Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (9 page)

“Shut up, Nate,” he says. “Don't do another goddamn thing.”

Which, I should talk. Because contrary to what you might think about me, I am not Coco Ferguson: Sex-Having Specialist. Which is the name Necro gave me when I was fifteen and told him I first became a Sex-Having Specialist with Lisa Alisi from Henrietta. And as I fall asleep in the apartment's scabies recliner, I think: Dear God please don't let anybody actually follow up with Lisa Alisi from Henrietta, because they would learn that I haven't even lost my virginity to my pillow. And then I would no longer be able to tell myself, after a bad night, “Oh well, at least people still think I lost my virginity to Lisa Alisi from Henrietta!”

Then, I'm awoken by, of all things:

“I'm Jeffrey Dahmer! I'm Arthur Shawcross! I'm Jeffrey Dahmer!”

Lip Cheese is standing in front of Spirit Bunny's bedroom door down the hall. He stares upward, no expression on his face, hands folded at his waist, waiting, neutral-like, like a Boy Scout ringing doorbells on a can drive.

Spirit Bunny opens her bedroom door, squinting at him in a tank top and orange boxers with the Coca-Cola logo.

“I ate a dude! I can do anything!” Lip Cheese says. “I've memorized this address!”

Spirit Bunny rubs her eye and drifts toward the door jamb. “Okay, that kind of abrasiveness is really not what we're about here,” she whispers. “You want to sleep in the chair outside, that's tops. But you need to know that within this space, you are riding the tip. Riding—the tip.”

“And you have enough hair on your head to clothe a small child!” Lip Cheese yells.

On the drive home, passenger-side windows fogging up with Lip Cheese's having to piss, probably, here comes a preview for the movie
Why Lip Cheese Will Die in a Life of Priestlike Anger: The Proto-Stachening of Lip Cheese
. Which was the joke we made up when Lip Cheese slept over once, and we noticed how movie titles were always “The [Somethening] of [Some Guy's Name]”;
The Fridgication of William Perry
, we said. Which eventually turned into the Proto-Stachening. The Proto-Stachening, right here, of why there is no way Lip Cheese will be able to live a full life:

“Hey Nate?” Lip Cheese asks, voice kernel-sized in the dark of the passenger seat.

“What.”

“Will you kill me?”

“Wait. What?” I say.

“As in, just, you know, pop me in the head.”

“I have to drop you off in—where am I going to get the gun?”

“Guess Necro had the right idea. Might as well light myself on fire,” he says, voice getting knots in its yo-yo string.
“Lip Cheese the Maverick Jetpants. Gets
all
the women on a conveyor belt.”

He's trying not to sniffle. “That girl?” I say. “How she kept rubbing her eye? That story about that van?”

But when you think the earthquake needle is about to settle, Lip Cheese shoves open the passenger door; wind rumbles in off the highway; the car jackhammers into the rumble strip.

“Lip Cheese!” I yell over the windquake.

“Gonna do it myself,” he yells, seat belt stretching.

“Quit it! Quit it!” I go, slapping his shoulder, grabbing at his shirt. “I'll crash the car!”

He closes the door. I yank the car back into the lane. All quiet.

“I'm just trying to do the practical thing,” he says. “I'm just trying to be practical.”

So to keep him from crying until his tears form people, here's what I do. As Buffalo's early shift wakes up, me and Lip Cheese go to get Gatorades at a Wegmans in Depew or somewhere. The Wegmans building is huge, its red-lit logo turning pink in the sunrise. We walk through the heat blasters in the entrance's corridor, and inside, it's bright. Boxes and pallets are in the aisles, and men with tattoos fading under their arm hair maneuver industrial floor sweepers. Def Leppard's “Hysteria” sounds like brittle crunch through the speakers in the store's ceiling.

Me and Lip Cheese set our Gatorades on the checkout conveyor. When who is in front of us, in line, paying for coffee and a pre-rolled sandwich, but Mindy Fale?

“Nate?” she says.

She's put on weight, in a beer-and-chested-up sort of way—all tits and failure. Her chin juts like a punter's chin-guard, and under the white semi-see-through sleeve of her work shirt, there's a Tasmanian Devil tattoo on her shoulder.

“Oh. Hey. Wait—hey!” I already hate myself. I'm already back in the low-ceiling halls of high school, when Mindy Fale and me got into a mock kickboxing match once, in the hallway, shoehorning each other into pretend headlocks. I'd listen to her laugh and try to figure out how she'd sound in bed. I guess she was always okay; she was maybe my eleventh choice for a girlfriend.

“Do you live here?” I say to her.

“Nope. Still in Gates! Parents and everything!” she smiles in an angry-chipper kind of way.

“Why are you all the way in Buffalo?”

She pays for her food, sighs, plants a palm on the bagging area, and leans.

“I was at Fredonia until about November, but it's stupid, political,” she says. “Professors know what they want to see, and if you don't do that, well. Now I'm making the drive to work at USNY Insurance. Buffalo office. Claims!” She makes a stiff thumbs-up sign.

The cashier scans our Gatorades. Mindy Fale looks at me, then Lip Cheese, and probably notices our reddened eyes and our pre-hangover sniffles.

“What were
you
up to last night?” she says.

And so I say—My One Asterisk: “More like, what was Lip Cheese up to?” Like I'm amazed and annoyed at him.
“Coco Ferguson, Mustache Express, this kid. A celebrity sex tape waiting to happen.”

Lip Cheese pays for our Gatorades. We all three of us walk outside, where there's a lone set of tire tracks, going all the way diagonally across the parking-lot slush. Mindy Fale walks toward her car, a white Civic with no wheel covers.

“Well, if you're going to be a tape,” she says, half-grinning at Lip Cheese a little. “Might as well be a—” She waves, grocery bag swinging around her arm.

After she drives off, though, look at Lip Cheese, trying not to smile. That's the asterisk, My One Asterisk, that I've tacked on to him.

“But since I'm not going to tell anyone what happened at that girl's apartment, you need to do something for me, Lip Cheese,” I say.

“Sure Nate! Anything!”

“Since Necro still for whatever reason talks to you, you need to follow him around, do some Ninja Recon.”

“But why?” he says, ladling it on like Sadness Molassness.

“To give him shit for NecronicA, Lip Cheese! For acting like the Colonel Hellstache Unabomber. Just, you know, to find something Uncomebackable, that's all. Maybe there's something weird in his browser history, I don't know.”

Lip Cheese frowns like a toy soldier, head tilted the way dogs do when they can sense something's wrong with you.

“The kid practically set you on fire in a painting, Lip Cheese,” I say. “You want to spend the rest of your life being everybody else's Washcloth Master? ‘I'm Jeffrey Dahmer?' Think with your
head
once in your life.”

Real Dad sits on a pastel loveseat, which came with his room, resting one foot on a plastic Lego-filled storage bin that he's using as a coffee table. His Stray Cats leather jacket straddles the loveseat's right armrest, sleeves dangling, and the sun in the window turns his stray balding-ponytail hair into lightbulb filament. The rip in his jeans is big enough for his entire knee to fit through.

“Squeezebeagler, at the Bug Jar tonight,” he says, rubbing his chin. “Sonic cocktail of Muler and Nod, a jigger of Hilkka, stirred with Lethargy breakdowns.”

“Nice!” I say, and bounce in the pastel blue chair that also came with his room.

“It is not nice, Nate. You cannot handle that combination. You bring your Rock Condom. Because in rock and roll, you only get one condom. It's a rule.”

“But it'd be awesome if there was a guy named Jigger,” I say, even though I'm too jolted up to Bring the Funny. “Or a dog, or a bird you could name Jigger. I don't know.”

He smirks and recrosses his legs, tasting the joke like wine. “Or name it like My Dad?” he says. “'I'd like to schedule an anal-sacs examination for My Dad at 2 p.m.? My Dad has chunks of Frisbee in his fecal samples?”

I crack up and sit on my hands. “Yeah,” I say.

Real Dad leans back, ankle on knee. “Just plug it into the formula. Comedians, certainly, have tackled this: ‘My Dad's been chewing on his elbow, I think he might have roundworm. I'd like to make an appointment.' Actually,” he says, “speaking of appointments, did Mom take me off her insurance?”

Which, I don't know about you? But I tune the fuck out whenever I hear words like premium or HMO. Because, Real Dad is saying something about catastrophic coverage, and clobetasol propionate. And I'm more just listening to his tone when he says, sounding like he's taking a stand: “—because, if all I can get is one of these plans online with a $2,500 deductible then I am going to send photographs of myself to her every day so she can chart how I deteriorate.”

So I say, just to say something: “Guess you have to let her know who's boss.”

Real Dad convulses laughing suddenly, leaning over to one side, crossing his legs—this focused, aggressive-sounding cackling. When I was barely even trying to Bring the Funny, and my Joke Rolodex hasn't been stocked, technically, for days.

Which makes me feel great! Because Real Dad's joke-to-actually-laughing-at-other-people's-jokes ratio is The-Universe-to-One. Which makes me feel like I can relax, maybe even go four or five turns in conversation without having to Bring the Funny again.

“Wow. Show them who's boss,” he says, still shaking off rounds of cracking up. He wipes his forehead with his palm.

Since Real Dad isn't a hug or handshake man, I open the mini fridge in his kitchenette and get the larger bottle of De Ranke Kriek. The price tag says $18.00, which he can apparently afford, and I get a tulip glass that's standing top-down and stuck to a paper towel laid on the counter next to the sink.

I pour him a glass, and he raises it, as in cheers, not looking up. “To who's boss.” He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head.

So, you smell the cigarette smoke that's been left over from the practically 1700s. And you see Real Dad's Blockbuster khakis shoved into the corner; the issues of NME and Magnet in the empty fish tank, the container of pomade; the Ranger Bob WUHF lunchbox he paid eighty dollars for and the Pez dispensers—of Donald Duck, Darth Vader, etc.—arranged on his bookshelf like they're mantel ornaments. You see Real Dad's twitching eyelid, and his hands scratched red from eczema, and the picture of the guy who invented the theremin in his bedroom. But that's also kind of why I love my dad: He's forty-seven but he Brings the Funny way better than I do. He has all these VHS tapes of Robert Forster movies, and performances of Steve Gadd and Tony Levin in various bands, and some mugshot of David Bowie when he got arrested for marijuana after a War Memorial show (“The newspaper reported that also arrested was a James Osterberg, Jr., 28, of Ypsilanti, Michigan,” Real Dad said, really excited about it), and he has all these weird records about Halloween and makes hilarious
jokes about them, and he makes me wish I knew those things, too, so that I could rip on people as well as he does. You think I talk fast, listen to Real Dad:

“Carl, this guy who buys vinyl at the Bop Shop, used to be a record producer in the 1970s,” he says. “Carl, he'll be there tonight. He and Squeezebeagler's guitar player used to be in Paul Mitchell? Before that in The Tinklemen? My previous boss at Blockhustler played lacrosse with Tam, Squeezebeagler's singer, Rocker of a Million Faces. He held cockroach-smashing parties with Tam. Take your shoe in your hand, turn off the lights, turn them back on, watch the cockroaches trickle out, and swing for the floor.”

See what I mean? Real Dad and the people he knows.

“They had to give Tam a rhythm guitar to keep him from sticking his hands down his pants while he was singing.”

“They're that good, he has to Touch his Puppy to it,” I go.

He punches his right arm up into the sleeve of his Stray Cats jacket and slaps his pants pocket to check his keys: “A masturbation joke? No, man! That's novice! Please don't say that around anyone tonight. Please don't. Please.”

He takes his tube of hand cream from his pocket and rubs the stuff over his fingers and slips it back into his pocket. He pours some De Ranke into a plastic cup for me so I can be buzzed on the ride there. Since I'm twenty, Real Dad says we need to get to the Bug Jar early, before the bouncer starts watching the door.

“There are stories about the people you'll meet tonight, stories,” he says. “Sverg, one of the music writers for
City
, he'll be there—stellar guy, says some really poignant, subversive
things. Sverg was telling me Squeezebeagler's guitarist, drunk one night, tried to go home and pass out in his apartment, but he woke up, and instead he was just in some lady's house!”