Homeostasis
Harold McManus set the book, The Stranger, a paperback edition of the Nobel laureate’s masterpiece, onto the table beside the plaid sofa, his comfort zone, his favorite spot where he often dozed on his days off—more often than not while he pretended to watch the Dallas Cowboys lose yet another game. Jesus Christ, thought Harold, that Albert Camus sure wrote some goddamned heavy shit.
Today, the high school principal couldn’t force himself to read. His heart just wasn’t in it. His mind, frazzled, rattled, couldn’t string together words, let alone sentences and paragraphs. From the stereo on the bookcase across the claustrophobic den of the house where he and Margo had successfully raised two daughters the syncopated rhythms of the Grateful Dead rampaged as freely as the hoard of villainous immigrants the president-elect railed about, the supposedly ravaging masses who dashed across the border sixty miles south of Dos Pesos, Texas. The chords and lyrics of the old hippies’ songs jitterbugged playfully off the oak-paneled walls then into Harold’s befuddled mind. “I will get by. I will survive.” Jerry Garcia’s plaintive voice, now silent in a grave somewhere, was almost—though not quite—reassuring. And, indeed, today, the sixty-four-year-old was in desperate need of reassurance.
Harold had a hankering to turn out all of the lights, light up a joint and let the world float right on by, like Jerry and the Dead would do under the circumstance—hell, under any circumstance—but it had been more than forty years since he’d smoked pot. Or was it now called weed? Harold hadn’t kept up with whatever was hip, what word his students at Travis High School used to refer to what Harold’s own parents, stodgy old ranch folks, had disgustedly called reefer. Reefer madness, he thought. Oh, my god. They didn’t have a clue what real madness is.
Harold couldn’t bring himself to turn on the TV in the corner of the room. He couldn’t take the decent enough, through dreadfully wrong, hand-wringing pundits on CNN and MSNBC puzzling over and regurgitating the numbers from the night before, psychically scratching their heads over how this could’ve happened. In all sincerity, the talking heads did their best to make sense out of what was nothing more than a pile of horse manure, certainly to no comfort for the likes of Harold. Today, he was in no mood for any of it.
But, sure enough, it had happened—the goddamned election. Like it or not, it really had happened, and the enormity of the cataclysmic event was only now sinking in. Last night, while Harold watched Rachel Maddow roll her eyes and attempt to explain just what the hell was going on, everything seemed surreal, a blur, as if he was watching a Fellini film, slightly stoned, like decades ago when he was an enlightened student at Texas Tech, hardly the hotbed of nonconformity in the 1980s—or now, for that matter—where nineteen-year-old Harold half-heartedly attempted to be a bit of a committed radical, both politically and socially. Yet, an overly cautious education major, hardly the stuff of a West Texas version of Che Guevara, Harold never quite made it.
“Camus again?” said Margo. “And the Grateful Dead? Boy, you really are in a funk. You haven’t read Camus since the last time that man won.” She chuckled. “I’m surprised that you’re not listening to Leonard Cohen or Jacques Brel. You should’ve gone to work instead of moping around here all day.”
He must’ve nodded off, or was he losing it? He hadn’t heard his wife come into the room.
That’s what wives are for, thought Harold. To needle you, to rub it in when you’ve been knocked to the canvas. To pour a little salt on your wounds. She voted the same way I did. How can she be so blasé as the country is being ripped apart, shred by shred? “It’s a novel about how meaningless human existence is,” said Harold. “About how absurd life is. Camus was in the French resistance. I’m thinking that I should do the same.”
“You’d look silly in a beret.” Margo smiled. “And, so what? Life is absurd. What else is new?”
Harold glanced at his smug, though comely, wife, the pretty redhead he’d met in a curriculum class his senior year, so long ago. He blinked, then went back to staring at the twinkling red dots on the EQ on his stereo equipment, an antiquated setup from the nineteen-eighties. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said, “absurd or not, if we had some pot in this house I’d be smoking it right now.”
“Wouldn’t that look great on the news? ‘High School Principal Busted’. Why don’t you have a beer? Or a Dr. Pepper?” She grinned. “Anyway, today’s marijuana isn’t the marijuana of your day. They say it’s a lot more potent. It’d knock your socks off.”
“The stronger the better.”
Margo laughed. “Well, aren’t you the rebel.” She sat beside him on the sofa “I don’t think you need to smoke dope.” She squinted, then smiled. “What you need is a strong dose of prune juice.”
“I don’t see how you can be so calm,” said Harold. He felt her breath on the side of his face. How long has it been since we made love? he asked himself. Why not? “We could get stoned and get it on.”
“You are in a mood. Maybe losing an election is actually good for you.”
“That losing makes me horny is about the only good thing about losing,” he said. “Don’t you see how fucked up things are going to be? That man is a demon.”
“Tell that to your sister. That’s who I was talking to. She called. She and Ted are thrilled.” His wife scooched closer. “Did you know that your sister and her husband are of the other persuasion?”
“No way.”
“Way.” Margo laughed. “You should’ve heard her. She’s ecstatic. So’s Ted.” She paused then pressed her warm body against his shoulder. “She called that goofy man ‘a gift from God.’ Can you believe it? Your sister’s one of them.”
“For Pete’s sake. She’s always been nutty. But not that crazy.” Harold grimaced. “She voted for that fiend?”
“She did.”
“I thought you were talking to your sister,” said Harold. “She’s the one who lives in Midland. I’d expect her to be the fascist.”
“Nope,” said Margo. “Your sister’s the fascist. Not mine.”
Harold sighed. My sister, he said to himself, a Trumpster? Ted, her nitwit husband, yes, I can see that. But not Evelyn. He bit at his lip, then harrumphed. “I swear if I could get my hands on some pot, I’d get stoned. I mean it. Don’t you get it? One day we’re going to wake up in Biden’s America, then that night we’ll go to bed in Franco’s Spain. Or, Orban’s Hungary. Or, something even worse.”
“We live in a town of eleven hundred people.” Margo shook her head. Her red hair, longish for a woman in her early sixties, dangled suggestively, like the tassels on Delilah’s satiny robe. “How would it look to the school board if the principal went around town trying to score some dope?” Again, she laughed. “You’ll get over this. You’re going to have to get a grip on yourself.”
“I can’t seem to get my head around how this could’ve happened,” said Harold. “How the fuck did this happen? I just need to calm down. To somehow relax. To find equilibrium.”
“Homeostasis,” said Margo.
“What the hell’s that.”
“It’s what the body does to find balance. What you called equilibrium. All organisms do it.”
Geez, thought Harold. Why in the world did I have to marry a goddamned science teacher? A biology teacher, no less. He let out a massive sigh.
“See, there you go. Your body’s trying to achieve homeostasis. Normality. Balance.” Margo crinkled her delicate, turned-up nose, seductively, or so thought Harold. “That’s why you took that deep breath. Don’t you feel better now? Relaxed?”
“I’d rather smoke some dope,” said the principal. He felt his wife’s warmth against him. Geez, he thought, now? Sex now? “You sound like Deepak Chopra. Or the Maharishi.”
Margo shrugged. “They’re pushing spirit. I’m pushing biology.” She paused. “There’s a difference, you know.”
Pheromones, thought Harold. My wife’s bombarding me with goddamned pheromones. I can feel it. At a time like this? Geez. “Things’ll be different in this country. And not for the better. Just you wait and see.”
Margo rolled her eyes. “Somewhat,” she said. “But people will go about their business. They’ll watch TV, go to movies, eat fast food… procreate. Just like they have for years now.”
“Procreate?”
“Yeah, screw, fuck, get it on, hump.” Margo again chuckled.
“Is that how you explained reproduction to your students.”
“No. My principal was a tyrant.” She paused. “You were, you know.”
“What did you teach them about procreating?” Harold grinned.
“We’re in Texas. Or did you forget? We don’t want students to know what’s going on behind the doors to their parents’ bedrooms.” She nodded, then added, “Nor any of that nonsense about evolution, or slavery, or the civil rights movement. In this state it’s ‘Remember the Alamo’ and “Jim Crow? Never heard of him!’ My principal, like I said, was a stickler for keeping the kids as dumb as we possibly could.”
“I was not. I am not,” he stuttered. “I’m no tyrant.”
“What now?” Margo asked. “With the new president you may be obsolete. With vouchers and school choice.”
“It’s not like anyone’s chomping at the bit to open a private school in Dos Pesos, Texas.”
“You’re lucky you’re not in Dallas or Ft. Worth,” she said. “Private Christian schools galore. And probably more to come.”
Harold winced. “Geez, don’t I know it. And then there’s all of that other crap, rounding up immigrants, harassing trans people, selling out NATO and Ukraine, kissing Netanyahu’s ass.” He shook his head then closed his eyes. He reopened them and stared at his wife. “Hell, half of my students, maybe more, could be from Mexico. Or their parents are.”
“What are you going to do? Will you check the students’ citizenship if they tell you to?”
Harold stood. “I’ll quit. I’ll fucking retire. Why should you be the only retiree in this house? After last night, I need to get my wits about me.” He held out his hand. “You and I could retire to your boudoir, madame. We could do a little of that procreating you keep yammering about.”
Margo laughed. “You get mighty frisky when you lose an election.” She took his hand, stood, then leaned against him.
“So much sorrow in lust,” said Harold, “so much lust in sorrow.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just a line from Graham Greene. It stuck in my mind years ago.”
“The actor?”
Harold grinned. “No, the British novelist. Although, I like the actor, too.”
“You should’ve stayed an English teacher.” Margo paused. “You’re better suited for that.”
“I’m afraid you might be right.”
Margo tugged at Harold’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “You need to take your mind off things. You never take the Cowboys’ losses this hard.”
“That’s because the Cowboys lose all the time. A man can only take so much procreating.” Harold winked. “I’m only trying to achieve some of that equilibrium you were going on about.”
“Homeostasis.”
“Whatever. Does procreating help get us to a sense of stability or Nirvana or whatever?”
Margot nodded, then said, “For men, it seems to. You always fall asleep afterwards.” She tilted her head. “For women it seems to just stir us up. I don’t know why.”
“Try reading Camus,” said Harold. “He’ll depress the hell out of you. You’ll want to sleep through the next four years. I guarantee it.”
From the speakers on the other side of the room Jerry Garcia pleaded mournfully, as only he could, “Trouble ahead, trouble behind, and you know that notion, just crossed my mind, and you know that notion, just crossed my mind.”
~