Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

  “We know about you!” someone called.

  “Oh, yeah? What do you know?”

  “You’re the man!”

  “That’s right, son, I am the man, at least for the next few hours, and this man hereby guarantees you a spectacular Togethering, a night you will never forget! I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the evening wears on and the liquor kicks in, but for now, before the music and dancing commence, I’d like to introduce a Catamount who’s made us all proud, whose personal warmth and political vision have helped catapult this region out of the cesspit and into the environs of respectable mediocrity. Ladies and gentleman, the next governor of his own living room, Glen ‘Double Dip’ Menninger!”

  The legislator climbed the stage, took the mike from Fontana’s hand.

  “Thanks, Sal. And I’d just like to say that during my time researching the health-care sector for a proposed bill I came across several fine rehab clinics which might suit your needs.”

  Menninger snickered. Fontana, asquat near the drum riser, swiveled a mammoth, imaginary phallus in the state senator’s direction.

  “To begin, I just want to convey how much my Eastern Valley days have meant to me as husband, father, public servant, and, perhaps, future congressman from this district who promises to …

  “Gracias, El Jefe,” said Fontana, snatched the microphone from Menninger’s hand. “We’ve got to keep this moving along. And boy do we have a special treat for you now. I remember this kid when he was a whiny little maggot with immaculate hair. He’d come running to my office every time somebody looked at him funny. I’d let him sit there and read his teenybopper magazines, but eventually I got fed up, told him to shut his trap and carry a buck knife. I’m not sure if he ever took my advice, but he returns to us tonight with a calculatingly filthy hairdo and a rather inexplicable run of success with a collection of tired chord progressions and overwrought lyrics he purports to be rock ‘n’ roll. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Glave Wilkerson and the Spacklers!”

  Gary joined me near the kitchen door, a joint reaching roach-hood pinched between his lips.

  “Fontana’s bringing it tonight,” he said. “Bless him.”

  He sparked his lighter and the flame overshot, torched the tip of his nose.

  “Shit!”

  SPACKLEFINGER TOOK THE STAGE with the stoic, heavy-booted gait of astronauts, men in quiet awe of their imminent triumph. They spent precisely forever strapping on their axes, adjusting their electronics. Space launches, in fact, required fewer systems checks. Finally Glave pushed some loose strands of feral hair away, leaned into the microphone.

  “Thanks, Principal Fontana, for that, I guess, introduction. Nonetheless,” Glave paused, “nonetheless, we intend to rock you full throttle tonight. I can’t say you all believed in me when it counted, or that I couldn’t have done it without you, because even the really die-hard Spacklefinger fans drifted off a few years ago, but what the fuck, I forgive you. How were you supposed to know how ginormous we’d be? Forgive and let live, that’s my motto. He who moves the most units wins, right? But seriously, for all the insults, all the betrayals, all the beatings, all the humiliations in the corridors and around the kegs, all those times you pretended to like me just to get some money off me or fool around with my sister, who, by the way, couldn’t be here tonight because her MP company has mobilized, God bless her, I forgive you, every last one of you. And now, in the hardest way that is humanly possible, I, or, rather, we, that is, Spacklefinger, rock you! One-Two-Three-Four!”

  It was majestic for a bar or two. They had amps the size of small barns up there for their sonic juggernaut. But it got vague and dreary pretty fast. That was the Spacklefinger way. While the more moronic of us moshed in affirmation of our decay, I fled the din, spotted Bethany Applebaum coming out of the bathroom.

  “Lewis?”

  She’d wound herself in some fringed and iridescent silk. Her eyeliner looked surgically applied.

  “Lewis Miner!”

  “Hi, Bethany. You look beautiful.”

  “Look at you. Put on some weight, huh?”

  “I guess I deserve that.”

  “Deserve it for what?”

  “For dumping you.”

  “Oh my God, are you referring to our high school romance? That’s so cute! Now I feel guilty because I’ve never thought about you once!”

  “What about that letter you sent me?”

  “What letter?”

  “From Cornell.”

  “Oh, that. That was a psych project. I got credit for that.”

  “You said some really nasty things.”

  “I can’t remember what I said,” said Bethany.

  “You said I was a stupid, insensitive, self-hating, woman-hater who didn’t have the looks or personality to pull it off. You said fucking me was like sitting on a wine cork.”

  “Well, I hope you haven’t been stewing about it for the last fifteen years!”

  “No, just stewing.”

  “Oh, Lewis, don’t take it so hard. I was wrong to waste that kind of ammunition on you. I just concentrate on helping people now.”

  “Yeah, I read about you in Catamount Notes. How you work with the advantaged. Must be very fulfilling.”

  “That’s very funny, Lewis. But as I often tell my clients, you won’t find bitter people in the first-class cabin. I should really get back to my actual friends now. Have a nice life, if that’s what you’re calling it.”

  BETHANY DOVE BACK into the crush of the Togethering. I ducked into the bathroom. Philly Douglas, Brett Meachum, and Stan Damon huddled near the stall doors, chugged rum.

  “Teabag,” said Philly. “Come over here.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “What, you think I’m going to teabag you again?”

  “No.”

  “Cat got your tongue? You sure had a lot to say to old Mikey. I hope you don’t believe his good guy routine. He’s the biggest bastard I ever knew. I never wanted to teabag you, Teabag. That was Mikey’s idea. He said you and your buddy Gary were giving our school a bad name.”

  “I thought it was some kind of initiation.”

  “An initiation? Jesus, an initiation into what, Teabag? Think about it? Into what? There’s only one club you could ever be in, and you were born into it. Me, too, though I didn’t know that then. I thought you and me were in different clubs, but it’s the same club, dude. It’s the We’re-Not-Mikey-Saladin Club. Come here. I love you, man.”

  Philly staggered over with his arms out. Brett Meachum and Stan Damon loomed behind him. Philly draped his arms around my neck, slopped a kiss on my chin.

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “Teabag the Freak!” he screamed.

  Catamounts, the phrase eternal recurrence comes to mind when I picture how Brett and Stan snatched me by the arms and forced me to the bathroom floor, Philly undoing his suit pants, all of it a blur of beefy white faces and dangling tie silk, me pinned beneath their impossible bulk. Then there was sliding noise, a skittering.

  “Shit!” somebody shouted, and I felt a great weight roll off me with a thud.

  “Brett?” Philly said.

  Brett Meachum lay still beside me on the tiles. Blood ribboned from a raised lump on his head. There was a dent in the stall door above him.

  “He’s out cold,” said Stan Damon. “Don’t touch him.”

  “Never had good footwork,” said Philly, tucked himself into his pants. “Always slipping on the line.”

  “We should call an ambulance.”

  “Teabag,” said Philly. “Call an ambulance.”

  Philly and Stan Damon stumbled out of the bathroom. Near the door Philly bent down behind the garbage pail.

  “Look at that shit,” he said, came up with Brett’s pistol, slipped it in his suit pocket. “I’ll make sure the cops get this.”

  I checked to see that Meachum was still breathing, went out to the parking lot pay phone to make the call. I figured I’d leave Daddy Miner out of
this. He had enough to worry about.

  SPACKLEFINGER HAD REACHED some crescendo of roaring derivation when the paramedics arrived, so most Catamounts probably didn’t notice Brett Meachum being wheeled away. Spacklefinger, in fact, were evincing a genius I hadn’t understood before, ripping off bands half their age, bands that stole from music Spacklefinger had ostensibly lived through, but which they, Spacklefinger, had actually missed the first time around. By jumping on the retro bandwagon, Glave and company were discovering the music of their youth.

  After the paramedics left I slipped into the kitchen, found Rick and Roni on milk crates near the meat locker, sipping beer.

  “How’s it going?” said Roni. “Having flashbacks?”

  “It’s all been one big horrible flashback,” I said. “Until you.”

  “Cue lame power ballad,” said Rick. “Oh, sorry, too late.”

  “Hey, man,” I said, “I’m taking a whack at sincerity here. Go chop a cherub. Roll in his fluffy blood.”

  Rick kicked his crate away, retreated to the stove.

  Roni rose, took me in her arms, spun us on the rubber floor.

  “My mom dropped by!” she shouted.

  “That’s why we’re dancing?”

  “Damn right,” said Roni, held an official-looking letter up to the light.

  “Law school?”

  “Call me counselor.”

  “California?”

  “Thank God. I can’t share a coast with my mother anymore.”

  “I’ll follow you,” I said. “I’ve got a mobile profession.”

  “You mean out-of-work? You’ll just be in my hair.”

  “I’ll hang out at the twenty-four-hour store. I’ll be the older guy there.”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  “I’ll help you study at night. You can practice suing me.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Now Daddy Miner burst through the doors, his hands on his ears.

  “Christ, this is crap,” he said. “I remember when men played rock ‘n’ roll.”

  CATAMOUNTS, I never figured so many of you for heavy juicers, but after witnessing the way you charged the bar the moment Glave Wilkerson started in with his amplified harmonica, it occurred to me that guys like me and Gary and Chip Gallagher shouldn’t feel such shame for our ceaseless stoking of the neural furnace. The rave kids, doubling as bartenders now, flipped fifths of spirits in the air, much like an old movie their parents had maybe forced them to watch in jest. Valley Cats hooted as bottles of whisky and gin smashed to the parquet.

  Chip Gallagher caught one in midair, tipped it into his mouth. The metal spout hooked his teeth. Bourbon dribbled down his shirt.

  “Holding up?” I said.

  “Bleak shit, this, here,” he said. “Open bar. Open casket.”

  “Well put.”

  “Fuck your well put. Put this in your fuck.”

  “Nice talking,” I said.

  “No, wait,” said Chip. “I’m sorry, man. You’re okay. It’s just that I came here tonight …”

  “Yeah?”

  “I came here tonight to find out if it was them I hated all these years, or if, really, like, in the end, it was me.”

  “Did you figure it out?”

  “Tie goes to the runner.”

  “Who’s the runner?”

  “I don’t know, dude. It’s complicated. My old man was the fucking janitor.”

  “Groundskeeper.”

  “That’s an outdoor janitor, man. That’s just a dude mops the grass.”

  I felt a hard grip on my forearm. It was Stacy Ryson, with pansies in her hair.

  “Lewis, can I have a word?”

  “I’ve got to go, Chip.”

  “Get this,” said Chip. “What if it was my wife who ate the ticket and she just said it was the dog? And me cutting my poor baby open?”

  “Later, Chip.”

  “More, later, yeah. For to be revealed.”

  I followed Stacy to an alcove near the coat check.

  “What’s up, Stacy?”

  “What do you think is up?”

  “Have you been crying?”

  “What? Oh, my eyes. It’s Philly. Sometimes he makes me so … oh, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I don’t get it, Stacy,” I said. “You’re this smart, wonderful woman. He’s a money-grubbing cretin. What do you see in him?”

  “What do you mean, what do I see in him? He’s my fiancé, that’s what I see in him! And don’t give me that. I’m smart, but I’m not wonderful. This isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s Fontana. We’ve got to do something. He’s out of control.”

  “I think he’s doing a great job.”

  “He’s drunk and who knows what else.”

  “Honest, maybe?”

  “It’s not funny, Lewis. Don’t defend him. He’s ruining the Togethering! This is your father’s place. Do something!”

  Stacy marched off, blew past Gary. Goony pulled a pansy from her hair, sniffed it, tucked it in his pants.

  “Pigfuck!” said Stacy Ryson.

  Goony shrugged.

  NOW IT WAS TIME to dance, Catamounts, strobe lights, air-raid sirens cranked to hell-of-the-senses levels, warnings of an imminent disco catastrophe no city could withstand. DJ Randy Pittman bobbed behind the turntables to some inner tranq-powered beat, his shirt open, his bare chest popping fluorescent green. He’d affixed glowing stickers to all his old buckshot scars.

  The floor filled up with Valley Kitties. I’d like to think we flailed with just enough humor to forgive ourselves the soullessness of our every move. I’d like to think that. There were exceptions to the mediocrity, of course, Ryan Barwood’s urbane and seemingly sincere sodomite thrusts and Devon Leventhal’s head spins chief among them, but even these displays seemed borrowed from more authentic precincts, and on the whole, Catamounts, nothing was evinced on the dance floor to reverse my suspicion we were no more than some lamentable congress of half-assed herkers, clods, and clownish shimmiers, and even, by dint of unpiloted knuckles, knees, and elbows, bona fide, if inadvertent, threats. Nor, again, do I exclude yours truly. For those of you who missed my Robot, or, more precisely, Teabot, which I had the misfortune of viewing on videotape, simply close your eyes and picture a fattish man with severe groin strain reaching for his shoe tips.

  Our slaggardly paroxysms were, thankfully, short-lived. Randy Pittman, effecting interminable and fawning shoutouts to former torturers, was unprepared when Fontana bumrushed the DJ booth, snatched the microphone, shoved Randy away. Fontana pumped his fist to the foment, the throb, Moses on Mount Sinai, his comeback special, two tablets, one night, standing room only.

  “Lordy lord, Catamounts, are we ready to get it on! We’ve got something that will blow your mindwad forthwith! We’re going to reach new, soul-shattering heights of Togethering in just a few minutes. We’re going to revisit the source text of all Eastern Valley belief and desire. You know of what I speak, kids. And let me tell you, it will not disappoint. I’ve seen the rehearsals and it’s a wonder I still walk among you. But first, can we cut the sirens for a second? Can we kill the kliegs? What is this, a fucking stalag? A fucking gulag? This ain’t no totalitarian hoosegow, folks! That’s it, nice and quiet, okay, a little dimmer please, which reminds me—Mrs. Strobe where are you? Ah, there you are. You all remember Mrs. Strobe. What an educator. And did you know that she was only one longburied college pot bust away from being the first science teacher to blow up on the space shuttle Challenger? That’s right. We’re just glad you didn’t go, Gladys. That’s it, bring the lights down, thank you, yes, intimacy, that’s what I’m after here, an intimate moment of quiet intimacy with my former charges. In loco parentis. Do you know what that means? It’s Latin for mom and dad are fucking fruitsacks! Look at all you people. I see Catamounts of every stripe: fat ones, dumb ones, lazy ones, sure, but the brave and the beautiful, too. All of us together here at the Togethering. I bet we’ve got near perfect attendance here tonight
. Can you pipe down in back? Yes, kids, I do mean to take attendance. I’ve asked Ms. Tabor here to keep tabs, too. We’ll compare our lists, just like in the old days. Take a bow, Judy!”

  There were claps from the crowd and somewhere above it a slender hand fluttered, dipped.

  “That’s it, Judy. Judy Tabor, ladies and gentleman. A brilliant woman and gifted teacher who gave it all up for several million dollars and new pair of tits! I’m just kidding, Judy! Love is love. It’s just that we loved you, too, honey, and not just because of your commitment to academic excellence, but also because you were, and remain, an astonishing piece of grade A ass. That combination is a serious fucking rarity in the public school system, trust me.”

  There were boos from the crowd. Hisses, too. Some of the hisses had begun as boos.

  “What, you don’t think she’s hot?” said Fontana, bugged his eyes in mock incredulity. Or maybe it was genuine incredulity. The man this hammered, it was splitting hairs.

  “Wrap it up, Fontana!” somebody said.

  “You’re a has-been!”

  A Lazlovian hook veered through the lights.

  “I’ll wrap it up when I’m good and ready,” said Fontana.

  Maybe he would have, Catamounts, but we’ll never know because at that moment Fontana finally lost his cage match with the hootch, crumpled to the floor. Daddy Miner shot me a wild stare and I jogged over to retrieve the microphone, tamp its screech.

  Fontana was having a peaceful snooze at my feet.

  “Teabag!” somebody shouted.

  “Hey,” I said into the microphone.

  “Miner smokes poles!”

  “Not like I do!” Ryan Barwood called. The more enlightened louts in the crowd started clapping. Ryan flashed me a thumbs-up.