Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

  Mays, Matheson, 443—45

  traitor, 334

  brutality as slaveholder, 358

  ultimate negligibility of, 516

  “It’s been brought to my attention that one of the historians responsible for the ensmearment of my family name has been accused of plagiarism,” Georgie later wrote in an open letter to the Eastern Valley Gazette. “If this proves true, I apologize to this man and his old bag of an aunt. As for the originator of these so-called historical facts about my forebear, please understand I intend to track you down and inflict hurt of notable severity on your person. I will not tire until the Mays name is cleared or I am dead. And even if I’m dead, I won’t really be tired. Just dead.”

  Let’s see, what else? Mikey Saladin caused an uproar after coming clean about his steroid use on a prime-time magazine show. He rolled up his sleeve to show the interviewer, a kindly woman in lavender, his needle marks.

  “What’s the big deal?” he said. “There are five guys in the world who can do what I do, with or without the juice. Do you hate me because I’m multiracial, or because I’m trying to help kids stay off the streets? Make up your minds, America. One day human clones will play baseball on the moon. They won’t care what you think.”

  Who’s to say he’s wrong, Catamounts?

  Mikey signed with St. Louis and, if you haven’t been watching the highlight reels, he’s been putting up monstrous numbers. The league has ruled any records he breaks will be tainted by his confession. The taint will be designated with an asterisk, a likeness of which Mikey had tattoo’d on his forehead.

  Many of you Catamounts attended the wedding of Doctor Stacy Ryson and Philly Douglas of Willoughby and Stern. I was not present, of course, but according to the “Hitchings” section of the Notes bulletin board, the sunset ceremony at the recently refurbished boat basin was quite a stunner. The bride wore cream, the groom a sporty sling for his mangled arm. Newly elected Congressman Glen Menninger made a rousing speech about the sanctity of the sacred. He also condemned those who would attempt to regulate the ingenuity and shininess of the American dreamscape.

  “The roads of our great nation were built by men and women,” he added, somewhat cryptically.

  PETE THE LANDLORD came by a few weeks after the Togethering to disavow his hoodlum stint. He’d stowed away his knuckledusters, his cologne.

  “Sorry about all that,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me. I’ve stopped watching those Mafia shows. They’re an affront to my heritage anyhow.”

  “I thought you were Greek,” I said.

  “I am. How come we don’t get a show? Tell your Jewish friends in the media to do a Greek mob show.”

  “I’ll get on that,” I said.

  Pete seemed a bit sad and I invited him in for a beer. His troubles had nothing to do with his heritage, though, or even Hollis Wofford. A dustup at our alma mater had him worked up. The Eastern Valley school board had sent down a memo banning obstacle courses, even use of the phrase. Challenge Trail was the preferred nomenclature, but whatever the term, a single pliant traffic cone would now replace those old assemblages of ropes and radials and two-by-fours. Every child would charge the cone unimpeded, touch it with self-empowering triumph, no exceptions.

  “Fucking fools,” said Pete. “It’s like they want the empire to crumble.”

  The Challenge Trail sounded like an improvement on the old Catamount style of physical education, which, as you may recall, was predicated mostly on pummeling people with hard rubber balls or else enacting their humiliation via hanging rings, but I nodded along with Pete enough to buy a few more weeks in the apartment. I’d have his rent money soon. Penny Bettis had already risen like some Lady of the Artificial Lake to hand me the sword of temporary employment. A major athletic wear company wanted to promote its child workers in Malaysia as master craftspeople. Consumers would be able to choose which set of malnourished fingers stitched their crosstrainers and Penny had somehow convinced the project managers I was the man for the job, which was, and still is, to fabricate kiddie-cobbler biographies on the company’s website.

  Teabag is back in the saddle, Valley Cats!

  Daddy Miner, sad to say, has not been riding so high. Business at the Moonbeam has fallen off since the Togethering, and the opening of Don Berlin, Jr.’s Orchard of Bliss, erected on the site of Don Berlin’s Party Garden in an ambiguous swirl of filial redemption and oedipal zoning, hasn’t helped matters. Still, at least my old man isn’t doing okay.

  I wouldn’t have the nerve to honor his wish.

  I STILL SEE a good deal of Captain Thorazine. I’m happy to report he’s up and about with only the barest of limps. His shin wound was painful but shallow, healed in a few weeks. He’s living at home in Ben and Clara’s den, deals weed out of a reasonable facsimile of the Retractor Pad, which he had to abandon when he gave his money away.

  No terrace, but a patio.

  He smokes bales of his own supply but at least he’s been going to meetings again. I know it’s supposed to be anonymous and so forth, but Stacy Ryson’s sister Tiffany is not only born-again but an excrackhead, too. Maybe I’m revealing too many secrets but, according to Gary, Tiffany hates her sister’s guts for good reason. You should hear the sick manipulations Stacy pulled when they were tots, like convincing Tiff the only way their father would ever love her as much as he loved Stacy was to eat worms and defecate on the sidewalk.

  Kids do the darnedest things, detest each other forevermore.

  Gary still won’t talk to Mira, but I visit her sometimes at the Bean Counter. She’s dating Dean Longo’s brother Darren, studying pharmacology at night. Darren Longo is an inspector for Taco King, drives up and down the state ensuring the guacamole is fresh and feces-free. This gives Mira extra time to brush up on biochemistry, which I believe is her euphemism for popping fistfuls of Percocet. Sometimes when I drop by the Bean Counter I talk to the Colette Man, whose real name is Craig Sperlman. Turns out he used to be a well-regarded college-sports affinity marketer before he had a breakdown at the Fiesta Bowl, ran out on the field in a diaper with a sign that read: “I love my poopy and football.” Craig’s a little crazy from a stint in the bughouse, but at least he has conviction.

  He doesn’t read Colette anymore.

  “Burned out on the bitch,” he said. “I’m heavily into feminists from the seventies now. Hairy first-wave hags with a seriously valid point about patriarchy.”

  He loaned me some of his books and it turned out I remembered a few of them from my mother’s bedside table. I used to page through them whenever Hazel was out of the house, skip past the manifestos to the fucking, the sun-soaked orgies in a manless paradise. This time, though, I read the books for their arguments, and when I finished I wanted to call every women I’d ever known, make amends, the way Gary does whenever he goes a few weeks without getting loaded. Maybe I’d call Bethany Applebaum, or even Sarah Chin. No, Tea, I finally told myself, that’s too easy. You’re not Gary. Just try to be a good guy for a while.

  Besides, the only person I wanted to talk to was Gwendolyn, and I didn’t even know where to find her anymore, except on Tuesday evenings at 8:30 P.M. That’s when her sitcom is on TV. It’s about a girl with big dreams living in a boring suburban town with her nowhere boyfriend, Grinder. It’s called North Hills and, as a veteran of those aforementioned twenty-five thousand hours of commercial television, I predict without hesitation this tripe won’t last the month.

  Days I don’t visit the faux-Retractor Pad, or work on my sneakersmith bios, I drive all over town. That’s right, Catamounts, Teabag is now a mobile bundle of anxiety and remorse. Fontana wasn’t kidding that day at the diner. He really did leave me his old Datsun. It was in his will, notarized the morning of the Togethering. I’ve tried not to think about that part too much. Let’s just conclude the man had a peek at the cosmic calendar, saw his name penciled in.

  It was Loretta who called to say the car was mine. She’d finally gone over to Fontana’s house.
The place was mostly shut down, the water turned off, the furniture covered with sheets. He’d left a strange assortment of objects behind. There was a leaf blower in the bathroom, a trash bag full of golf balls in the refrigerator. He’d Scotch-taped Bat Masterson to the TV screen.

  “He died typing,” I told Loretta.

  “Lucky him.”

  We were boxing up Fontana’s books when I flipped open a steamer trunk heaped with yokes, straps, bits. Loretta wept in sight of their old love gear.

  “Goddamn it,” she said. “He just wanted to open up the earth for me.”

  We sat and I held her for a while. It was nice to hold her, it was beginning to be more than nice, the smooth warmth of her shoulders beneath her blouse, the blackberry scent in her hair.

  “He really admired you, Lewis,” said Loretta, tugged herself away.

  “I admired him.”

  “He said you were a guy who did the best you could with what you’d been given.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  This comment didn’t sit well with me, Catamounts. I guess secretly I’d been operating under the assumption the opposite was the case, that I’d been paralyzed by my enormous gifts, but what the hell did Fontana know? He was dead, for one thing.

  “Don’t take it the wrong way,” said Loretta.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  I drove out to the cliffs, parked at a scenic overlook. Barges loaded with garbage chugged down the river. Sick-looking gulls swooped, cawed. Factories on the far bank blew black smoke into the sky. A perfect May day.

  Fontana had left me a note with the car keys.

  Dear Lewis,

  Like I said, nothing never happens. Keep an eye on Loretta. Don’t put any moves on her, though. If she finds true love again encourage her to trust in it.

  Cheers,

  Dead Fontana

  PS Best get the brakes aligned or we’ll be having a putrefaction contest, and I have a head start, though the booze may finally hamper me in this, too.

  I slipped the letter into a plastic sleeve with the Datsun’s papers, drove to Fontana’s grave.

  I hadn’t been there since the funeral, which a few of you, to your everlasting Catamount credit, attended. I’ve forgiven Mikey Saladin his absence. He was playing a crucial doubleheader in Atlanta (two for four, three for five, one error). Why our illustrious representative Glen Menninger couldn’t make it is less clear, but even sending his minion Lazlo would have been gesture enough.

  You never had my vote, congressman, but Gary was always on the fence concerning your legislative gifts. Yes, he’s just one man, but all you need do is alienate a single undecided a day and your next election could be your last. It’s such political miscalculations that confirm my belief you will never be more than a junior drone on Ways and Means.

  Glave, your rendition of “People Get Ready” was a travesty, but we were all touched by your presence, and I won’t soon forget the lone tear coursing down your meth-carved cheek as you, Gary, Chip, and I lowered our troubled but beloved mentor into the earth.

  That day I drove back to the Nearmont Cemetery in Fontana’s car I made a funny discovery. Walking up to the plot I noticed the lawn all around it dotted with bright white orbs, hailstones from heaven. Just beyond the treeline, I realized, was the Nearmont Driving Range. I picked up one of the golf balls, made to balance it on the flat edge of the gravestone. I’d seen grievers do it with pebbles in movies about my people, the Jews, but the ball just kept rolling off, plopping into the grass.

  I laid down in it myself, boots up on Fontana’s tomb. I guess I was waiting for something, some kind of inner montage, but aside a few stray images, Fontana on parade in the corridors of Eastern Valley High, or brooding on life’s purpose behind his cluttered desk, or harnessed to his Hoover in the buff, no suitable reel unspooled. I did recall that book on his office windowsill: What the Aztecs Knew. What did the Aztecs know? How to carve a beating heart from some poor bastard’s chest? Actually, according to Craig Sperlman, who’d been on a pre-Columbian kick before Colette, the Aztecs knew a good deal. They knew the earth, the stars, the vagaries of lake travel, the secret to spicy cuisine. They knew crowd control and how to exact tribute from client tribes. Obviously they knew show business. But most of all, I think, they knew, as Will Paulsen may or may not have known, that they were fucked.

  It had been foretold.

  The longer I stayed there at Fontana’s grave, the less I could remember him, the more I dwelled on other things: how I’d better get some car insurance and what a hassle that would be, how Penny Bettis was lowballing me on the Malaysian biographies and there was nothing I could do except pick up more work at the Moonbeam, or, God forbid, Don Berlin, Jr.’s Orchard of Bliss.

  Roni was on my mind, too. We’d hit the apex of our passions a few months after Fontana’s funeral. Winter had been a steep, achesome slide to uncertainty: jittery phone calls, canceled dates. Roni started picking fights for sport, wore a Spacklefinger hat to goad me. She’d disagree with everything I said, even, “Good burger,” talk incessantly about anal sex in the manner of her favorite radio jocks, which I took to be the symptom of some greater cultural malaise, but when I finally said, “I’m sticking it in your ass” and stuck it in her ass, she screamed, swiveled, punched me in the nuts.

  “Pigfuck!” she said.

  I told her that was Stacy Ryson’s word, and besides, a pigfuck wouldn’t have warned her first.

  “I’m trying to be a good guy,” I said. “You can stick something in my ass, too, if you want. I hear that’s the happening thing now, anyway.”

  “Fuckpig,” said Roni.

  “That’s more like it,” I said.

  Roni calmed down and we made some popcorn, watched an old movie on the Boring Old Movie Channel, the kind with men in suits and women in veiled hats and nobody trusting each other much.

  It was no submarine flick, but it was one of Roni’s favorites and I pretended to be engrossed.

  “This so great,” I said.

  “Lying sack of shit.”

  I let it go because I loved her, Catamounts, but most of me knew it was over. She’d refused to wear the leg warmers I’d bought for her birthday. She was going to California and I guess she wanted to be certain she’d ruined everything so she wouldn’t come back. Or maybe she was just sort of done with me, looking past my shoulder into the blur of better days.

  Another Hazel in the making.

  Driving out from the Nearmont Cemetery I thought about the Erasing Angel, that memory cleanser I’d once pictured myself becoming, roving from town to town, burying all the badness, leaching out the poison history. The Kid could have ridden shotgun, his spent, dribbly member flapping in his lap as we rattled over the roads of this great nation, highways and byways cut by men and women through our shiny, ingenious land. We’d be weary fellows, far from our dreamer, the sun burning through the windshield, the trees and cities and deserts and fields unfurling before our tremulous advance. We’d drive on with the truth in our hearts: The mission was pure folly.

  There’s nothing for the pain, as Doc Felix knew.

  “Love it or leave it,” he’d said.

  This Catamount wasn’t going anywhere, Catamounts.

  I took a shortcut down Mavis to Gary’s house. We sat out on his patio, passed the bong between us. The view here isn’t much, no mayonnaise factory, just bushes, birds. I knew the names of them now.

  “What are you, a fucking ornithologist?” said Gary.

  “A bird guy?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Gary, “that would be a bird guy, moron.”

  It was good to be here with Guano again. It’s not so bad at the Palace of Satan, either. Gary’s father, maybe out of guilt, lets us do as we please, serves us trays of hoagies and beer. The patio thick with our smoke, he’ll sniff it up, say, “Good harvest this year.”

  Sometimes he’ll take a hit, too, tell us how everything going down in the world these days is a joke, t
hat Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, and Leon Trotsky, his Big Three from history, are sitting around busting their guts at how bad we’ve botched it. Then he’ll go back inside, bid for antique candy on the Internet. It’s his hobby. He has lollipops from the Wilson administration.

  “Son-fondler,” Gary will hiss when he leaves.

  This time Ben and Clara were gone to visit Todd in the city and we had the house to ourselves. We stayed out on the patio anyway. Gary had that week’s Gazette and he pointed to a picture of Judy Tabor, the same windswept beach shot I’d seen at Auggie’s house, the rich husband cropped out. “Popular Teacher Returns to Heal Catamount Community,” read the headline. She’d been appointed the new principal of Eastern Valley High.

  “Maybe she’ll publish your updates,” said Gary. “You still writing those?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Time to move on.”

  “You’ve said your piece?”

  “I’m up-to-date.”

  “Maybe you should send them to Bob Price.”

  “Fuck Bob Price.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  “‘Good Hands’ is good, though,” I said.

  “It’s okay. If you like sentimental bullshit. I’m happy he screwed over Mira, though. The whore deserved it.”

  “Gary, you’re pathetic.”

  “Yeah, right, me, I’m pathetic.”

  “She didn’t like you as much as she liked Bob. Can’t you just accept that? Why does that make her a whore?”

  “Are you hanging out with that Sperlman guy, going all feminist on me? You know he goes to sex addict meetings? Crackhead Jesus freak Tiffany, who’s also a nympho, she sees him there.”

  “It’s none of my business, Gary. People do what they have to do to get well.”

  “Oh, do they? You should be on a fucking talk show with wisdom like that. The fucking Teabag show. The nation is going nuts for Teabag. He just wants us all to get well. We’ll do what we have to do.”