The Fly Under – Jack Coey

Frenchy comes back to the men.

There was another night with Bronson, he said, and he waved a little cardboard box in my face, and say, Frenchy, this is going to make me a million dollars!, and I said tres bien, Bronson, and I don’t laugh at Bronson because he is a smart man, no? Inside that little box was the thing that finds oil in the ground.

He started a company called Oil Recovery Systems with that invention, said Regis. Billy Jones told me he would go see him, and he would have a pot with water in it, and he would pour cooking oil on top, and try and separate the two using the vibration from a dildo. He wanted to figure out a way to detect oil on water so he could find it and eliminate it before it polluted the ecosystem.   

The sadness with Bronson is the alcohol, no? quietly said Frenchy.

The men were silent. Finally, Regis spoke,

I don’t know what comes first, the chicken or the egg. I mean, I don’t know whether alcoholism was a part of his temperament or separate from it. Temperamentally, Bronson was self-absorbed which impedes intimacy with others so does that inability to connect with others “cause” the alcoholism, or would it be there if he had been happily married? I don’t know. I know of other men, temperamentally like Bronson – William Faulkner and Eugene O’Neill were alcoholic, so the temperament seems to lend itself to the disease, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

There are plenty of married men who are alcoholic, said Jean.

Oh, for sure. As I say, I don’t know. It’s my observation totally. Proportionally there may be a greater incidence of alcoholism in these intrapersonal temperaments than there are in interpersonal temperaments. These men also seem to have a death wish which Bronson’s fly under could be interpreted as. There is a paradox in their personality of being highly creative on one side and highly destructive on the other.

Wow, you’re getting pretty heavy there, Regis, said Jean.

That’s the thing about a man like Bronson, he was so multi-faceted.

Did Billy Jones tell you about his wood stove? asked Lyle.

The men all looked at Lyle.

He took a bathtub and turned it upside down and attached a pulley to it. He cut some holes in the top to regulate the air flow, and he would put a tree stump under it, and it would burn for a week before he would have to replace the stump. He used a hairdryer with a vacuum cleaner extension which he would stick into the faucet drain to blow air on it if he needed to. He would let it burn down overnight and get it going again in the morning with the hairdryer. He slept all night without having to tend the stove. 

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