by Sam Lipsyte
Later we’d invent new personas, meet the same shitty fate all over again. One day Gary said, “Screw this.” We went outside to shoot hoops.
“Don’t blame me,” Todd called out after us. “I’m not God. I’m just the dungeon master.”
Walking down the hallway of Nice Horizons I wondered what menace lurked behind door number last, a slab of blond wood with a dry erase board hanging from a hook. Gary knocked, and just as he did, I read the note penned in neat lunatic script near the edge of the board:
Doc, sorry I missed our last group: I took your advice and it worked, but it hurt like a bastard. Best, Alvin.
Gary paused, knocked again.
“Enter,” said a voice.
I followed the Retractor into the dim concrete box. A penitent’s cell: desk, bed, tiny TV. My old dorm room, the one I’d inhabited for half a semester before realizing there was nothing I could misconstrue in college I couldn’t misapprehend in the real world, had more amenities. A lean bearded man sat backward on a swivel chair. He bobbed slowly, chest snug upon the spongy pad, a frothy beige shake in his hand. The room smelled of Pine-Sol and pipe tobacco, cherry-scented.
“Remember me?” said Gary.
“The broken boy who reamed me good,” said Doc Felix.
A tendon in his neck twittered as he spoke. His eyes stayed locked, peerless. Felix had a majesty to him I had not expected. It couldn’t just be the power shake. He seemed some kind of sage in his ruin.
“That’s right,” said Gary.
“You took everything I had. What else do you want?”
“Got a beer?” said Gary.
“There’s no alcohol here. This is a medical facility.”
“Got any medicine?”
I laughed.
“Who’s this guy?” said Doc Felix.
“Teabag.”
“You had to bring a goon? Are you that scared of bad old Felix? And why does he have that fake-sounding laugh?”
“It’s my real laugh,” I said.
“Sounds a little worked to me,” said Felix.
“He’s not a goon,” said Gary. “He’s just gotten fat.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t you remember Teabag?” said Gary. “I used to go on about him in our sessions. Remember, the guy who was holding me back?”
“Thanks again,” I said.
“Burned my notes,” said Doc Felix. “I’m going to drink my lunch now. Feel free to sit down.”
We perched on his narrow bed. The quilt stretched over it was stained, ancient. It had a rodeo on it. Cowboys on bulls, broncos.
“That blanket goes back,” said Felix.
“Looks it,” I said.
“You can see my early spurts.”
“Is that what those are?”
“Mementos,” said Felix. “Tribal markings. Tree rings.”
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” said Gary.
“I know why you’re here.”
“Why am I here, then?”
Gary’s voice bore the whiny vibrato of an arrogant child, the kid he used to be, the one about to get caught out for breaking the vase, spraying the schnauzer’s balls with silver paint. It was tough to watch old Goony this way, but a buddy sticks by through all phases of the asinine.
“You’re here,” said Felix, “because you’re worried that maybe everything was true, after all. Everything except the retraction. You’re here because you’ve been having the dreams again. You’re here because you’re realizing that what your mother and father did to you cannot be undone just by denying it happened, by saying, ‘Oh, my, I’m so sorry. I must have had it all wrong!’ So, you want me to make it okay again, like it was for a little while, until it wasn’t okay anymore because you slacked off and drifted away from my care. That’s why you’re here.”
Gary gnawed at his nub.
“So now what?” he said.
“Now what what?”
“I need your help.”
“It’s too late.”
“I’ll give you your money back.”
“I don’t want the money Whoever has the money is weakened. It’s like a bad amulet. Do you understand?”
“I have to know what really happened.”
“Do you have a time machine?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll never know what happened.”
“I dream about the goats,” said Gary. “Octavian, my twin. I have to get past this.”
“Nobody gets past anything.”
“Or work through it.”
“Nobody works through anything, either.”
“Then I have to accept it.”
“Who could accept such a thing?”
“Learn to live with it, then.”
“That’s what you’re doing.”
“But what about the pain?”
“Love it or leave it,” said Doc Felix.
“That’s it?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“What else?”
Felix swiveled away, drank down the rest of his shake.
“May you be gang-fucked by flyblown wildebeests.”
Shop-N-Pay
HELL OF A DAY TODAY, Catamounts. So damn close to promising. Already by noon I’d polished up some FakeFacts, put a dent in the dishes, even banged out a few pushups on the kitchen floor. The sweet burn lingered in my shoulders for hours.
It seemed your faithful correspondent had turned over a new leaf, or at least wiped some larval slime off the old one, was, in any event, readying himself for a new Minerian epoch, one notable for relative efficiency in the industrial sector and widespread cultural giddiness.
A long boom was in the offing, a mood I could ride into early evening.
Then the mailman came with the mail, for which he’s not to blame, handed over the usual sheaf of bills, bill notices, final bill warnings. My whole life is either due or past due, Valley Cats. Forests are falling for the burgeoning need to threaten me.
There, hidden in the grim bundle, was the card:
TIME WILL TAKE YOU ON!
THE EASTERN VALLEY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION PRESENTS
A TOGETHERING
FIVE YEARS OF CLASSES: ’86–’90
DON BERLIN’S PARTY GARDEN, RT. 17
DRINKS AND DINNER SERVED
MASTER OF CEREMONIES: SALVATORE FONTANA
SPECIAL GUESTS: CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE GLEN
MENNINGER, SPACKLEFINGER
Catamounts, let me be certain I understand the big plan. We’re all to drive over to Don Berlin’s and hop on the cosmic scales, weigh our failures, our follies, our fat asses, all of us, Glen Menninger, even, Stacy Ryson, Mikey Saladin.
All of us, minus the dead.
Minus Miner, too, if I can help it.
I called my father, asked if he had any work at the Moonbeam for the night in question.
Daddy Miner said he had a dinner for the United Federation of Shamans scheduled, could use an extra hand with the bus trays.
“You hear about Berlin?”
“Another wall?” I said.
I feared my father had heard about the Togethering, would berate me if I told him I wasn’t going. Nothing pisses him off like people trying to avoid awkward social encounters in rented halls, even somebody else’s rented hall. You have to care about your industry as a whole.
“Not Germany,” he said now. “New Jersey. Don Berlin.”
“No, what?”
“Rumors, is all. I’ve got a guy at the health department. People are talking. Code violations at the Party Garden. Oh, how the mighty have fucked up.”
“They’re going to shut him down?”
“Probably not,” said my father. “It’s just talk. I’m sure it’ll all work out.”
“Buy them off?”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“How does it work?”
“How does what work? I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said my father, hung up.
He called back later on a pay phone, said he thought his lines were tapped.
“The health department?”
“It’s a government agency.”
ALUMS, I’m a bit worried about Gary. He hasn’t been himself since our visit to Nice Horizons, if Garyhood can be defined as a kind of viscous swirl of big-hearted sadism blended with thick chunks of auto-destructive habitude and the merest tincture of regret.
Doc Felix, once again, has screwed old Guano up but good.
I’m not sure how to help him, either.
Last night I walked over to the Retractor Pad, took my usual spot on the terrace bench. Below us, on the loading bay of the mayonnaise factory, a commotion. A stocky guy in coveralls stood on the platform, called out to the factory doors.
“Come out like a man!” he said. “Come the fuck out and get your man-beating!”
“It’s our lucky day,” I said. “Ringside seats.”
“Asshole,” said Gary, got up, took his bong inside.
We sat in the living room and watched TV, an old cop show. Men in checkered suits batted each other into big spools of wire on a factory floor. Maybe the incident pending outside was based on this episode.
“Assholes,” said Gary, clicked over to a show about sea life. Something furred, five-spoked, filled the screen.
“That’s a sea star,” I said.
“What, are you fucking my girlfriend, too?”
I kept my eyes on the coral reef. The eyes are windows into men’s boners, and I feared Gary would see mine. I heard the click of his Bic lighter, the charry suck.
“You know I’d never do that,” I said.
“She’d never let you do it,” said Gary.
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is everything.”
Noises rose up from the factory dock, something soft heaved down on something hard, corrugated metal, maybe, followed by a high human wail.
“Man-beating in progress,” said Gary.
“Some scientists,” said the television, “have ignited controversy regarding the name of this enchanting creature. The starfish, you see, is not a fish at all.”
“The fuck it’s not!” said Gary, poked back behind him at the bookshelf, snatched down a thousand-page biography of Elvis I’d once given him for his birthday, whipped it. The book hit the plastic base of the television, bounced to the carpet.
“That would have been genius,” I said.
“Go fuck yourself,” said Gary.
“Hey,” I said. “Calm down. What’s with you? I’m not your enemy.”
“You’re an enemy of feeling,” said Gary, got up, stalked off to the kitchen.
I sat alone for a while, watched hairy things float and flutter.
TODAY Penny Bettis called to tell me Fizz had been discontinued.
“Nothing personal,” she said. “Company cuts.”
I told Penny what a shame that was. We jawed for a while about the many vital journals going under these days, how a virtual silencing of the American conversation had ensued. Or maybe it was just me jawing.
I think Penny Bettis had already hung up.
I called my father and asked for more shifts at the Moonbeam, told him how a few days ago Pete had barged past me into the apartment, run the tap, inspected the plaster on the walls.
“Place should be ready in no time,” he’d said.
“Ready for what?”
“Decent tenants.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Daddy Miner now. “By the way, a friend of yours called here. Guy named Bob Price.”
“What the hell did he want?”
“Said he wanted to volunteer in the kitchen. Something about research for a book.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d been misrepresented enough in your mother’s plays. I gave him Don Berlin’s number.”
“Good.”
I WENT for a walk around the block. I needed air, new vantages. Moonbeam stopgap notwithstanding, I knew I was pretty much screwed. When does it end, Catamounts? I’m no philosopher, but when does it fucking end—this carousel, or whirligig, or whatever spinning thingamabob it is which whips us with terrible speed back to the same hopeless place we started? Is life just this ceaseless cycle of weariness and fright, or is there some luxurious interlude I’ve somehow missed?
Responses appreciated!
Now a van puttered past, a dented heap tricked out with stickers and crepe, a multidirectional bullhorn bolted to the roof.
“Vote Glen Menninger for congressman! He has money! He knows people who have money!”
Through the windshield you could see shiny claws on the wheel.
“Vinnie!” I called. “Lazlo!”
The van pulled over to the curb. Vinnie curled himself out the window, hopped to the sidewalk.
“Miner, how are you?”
“Jesus, Lazlo,” I said.
Have any Valley Cats seen Vinnie Lazlo lately? All this time I’ve been drinking too much and cursing the inevitable he must have been at the gym. He’s a freaking Adonis with forks coming out of his sleeves. I asked him about the forks, too. We were never buddies but there was always something understood between us. Maybe it goes back to the locker room, the day I got my Teabag tag, Vinnie whinnying under the sink while Philly and Friends pinned me down and Philly shimmied up my chest, his balls some pink tuberous bulb sprouting from his clenched fist.
“Teabag that faggot!” Brett Meachum said. “Teabag him!”
My head pincered between Philly’s knees, I felt the smooth bulb wrinkle, bob loose in my eye.
“Look, he likes it!”
“Dickslap him!” somebody else, maybe Stan Damon, said.
“Dude, now you’re being a faggot!” another called.
“No, I’m just saying dickslap him.”
Vinnie must have seen Will Paulsen burst in then, throw Philly up against the wall, give him that hard chop to the gut. Philly slid to the tiles and his cronies fled.
“You’re fucked,” Philly moaned, crawled off.
That’s when Vinnie Lazlo waved his weak hooks, clicked out from under the sink. I wonder if he noticed the nod Will gave me before he left the locker room that day, the nod that said I saved you this time, stranger, but now I must make my lonesome hero’s journey of a thousand heads or whatever and anyway we are all of us fucked, we are all of us always fucked on this so-called road of life, pitted and rutted and rife with fiends as it is, so do not believe for a moment you have truly been saved from anything, for the road never ends, only you end, another meat sack heaped on the berm.
I think that’s what the nod meant.
Maybe it meant something else.
“I do have hands,” said Vinnie now. “Very high-tech. Flexible. But I missed the hooks. Truth is, chicks go for the hooks. I wear the hands when I have to, the hooks when I can.”
“You look great, Vinnie.”
“Thanks. I’m a decathlete. I play the mandolin, sculpt. I do all the things the handed do.”
“Yeah, I’ve been sculpting a lot lately.”
“Same old Teabag. How’s Gary?”
“He’s okay.”
“No three-ways with the folks these days?”
“He’s working on it,” I laughed.
I guess Vinnie always hated Gary for cutting his thumb off. Maybe Vinnie took it as a taunt, though I know Gary wasn’t thinking of Vinnie when he did it. God knows what Gary was thinking. I’m still partial to the late show theory.
“Vinnie,” I said, “are you working for Glen Menninger?”
“Volunteering.”
“Why?”
“I believe in his vision.”
“But he’s a dick.”
“He could be a great leader.”
“Man, I’d vote for you long before I’d vote for him. I’d vote for Stacy Ryson. I did vote for Stacy Ryson.”
“This isn’t Eastern Valley, Tea. This is reality. This is down-and-dirty politics with
real lives and actual ideas at stake. Menninger’s the man for our times. He has money. He knows people who have money.”
“Yeah, I heard you going on about that from the van. That’s kind of a weird slogan, don’t you think?”
“I don’t mean to be rude, Tea, but the only people who think it’s weird are the weirdos themselves. People living in a fantasy world, a world without legitimate reasons for torture and all the cars run on strawberry ice cream.”
“Interesting.”
“I don’t mean to get on my soapbox, but I was born without hands. Look at me now. I made it. Fuck the victims. I mean, victim-hood.”
“Your dad is a bank president.”
“I know what my dad does.”
“Just saying,” I said.
“Your dad owns a bar and a catering hall.”
“So?”
“You look pretty fat these days.”
“Thanks.”
“Just saying,” said Vinnie. “Anyway, I should get going. Here, take some literature. We can always use another hand.”
Vinnie didn’t crack the smile I expected. He’d always delighted in dumb allusions to his condition. But that was the old Vinnie. He was dead now. The new Vinnie slid back into his van, pulled away from the curb. Where the same old Teabag stood. The fat bastard who’d forced a chuckle at the expense of his best and only friend.
God, Catamounts.
Blow my friggin’ head off.
AT THE SHOP-N-PAY I walked my typical circuit, down cleaning goods, up party food. The synchronicity puts me at peace. The sports drinks are the same unnatural hues as the toilet cleansers. The snack chips come in canisters like those for the scouring powders. Maybe I’m nostalgic for that simpler time when synthetics aroused such jubilance, before the food freaks began clamoring for actual food, fruit from the trees, roots from the earth. I’d always hoped we’d get down to one item, an energy bar, say, which, after eaten and voided, could be suitable for use as spermicidal lubricant. Or, with a few molecular nips and tucks, deodorant. No more mushy pears, lettuce the texture of wet tissue paper. Shunt those to an uncooled corner. Shelf space would be reserved for the one product in its principal flavors: wicked, awesome, phat, phresh, skyberry.