by Sam Lipsyte
I stood.
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Sit down,” said Gary. “I was just kidding. It’s this weed. Must be the pesticides or something. They make you all bitter about life. I bought this stuff from Loretta.”
“Loretta’s dealing?”
“Just to me. It’s Hollis’ leftover stash. Loretta wanted to unload it. You know, pay for their kid. It’s going to be a bitch moving it, though. Guess I’ll have to smoke it myself.”
“Her kid,” I said. “The kid is Will Paulsen’s kid.”
“Will Paulsen? Really?”
“Yeah.”
“That guy was a head case. But a good bike rider.”
“He stood up for me in the locker room,” I said.
“Good for him.”
“You weren’t there, Gary. He was.”
“I was in study hall.”
“Still, it was Will Paulsen. Don’t pop shit about him.”
“Copy that,” said Gary.
We sat there, listened to the birds for a while. Maybe Gary was a bit pissed about my Will Paulsen worship, but I didn’t care. Will was on my mind and I could see him now, thirteen, fourteen, cruising around on his puny bike, flipping curbs, popping wheelies, riding the wide circuit of the neighborhoods, nodding kindly and pedaling onward, maybe back to the fields behind the power plant. He’d sit there and dream of his escape, maybe never quite able to picture it, not the philosophy, not the squash, not the ocean life, not knowing he’d be home again, either, with a son who called another man, a bad man, “Dad.”
Maybe he’d be dreaming of nothing at all, just sitting in the high grass with a breeze on his face. I guess it didn’t matter because he was somebody else’s dream now, mine, in fact, had been since that hit-and-run on the County Road. Will was dead like Hazel and Fontana were dead, like all of us would be dead.
It was a dumb thought, Catamounts, I know, a pretty fucking obvious thought, but it was that kind of weed, maybe, the kind that if you smoked enough of it even the dog turds on the curb would glisten with meaning. The pesticides, if there were pesticides on the weed, they definitely gave the world a bitter taste, too, or at least made the world fall away from you somehow, like you could be strapped to some satellite spinning off through space, a satellite beaming sea stars and factory fights and unjust wars and second-rate sitcoms all across the earth, a satellite in deep orbit shooting out rays of entertainment, its hazard lights winking red in the void. Yes, there must have been some seriously bad spray on Gary’s weed that could make you think you were truly harnessed to this device, able to breathe in cold airless space, plus blessed with supersonic vision like one of those floating telescopes, so you could look down on the earth and see all the ant-people running around like crazy as though it all meant something, and you not wanting to mock them like Jesus or Trotsky but wanting to comfort them, to fly down on your satellite ship and land softly before the ant-people like some kind of entertainment-beaming space priest, caress their antennae, their carapaces, their pincered mouths, only to discover that as you do, the ant shells fall away, all the ant-people you touch, the antness of them falls away and there beneath the carapaces are fluffy little cougar cubs, that’s right, alums, tiny baby catamounts, scared but playful mountain kitties lost down here in Eastern Valley. You must take them up in your arms, my brothers, my sisters, if you are such a satellite flyer, an ant-person toucher, you must take these soft and weepy needballs up in your arms, tug at the fur on their necks (they like that), hush them, kiss them, cuddle them, tell them it’s going to be okay, everything will be okay, even though, of course, it won’t, it can’t, but still, there they are in your arms, so sad, so fuzzy, so confused, what else should you say? What else should anyone ever say, ever?
“What the fuck are you mumbling about?” said Gary.
“Me? Nothing.”
Gary hacked some lung chunks into his hand, started to smear them into his army pants. He picked up the Gazette instead, laid the biggest loogie under the photo of Judy Tabor.
“I’m glad they hired her,” I said. “It’s what Fontana would have wanted.”
“Would have wanted?” said Gary. “Why do people say shit like that? You can say that about anything. Maybe Fontana would have wanted me to dig up your dead mother and bang my dick on her brittle, powdery skull until it crumbled.”
I’ve never punched someone smack in the jaw before, Catamounts. It was a strange combination of sickening satisfaction and searing pain that shot through my wrist like something electrical. Dirtfuck teetered on his wrought-iron chair, pitched over to the patio stones. He looked up from where he lay, rubbed his teeth, shook off the daze.
“What the fuck was that?” said Dirtfuck.
“That would be love,” I said.
ALSO BY SAM LIPSYTE
The Subject Steve
Venus Drive
More Praise for Home Land
“I have no idea whether this is the way people talk, but I suspect it is, and that I’ve learned something. In any case, I was impressed, amused, and—since blurb writers like to list things in threes—moved by the events in Home Land. This Catamount really listened up.”
—Ann Beattie
“Comic genius on every page. Lewis Miner speaks truth to power, part Lenny Bruce, part Leon Trotsky, with tiny hints of John Belushi and Camus in there, too. Holden Caulfield, fading poster boy for pissed-off alienated youth, comes to mind, not by way of comparison, but rather because Home Land would be his bible.”
—Thomas Beller
“A biting satire on the confused aspirations and ideals of American youth. Sam Lipsyte eulogizes the quiet disappointments of yesteryear’s high school graduates through the voice of his anti-hero, Lewis Miner, a kind of Holden Caulfield for Generation X.”
—Marco Notarianni, Times Literary Supplement
“Playful, serious as a death mask, inventive, filthy, and gifted as can be, [Lipsyte] takes on contemporary reality and gives it one hell of a fight … . A despairing riot of laughs. Read it now.”
—Chris Roberts, Uncut
“A profoundly funny comic novel … . No pocket can possibly be complete without a copy.”
—David Belcher, The Glasgow Herald
Praise for The Subject Steve
“Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny. In a time when the language of most novels is dead on arrival, this book, about a dying man, is startlingly alive.”
—Jeffrey Eugenides
“I laughed out loud, and I never laugh out loud. You’ll want to rest up before reading this one. Thank you, Sam.”
—Chuck Palahniuk
“First-rate satire and writing that dares to be bold and edgy and a little ragged … . [A] spot-on DeLillo-like excavation of our consuming consumer culture, and the ultimate fear—the fear of death—that lurks beneath it.”
—Andrew Roe, San Francisco Chronicle
“Stings as it makes you laugh … . Lipsyte’s poignant acidity is nearly flawless.”
—Alexandra Ringe, BookForum
“Smart, savvy, and admirably ambitious … . Lipsyte excels in a kind of edgy hilarity, a breathless mirth the function of which is to mask feelings of dread and discomfort.”
—William Skidelsky, Times Literary Supplement
“Sam Lipsyte’s gifts as a stylist are mighty indeed: sentence after sentence is so cannily cast as to merit blowing up and sticking in a frame … . A book so sharp you can hardly stand to pick it up.”
—Dominic Maxwell, Time Out London
“Strange, disturbing, and hilarious.”
—Maurice Newman, Irish Independent
Praise for Venus Drive
“Sam Lipsyte is a wickedly gifted writer. Venus Drive is filled with grimly satisfying fractured insights and hardcore humor. But it also displays some inspired sympathy for the daze and confusion of its characters. Above all, it’s wonderfully written and compulsi
vely readable with brilliant and funny dialogue, a collection that represents the emergence of a very strong talent.”
—Robert Stone
“Sam Lipsyte can get blood out of a stone—rich red, human blood from the stony sterility of contemporary life. His writing is gripping—at least I gripped this book so hard my knuckles turned white.”
—Edmund White
“I like it when short stories—metaphorically speaking, of course—smack me in the face, kind of like what Kafka said about art being like an axe. And that’s what Sam Lipsyte’s stories do—they come at you like a fist, they knock you around, they make you wince, they make you look away, and then they make you look back.”
—Jonathan Ames
“The new world as viewed by the newest.”
—James Purdy
“Pitch perfect. Venus Drive explores the complexity of despair with poignancy and sly wit.”
—Christine Muhlke, The New York Times Book Review
“It’s fascinating to read a writer who can bring you so efficiently to such an uncomfortable place.”
—James Hanrahan, Voice Literary Supplement
HOME LAND. Copyright © 2004 by Sam Lipsyte. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.picadorusa.com
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.
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First published in Great Britain by Flamingo
eISBN 9781429994224
First eBook Edition : March 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lipsyte, Sam, 1968–
Home land : a novel / Sam Lipsyte.—1st Picador ed. p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-42418-3
EAN 978-0312-42418-3
1. High school graduates—Fiction. 2. Young men—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.I648H66 2005
813’.6—dc22
2004057318