This Book Is Not for You

by Daniel A. Hoyt

I finished Huck Finn, and then I started Copperfield. They had both books down in the jail library.

  Tax was in that jail somewhere, and then Calvin and a bunch of anarchists showed up too. An anonymous tip led to a raid at the anarchists’ house.

  Okay, the tip wasn’t anonymous. I turned snitch.

  Isn’t that the gateway to writing memoir?

  I knew they had weapons, sawed-off shotguns and shit like that.

  If I hadn’t run off with his dynamite, Calvin would have probably faced twice as many years. That’s what I do for people: I take the years right off. They melt away.

  They let me out before I had to start reading Moby Dick. I think that whale was an orphan too.

  They had a confession for Marilynne’s murder—Howard Asshole’s story checked out. They couldn’t hold me for all of the minor sins I’d committed. They could guess at them, but they couldn’t charge me.

  If they could, think about how much time you’d serve for all the little things you do, for lying and for going five miles over the speed limit and for thinking cruel and pointless thoughts about the people who love you.

  “Do I get an apology?” I asked the guard who processed me before my release back into civilization.

  He looked at me, then tucked the side of his mouth into half a sneer.

  “You get no such thing,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

  He gave me back my stuff: my phone, my wallet, my shoelaces.

  “I’m going to sue,” I said, because it seemed like the thing to say.

  “You ain’t suing nothing,” the guard said, “and you know it.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  The only good part about jail is they take away your phone.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Marilynne was killed by a guy looking for money and drugs. It was this kid named Howard Donaldson, and he lived in Kansas City. He was churning on crank and his car found Marilynne’s driveway.

  I didn’t know him at all. Marilynne didn’t know him. You think maybe I’m a dirtbag, but a guy like that might be driving by your house right now. You’re better off hanging out with me. Don’t look out the window. Don’t spark his attention. If he’s out there, let him drive past. Stay here with me. I have something to tell you.

  There weren’t any clues.

  The only true mystery is the way life dispenses luck.

  That’s the greatest mystery of all.

  I told you you weren’t going to solve anything.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I got Jimmyhead to help me clear out my trashed apartment. We threw everything in the back of his pickup truck. We went up and down the stairs with armloads of crushed books. We slid the ripped mattress down the stairs. We threw handfuls of old clothes.

  We each grabbed an end of the couch and started the awkward trek down the stairs.

  “Are you okay?” he said as he backed down. “You got it?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Are you sure you’re sure?”

  That’s when my phone dinged, and I sort of let go of my end of the couch. The force of it pushed Jimmyhead down the stairs, and then he went under. The couch clattered and shifted and banged right over him.

  Jimmyhead looked kind of oily and withered.

  “I think I’m concussed,” he said, “and I think the couch popped my left testicle.”

  I shrugged.

  “Why do you have to be such an asshole?”

  I didn’t think I was being an asshole, but I’d been wrong about these things before.

  “It was my phone,” I said, and I pulled it out. I had a text message from my service provider. They wanted me to pay my bill and the one before that and the one before that.

  “You owe me beer,” Jimmyhead said.

  “I owe you beer.”

  “You owe me whiskey.”

  “I owe you whiskey.”

  “Now!”

  I left him lying on the stairs. I walked the eight blocks to the liquor store.

  When I got back, Jimmyhead looked slightly stoned. His eyes were more pink than white, and his hair seemed a bit chuffed about being styled by a couch. It blossomed everywhere like little tufts of brown grass.

  “Dude?” I said.

  “Dude,” he replied solemnly.

  “You okay?”

  He didn’t answer, just held out his hand for one of my beers.

  “Drink it fast,” I said, “and it won’t hurt as much.”

  We gulped.

  “I’ve decided to kinda go to law school,” he said.

  “Oh, man.”

  “Dude,” he said in his solemn way.

  “Is this about Marilynne?” I said. “Has she made you rethink your life path?”

  “All of life isn’t about fucking Marilynne.”

  “What’s this all about, then?”

  “Marilynne,” he said.

  “Would Marilynne really want you to act like such a depressed shithead?” I asked. “Probably,” he said.

  He stuck out his hand for another beer.

  “They grow on you,” he said.

  “It’s an acquired taste really,” I said.

  We drank, and it tasted like fungus, like something growing in your esophagus.

  “Here’s to law school,” I said, and I twisted off the whiskey cap, swigged from the bottle. It tasted like the burn of a match. I handed him the bottle.

  “A girl came by to see you while you were gone. Just looking at her sort of reinflated my testicle.”

  “What girl?”

  He took a gulp of whiskey. “You are conditionally forgiven,”

  he said. “I tried to give the girl the couch, but she didn’t want it.” “Bad things have happened on that couch.”

  “Bad things happen on every couch.”

  “They flatten our asses,” I said.

  “American couches—the silent killer.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Just a girl,” he said.

  “Saskia?”

  “Never seen her before. But she smelled nice. She resurrected me with her smells.”

  “Did she have wide-set eyes, like real blue?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She was good-looking, man, and she smelled nice, like pistachio ice cream and oranges.”

  “Did you tell her I was coming back?”

  “I told her you were done, that you’re leaving town, that you’re practically gone.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her to wait?”

  “You said, and I quote, ‘Fuck this place and everyone in it.’” His quotation was accurate.

  I pshhed open a can of beer and then another. We drank for a while.

  “You going to miss this place?” he asked.

  I shook my head, my mouthful of beer.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I put three shirts and two pairs of pants and some socks and some underwear in my backpack, and then I stuffed in just one book and then another.

  “Man,” Jimmyhead said, “this is your life.”

  All my other stuff was just loose in the back of the pickup. It rattled and sloshed around.

  We drove down the alley between Massachusetts and New Hampshire and threw my life into the dumpster behind the Bottleneck.

  We pitched in the couch and the trashed paperbacks and my clothes and, finally, my cell phone.

  “You keeping that backpack?” he asked. He eyed it like he wanted me to throw it in too.

  “Dude,” I said. “I’m pitching out the rest of my life.”

  “I’m just askin’.”

  We looked at the dumpster crammed with all my stuff.

  From deep within it, I could hear my phone chiming away.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I went to the cash machine, and three times I attempted to withdraw exactly $27.12 from my account, its entire contents. Three times the machine impolitely rejected this request.

  Finally, I settled on a desire
for twenty-five dollars, and the machine spit out my money and a receipt. My $2.12 was spinning around within the circuits of that ATM. What did the machine need my 212 cents for?

  I was on my way back to the Replay with my crisp bills, a five and a twenty; they smelled salady, and I rubbed them together as if friction would create more of them in some economic-slash-sexual way.

  The guy who always plays the saxophone downtown was playing his saxophone downtown.

  Outside the Red Lyon, Calvin’s beggar child wheedled five of my bucks off me.

  “He’s not even my real dad,” he said.

  We tried to wink at each other, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t even bob his head.

  He nearly bankrupted me.

  Lawrence’s big freckled face kissed me on the cheek and whispered in my ear. It would all be okayish; I would survive; I would drink a beer and tip my server with generosity and perhaps wit; I would use semicolons correctly.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I would have one last drink, and then I’d hit the road.

  Except my math was off. I drank for a long while.

  Random people bought me shots.

  Right after last call, I slipped through the crowd. A girl I once slept with didn’t say a word but patted me on the cheek. A guy named Lunchmeat high-fived me.

  I circled the patio.

  I headed down Massachusetts for the last drunken time.

  I thought about sleeping under a tree. When the world resurrected itself, I would be ready. I would already be out there. I would be breathing the morning air before anyone else. I would leave town before the day began.

  These thoughts pelted me like hail, little icy cubes that beat away at me.

  Then I heard the sound of running footsteps.

  I waited for a person. You hear footsteps, you expect a person. It seemed reasonable. I felt the cold plink of a thought: this could be fucking anyone. Maybe someone would shiv me before I left town.

  I could see the person. It was small, thin. I thought maybe it was made out of pretzels, those hard little sticks that crush each other in a Ziploc bag.

  I made my fist into a harder fist, tight knuckleboned possibility, and it made the muscles tug up in my forearm.

  As the pretzel man ran toward me, it became a pretzel woman, and then it became Saskia, and she yelled, “Boo,” and my fingers collapsed back into being a hand.

  She panted and she panted some more, and I grabbed her chin in my hand and turned it and licked her cheek.

  “Salty,” I said.

  She snapped her head away and shook off my hand. “You are so fucked up,” she said.

  “I want you near.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I’m always saying what, and you’re always saying nothing.”

  “That’s not true. Sometimes we switch.”

  I tried to reach out for her chin again, and she snapped it back.

  “You ran all this way so I wouldn’t touch you?”

  “Come here then,” she said, and I stepped toward her.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Saskia said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

  She held my face by the sides, and she leaned in, and she angled my head down until our foreheads touched. I stared into her big old eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It seemed like the only way. Do you believe me?”

  “I don’t not believe you.”

  “It’s a start,” she said.

  Saskia slipped her arms around my neck, and I slipped mine around her waist. Our lips pressed together. With my left hand, I felt her right hip, the perfect curve of a perfect arc of a Frisbee.

  We pushed our foreheads together so our eyes fused and became anime, larger than life. Her soul wasn’t in there, but I saw flecks of ground-up glass, bits of her brain, the pulse of blue neon, the stars after difficulties.

  CHAPTER ONE

  When I went to the dumpster to get my stuff back the next day, a freegan hippie kid was already pulling things out of the trash.

  “All this shit’s mine,” I said.

  “Garbage is for the people,” he said. He had long, blond, stringy hair and a red Miami Heat headband. I couldn’t remember his name.

  “We could share it,” I said. “I’m people too.”

  “Are these your shirts?” he asked. “How come you didn’t throw out any clean ones?” He sniffed one right in the armpit.

  “You can wash them.”

  “Maybe.”

  We dug out the couch, some jeans, the ripped mattress.

  I unearthed some of my books.

  “You ever read Kafka?” I asked him.

  “Dude turns into a bug?” he said. “Skimmed it.”

  “Skimmed it?”

  “Cliffs Notes.”

  We worked some more. The dumpster smelled like rancid beer.

  “I’d like to read a book,” he said, “about a bug who turns into a man.”

  He found the phone, which he held up and into the sunlight, arm fully stretched, as if it were a torch or a magical sword, but I guess he was just checking for reception.

  “Still charged,” he said. “You wanna call anyone?” “Nope,” I said. “You can have it.”

  “Fucking thing’s obsolete.”

  He threw it back in.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Each time I start again, it gives me the illusion of control.

  Each time you turn the page, I bet it gives you that illusion too.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I almost called this “I Am Not Calling This Chapter One.”

  I don’t like how that whole fucking conceit gives you an excuse, a reason—maybe it’s a pathology—to never actually follow through with anything.

  I could tell you were writing about me sometimes by the look on your face.

  It didn’t happen like that. I did squat over you, sure, okay. But it seemed like a dirty and necessary kindness.

  Actually it did happen that way. But I don’t know why you had to write about it.

  I can vouch, though, that you are telling some form of the truth. Whatever that’s worth.

  I didn’t like the part when you fucked what’sherface or when you wanted to fuck the ghost. I think you wanted to fuck her anyway. And about the unprotected sex with what’sherface— thanks for telling me, asshole.

  Also, that cave was disgusting.

  And I did lie to you three times, but we’ve said a million things to each other, so my percentage of truth is pretty damn high. It’s statistically significant that I almost always tell you the truth. That sliver of falsehood barely exists.

  Are these sentences supposed to add up to a chapter?

  I don’t think yours do either.

  I guess I think most of what you wrote is pretty fair, somewhat accurate.

  But there’s nothing rodenty about me. Feline, fine; I appreciate that. I took some other notes. I have talking points, concerns, worries, emendations, corrections, and real and substantial suggestions for style and clarity. And actual grammar tips.

  All of this, and I still think I love you, and I only think you’re a little bit of an asshole, a part-time one, like most of us.

  Forget the rest of this actually, but please reconsider rodent-like.

  And why didn’t you tell me about your parents?

  CHAPTER ONE

  That last chapter was guest-written by Saskia, who said she wouldn’t read this until I was done and happy, but I don’t think you can be done and happy with anything.

  Saskia and I have been hanging out. By that I mean that we sleep in the same bed every night, but it is far easier to call it hanging out.

  She just asked me if she could go back and revise what she wrote in the last chapter, and I just told her, “No, never, impossible,” and she gave me a fake-sad frown that made me want to suck up her bottom lip. It would become one of the pink curling folds of my brain.


  “I just wrote that we’re hanging out,” I say.

  “Is that what we’re doing?” she says.

  “I’m finishing a book,” I say.

  She waves her hand in a way that makes me think of the act of relinquishing.

  It’s not necessarily a bad thing. If it wasn’t for all of the shit before, maybe we wouldn’t have ended up in this kind of now.

  We’ve caught up to the present. I sometimes thought we’d never make it.

  When I stand up at meetings and say, “My name’s Neptune, and I’m an alcoholic,” everyone says back, “Hello, Neptune.”

  You’ve probably seen it on TV.

  Saskia and I both go.

  I still do stupid stuff, but it’s somewhat less stupid than it used to be. That comma scab isn’t even a scab anymore.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I couldn’t help but think it was all connected. I tried to draw a chart that zipped from me to Marilynne to Saskia to Allen to Howard Asshole to Tax to my parents to Marilynne again to Casey to Jimmyhead to the cops to Calvin. I looked for patterns. I had all of these people on the perimeter of a circle, and then I drew lines between all of these people, and then I had a circle practically filled in with black. It kind of looked like this:

  Something about it nearly stopped me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I believe in a higher power, if we can somehow consider this book a higher power.

  It’s a piece of shit, of course, but it’s worth thinking about.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the end, maybe all books are about loneliness.

  But not yet. I don’t have to surrender to it yet. I can turn back to page 30, when she was still alive, when I could hear her voice.

  And you’re still here with me, right?

  I’m still here with you.

  I haven’t finished yet.

  If you think this book sucks, remember that you only read Chapter One. It could get better. There’s always that possibility.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are too many people to thank and not enough pages to list them all and not enough brain cells to remember, but here goes.