We drove him to the Eastern Valley clinic in my father’s Dart. Randy bled all over the seats, but they were vinyl and I didn’t mind. He wasn’t dying and this was a nice vacation from our usual Pitch-n-Putt bone routine.
The way the doctor figured it, or whoever the guy in the white coat who tweezed out the buckshot was, somebody had fired on us
from far off. The pellets had petered out right as they hit Randy. The police never found the shooter, though they did undertake a token manhunt, once through the trees with a flashlight. They also issued a sketch of the suspect, a suave-looking black man with slicked-back hair. We had no idea where they came up with that one. It looked copied from an old Duke Ellington album sleeve.
Later we figured it was Georgie Mays who’d fired on us, this nutjob from Nearmont who’d been bragging all week about his new shotgun. He’d never be brought to justice, though. Georgie’s family went back to Revolutionary War times, descended from the guy on the Nearmont town seal, Matheson Mays, who either spied on the British or spied for them, scholars have never decided. Matheson Mays was hanged before he could clear up the debate.
It didn’t matter now. The man was on the town seal and the Mays name was under municipal protection. Besides, everyone was too riled up about the gangs of dead black jazz geniuses, apparently roving our district with heavy armaments, to give the Mays connection much thought. You may recall Glen Menninger’s editorials in the school paper about the need to balance tolerance with safety, arguing we should err on the side of safety. I wrote a short rebuttal, which he tried to pull, big surprise.
But most of our times out here were not so eventful. It was usually just me and Gary and maybe Randy Pittman or Dean Longo. We’d sit around and talk about the unrelenting boredom of our town. The unrelenting ferocity of the world was a different problem. Only Dean Longo found a permanent solution, a bag of dope that, according to the coroner, would have killed a rhino. I think about Dean sometimes, not that I ever knew him so well, because we all dabbled in rhino death, and Gary did more than that, got himself a habit that was scary and embarrassing at the same time. We were all so grim and invincible then. I guess we figured we were trying so hard, there was no way we could die. But you can always die.
IT TOOK ME AN HOUR to walk to In Your Cups. The notion of a car seemed newly appealing. Maybe my father was right about this being a car state, a car system, and how you can’t buck a system you’re not in, or under, that’s not bearing down on you.
Daddy Miner was behind the bar with Victor, the new bartender. I considered sharing my ontological breakthrough with the old man, but I’m not an utter fool. I’m not an utter anything. I pulled a stool up to the leather-padded bar. Down the far end of it Chip Gallagher appeared to be having a lover’s spat with his double scotch. I decided to leave him to it, asked Victor for a beer.
“That’s not on the house,” said my father.
He was twisting a key in the register. He twisted it some more and the key broke off.
“Goddamnit!”
“Don’t know your own strength, Mister M.,” said Victor.
“No, Victor, I do know my own strength. I’m a weak piece of shit. This key is just a weaker piece of shit. They don’t even make them out of metal anymore. I don’t know what this is. Some kind of alloy.”
“That’s still metal,” said Victor.
“What are you, a fucking smelter?”
“No, but I blew one at a club once.”
“You people are always bragging,” said my father. “I’ve had more flap candy than you could shake a stick at. You don’t hear me yapping about it all day.”
“Yes, I do,” said Victor.
“Well, I’m the exception. I’m the exception which proves the rule.”
“What’s the rule again?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said my father. “I’m all confused now. I can’t get into the register. I wish I could just smash it open. Get me some steroids. Like that Saladin kid.”
“That’s just gossip,” I said. “Mikey’s the best player in the game.”
“Yeah, but the question is, which game? It’s not baseball anymore.”
“You’re dead on, Mister Miner.”
“Thanks for agreeing, Victor, but you still can’t have Wednesday off.”
“I’ll work Wednesday,” I said.
“We don’t need a bar back.”
“I’ll pour,” I said.
“Sure you will.”
“I know the drinks.”
“You think that’s all this is?” said my father. “A rang-a-tang can learn the drinks. It’s not the drinks. It’s knowing what to do when the shit goes down. It’s about quiet strength. A light but firm touch. Ask Victor here.”
“Touch lightly but firmly,” said Victor.
“What is it with you people and innuendo? You’re out, you’re proud, I’m proud, calm down. You don’t have to reduce everything to the baloney pony.”
“You don’t have to leer at every woman under seventy who walks in here.”
“I said I was the exception,” said my father.
“Okay, then I’m an exception, too,” said Victor.
“Fine. We’re both exceptions.”
“But don’t use the phrase ‘you people.’ You haven’t earned it.”
“You don’t know what I’ve earned,” said my father.
“Let me pour,” I said.
“Absolutely not,” said my father.
“Dad, nothing ever happens here. Everyone’s pleasant.”
“That’s how they lull you.”
“Who?”
“The bringers-down of the serious shit. And I can’t be here to protect you. I have a vast empire to survey.”
“Okay,” I said. “Forget I asked.”
“I may need you at the Moonbeam soon. I’ll let you know.”
“Fine.”
“Maybe I won’t, though, if that barracuda Don Berlin keeps it up.”
“How’s that?”
“Nothing.”
My father went back to his office, fled the rush of suits from the bus station. These were family men, or else anxious types who’d lost their nerve, their wolf moves, for the city bars. One of them I’d seen before, a bond specialist who favored worsted vests. He sat in the corner talking to a familiar cascade of hair.
“Mira!” I called.
Catamounts, I must confess, I had thoughts of carnal betrayal vis-à-vis Gary when Mira came over to greet me, that thrum she gave off, her tawny arms hooped in silver, the voluptuous green wit of her eyes. People say the truly beautiful don’t know how beautiful they are. People also say the meek shall inherit the earth, that anybody can be president, that someday they’ll make androids you’ll want to fuck. Maybe they will, but where are you going to get the money for the androids? Those prices, you might as well be president.
“Teabag, how are you?”
“A-okay, Liquid Smoke.”
“Are you going to buy me a drink?”
Victor swept by with a bottle, topped off Mira’s vodka tonic.
“On the house.”
“Thanks, V-Man.”
“V-Man?”
“We go back. I was here last night.”
“With Gary?”
“No, not with Gary.”
“Oh.”
“You know what I read yesterday? Well, I didn’t read it, but the man who told me, he read it somewhere. You know starfish?”
“Is that a band?”
“No, I mean, like, starfish. The ocean creature.”
“Resting on the ocean floor.”
“Right. This guy told me you’re not supposed to call them starfish anymore. It’s, like, derogatory. You’re supposed to call them sea stars.”
“Why is that?”
“Because they’re not really fish. They’re something else. Mollusks, maybe. That type of genus. I don’t know the technicalities.”
“That’s weird,” I said. “But I guess it’s reasonable. If they’re not fish, I mean.”
“Fucking thought police,” said Mira.
I laughed. It wounds me to admit it, Catamounts, but my laugh did sound different now, a tad fakey. Was it due to some reaction when it hit the atmosphere, a sine-wave vapor-type deal? Damn me for not paying more attention to Mrs. Strobe sophomore year. I guess I just tuned out after I aced that quiz darkening bubbles at random. Mrs. Strobe kept me after class, hovered over me in her serape, her heavy jewelry, told me I had a future in science. This scared me, Catamounts. I kept picturing myself stuffed into a mist-shrouded pod, genetically spliced with Vinnie Lazlo.
I tanked the rest of the semester.
“Still seeing Gary?” I said to Mira now.
“Here and there. Mostly there. Now and then. Sometimes. I’m still intrigued by him, sort of.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“He’s a basket case, maybe? You know what he’s been talking about? Retracting his retraction.”
“I know.”
“Will he have to give the money back?”
“I have no idea.”
“I told him he should go find Doc Felix, confront him.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I told him he should bring you along. He’s not well. He needs an interest. Something beyond the pursuit of immediate gratification. A passion.”
“Like model boats?”
“Not a hobby. A passion.”
Mira scoped the room, maybe for the starfish man.
“Real boats?” I said.
“Keep thinking, Teabag.”
Catamounts, I walked home from In Your Cups filled with visions of Mira’s hair sweeping across my skin, my lips buried in her sweaty golden rabbit butt. Shameful, sure, but just a vision. My loyalty lies with Captain Thorazine, and besides, Mira didn’t seem too keen on me. I chalked up my lust to Gwendolyn’s proximity. She still hadn’t called, and her hotel wouldn’t put me through.
I guess I’m not famous enough for standard operator service.
IT OCCURS TO ME, Catamounts, sitting here composing this latest update, that someday, if and when the collected works of Lewis Miner ever see the light of day, some futuristic editor-type might attempt to assemble these dispatches in a certain manner, to, for example, tell a story, or else effect some kind of thematic arrangement of interwoven leitmotifs: Work, Love, Masturbation, Gary.
This would be a grave mistake.
There are no themes, no leitmotifs. There is no story.
What’s all this storytelling stuff, anyway? Stories pour out of us daily, and most of them might not unfairly be lumped under the taxonomic heading: More Boring Than Your Neighbor’s Spork Collection. Ever notice how whenever anybody says, “Hey, have you got time for a story?” or “You simply must hear this story” or even, in that down-to-business style of today, “Quick story,” you find yourself wishing some wheezing and pustular people-snatcher would
burst through the wall and carry you off to some dank cave to feast on your viscera?
There’s a reason you wish this.
Nobody likes a story, especially a good one.
Nobody likes a story, that is, unless he’s in it. Are you familiar with that searching twitch on people’s faces when you relate some tale to them?
Where am I in this? they are thinking. When is he going to get to me?
Maybe it wasn’t always this way. Maybe when the Cro-Mags sat around the cookfire scaring the crap out of each other with yarns about saber-toothed tigers, or even pustular people-snatchers roving the outer dark, those in the audience had the opposite in mind: Please, please, pantheon of local animistic deities, please don’t let me be anywhere near this story.
But it’s all very different now.
It must be the video games.
MY TROUBLE, Catamounts, is that I am very much in this, at least as far as Hollis Wofford is concerned. Last night, back from In Your Cups and my boozy, dreamy walk beneath the lights of the county road, I found the man waiting on my stoop. He seemed steeped in painful thought, wore mustard-colored driving gloves, rolled a bottle of mineral water between his palms. He’d parked up on the sidewalk, more statement, it seemed, or automotive jeer, than bad parallel job.
I wondered if he had his Ostrogoth war mace in the trunk tonight.
“Hollis. What are you doing here?”
“I’m sitting,” he said slowly. “I’m chilling. Maxing and relaxing. Cold-lamping, as the poet once said.”
“Did you want to see me about something?”
“Just checking on one of my properties.”
“I heard the news. Congratulations on your new business venture. How’s your old business venture going?”
“You’re very cheeky, Larry. Actually, I was just conferencing with your neighbors. Have you met them?”
“Briefly.”
“I’m trying to help them achieve a moment of clarity.”
“You’re selling them drugs.”
“Some people have to hit bottom before they can … well, hell, you know. Look at you. Look at your head.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my head.”
“Looks like a hippo’s hemorrhoid.”
“I’m a buck turtle.”
“Come again?”
“Does Gary know you’re here?” I said.
“What’s Gary got to do with it? I just figured as long as I was here I’d wait around, see if I could talk to you.”
“I didn’t even think you knew who I was.”
“I don’t. Not really. I know you’re Larry or Teaball or something. I know you talk to that fuck Fontana.”
“He was my high school principal.”
“My wife’s, too. You know my wife Loretta. She knows you. Sweet and dumb, she said about you. I think those were her words. But Gary tells me you’re some kind of writer. I always thought writers were smart.”
“Not the dumb ones.”
“I could tell you some stories. You could write them down, make a mint.”
“Sure that’s a good idea?”
“You could change my name,” said Hollis, tucked his shades into the collar of his collarless shirt. “I could be Wallace. Wallace Hofford. Does that sound too Jewish?”
“I don’t need your stories. I don’t even like stories.”
“Screw you, then. I’ll get a pro. Loretta always said I had good stories.”
“Aren’t you under court order not to see her?”
“Justice is fallible,” said Hollis.
He peered into the water bottle as though proof of his belief were in it. Or maybe he was just enjoying the bubbles.
“I should really go inside,” I said.
“That would be your personal choice.”
“Was there some message you wanted me to relay?”
“A message? Relay? How does that work?”
“Do you want me to tell Fontana anything?”
“Tell him to stay away from my wife,” said Hollis, and for a moment I thought of Lenny, how he’d never been able to sell a line like that. Poor dead Lenny.
“Ex-wife,” I said.
“Only in a legal sense. I still fuck her sometimes. I still know what to say to make her cry and hate me but need me more than ever. Doesn’t that make her my wife?”
“That’s sick.”
“Sick? You ever been married?”
“Almost.”
Hollis cackled, stood.
“I will, for real, kill the fuck,” he said. “If it comes to that.”
He started down the stoop, clipped me with his elbow on the way to the curb. School yard stuff. Bullies grow up, too. Grow old, stay bullies. Buy cars, car insurance. Borrow tools, have biopsies.
Ensconced in his machine, Hollis lowered the passenger window, saluted, a sort of wistful
sig heil,
gunned into speed.
I knocked on Kyle and Jared’s door. Jared answered, shirtless, jittery.
“We’ll turn it down,” he said.
“Turn what down?”
“The music.”
“You’re not playing any music.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I was just checking in. Hollis was hanging out with you, right?”
“Hollis. Yes, Hollis. Six letters.”
Jared stuck his hands in his armpits, gibbered under his breath.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Me? I don’t know, man. How can I know if I’m okay? How can I make that judgment objectively? I’ll tell you what I do know. That meteor, the one that took out the dinosaurs? Kyle and I were just talking about it. A rock from space. A piece of masonry, right? A piece of free masonry. Are you following? Stop me if this is obvious to you. Corn comes from the Andes. Andy Griffith was the sheriff of Mayberry. Omar Sharif was in
Lawrence of Arabia.
Mayberry. A-berry. Arabia. Coincidence? This is shit nobody’s looking at right now. This is shit they’d kill us if they knew we knew.”
“I won’t tell anybody,” I said.
“I haven’t even told you yet.”
THERE WAS A MESSAGE from Gwendolyn on my answering machine. Alums familiar with my feelings for this woman will not be surprised to learn I fell to my knees and kissed the perforations of the speaker as her frayed voice squeezed through them, ran my tongue along the rims of those tiny holes. I’m a man of great emotion, and I’m not afraid to show it, especially when I’m alone.
“Lewis,” she said. “Oh, Lewis. I’m here at the hotel. And you’re there, aren’t you, Lewis? Oh, you must despise me. I despise me. But not like you must despise me. I’ve treated you so bad.”
“Badly!” I shouted at the machine.
“I should have just left you alone. But part of me still wants to be with you. But that’s the part of me I don’t want to be part of anymore. Talking in circles, I guess. Sorry. Or, no, these are more like parallelograms. Or those things, what are those things? That overlap? That are somehow separate but overlap? It’s something from
geometry. Oh, I don’t know. I’m so tired. I just want to curl up in my room tonight. My room is three fourteen. Isn’t that bizarre? Lenny’s birthday was four thirteen. Nothing happens by chance. This room is my haven. I’m so damn tired, Lewis. I’ve been going out every night. Lenny’s old friends. I miss you, kind of. I still want you in my life. Or, I still want to think of you as somebody who’s in my life. Do you remember when we met? Toronto? The aphorism slam? I want to say we were so innocent then, but we weren’t, were we? We knew what we wanted. You wanted to fuck me. I wanted to win the aphorism slam. I love aphorisms. They’re so terse. Is terse the word? But here I am yammering. Shows what I know about terse, right? Oh, fuck it, I did love you, Lewis. I wanted the little things with you. I was scared of the world. But now I know I like the big things better. I learned that from Lenny. He knew how to reach up for the brass balls, the big ring. And now that he’s dead, I have to honor Lenny. I have to carry on his legacy. Does that sound crazy? Maybe it’s crazy but it’s the way it is and I’m—”
The machine cut her off. The beep blasted my ear.
“What?” I shouted. “What are you?”
I found the number on my Caller ID, dialed it back, told the desk Gwendolyn’s room number. The clerk put me right through.
“Hello?”
“What the fuck was that?” I said.
“Oh, hi, Lewis.”
“Nice speech.”
“Sorry. I guess I got a little carried away. What did I say?”
“Come over, you can listen to it. I’ve got it on tape.”
“Jesus, you have that on tape? You wouldn’t do anything with that, would you?”
“Gwendolyn,” I said. “You are not famous. Nobody cares. Nobody even remembers Lenny. He was a blip.”
“He was not a blip, Lewis.”
“Yes, a blip.”
“He was my brother.”
“The radar man doesn’t care, Gwendolyn.”
“Radar man?”
“The fucking blip tracker!”
“What? Oh, Christ. It’s okay, Lewis. I forgive you. It’s good for you to air your grievances. It’s good for you to clear the air of your …”
“Grievances?”
“No, fuck, I can’t think of the word. I smoked too much pot. Trying to come down off the—”
“I still love you,” I said.
“Oh, Lewis.”
“No, wait.”
“Wait, what?”
“Scratch that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something just clicked. When you said, ‘Oh, Lewis.’ I felt this seismic shift.”
“I thought it was a click.”
“I don’t still love you. I don’t still love you at all.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Say it again.”
“I don’t love you, Gwendolyn.”
“I can’t believe it. I’m shocked.”
“I advise you to get over your shock.”
“Lewis?”
“Yes?”
“Come to the city tonight.”
CATAMOUNTS, I wish I could say that was the end of that, but I guess I was still dreaming of our future together, our basil, our mint. Maybe I was my mother’s son, living in the fog of tomorrows, shutting my eyes for the retinal burn of snapshots never snapped. Why
couldn’t Gwendolyn just settle for me? Don’t we all settle, Valley Cats? Haven’t you all settled, weighed the trade-offs, shaved down your desires for what was there, what worked, what wasn’t actively bent on your destruction? Resigned yourselves to the ear hair, the nipple hair, the watery farts, the fat behind the knees? The shoes in the doorway, the dishes in the sink? Isn’t that what love is all about? Don’t the experts tell us so? Don’t the people on the street concur? Don’t we all settle, barter our fevers for a partner, a mutual fondler, a talking animal companion? Catamounts, why couldn’t she settle for me?
Because she’s a dumb selfish cunt, I thought. Because she’s a sick, sad, broken thing who can only love what won’t love her back.
I caught the last bus to the city.
GWENDOLYN’S ROOM was mostly bed, beige. Wall art on the walls. Sea scenes, Aegean. A cactus on a shelf. Soft rock drifted from the clock radio on the bedside table. Thick candles flickered, lilac, chemical. Gwendolyn led me to the bed, laid me down, undressed me, herself, straddled me, raised a slender glass pipe to her lips.
“What are you doing?”
“Smoking crack. They call this the glass dick.”
I knocked the dick from her mouth. It bounced off the bed.
“Smoke crack on your own time,” I said. “Not when we’re having break-up sex.”
“Sorry.”
I took her in my arms and we rocked softly to the soft rock for a while. Gwendolyn licked my neck. I bit her hair, her breasts, slid down and nibbled, swirled, easy with the teeth, hard with the tongue. I hadn’t eaten pussy in a while. It’s like falling off a bicycle. You never forget.