by Sam Lipsyte
I guess it’s probably a good thing that my true, non–alternate reality mother’s not around to witness this. How could she, though? She’s in Montana with Vance and Tina. She’s on life support, if I heard my sister’s message right, though a part of me is still convincing the rest of me that I didn’t hear the message right.
Everybody thinks I hate my mother, that all of my so-called shenanigans can be traced back to some primal trauma. But though I’m not a rabid Vance fan, I love my mother. Like I said, she did the best she could. That’s what I’m trying to do, too, as I raise my lips from Mrs. Gottwald’s nipple and press Baby Gottwald’s mouth there. The hungry worm starts feeding and Mrs. Gottwald groans sweetly and I get to work on the other breast.
“Zekey,” whispers Mr. Gottwald, “nine one one.”
“Did it,” says the boy in a faraway voice.
When Fanny was dying in her apartment uptown, I sat with her most days and nights. I’d hold her birdlike hand, not that her hand looked like a bird, it looked more like a very old and sick hand, but I’d hold it as she whispered the Wisdom of the Doulas one last time.
“Mother the mother,” she said. “Mother the father. Mother the room.”
“Nurture,” she said. “Nurture, nurture, nurture. Plus nature.”
“And remember, don’t spring for the pizza.”
Okay, that last one was mine, but what I’m trying to say is all I ever wanted was to carry on Fanny’s legacy, be part of a loving continuum.
There’s a thud in the pillar near my head. An iron star quivers in the wood. Now comes the sound of many men in non-nurturing boots. I can see them from the corner of my eye, padded black turtlenecks, batons. One stomps over, jabbing at the air with a weird-looking gun. He seems very judgmental.
My story won’t end here. I’ll start my own foundation, certify myself. The American League got a late start, but don’t they win their share of all-star games? No more forged letters from Fanny, either. I’ll find the families that need me, appreciate my craft. I’ll start with my building, Paula the Crackhead down the hall. There’s no question she’s knocked up, and I’d wager she could stand for a little doulo-style tenderness.
Outside the window the evening is overly bright, and I wonder if the gods aren’t having a festival of capricious cruelty in the sky, which for some reason I picture including a hot buffet, maybe because I can almost smell one, and I notice some trucks parked down the block, big floodlights, reflectors, rigged for a night shoot. Men and women with walkie-talkies mill around a table heaped with pasta and fruit.
There but for the grace of God, and Fanny Hitchens, mill I.
Now the man with the weird-looking gun is shouting some official-sounding speech about the electrical nature of his weapon, which he vows to fire if I don’t drop the nunchucks.
I don’t drop the nunchucks. I whip them at his gun. They miss, skitter across the floor.
“Zap this fuck!” calls one of the turtlenecks, maybe the turtleneck leader.
The volts eel up my spine, out my arms and legs, and as I’m going down, I can see my fist pump in the air, pump once, twice, until it finally flops into a sweet caress of absolutely nothing.
I call it the Doulo Salute.
It’s mine, too.
SNACKS
Everybody waited for me to get skinny. My father said it could be any day. My mother said if I got skinny, it would improve my moods. She promised me a new wardrobe, one more congruent with my era, my region. My sister said if I got skinny, there would be the possibility of hand jobs from her friends in the Jazz Dancing Club. Blow jobs, even. All the jobs. It was only fair, she said. Her friends had brothers. She’d done her part.
No one ever told me to stop eating, or even to curb it.
There was the occasional mealtime glance. Somebody might say “Stop playing with your food,” which I could reckon only as code. Never in my life did I play with it.
Dinner was the least of it. Lunch was nothing. Breakfast was how I got to lunch.
Home from school, I’d stand at the refrigerator. Everything I needed in this life was there, cold, in plastic pouches, cylindrical tubs. I hated the word “snack.” It demeaned.
My mother liked to watch while I dipped nachos into the jelly jar.
“Are you losing weight?” she’d say.
* * *
Somebody on TV said sex could make you skinny. I knew I’d have to go it alone.
Unfortunately, a certain technique of mine had consequences. The hair on the parts of my arms that rubbed against the mattress rubbed off. It grew back patchy, stubbly. Somebody started a rumor that I shaved my arms.
All the time I spent denying this, tracing the source of the lie, I could have read some inspirational book, had the world opened up to me. The world never opened up to me. It just sat there. It needed a little salt.
* * *
Cigarettes, a girl I was eavesdropping on told her friend, cut your appetite. I bought the brand I’d once spotted while going through my babysitter’s purse. Later I learned they were women’s cigarettes.
This affected me.
Eventually I moved into the basement. It was meant to be a sign of independence, being nearer to the boiler. I could conceivably control the temperature of rooms. Here, far from the sidelong sadness of my progenitors, I learned to ungirl my manner with a cigarette, to teach myself a disrespect for fire.
“Are you smoking?”
A shift in aromatics had brought my father to the door. He always sniffed at things—his breakfast, his wife. He liked to pinkie out his earwax, whiff it. He said the smell contained important information about his health. Most of his knowledge was of this order. He’d come from strivers, made the Ivy League, but this is what he’d whittled it down to. I was a major admirer.
“I’m giving you a chance to answer me,” he said now. “Are you smoking cigarettes down here?”
He’d been prelaw in college, and I remember thinking that since he was not a lawyer, he would die prelaw. I crushed out the burning Capri in my pocket.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” he said. “Are you?”
We squinted at each other through the smoke.
“No,” I said.
I felt a part of his world then. Men lied to his face every day.
* * *
It was hard to believe how big I was. I wasn’t quite obese. Those types were to be pitied, the ones we saw at the mall when my mother drove me over for new fat-boy pants. We’d circle the parking lot, the inseams of my corduroys planed down or outright split, my hands cupped over pressured bars of crotch flesh.
“It’s glandular, poor things,” she’d say, point them out for me, the obese kids hobbling past our windshield with their mothers. “It’s not their fault.”
Me, on the other hand, I was definitely my fault.
I spent long minutes on the bench outside the ladies’ room, listening to my mother’s voice above the flushes, the faucets. She’d strike up talk with other mothers. Maybe some had come for fat-boy pants. You didn’t really need your fat boy along for buying fat-boy pants. There were not a lot of choices to make. There were not a lot of colors. It was just a matter of getting really big pants. Maybe a sweater.
* * *
I knew some Catholic kids from the Catholic school down the block. They called me names, but not fat names. They called me kike, Christ killer. Finally, real friends. I sat with them on the bike rack behind their school and smoked.
One of them was huge, too. He said we were both going to hell for gluttony. The idea seemed to make him giddy. I told him my parents had parented me to understand that you pay for everything here, in your own time, in your own home, even. They were humanists. They got special magazines in the mail.
My ass, my thighs, my belly, my breasts, it was all becoming an ethical question, a great humanist dilemma. Also, there were these big, moist boils on my chest. My father said not to worry. The same thing had happened to him. Then one magical summer the weight
just melted away. He’d even written a prizewinning children’s book about it.
We had to read this book in school.
The boy picked to give the report on it stood in front of the class and stared at me.
“The author hopes to show how gross his son is.”
* * *
The new boy, he was Brody. He was mall obese. He was beyond mall obese. He had a new kind of body, something never before seen. When he walked through the hallway, everyone whispered “glandular,” as though they were saying “Holocaust” or “slavery,” all hushed and sorry.
Brody was holy, made by God, hands-on. They figured him for the fattest boy in the world. Me, I was fat for the town, the county. I was Fat Shit, Lard Ass, Tits, Tub. Brody was the wonder of glands. He’d been put on this planet to teach us. Even the real torture freaks wouldn’t touch him. They’d compliment his sneakers. If Brody dropped a ball in gym, some jock would jog over, hand it back to him. Brody could not pick up the ball himself, but he had other vital work. Any ball I dropped I got back hard in the nuts.
Sometimes I wondered what Brody’s mother told Brody when they circled for parking at the mall.
Did she point me out, and say, “You, my darling Brody, are glandular, but that boy there, he’s just weak”?
Is that what she said?
Whore.
* * *
They put us back-to-back, yards apart, each yoked to the looped end of a tug-of-war rope. Such was physical education in our school. The coaches least known for copping feels, the cruel, unperverted ones, had thought it up. Students cut lunch, free periods, to attend. They came in sick to see.
We stood there on the hardwood floor. Light poured down from the high gym windows. I couldn’t see Brody, but I could feel him test the rope. It tightened at my hips, burned up my belly, went slack again. I heard his sneakers squeak.
We waited for the whistle. When it came, we would charge up out of our crouches and one of us would topple in shame.
There were hundreds in the bleachers now.
They were chanting for him, for Brody.
They were sorry about Nagasaki, I guess. Babylon, Union City.
I was sorry my father ever found my mother, smelled her, found her.
Now I heard that little ball begin to rattle in the coach’s whistle and I knew the next thing I heard would be Brody falling, crashing.
I could always hear things. Smell, I couldn’t smell much since the cigarettes, but I could hear the quietest of things, things coming out of the quiet, sounds before they were sounds, names before they were shouted after me.
It took all the coaches to carry Brody to the nurse’s station. Word came soon of a concussion.
* * *
Brody was out for a week, and then it was winter break. I’d waited days to be treated like a hero, but no dice. I was a dick. I’d hurt the huge Christ.
I saw him at the mall a few days after New Year’s. He had a neck brace, a plastic halo fanned out behind his head. He waddled up in a version of my pants. A more benevolent color.
“Brody,” I said.
He shot me this look of brotherhood, as though together we could shoulder a great burden of sorrow. We could forget everything that had happened between us, enter the kingdom of kindness hand in hand.
I punched him in the gut. He leaned up on the wall, held his belly, kneaded it as though to push the sting out. Blood drained out of his face. I pictured him at home that night in bed, everything collapsing from a dead point in the center of him, dying like a star dies. Or maybe he would die right here, slide down dead against the wall.
I took up the rolls of his throat.
“Brody,” I said.
My arms quivered, and I noticed the hair grown back. A revolution in technique, its dividends.
“Brody,” I said, squeezing, squeezing.
“Brody,” I said, “you fat fucking fuck.
“Brody,” I said, “you’re killing me.”
I was squeezing and squeezing.
Our mothers approached, ladies from the ladies’ room, chatting.
the WORM in PHILLY
Classic American story: I was out of money and people I could ask for money. Then I got what the Greeks call a eureka moment. I could write a book for children about the great middleweight Marvelous Marvin Hagler. My father had been a sportswriter before he started forgetting things, such as the fact that he had been a sportswriter or the name of his only son, so my idea did not seem crazy. Probably it’s like when your father is president. You think, If that fuck could do it …
Why Marvelous Marvin Hagler? Why not? He was one of the best of his time, my time, really, meaning the time I was a boy and the world still seemed like something that could save me from the hurt, not be it. Why for children? Children were people you could reach. You could really reach out and reach them. Plus, low word count. That meant I’d get the money faster. I was experimenting with unemployment, needed to make rent quickly. I was no longer experimenting with drugs. I knew exactly what to do with them.
Thing was, I remembered certain facts about Hagler from my father’s boxing magazines, the ones my stepmother always groused about, stacks of them littering our house in New Brunswick. Hagler was tough and bald, for instance, perhaps the toughest, baldest fighter ever. I could begin with that piece of the story and just build out. Maybe my friends could help, though I’d never heard them talk about boxing, and most of them were hopeless drug addicts, good for only a couple of hours. I was hopeless, but prided myself on being good for more than a couple of hours. I still had what my father called get-up-and-go. Also, I was in possession of a positive outlook, which is just a trick whereby you convince yourself that the desolation of your world is a phase in your personal growth.
The weird thing is it works.
* * *
One evening a few of us got together in the apartment Gary and I shared. John and John’s cousin were there. John’s cousin went to divinity school. He told us about his fellow students, the gay guys in the closet battling their mothers and God, the brainiacs who approached faith as a physics equation, the bruisers groomed for ghetto heroics, the quivery social needs types. I stood, paced around the steamer trunk, which was cluttered with bleach and alcohol and glasses of water, bent spoons, cotton balls. I had a social need. I waited until John’s cousin nodded off, the dope overtaking his narrative imperative.
I wanted everybody to witness the fire in my eyes. I wheeled on them, announced my goal to write a children’s book about Marvelous Marvin Hagler.
Mostly when one of us spoke like this, by which I mean shared a dream or ambition or plan with the others, nobody would pursue the topic or even offer comment. The group would regard such an utterance with stricken silence. Then somebody would start in on something else entirely. It felt cruel at times, but served, I believe, to slightly check our plummet. Even as we sat around and measured, cooked, tied off, we would not indulge one another’s delusions.
But tonight when I mentioned the Marvelous Marvin Hagler children’s book, somebody spoke up. It was John’s cousin, the guy in divinity school. He was new, I guess, ignorant of our code.
“Hagler was bald, right?” he asked, rising out of his nod.
“Yes,” I said. “He was the first bald guy.”
“The first?”
“In the modern era.”
“Nobody was ever bald before?” said Gary.
“You know what I mean,” I said.
“I remember him,” said John’s cousin. “Dude was relentless.”
“Nobody would fight him,” I said. “That’s why it took him so long to be champ.”
“Like me,” said Gary, tapped the barrel of his syringe.
“But why Marvin Hagler?” said John’s cousin.
“He was relentless,” I said.
“Did he ever lose?”
“Just a few times.”
“I was robbed!” said Gary.
“Huh?” said John.
�
��I’m being Hagler.”
“He was, actually, robbed,” I said. “In a fight with Boogaloo Watts. But then they became good friends. That’s partly what the book is about.”
Nobody said anything, and I figured this would be the moment a new topic got introduced. I could see Gary doing the things he sometimes did when he was about to launch a rant, maybe about the cunning rhetoric of the soft left (he was the hard), or the immense number of people he believed had pancreatic cancer but didn’t know it, or how the smartest pop songs were by definition the dumbest, namely letting his head drop so that it was nearly in his crotch and doing some painful-looking thing with his shoulder blades and breathing super quickly, but then he didn’t lift his head or say anything at all, and it was John’s cousin who spoke, looked into my eyes, and said the oddest thing: “I can help.”
It turned out that the divinity student had an older sister in publishing. Children’s books, in fact. She kept an eye out for fresh talent, John’s cousin said. He’d be happy to write down her number.
“Oh, he’s fresh talent,” said Gary, his head still buried in his corduroys. “This motherfucker is fresh and juicy.”
* * *
The next afternoon, I called the sister.
“Yes, Leo said you’d be in touch,” Cassandra said. “He thinks the world of you.”
“Who’s Leo?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Sorry. We have a different name for old Leo. A nickname.”
“What is it?”
“John’s Cousin,” I said.
“How endearing.”
“I’m a big fan,” I said. “But anyway, the reason I called you—”
“You want to write a biography of that boxer.”
“He battled racism,” I said.
“I’m intrigued. We need books for boys. With real stories about gritty people who struggled and triumphed.”
“I could do that for you,” I said. “No sweat.”
“No sweat?”
“Look,” I said. “I’ve never written anything like this before, but I feel a passion welling up in me. Before he forgot everything, my father was what he liked to call a ‘wordslinger.’ Also, I was accepted into a name college, though I was unable to attend.”