must be charging off to do some work near the entrance of the center; however, he quickly revised that decision when the noise of the bulldozer’s engine abruptly changed. The Cat made a near right angle turn, slewed off the road, shoved aside the rusted car axles that marked the edge of the library’s five parking places, and jolted across the weeds bordering the library’s crushed stone walkway. The Cat’s blade stopped less than a foot shy of the library’s entrance, a spot where a half-second before Gleasoin had been standing, arms crossed in Tiananmen Square defiance, until some wiser aspect of his autonomic system had jerked him backward through the doorway.

Above the metallic pulsing of the Cat idling, and through its diesel redolent panting, Gleasoin heard the dozer’s long-time operator, Hodge Johnson, yell, Bookboy, you still sure I don’t want to fuck with you?

Gleasoin could hear the raspy voice of his enemy, but he couldn’t see him. The height of the dozer’s blade and its proximity to the building prevented that. He considered stepping outside to confront Johnson, but he only took one step before thinking that if he couldn’t see Johnson, then Johnson probably couldn’t see him. If Johnson got the idea to move the dozer a little closer while he was trying to slip out, then he, Gleasoin, could end his life like a bug on a windshield.

Sheltering inside the shack, the librarian bellowed, Take your Tonka Toy somewhere else, you fucking asshole.

Tonka what, Bookboy?

Toy. Tonka Toy.

The bulldozer blade edged closer until it covered so much of the library entrance any illumination provided by the sun was eclipsed. The Cat’s hot stinking breath billowed into the library. A second later, as the blade made contact, the library’s bones screeched in pain. The noise of the building’s anguish was followed by a series of thuds and thumps as stacks of books came crashing down, like the pillars of the Tower of Siloam.

Seconds after the tremblor began, it ended. The building stopped moving. Sunlight was restored. The librarian began breathing again. Enough brain space became available for him to listen both to the whine of the dozer as its treads reversed and the gulping noises that were emanating from somewhere between his lips and lungs.

Gray-haired, scraggly-bearded, rail-thin, stoop-shouldered sixty-four-year-old Mark Gleasoin, the part-time attendant of the Free Library, went back to doing what he had been doing before the bulldozer attack--sorting through the contents of a box that once had held cans of tomato paste before being repurposed to hold a collection of paperback novels focusing on the long lives and shorter loves of zombies. To distract himself from the adrenaline still agitating his body, Gleasoin tried to amuse himself with the irony of the bloody teeth and bitten neck artwork dominating many of the books’ covers, arriving in a tomato paste box.

Kingslund, a small Rhode Island town, paid Gleasoin $8.35 an hour to work at the Free Library from ten until three Monday through Saturday. His job was to sort and shelve incoming donations, keep the collection off the floor, and cull the old to make room for the new. The culls were taken by wheelbarrow to a bin in the recycling area of the center, where they were transubstantiated from art, entertainment, or education to scrap paper. The librarian was paid for five hours, but during the three months he had held the job, he often stayed until just before the landfill gate was padlocked at four o’clock.

After adding the latest donations to the section of the shelf that held the library’s Science Fiction and Fantasy offerings, Gleasoin stepped outside to listen to the muted sound of the bulldozer as Hodge Johnson went about his work on the far side of the center.

Although there had been times in Mark Gleasoin’s life when he had come across someone more unrestrained than he was, there hadn’t been many. The value of going berserk first had become apparent when he was a sophomore in high school. Football season still had four weeks to run, and he already had been on the losing end of four locker-room fights. He was positive he was the smartest boy on the junior-varsity team. What got him into trouble was, that while he thought he was being smart, other boys, bigger boys, thought he was being cocky. And a small, cocky boy was asking for it. So, they gave it to him. The first three times his cocky intelligence got him into trouble he had ended up half-naked on the dressing room floor spitting blood. As he was getting beaten up, he had tried to use the same intelligence that got him into trouble to get him out of it. However, that strategy had not worked. It was not until midway through the fourth encounter, with Jim Antanopolis’s fist grinding Gleasoin’s bloodied lips against his teeth, that he thought to ignore his mind and follow his emotions. Instead of parsing through ploys and options to get the leverage necessary to push the junior center’s ham hock-sized fist away, he held it tight, opened his mouth, and began biting. By the time their teammates were able to end the fight, Jim Antanopolis had bleeding bite marks on three of his fingers, two on his forearm, and a deep bite on his chest that, if had been one inch lower, could have cost him a nipple. No one on the junior-varsity football team ever screwed with Gleasoin again, but, in part, that was because Gleasoin no longer was a part of that, or any other, team.

The lesson the teenager had taken away from his football experiences was that knowing when and how to go berserk, both mentally and physically, could be a useful tool in a complicated world. It was a tool he occasionally used in his marriage, and much more often in the decades since the civilizing force of his wife had gone. It had come in handy with fellow barstool savants, but less handy with bouncers and policemen intent upon restoring order to what Gleasoin considered to be an inherently unruly world.

Now, as his breathing slowly dropped down into a more normal range, the librarian wondered what the wiser choice might be—to act smarter than, or to go more berserk than Hodge Johnson. There was no doubt that he was smarter than Johnson. Just as there had been no doubt that he was smarter than Jim Antanopolis. However, after what had just happened, he wasn’t sure that he had the capability to go more berserk than Johnson. Or, if he could, just what the consequences might be. He wasn’t all that surprised at what just had happened. What did surprise him, however, was that a week had passed from the time he had slathered the dozer seat with glue and shrapnel until its driver came to seek his revenge.

Now, as more of the fear he had felt when the building’s bones’ were protesting faded, Gleasoin could feel his own berserk energy growing. He had a vision of stalking across the layer of garbage that covered The Pit’s floor, reaching up to grab Johnson by his ankle, yanking him off the bulldozer, throwing him into the garbage, and stomping on him while yelling, Now, who’s fucking with whom?

Gleasoin’s experience was that most people, certainly it had been true with Serafina, tended to run scared when he released his craziness upon them. But he had a feeling Hodge Johnson might relish that drama, might take it as a challenge, a goad, to go even crazier. Stomping Johnson into a mess of trash would be an exciting climax to a violent vision. Unfortunately, that climax might only be the end of Act II. If there were to be an Act III, the librarian could visualize how it might begin with Johnson using the bulldozer to push his own car down the hill that began its steep descent thirty feet behind the back of the library. And if that were to happen in Act III, and, if he were to retaliate, then what drama might occur in Acts IV and V?

After a minute’s consideration of what his response might be and how it could lead to the play being limited to two acts, not five, generated no answers, Gleasoin walked back into the library to begin to rebuild the towers of books that had been destroyed by Hodge Johnson. As he built back from the ruins, thoughts, thoughts that had niggled at him over decades, came back. He had been smarter than Antanopolis, but Antanopolis had played starting center his senior year. First, Serafina had run scared, but then, she had run off. Several times, going berserk had put him into jail cells. Going berserk could be an invigorating, but consequential business.

* * *

Hodge Johnson was nine-plus months into his thirty-second year of working at the Kingslund Resource Recovery and Recycling Center. Back when he started it was called the dump. When he looked back Hodge thought that name might have lasted for the first fifteen years of his tenure. Dump was supplanted by landfill, which lasted for about a decade before it was shunted aside for resource recovery and recycling center. Forrest and Handsome Jack, who had earned his nick name after picking long and hard at his teenage pustules, handled the recyclables. Joey Joint took care of operating the scale, selling waste bag tags, collecting money, and staying stoned. Jason Bley was the director. The center’s small staff was satisfied enough with their jobs that they didn’t need a lot of direction, which was good because Jason Bley was rarely in his office. Hodge took care of what couldn’t be recycled, mostly by driving his Cat back and forth in a sixty by one hundred twenty-foot pit contained on three sides by open concrete walls and covered overhead by a corrugated metal roof. The south side of the pit had no wall so trucks could back up and dump their loads. The west and north walls rose three feet above the grade of the road, high enough to contain the trash, but low enough to allow cars and pick-ups to unload.

A year after dropping out of high school, where his highest marks were achieved on the speedometer of a 1969 Plymouth Valiant, Johnson had set a new Kingslund record on a Breathalyzer operated by Sergeant Crisp Morton. The reward for that outstanding performance was one hundred twenty hours of community service sorting and stacking a small mountain of bald and punctured tires at the dump. At the end of his service, Johnson had managed to finagle his boss, Lester Miller, into giving him a full-time job.

Back in early days, when it was still a dump, it was a good place to work for someone who often needed to spend early to mid-morning working off one hangover and mid to late afternoon working his way toward another. Back in the dump days, managerial oversight was minimal. One-eyed Lester Miller, an ancient town employee lifer, spent almost all his time in a small plywood shack decorated with Goodyear Tire calendars and air fresheners shaped like pine trees, skunks, and buxom women. In winter, the heat from a kerosene stove and the moisture from Miller’s Pepsin chewing gum breath left the windows so befogged both employees and the occasional minion from town hall were left in the dark as to what the old man might be up to. In the summer, the door of the shack was propped open, but not as a gesture to open government. Instead, it was opened to provide an escape for the vortex a noisy pedestal fan with rusted metal blades, big enough to double as airplane propellers, generated. That tactic was an attempt, mostly useless, to keep the fetid smell of ripening garbage away from Lester Miller’s knobby, blue-veined nose; however, that engulfing smell was useful for keeping the town hall minions from snooping too closely on how Miller spent his days.

After Lester Miller died of pancreatic cancer a year before his intended retirement and Dickie Laughton came off the Cat to become boss, Laughton offered Hodge the keys to the dozer and told him that if he could keep his drinking to after-hours and was willing to suffer through his hangovers while inhaling diesel fumes and bouncing around on the well-worn seat of the dozer, the job was his.

When he wasn’t suffering through the end-stage of a hangover or craving a drink, a window most days of about three hours, Hodge Johnson thought he had just about the best job in the world. When the Cat was idling on solid ground it vibrated in a way that would make his dick stiffen and his balls tingle. When he was dropping his blade on a wooden bed frame to splinter it, shattering the panes in a discarded picture window, or crushing a cigarette-scarred recliner against The Pit’s back wall, Hodge’s soul would fill with a sublime joy that nothing other than destruction brought. During those peak moments, Hodge’s anger, resentment, or confusion either were energized or released as shards of glass detonated like terrorists’ bombs or clouds of powdery, yellowed recliner foam exploded, like spores bursting from a giant puffball mushroom. Those spiritual highs were complemented by frequent bouts of leaning over the edge of the Cat puking out the previous night’s poison. As he added his own ingredients to the noxious stew of garbage cooking under The Pit’s roof like a giant crockpot, Hodge would momentarily curse the job he loved.

There had come a time, around the two-thirds mark in Johnson’s thirty-two-year career, when the pain from being angry, resentful, and confused became so great, it robbed him of the courage necessary to endure a hangover. He adapted to that change by being half-drunk when he got to work and full-drunk by noon.

When he looked back after his accident, Hodge was never been sure of what his intentions might have been. He couldn’t say whether those intentions were conceived in a death-seeking black mood or just an ordinary black-out, but whatever the source, when he ran the dozer at full speed, blade raised high, at the eight-foot-high mogul he had built in the middle of The Pit, he managed to hit the mound off-center. The dozer’s left tread dug into the floor of The Pit as the right tread climbed the mound. The machine tilted. Hodge slid off the seat. The dozer climbed forward a few more feet before crashing over onto its side. The Cat missed Hodge, but the left tread continued to churn like a giant, frantic, June bug. The moiling tread hurled a storm of garbage back toward Hodge. Meat scraps, newspapers, asphalt shingles, soda and beer cans, broken boards, and corn cobs were propelled toward the dislodged driver. In what might have been nothing more than serendipitous irony, but what Hodge came to believe was divine intervention, a direct manifestation of God’s infinite grace, the snapped-off neck of a pint bottle of Jim Beam shot backward with such force that it severed the top third of Hodge Johnson’s right hand middle finger. In Hodge’s later retellings, some in front of a room of recovering alcoholics, losing such an important component of what he referred to as his Fuck You! finger had been intended by a benevolent God for Hodge to take as a cautionary tale. Although the finger was only reduced by a third, Hodge Johnson’s resentful, angry and fearful Fuck You! response to the world was, for a time, diminished by more than that.

Hodge Johnson did not take a drink for more than six years after his accident. He thought about drinking. He missed drinking. He planned drinking. There had been long, barely endurable hours when he craved drinking. But despite the myriad temptations, he had not found it necessary to drink. However, his record of abstinence from offering the world his deepest, mercurial sentiments with his reduced middle finger was not nearly so perfect as his record of abstaining from alcohol.

Back in the days when he was drinking and someone at a bar, racetrack, or strip joint had asked about his employment, Hodge had taken pride and pleasure in saying, I work at the dump. He had discovered that letting people know the kind of place where he worked did not lead to many follow-up questions, which for someone who disliked people, was a welcome benefit. Occasionally, however, a sentence or two were necessary to clarify that he worked at The Dump, not, as a newly met bar-mate might have indicated that he, too, worked at a dump. Hodge had been forced to change his response to questions about his employment when answering The dump began to lead to Do you mean the landfill? It was about the time that Hodge had been perplexed about how to answer employment questions that he had rolled the dozer. Once that spiritual event had occurred, Hodge wasn’t often asked where he worked because he stopped going to bars and discovered that losing money at the racetrack and being part of the audience at a strip bar was less engrossing when he was sober. In its last years as a landfill and for most of its latest iteration as a resource recovery and recycling center, Hodge answered the infrequent employment question by informing his interrogator that he operated a Cat.

Early in March of 2014 upon learning that the Kingslund Department of Public Works had allocated funds to hire someone to manage the Free Library, Hodge Johnson derived some amusement, but much more indignation, at the idea that it was necessary to pay someone to get rid of free books. As Hodge noted to Handsome Jack, you didn’t have to do that with bicycles. If someone left a bicycle in any shape near or close to the metal recycling bin, it was gone within the hour. A lawn mower, power washer, or snowblower, which had been cast off because its owner could not get it to run, would be gone within three days because Asa Lewiston, the Public Works mechanic who kept the department’s equipment running, swung by twice a week on his lunch break. Asa once had told Hodge he averaged more than $9,000 a year repairing discarded equipment and selling it by displaying it on the weedy yard fronting the seedy house Asa called home.

But books. As far as Hodge could tell, getting rid of free books was harder than getting rid of a three-legged cat at a pound or a teenage boy with bad teeth and a worse haircut at an orphanage.

Hodge Johnson had a thing about books, especially free books. Part of that thing had to do with the building where the books were housed. That building, closest to the center’s entrance, had been built a couple of years before Lester Miller died. It was meant to replace the old man’s shack. And then some. It was intended to be an office where Lester could do whatever it was he did for forty-five hours a week, which no one ever had been close to being able to figure out, as well as provide a break room for the workers. It was supposed to have electricity, running water, heat, and a bathroom. The three-person Public Works construction crew, which as far as Hodge could tell shared two hammers, one handsaw, one circular saw, a square, a one-bubble level several inches short of a foot, and three two-pocket canvas nail-bags, began the work. But after four months, when the construction had not gotten much beyond framing, sheathing, roofing, and hanging a door, the town council changed its mind. Kingslund was not to be left behind. Goodbye landfill. The wave of a municipality’s waste future was resource recovery and recycling. To achieve that transformation, a cyclone fence went up. The road back to The Pit got pinched down. A truck scale was bought and installed. A cinder-block building that featured not only heat, electricity, running water and finally, praise God, a bathroom, but also, and more importantly, a sliding window, microphone, speaker, cash register, and credit card machine was built. Unfortunately for the staff, due to budget constraints, no break room could be provided, and, within a year due to security concerns about money, only Joey Joint was allowed in the building. Hodge was left as he had been for decades—eating lunch in his pick-up, pissing while standing on the tread of the dozer, or sculking off into the scrub that grew on the east side of The Pit if he needed to do more than take a leak.

Back when he was a kid in elementary and middle school and a near-man in high school Hodge Johnson had viewed books as a nuisance. Things teachers pulled on his shirt to get him to attend to, but things in which he had no interest. After the unfinished building meant to house Lester Miller and his mysterious affairs as well as the landfill staff’s breaks and rest room was designated a free library, books became Hodge Johnson’s enemy. In those years when the building had no librarian and was not managed beyond a few upright citizen bibliophiles shoving aside teetering mounds of books and magazines to make their way deeper into its murk, Johnson had used a tattered khaki backpack to transport thousands of books from the building to The Pit where he crushed them with the Cat’s blade