Authors: Owen King
It was, however, the last night when he felt about himself how he always had—like a person on the way—and because of that, he regarded it more wistfully than he would have otherwise. Afterward, Sam was who he would always be, complete, finished, wrapped.
■ ■ ■
Roughly eight years later, his best friend, Wesley Latsch, proposed a theory: the threesome had exhausted Sam’s personal reservoir of good luck. “Why do you think that people win the lottery and then their lives fall apart?” asked his best friend.
Wesley shook his head, not at Sam but at the scrolling computer screen on the desk in front of him. Following a few aimless years in the advertising industry, Wesley had found a niche as a professional blogger. The genesis of his career realignment had been the penning of a list entitled “Seventy-Four Things That Cause Unnecessary Fatigue.” The list—which included everything from #7, “Dating,” followed by #8, “Laundry that must be air-dried,” to “Jazz” at #28, and “Criticizing people face-to-face and being criticized face-to-face” at #30, to #53, “Waiting in lines,” and #73, “British-style crosswords”—had led Wesley to appreciate that if he were ever to find happiness, it would be in a job that, at the very least, allowed him to work from home, at hours of his own choosing, and liberated from the hygienic regulations of the office world.
“Everything goes wrong because they have no luck reserves. The lottery uses it all up. Then they have no luck to fall back on, and all the negative forces in the world zap them.”
“You make luck sound like sunscreen,” said Sam.
“You had sex with two attractive women to whom you owed no attachment. For free. You ran your luck reserves down to nothing.”
They were roommates then, on a Thursday in the fall of 2011, and shared an incommodious fourth-floor walk-up in Red Hook. The living room window held a view of a solvent-colored notch of the Gowanus Canal. Sam sat on the couch, surrounded by boxes of shit that people sent to Wesley.
Once he had concluded what he could no longer brook—i.e., unnecessary fatigue—Wesley determined that what he was ideally suited for was “cultural criticism.” Besides his exacting nature, his term of service in the warrens of advertising had gained him a lifetime’s worth of experience with unsatisfactory products. Thus was born his blog,
The Swag Hag Chronicles
. The Hag offered his thoughts on movies, music, books, electronics, toys, doodads, tools, household items, fair-trade coffee beans, hot sauce, whatever, so long as it was free. In this capacity, it
was only under the most extraordinary circumstances that Wesley was forced to expose himself to the enervations of his list.
His legions of readers regarded the Swag Hag as a kind of one-man no-bullshit consumer-advocacy strike force. He offered only two grades:
NOT EVEN FOR FREE,
and
YEAH, I’LL TAKE IT.
About the latest Madonna album, Wesley had decreed,
Listening to this album made me feel like I was trapped inside a Tetris game while strangers slapped my fat rolls. NOT EVEN FOR FREE.
More favorably, about the Gourmet Artisan three-speed food processor, he wrote,
The average human heart weighs ten ounces. On high speed this processor turned ten ounces of raw chicken into a frappé in thirty seconds. Therefore, this processor can render your archenemy’s heart drinkable in under thirty seconds. YEAH, I’LL TAKE IT.
“What about people in, you know, the poorest, most war-torn countries? Places where there’s guerrilla fighting and no clean water and asshole corporations are sucking up all the oil and precious metals?” Sam tore open a box from a company that made joke items. “Why are the people in those places so unlucky?”
To this, Wesley responded with a murmur of consideration. On his computer screen, there was a looping video of a German shepherd on its hind legs, punching a man in the face. Over and over, the dog’s forepaw shot out, and the man stumbled backward, his comb-over flipped up into a tragic Mohawk.
Here was the nut of modern life, of Sam’s life. Embarrassment was entertainment; people devoured humiliation like fucking bonbons. Every stupid thing you ever did was forever. Because of the camera on the bureau, the guy you most regretted fucking fucked you for all eternity. Because it was on film, your slip, your car crash, your drunken confession never ended; you kept slipping, crashing, slurring, continuously. When did it become such a crime, Sam wondered, to be careless? He felt very sorry for the dog, and sorrier for the man with the comb-over, and sorriest for himself.
In the box from the joke company, there was a selection of fake noses: bulbous noses, needle noses, flat noses, and crooked noses of various sizes and colors. They had nothing on Orson Welles’s fabulous nose at the Museum of Cinema Arts, but they would be fine for a kid’s Halloween
getup. As he turned the shapes over in his hands, the rubber tacky against his skin, Sam was, naturally, reminded of his father.
The year his parents began their divorce proceedings, when Sam was eleven, Allie marked on a school form that his parents were separated. The elementary school guidance counselor, Mr. Alford, had called Sam in for a session.
“Tough times at home, huh? I’m awfully sorry to hear that. Not uncommon, though. Well, do you think you’ll live?” the counselor asked Sam. Mr. Alford was widely considered to be a dork. On Halloween, for instance, he was one of the teachers who really went for it in the costume department. That year he had been the Scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz
. Sam, hunched on a couch against the wall, noticed bits of shed straw mashed into the gray rug of the guidance office floor.
“I’ll be okay,” said Sam, and Mr. Alford said, “All right!” and suggested they play checkers for the rest of the period.
For a few minutes they pushed around the pieces. Alford asked if he could ask a question. Sam shrugged.
“Okay: your dad. I’ve seen a bunch of his movies at the drive-in—over in Hyde Park, you know? And he always looks so different from movie to movie. What do you think his big secret is?”
“False noses.” Sam hopped a couple of the guidance counselor’s red pieces. “He has these two big cases of false noses.”
“No way!” Mr. Alford slapped his knee. “That’s all? Prosthetic noses? Really? It’s like his whole face changes!” He shook his head, grinning.
“Your turn,” Sam said, and Mr. Alford said, “Oh! Right! Sorry!”
The descendant of that boy carefully replaced the lid on the box of noses. Sam twisted around to where a much bigger box sat on the floor, opened its flaps, and dropped the nose box inside. Then he gave the bigger box a shove with his foot. It fell over with a thump and vomited a gush of packing poppers.
On the computer screen, the German shepherd continued to strike. Wesley tapped his computer’s space bar. “You’ve stumped me with this poor-places issue, Sam. I don’t know why some countries and peoples are so unlucky. It could be I’m completely wrong. Maybe there’s no such thing as luck at all. Maybe fucking and winning the lottery are just things that happen. I hope it goes without saying, I would much rather I’m wrong. I don’t want to believe that your epic bone session
with those two stoned girls created some karmic liability. Who would want to believe that?”
It was late afternoon. The low sun deepened the color of their sliver of the canal from glassy pink to impenetrable vermilion. A slab of Styrofoam sailed by on the current. Two small flags, U.S. and Puerto Rican, poked up from the Styrofoam. It was a brave and fragile picture, Sam thought.
“But let’s not get too lost in these philosophical questions,” Wesley went on. “Let’s keep our eye on what’s important: two girls at once. Whatever else, that goes in the win column.”
The next morning Sam did, without a doubt, as he extracted himself from the arms and legs of the two women, and the large mound of quilts that had served as their makeshift bed, feel like a terrific success. (The two actual beds in the room, both singles, were too small to accommodate the group. There it was again: the issue of engineering. “This is like an operation!” the redhead had complained sometime in the middle of the episode. “A
love
operation,” the brunette had added in a sultry bass, and that cracked them up so much, a break was required to smoke more pot. Thoroughly stoned, Sam was emboldened to confess that he was feeling a tad inadequate. “You
are
inadequate,” the brunette had said, “but that’s what girls are into.”)
While the sex itself hadn’t been all that pleasurable, he found himself viewing it in experiential terms: just as he was sure that, with this first movie under his belt, his next would be even better, it seemed likely that, with practice, his group-sex skills could only improve. Wait, he had made a movie, hadn’t he?
A new sensation of boundless possibility made every detail of that morning stand in relief. It felt as if he were home for the first time in a long time; it felt really, really good.
Dressed only in his boxer shorts, Sam carried the rest of his clothes in a bundle down the hall to the coed bathroom. When he urinated, he noticed that one of the girls had lightly written
CUTE!
in tiny letters in green ink on the head of his penis. Sam sighed happily at the sight. The
letters were so ornate and feminine, furling at the tips. He had an urge to photograph it, except he didn’t want any pictures of his penis floating around in the world. In the shower, the word faded to faint shadow.
The day’s plan was: pack his gear, drive to Queens for a late-afternoon screening with Wassel and Patch. The producers had been making eager noises. “Two words,” Wassel had told him when they spoke on the phone. “Rick, and Savini.” Patch, who had also been on the line, chimed in, “No, no. Just one beautiful word, sluts: Ricksavini.”
Sam put on the rest of his clothes, left the dorm, and started to walk across campus in the direction of the film department.
The magic tree, the yellow willow decorated in cranes and condoms, was a few steps from the dorm. Shrunken by their exposure to the air, the condoms had the appearance of discarded husks. Ah, he mused, how sorrowful is the short prime of the prophylactic bloom!
He continued along the sidewalk, which ran the campus’s single long, looping one-way street. A Tibetan flag, hung from a dorm room window, waved majestically in the breeze. Someone’s old-fashioned alarm clock went off in a pinging fire-alarm burst and was quickly silenced. The potpourri scent of the grounds, the late-blooming flowers and the fresh mulch, the dewy grass and the cut straw on the spring beds, mingled and made his eyes feel huge. On the stoop of one brownstone dorm, a bird-watcher sat peering through binoculars, focused on the top of a pine tree. A bicyclist in yellow and green spandex shot past with a thrum. Everything seemed auspicious, young, well intentioned. The chapped feeling at his groin made Sam feel strong, toughened. Even the thin, oily ribbon of smoke rising above the trees initially seemed to forecast good tidings, an all-clear signal lit by allied forces.
But—wasn’t there familiarity in the sight? His nose itched, and Sam scratched it. He stopped, thought; there was something there, and it was unpleasant, like the rotten black underside of a felled tree, another smoke signal, another time, one that had broadcast not the all-clear but distress. The memory was too deep, though, and it slipped back into the murk.
He resumed walking.
As Sam turned onto the swoop in the path that drew away from the cluster of brownstone dorms to the brick complexes of the various academic buildings, he was compelled by an unprecedented urge to whistle. (Sam was not a whistler.) The tune that came to him was jaunty, a series
of quick trills interspersed every few notes with a slippery-sounding bend. It took a few runs to place:
“The Huckster’s Lament,” the main theme in
New Roman Empire,
composed by Booth himself on the oud.
“The Huckster’s Lament” was the song that played each time Booth’s character, Dr. Archibald “Horsefeathers” Law, began to make his pitch. “I am not a miracle worker!” professes Dr. Law, and pauses sharply, drinking up the attention of his audience. This is when the theme begins—the pluck of the oud’s strings is warped and drunken. “I am,” he continues in a hushed voice, “a physician specializing in the deeper body. There is no magic about this. My medicine is, quite simply, a scientific treatment for the soul!”
It had been years since Sam had heard the riff or seen
New Roman Empire.
On a level of craft, his father’s sole directorial credit had none; from a visual standpoint, the movie was static, as repetitive as a metronome: medium two-shot, close-up of speaker, close-up of reacting actor, again and again. Except for two or three brief dolly shots, that was it. A play on a stage was more dynamic. A comic strip was more dynamic.
New Roman Empire
was so hokey, too, so unconcealed, such a “yarn.” The con man tricks everyone into trusting him, and it’s left to a few fearless young idealists—i.e., hippies—to stop him from razing the whole town. That was it. You could fit the entire thing on one side of an index card. It was a fairy tale.
Finally, there was the movie’s lead character, a fun-house reflection of Sam’s actual father—excessively theatrical, lying about everything, inexplicably beloved. When Dr. Law talked about his “scientific treatment for the soul,” Sam could hear Booth—Sam was ten or eleven at the time—wondering why he was so insistent on bland truths. “Don’t you want me to enliven your childhood?”
So it was peculiar that Sam should have found himself, on that marvelous first day of the rest of his life, whistling the sound track of a movie—and a man—that he objected to so completely.
In the middle of the lawn that fronted the building, a man outfitted in the gray jumpsuit of a Russell College maintenance worker stood spraying foam onto a smoldering pile of junk. A few ballerinas watched from a safe distance. As Sam approached, he could see that the junk was computer equipment. He stopped whistling. “What happened?”
“Vandals,” said the maintenance worker. “What a disgrace. What a disgrace.” He had a light accent—
de
-sgrace—and a full white beard.