A Good Problem to Have

By Joseph Britt

It is the seventies. Tom Phillips is a
fugitive from the Navy and involved
romantically with his best friends
mother. What he doesnt know is that he
is bi-polar and headed for a crash. This
coming of age story tells of a young mans
adventures as he struggles to wake up from
the dream of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465399564

Joseph Britt

Joseph Britt lives and writes in Pelham, Alabama.

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Copyright © 2012 by Joseph Britt

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the author or publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the author or publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number:  2011960863

ISBN:  Hardcover  978-1-4653-9955-7

Softcover  978-1-4653-9954-0

Ebook  978-1-4653-9956-4

Book design by Jimmy Achapero Jr.

Printed in the United State of America

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

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108394

This Novel is Dedicated to the

United States Navy

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER ONE

By the end of the summer, Tom Phillips was spending all his weekends with a woman by the name of May Boone. It was August 1980. Tom was nine months out of the Navy and lonely for companionship. May worked at the Riverside Club. She lived in one of the guest cabins with her two small boys. She was looking for something more than a one night stand. She and Tom were getting along fine.

Tom’s best friend was Bobby Allen. He was the drummer in the house band at the Riverside. Tom had known Bobby since they were teenagers.

It’s a plum shame you have to work at that damned saw mill, Bobby said one night after the club closed. Tom had helped Bobby load his drums, and they were standing by his blue Satellite. The night was still warm.

Tom shrugged. It’s not much of a job for my twenty-five years. But at least I’m doing something. He felt like the town of Andalusia judged him. Those who knew him from high school would judge him for only making it to Cecil Dixon’s cross-tie mill. They would wonder why he had not done better. He had had the same chances they had. They would guess something had gone wrong. They would know Tom had fallen along the way.

I’m going to tell you something, Bobby said. He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and began to squeeze. His big blond face was grinning. One day you are going to write the Great American Novel. You said you were going to do it, and I know by god you will.

If I can only stop living it, Tom said.

Bobby squeezed Tom’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. What I would write about, if it were me, is women. That’s what people want to read about. I would write about all the women you’ve had.

It would be an epic, Tom said.

No. You want to write about love, Bobby said and squeezed Tom’s shoulder.

I’m going to write about kicking your ass if you don’t stop squeezing my shoulder.

The hand that was squeezing slipped around Tom’s neck and got him in a headlock. Bobby tightened the grip and tried to bring Tom down. Bobby was as tall as Tom, but not as strong. Tom seized him around the waist and lifted him up. The headlock loosened, and Tom threw him off. Bobby was laughing.

I can’t ever get you, Tom. You know that? Bobby went around and opened the door to the Satellite. Are you going home?

No, I’m going to spend the night with May.

"When your mother calls in the morning, I’ll tell her I haven’t

seen you."

Tom laughed. You can tell her whatever you want. Tell her I met a trucker who was going to California and I hitched a ride.

She’d probably believe me, Bobby said and got in the car.

Tom stood and watched him drive away.

Tom sat on the tailgate of the rusty Ford Ranger. He did not want to go back inside the club. He had been in there all night. Besides, May still had to make the deposit and inventory the bar. It was quiet outside, the crowd was gone, and the warm summer air made him relax and forget the past. He could feel the river close by.

The Riverside in the sixties had been a happening place for young couples to come and drink and dance. Those young couples were now in their forties. The clientele these days were local boys seeing how much beer they could guzzle. And Bobby’s band, the Rustlers, was just a honky-tonk group. No matter how much Tom liked them, that’s all they were. Tom thought that it wasn’t the club that had fallen on hard times. It was his generation. And he was a little out of sync with his generation.

Sitting there on the Ranger he saw through the trees a pair of headlights slowly approaching. At first he thought it must be the police. The car was moving as if it wanted to sneak up on you. And then, it came to him, he knew who it was. It was a premonition. He was as certain it was Beth Winters as he was of the river he could feel but not see.

One time when he was fourteen, he was out raking leaves with his mother at their house on McGowen Street. A car pulled up with his great aunt and her preacher. Immediately, Tom’s mother dropped her rake. The preacher came to her. But before he could speak, Tom knew his brother Leon was dead. That was another premonition he had had.

The car crept out from the trees, a VW hatchback. It came to a stop on the moon-dusted parking lot. Tom walked over and got in.

At forty-five, Beth Winters was still beautiful. You could tell she was once a rich man’s wife. Tailored suits, Estée Lauder, salon hair. She was soft spoken and classy. Tom remembered when she drove a ’98 Oldsmobile, not a Volkswagen. But she had kept up the rest of her appearance.

You must have called my mother. To find out where I am, Tom said.

She’s worried about you.

Is that why you drove all the way up from Gulfport? Because my mother is worried?

No, Beth said. Her concerns are not the same as mine. She leaned over and took his face in her hands to kiss him. I want you to come home with me.

No, Tom said and turned away. I can’t go back to Gulfport.

Is it because of this girl you are seeing? Of course Beth would have pumped his mother for all the information she could get.

I’d rather not talk about her, Tom said.

Your mother said you were working at a saw mill. Do you really think that is what you should be doing? Beth’s ex-husband was in the timber business. Saw mill workers to Beth were the lowest sort of laborer.

No, it’s not what I should be doing. But it’s what I am doing now, Tom said.

Well, if you won’t come back with me, she said. Let’s at least have coffee.

It’s two o’clock in the morning, Beth. This is Andalusia, Alabama; we don’t have a Waffle House.

We could go to the all-night Zippy Mart and sit in the parking lot, she said.

This echoed back to a time when Tom was seventeen, and Beth was a volunteer at the library, and they did things like have coffee at the Zippy Mart.

Innocence is its own courage, Tom said.

Beth looked out and noticed the Ford Ranger. When are you going to bring back Roger’s truck to me?

Tom said, Oh God, Beth, you will try anything.

"Well, it is my truck now."

Roger would want me to have it, Tom said and opened the door and got out. Bye, Beth, he said leaning in the window.

She stretched over to kiss him again. "Bye, Tom. You can use the truck. But bring it back to me one day."

The Volkswagen pulled away into the trees and disappeared.

May was waiting on the club steps when he walked back. She had taken off her shoes and had her black cocktail dress hiked up to her knees.

That was her, she said. Wasn’t it?

That was her, all right.

Oh, Tom, May said. She’s just a mother figure.

It was not that Tom had never considered the Freudian implications of his relationship with an older woman. It just didn’t help much. Six years ago Beth was married to one of the richest men in Andalusia. Then, she chose a different life. Somehow, Tom got caught up in it. Indeed, he was partially to blame. On some level, he felt obligated to her.

The previous December, when Tom got home from the Navy after a month with his sister, he was twenty pounds overweight. It was chow line fat, gedunk fat. His time at Naval Station Great Lakes was soft on the waistline. Tom’s mother, Ellen, had always been plump. She decided to put them both on a diet.

She sat at the kitchen table and flipped through magazines until she found the diet she wanted. It was called the eggs, grapefruit, and tomato diet, and it was guaranteed to take off five pounds a week. They were to eat nothing but eggs, grapefruit, and tomatoes, drink a minimum of eight glasses of water every day, and walk a mile. Tom and Ellen both agreed they could dispense with the mile walk but vowed to do the rest.

Tom’s stepfather, Harold Black, did not think much of the diet. He was older and could live off peas and cornbread. But then, he did not think much of Tom, either. He had given up on his stepson ever amounting to much.

Tom could see his point. This was not the first time he had come home after making a fiasco of things. He came home once when he was between colleges, once after spending a year with Beth Winters in New Orleans, and now there was this business with the Navy. And it was true Tom had no clear future. His skills in construction were limited. Besides, he found carpentry tedious. For now, the saw mill suited him; it took a strong back and a weak mind.

Every morning, Tom would grab his lunch box with boiled eggs, tomato wedges, and wax paper packets of salt, thoughtfully put there by his mother, and go to work.

It was called a pepper box cross-tie mill. The logs were trucked in and chain-sawed into the length of a cross-tie. A fork lift hauled them to the mill. There, a man with a peavey flipped them onto the sawyer carriage. The log was shaved down each side until meeting the specification of a tie. When it came down the roller bed, Tom and another man did the stacking, swinging them off and then binding them up. When the stack reached five high and five deep, a fork lift would come haul it away, and they would begin another.

Tom liked the mill. It had a Jack London feel about it. His mind could wonder. He thought about music and all the stories he wanted to write and what it would be like to be famous. When the sawing paused to change the bits there was nothing to do. Tom would pull a copy of Huckleberry Finn out from his pocket and read.

Tom was partnered with a guy named Andy Rawlings. Andy was blind in the left eye from a fight he had gotten into at an Andalusia High School football game. Unlike Tom, Andy was fidgety when the work stopped.

What do you see in that book you are always reading? he asked one day after spitting his tobacco juice.

Tom spit his own tobacco juice and said, It’s funny, for one thing. I don’t know. I like stories, even though I don’t know how they work.

Andy wanted to be helpful. Well, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you can’t give away the ending too soon. Like the gunfight has to come after the fellow has tried every way he knows to get around it.

Tom suspected Andy had a stack of Louis L’Amour by his bed. Yeah, but what does it mean? Tom wondered aloud. What do the two men in that gunfight represent?

Andy looked as if the question did not make a lot of sense. It’s a good guy and a bad guy, he said simply, as if to look any further was frivolous.

Weekends for Tom at his mother’s were rather sedate. Tom would cash his check and wait for his friend John Graves to come over with his grey Monte Carlo. John worked on his daddy’s farm and always had gas money.

Before getting some beer and riding around, they would go eat. After a week of eggs, Tom was famished for a burger. He felt a little guilty cheating on his mother’s diet, but not much.

The Pit Barbecue Grill was owned by the mayor. The coffee mugs were stained, but the food was good, and the walls were decorated with all the SEC pennants. John noticed a high school couple sitting at a booth. The boy was beefy with a mullet, the girl a robust cheerleader type. They were sharing a plate of gravy fries.

John said, It was like that when we were in school. The dumbest guys get the best-looking chicks. I always ask myself, ‘What does she see in him?’

John did not have the same problems as Tom. Where Tom’s problems were money, a career, settling down, trying to stop hurting people, John was as solid as a rock. He had never hurt anyone in a relationship. In fact, he had never had a relationship. That was his problem, and it put him on an opposite pole from Tom. Still, their friendship shared a general longing for women.

Girls aren’t interested in brains, Tom said. They are more interested in confidence. That’s what attracts them.

I’m in trouble then, John said.

Tom thought about Julie O’Conner, his first girlfriend, and the one he always loved. That might not be such a bad thing. At least you have learned to live without a girl. That’s a kind of freedom, he said.

I don’t want to live without one, John said.

Tom, still thinking of Julie, thought that he did not want to live without her.

Then, as the winter turned to spring and the nights grew warmer, Tom became restless. He started driving Roger Winters’ pick-up to The Riverside Club to listen to The Rustlers.

Tom was not looking for a girl. His confidence for starting a relationship was shot, and he had never been good with one-night stands. But he was looking at girls. So of course he noticed May Boone behind the bar.

She was cool with the men she served. She lit their cigarettes, laughed at their jokes, but kept a professional distance. She wore glasses—Tom liked that—and her black dress shimmered in the mirror behind the bottles. She had a mane of red hair, and her bare arms were pink. Her chest was large, her hips thin.

Tom knew she had been around. He knew her sons were from different fathers, and she had married neither. He knew Bobby Allen had slept with her. But none of that mattered. What mattered was Tom having the courage to win her. All those lonely nights in the Navy, preceded by a long relationship with an older woman, had left him feeling like spaghetti inside. He had had too many bumps in the road. His own self image was guilt-ridden.

The worst thing that happened, the thing that had damaged his confidence the most, was when Tom went to visit Julie O’Conner, in the spring of ’77, three years earlier…

Tom had not adjusted well to the Navy. On the ship, he stayed alone. He felt he was wasting his life. He had high hopes for himself, but all he was doing was chipping paint and hiding from work. At night, he sat in the galley, drinking strong coffee from a blue mug, and reading. On liberty, he tramped through the bar district of Norfolk, pissing in phone booths and looking for a place to drink without sailors. He played the jukebox and thought about Julie O’Conner.

Julie was Tom’s high school sweetheart, and he had never gotten over her. They had a bad break-up when Tom started with Beth Winters. But by then Julie was fooling around herself. So it seemed to be over. Still, he could not forget her.

He got her address from Mary Graves, John’s sister, and took a chance and wrote to her. Julie was at Eckerd College, in St. Petersburg, her third undergraduate university. Unbelievably, a letter came back. The loops and scrolls of her handwriting on the envelope made his heart jump. They began to correspond. He stayed up late, constructing long letters detailing everything he was doing. He waited anxiously for mail call and her reply. He made himself sound cheerful and strong, when really he was just lonely. She was taking a poetry class and sent him some of her poems. They were better than his.

Tom’s ship, the LPD Nashville, was scheduled for a nine month Mediterranean cruise, but Tom was to fly home once they reached Spain. He had orders for electronics school in Great Lakes. The Navy gave him a week’s leave between duty stations. It was an opportunity to fly down to St Petersburg and see Julie.

Before getting underway, he got a letter that said he could come. She said she was looking for a man in her life and wondered if Tom was that man. Tom assured himself he was. He dreamed of her every day. On the voyage over, he couldn’t sleep for dreaming of her. He would lie in his rack with the swaying of the ship or go topside and stare at the lights of the flotilla, steaming away. Then he would look up at the sky’s billion stars and count off one more day until he would see Julie.

In Roda, he stayed drunk on awful Spanish beer, until his military plane to Madrid came in. From Spain, he flew into the night to Philadelphia, and then he hopped a flight to Tampa-St. Pete. Tom was nervous from the ordeal, felt unwell. He was bearded and chubby, and when he arrived his summer whites were rumpled from travel. He smelled of cigarettes.

At the terminal, she passed him by. She backed up. The moment he got into her Audi, he knew that coming was a mistake.

Everything about her was wrong. Nothing was the way he had dreamed it. She was real, she was alive. She had lived so much in the past three years, and he had not been a part of any of it. Meanwhile, he had this dusty dream of her in his head. He did not know her.

Physically, Tom’s throat locked up on him. He couldn’t speak. There was a giant tear in the center of his larynx. He pushed back against the seat, rolled down the window, stuck out his arm.

Are you all right?

He motioned for her to keep driving.

Julie looked older. Her blonde hair was cut. She wore shorts and flip-flops. She had done nothing to make herself look special for him. Also, she was haughty, angry, as if he had just woken her up. She wasn’t going to give him a break.

You come all the way down here, and you can’t talk?

I can talk, he said. Just give me a minute.

Julie drove to her apartment, which was in a lady’s back yard. It was above a garage, and there was an exterior walkup. Inside, there was not much furniture. It was barren and cold, although breezy with palm fronds at the windows. There did not seem to be a place for Tom to sit or stand. There were just a couple of ratty kitchen chairs and a futon way off in a dark corner. There was the bed, of course.

Tom noticed a bookcase made of waterbed railings.

You remember that, don’t you? Julie asked. You made it for me when I was at Auburn. I was trying to set up an apartment, and it was the one thing I could get you to do for me. All I asked for was a little help putting together the pots and pans, and you couldn’t be bothered. And do you know why?

Don’t say it.

It was because you were screwing around with the mother of your best friend! You’re shaken now; I can see that, being here with me. And it’s just me, the one who loved you and wanted to make a life with you. But you put another woman between us.

I did, didn’t I? Tom said. It was the first time he had actually ever thought this.

"And now you can’t get close to me. You’re too broken. I can see the effect of not having me in your life. You’re sullen and seem lost."

Do you have to be so angry?

"I am angry. You misrepresented yourself in your letters. I didn’t know who I was writing to, because you sure didn’t sound like yourself, but your letters made you out to be a lot more together than you seem now." With that, she picked up her keys and wallet and headed for the door.

Where are you going?.

Out.

But where?

To see someone.

Julie had had a lot of boyfriends. She’d gone first to a guy she knew in seventh grade. Then, at a party, she went skinny-dipping with this Marine and later went to his house. At Auburn, she had a couple of foreign exchange students, one from Nepal who was dark skinned, and another from Iran who tore her clothes off. At Eckerd College, she had known a number of men.

But was it all Tom’s fault? When Tom left Julie for Beth, he left a needy girl. When he let go of her hand in the summer of ’74, he set her adrift. She had a need for love, or anything that resembled it. Tom activated Julie and then deserted her. But, he couldn’t be the cause of all that anger.

An interesting thing happened when Tom was getting on the military flight in Madrid. An officer, a young ensign, approached Tom to ask if he would carry on some wine for him, something about customs. Tom saw no reason not to, and flew from Europe to