Dewey's Nine Lives

New Perspectives was a series of low, concrete block buildings above a commercial strip in east Sioux City. It wasn’t much, inside or out, but the people made it special. Bobby collected bottles for redemption with enthusiasm, calling out to everyone across the room. A young woman had lost most of her brain function when she was hit by a car, but she could remember everybody’s birthday and tell them what day of the week it was going to fall on in any given year. They needed a strong man to hold Ross, a three-hundred-pound diabetic with Down syndrome, when he went into a seizure. As he walked the facility, as he met the special adults in the work program, Glenn felt a rising sense of joy and relief. He had been working all those years on his car, figuring out the systems. He’d spent all those years with Rusty, learning to live like a cat, without resentment or disappointment. He hadn’t just been killing time. He’d been working on himself. He’d been working toward something. And this was it.

“You got me,” Glenn said. “I’ll start tomorrow.”

Within a month, Glenn didn’t need to hold Ross during his seizures; he knew the man so well, he could sense when they were coming and always had a candy in his pocket to raise his blood sugar. He introduced everybody to the young woman with brain damage, because he could tell she loved showing off her birthday skills. He came in one Monday morning and told Bobby the bottle collector, “I’ve got a present for you, buddy, but you gotta do me a favor.”

“What’s that, Glenn?”

“I gotta have your hat.”

Bobby backed off. He wore the same filthy hat every day, and he wasn’t going to give it up.

“I got a brand-new hat for you, Bobby, and it’s got the tag still on it.”

Glenn showed him a bright orange hunting hat that said GRAHAM TIRE across the front. Bobby grabbed it and immediately put the brim to his nose; he had a habit of smelling everything. Then he turned away, slowly took off his filthy hat, and handed it to Glenn. When he turned back, he had the orange hat on his head and a huge smile on his face.

“We’ve been trying to get him to change that hat for two years,” the woman who had hired him said. “He wouldn’t take it off for anybody.”

After New Perspectives, Glenn cut back on his divorced-dads sessions. He started playing more seriously with the band, spending nights at the Eagles or other music clubs around town. When Storm’n Norman’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Auditorium opened, Glenn not only played guitar with the band, he carried the keg and helped drain it, too. There was no official first dance; no advertising; no sign on the building; no arrows pointing the way through rolling hills of corn to a tiny Nebraska town. But somehow, more than one hundred fifty people showed up. There was no air-conditioning, not enough bathrooms, and the only chairs were borrowed from a funeral home—they even said “funeral home” on the back—but it was a heck of a good time.

I suppose you could say that, after years of work and decades of disappointment, Glenn’s life was full. He had Rusty, his mother, his daughter Jenny, who was already in high school. He had friends and music. He worked an important job with people he loved. On the one night a month when Storm’n Norman’s was open, he did chores: unclogging toilets, tending bar, “feeding the chickens”—a euphemism for sprinkling the dance floor with no-slip wax. After a while, he noticed that a lot of women managed to coax their husbands to Storm’n Norman’s, but couldn’t convince them to dance. So he added another job: one-song dance partner for the frustrated wives of Iowa and Nebraska, the tall good-looking gentleman who swept them away and let them cut loose, at least for a minute or two. Truth be told, though, he barely saw their faces. Dancing was another way to enjoy the music, to help a stranger, and pass the time. He loved dancing—he’d almost forgotten how nice it felt—but for Glenn Albertson the dance hall, despite the bright lights, was nothing more than a sea of gray.

Until one night, sixteen years after his last divorce and ten years after Rusty broke through the scars on his heart, Glenn Albertson saw a face. He was at the bar, mixing drinks, when he looked up and noticed her across the room. She was at a table on the edge of the dance floor, talking with a couple of friends, and it was if a spotlight was shining only on her. It was just a moment, a glancing chance, but it was something Glenn had never experienced before. In the gray sea of his life, this woman seemed to glow. And then their eyes met.

“Take over, Joe,” he told his fellow bartender, “I’m gonna ask that woman to dance.”

He did. She looked up at him, hesitated, then said, “Sure.”