It Feels So Good When I Stop (6 page)

“Is that so?” Jocelyn asked. “Mr. Zagat’s. Mr. Hepatic. Mr. Homeless Spermer.”

At that moment I definitely wanted to partake in frequent and varied sex acts with her. But way more than that, I just wanted to be around her. It’s corny as fuck but true: If someone had told me I could freeze any minute and spend the rest of my life in it, I would have picked Jocelyn and me sitting on that bench in front of the Amherst Post Office. But who the fuck has the power to grant that kind of perpetual happiness? And if they did have it, why would they wield it on my behalf?

“I know there’s nothing for you in New York,” I said.

“And Amherst is what, the world capital of culture and opportunity?”

“It is.” I flung open my arms like Mary Tyler Moore at the end of the opening credits. “Everything you need—and I don’t mean some slick job or material shit, but the important stuff—is all right here.”

“Really? Like what kind of important stuff?”

“The important stuff. Hey, are you hungry? I’m fucking starving. Want to split a foo yung at Hunan the Barbarian’s?”

“You know what I think?” she asked. “I think you love distraction.”

“Did you say something?”

She was free with her hands. She punched me in the stomach.

“Someone help me, please!” I called out. She hit me again, but harder. “I’d puke right now, but I’m so hungry, there’s nothing in my stomach to puke.” I faked a retch.

“You love distraction. Maybe more than anybody I’ve ever met.”

“I told you I was different.”

“You might be.” She kissed me first. It took about five seconds before we were officially mashing in public. If I had been a mere witness to it, I would have hurled at our feet.

PAMELA’S SUBURBAN—with winterized boat still in tow—was parked in front of the house. I could see the back of James’s head behind the wheel. I coasted to a stop on the driver’s side. His window was open a crack, and he was talking on the phone, smoking. When he saw me, he rolled the window down to halfway, and smoke poured over the outside of it like water over a falls.

“Just the prick I want to see,” he said. “No, not you—my brother-in-law. You, Teddy, are the prick I never want to see.” James would probably always call me his brother-in-law, like he was divorcing only my sister and not me. “I’ll be there in a few. Yeah, we’re all set. Yes. Yes. Yes, Teddy,” he said, agitated. “No. No, I have two full rolls in my truck as we speak. No, twenty-fives. It’s plenty. Trust me. Because I’ve been doing this job since I was seventeen’s how I know.” He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at me in disbelief. “How about if it isn’t enough, I drive back to Orleans and get another roll and finish up alone?” The last proviso seemed to satisfy Teddy. James listened.

I sat there on the bike—on hold. I looked in the back of the Suburban to catch a glimpse of whatever kind of rolls James was sure would be enough for whatever job they were talking about. Roy was falling in and out of sleep, strapped into a car seat directly behind the front passenger seat. His head kept drooping forward, and he’d snap it upright, doze back to sleep, and so on.

“I just have to drop my kid off,” James said. “I don’t know, fifteen minutes.” Then he hung up. “Fuck me,” he said to the gods.

“What’s up?” I said.

“The fucking guy—” He stopped himself when he saw me and the bike. “How you holding up?”

“Eh, you know.”

“That’s a nice ride you got there. Reminds me of my buddy Dogshit.” James had a friend who actually answered to the name Dogshit. When Dogshit was a teenager he passed out at the wheel and cracked his two upper incisors. He never got them fixed, and they turned brown, like stubborn leaves that refused to fall. “You know Dogshit,” James said, pulling at the outer corners of his eyes because Dogshit’s mother was Korean.

I’d met him a few times. I called him David at first, and he looked at me like I had two heads, both filled with teeth more fucked up than his own.

“They busted him for DUI, and he wasn’t even driving. He was parked.” James found his recollection of the story entertaining. “He had to get back and forth to the boatyard on a friggin’ ten-speed. You know, with the handlebars?” He traced the outlines of ram’s horns. “Funny as all fuck, Dogshit pulling up all out of breath and he’s pissed off, bitching to himself.” James tapped his front tooth. “Nobody would give him a lift—I swear to Christ—just so we could watch him ride up in the mornings . . .” James trailed off, quieted by his own take on nostalgia. “He’s a good shit, though, Dogshit.”

“At least it’s exercise.” I pulled the front end of Sweet Thunder up into a stationary wheelie position. The tire knocked the driver’s-side mirror out of whack.

“Hey, easy, easy.” James readjusted the mirror. “Yo, what’s this coming up behind us?” I turned around a lot more conspicuously than I would have had I known he was talking about Marie and not an El Camino or a Har ley. She was wearing the same Kelly green track jacket. I was embarrassed because she had to think we were gawking at her. She turned her eyes to the ground. I spun back around and leaned forward with my forearms on the handlebars.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath, “I thought you were talking about a car.”

“Cars, women, whatever, they all like to be looked at.” James and I pretended not to notice her as she walked past the Suburban. She was carrying a brown paper bag large enough for a six-pack and maybe a fifth of something. She drew the package closer to her breast. “Weird,” I said when she was well out of earshot.

“You got that right.”

“No, she bummed a beer and a smoke off me the other night,” I whispered.

“Get the fuck out of here,” James said.

“I’m serious. I was sitting right there, and she was walking by, just like that.”

“No shit.”

I nodded.

“What did you guys talk about?”

“Nothing. She skulled the beer in like two seconds, and that was it.”

“Interesting,” said James. “You must have made some first impression.”

“Or she doesn’t remember.” I drank from my thumb. “Seems to me like she has a bit of a battle with a bottle, if you know what I’m talking about.”

“It’s fucking Cape Cod for chrissake,” James said. “I’d still like to throw a fuck into that.” I didn’t second that emotion. James shot a look at me. “What, you wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trust me, if you saw her in a bikini you’d know. Meat on her bones. Nice shitter. Tattoos everywhere. It’s hot.” He inhaled through his clenched teeth. “I’m into that Elvira thing. Not for anything serious, but a couple hours, no strings attached? Just tell me where to be.” James could talk a good game, but to be honest, I didn’t know how much of a follow-through guy he was. Then again, he must have followed through with enough of the wrong shit for my sister to want to divorce him. Pamela tried confiding in me when they were first having problems, but I told her I was too screwed up over Jocelyn to be of any use to her. After that, I’d ask her perfunctorily how things were going. She’d say “Same,” “Worse,” or “Better” if she said anything at all. “Okay,” I said to James. “If this woman asked you to go—right this minute—you would?”

“And you’d watch Roy?”

“Sure, whatever.”

James consulted his watch and smiled. “In a New York minute.”

“Not me. I couldn’t do that, especially now.”

“Well, it’s a mute point, isn’t it? I don’t see her coming back for you anyway.” He thought I was judging him when in fact I was judging myself.

“What I meant was, the less I know someone, the worse the whole thing is for me. You’re a free man—”

“Almost.”

“I don’t care who you fuck around with.” I really didn’t.

James understood. He handed me the Suburban’s glowing cigarette lighter as a peace offering. He let his sensitive side show. “Do you have trouble hoisting?”

“Fuck no.”

“Don’t get worked up. I’m just asking.” He ticked my potential impotence off his checklist. He wiggled his pinkie. “Do you have a tiny pecker?”

“Huh?”

“That’s not your fault, either. It’s not like you chose it. You get the dick you’re born with.” He went on to paraphrase from his rickety cosmology. “Look, you’re a decent guy from what I know of you. And you’re not the ugliest motherfucker out there. A little shaggy-looking, maybe, but chicks might mistake that for your style. So if you think you have to lay a bunch of groundwork before you can lay pipe, you’ve got to have some kind of dick issue. Or—and this is a tougher nut to crack”—he pointed the pinkie at me—“you think you have a dick issue.”

I watched Marie disappear. “I’m as average as the next guy.”

“Well, there you go.”

Roy let out a single cry, then smiled when he saw his old man’s big face looking back at him.

“Wook who woke up,” James said, his eyes wide with fake surprise. Adults—especially big, hairy men—talking like babies creeps me out. Roy was beaming.

“God, he looks so much like Pamela,” I said.

“Everybody says that. I don’t see it.”

“He looks like you, too. But he looks a lot like her.”

“He’s the spitting image of my old man,” James said. He was still admiring Roy when he shot me a look out of the corner of his eye. “Hey, I need to ask you a favor.”

“What is it?” I couldn’t imagine what someone in my position could do for anyone short of maybe elevate their head until the ambulance arrived.

“This big emergency repair’s getting towed in from P-town.” James checked his watch again. “Fuck, it’s probably there already. Some rich fruits who want it done yesterday and are willing to pay through the ass.” He let the concept of big-money-to-be-made spin in the air.

“And?”

“I was wondering if you could watch Roy for a few hours.”

Giving my undivided care and attention to a leaky need machine was among the least appealing of my options. “For real?”

“Honest to God.” He pulled a silver crucifix from under his shirt and kissed it.

“Can’t Pamela?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” He was reluctant to show his hand.

Roy and I were basically strangers to each other. “Wouldn’t he be better off with her?”

“Of course he would, but if I ask her, it’ll look like I can’t hold up my end of the bargain.” He hardened like a quick-set epoxy. “And I don’t want to give her any friggin’ reason not to let me have my time with him.”

“I don’t think she’d do something like that.”

“Oh, no?” He was dying for me to dare him.

“You know what? I don’t want to know.”

“No, you don’t. Believe me. There’s a lot of shit you wouldn’t think she’d do.” He lightened up when it dawned on him I wasn’t Dogshit. “Seriously, the kid’s a breeze. And what the fuck, it’s only for a couple hours.”

I looked at Roy. He was trying to convince a lime green Nerf football bigger than his face that it could fit in his mouth. When I didn’t jump at the chance to be his mother for the day, James pulled out the guilt gun.

“Plus, one hand washes the other, right?” He forced my eyes with his own toward the ranch house I was staying in free of charge. He was right about one hand washing the other, but I still thought he was a prick for saying it and cashing in so soon.

“Sure. I’ll take him for a while.”

“See, kid? I told you he’d do it.” James clapped his hands, then reached back and tickled Roy’s stomach. He laughed so hard he got the hiccups.

I WAS SITTING on the back porch in the cool early-September night. The phone was stretched as far as it would go through the back door. Jocelyn’s call was already over an hour and a half late. It was the fourth week into our long-distance relationship. I missed her a lot. When she’d called me from work earlier in the day, she still wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get away from New York for the weekend. I pressed her hard to come up to Amherst. She said she really wanted to, but she was trying to make a good impression at
Redbook
. She was told on the q.t. by her internship supervisor there that a junior associate editor position might be opening up in the next few months. I would have made the trip to see her, but it was back-to-school weekend, and Lello’s directive to the entire waitstaff had come down weeks earlier: Don’t even ask for the time off. Richie said he was going to put in for the weekend off anyway, just to fuck with Lello.