The Reason You're Alive

by Matthew Quick

  Gays always contribute something positive to the community. You never see gays move into a neighborhood and make it worse. No, you always see them renovating old fucked-up houses, adding value, making things look better, starting businesses.

  Don’t get me wrong. I could never willingly hold hands with another dude, let alone put another man’s dick inside of me. No homo here. Heterosexual and proud of it. I’d march if we straights had a parade.

  But consenting adults can do whatever the fuck they want to each other as far as I’m concerned. That’s what freedom means. And Timmy is the best spin class instructor in the city. You have to sign up for his class years in advance or know someone who can get you in if you want the privilege, and believe me when I say it absolutely is a privilege.

  I have driven BMW for decades and own—outright, no mortgage—a South Jersey suburban house valued well over eight hundred thousand. I’ve made many millions in my lifetime—but the truth is that most people are more impressed with my spot in Gay Timmy’s spin class. That’s how much respect this exceptionally fit homo commands.

  I did some noteworthy real estate transactions with Timmy’s homo lover, who is a big-time player in the Philly real estate game and the man in their gay relationship. The gays only say “life partner” instead of “homo lover” to people they think are uncomfortable with their gay lifestyles, by the way, and I’m comfortable, so I can say “homo lover.” I’ve been given clearance, if you’re one of those uptight liberals who keeps track of these things.

  Anyway, Gay Johnny and I each made seven figures on this old building I purchased back in the eighties. Johnny turned my shithole property into a hot popular brewpub down in Old City maybe eight years ago. Big, big, big fucking coin was made by all parties involved. Win, win, win. So we’re tight, Johnny and yours truly. Anyone who helps me make serious money is okay in my book, no matter where he may or may not insert his dick.

  Here’s another good thing about homos. They are extremely thoughtful and surprisingly patriotic. Since I’ve known them, Johnny and Timmy have sent me a card every year on Veterans Day, thanking me for my service. And there is always a little notice stating that they donated money to a charity that supports US veterans. They donate in my name too, which is a nice touch, even though they get to keep the tax write-off for themselves. My favorite gay couple hasn’t missed a single year yet. They have no idea what the fuck thanking me for my service means, because they have never been to war, but I appreciate the sentiment. Actually goes a long way with me, especially when I consider how many heterosexuals say fucking zilch to me on Veterans Day, let alone make a donation to help my brothers-in-arms.

  So these two are okay in my book. Any day of the week, I’ll take a classy pair of gays who say “Thank you for your service” over a million straight ignorant assholes who say nothing at all to combat veterans. The gays can hump each other all they want as long as they are patriotic, because that’s true American freedom. Love your country. Period. And Timmy and Johnny proudly fly the stars and stripes from their home on historic Elfreth’s Alley, which is a detail not lost on me.

  Any fucking way, I’m in Gay Timmy’s spin class, riding the bike, sweating my motherfucking nuts off, when I smell nuoc mam, which is a Vietnamese fish sauce.

  Fucking nasty awful stuff. Make you wanna puke, just smelling it.

  I scanned the room using the mirrors on the walls and found the culprit pretty easily. There was this little Vietnamese broad toward the front pedaling fiercely, sweating up a goddamn rice-paddy monsoon. The fish sauce smell had to be coming through her pores, no doubt, I initially thought.

  This fucked up my spin class experience, to say the least. Timmy kept saying, “Keep pedaling, David! You can do it! Beauty is paid for in sweat!” because my ass was dragging. He usually doesn’t have to single me out like that. I generally can keep up, because I am a tough motherfucker and don’t you forget it. So he knew there was something wrong right away when he saw me putting in a subpar spin.

  What Timmy didn’t understand was this: Back in Vietnam, I used to set up with a sniper rifle downwind of a trail. I’d smell the gooks before I ever saw them. I don’t have miraculous powers when it comes to my nose. But nuoc mam stinks. Fucking hell, it’s a truly terrible potion. You can smell it from miles away. Eat that stuff, and it’s like you sweat rancid putrid liquefied fish guts for days. The little bastards in Vietnam love that shit too. Drink it down by the bottle. And whenever I got a whiff of it during my tour, that meant I was going to do some killing. So you can imagine what the scent of nuoc mam does to my brain when it comes to triggers and flashbacks here in the USA. Takes me right back to the jungle.

  “Get that ass up in the air, David!” Timmy yelled at me. “Pedal like your life depends on it!”

  Timmy was pushing me like he was paid to do, because he is an extraordinary motivator when it comes to fitness, but he didn’t know that I was in kill mode at the time. Civilians don’t understand kill mode because that switch in their brain has never been activated. So I didn’t blame Timmy. He didn’t know any better. Instead, I just got off my bike and hit the shower early. I gave Timmy a wave on the way out, letting him know I was okay, but he looked concerned nonetheless.

  Gays are pretty perceptive when it comes to feelings, which is another thing I admire about them. If ever I’m sending flowers to someone, I always make sure I hire a gay florist. You’d have to be a fucking moron to hire a straight man to arrange flowers. Gays are the best when it comes to floral arrangements. I regularly send flowers to Geraldine, my old secretary from my banking days, because she’s a classy lady and her husband, Carl, died a few years ago, so he obviously can’t send her flowers anymore. Geraldine is black, by the way—if you couldn’t tell by the name—and what racist sends a black lady flowers multiple times a year, let alone hires a black secretary in the eighties? I’d like to see my liberal son go back in time and hire a black before it became the trend. People praise you for hiring blacks today. You were punished, back in my day.

  And if you’re thinking, How the hell did the foulmouthed son of a bitch telling you this story ever make it in the banking world? you don’t understand real estate investment. I wasn’t a born-rich New York banker in a ten-thousand-dollar suit getting cute little manicures during Friday lunch breaks so I’d look refined in the Hamptons on the weekend. I was a Philly banker kicking ass on my city’s streets. Hustling. Making prime-time players real money. And if you make money for the right sort of men, you can do and say pretty much whatever the fuck you want.

  After I showered and dressed, I waited around for spin class to end because I didn’t want to offend Timmy and get kicked out of the best class in the city, nor did I want to risk offending Johnny, with whom I hoped to make a lot more money in the future. It’s been my experience that if you offend one gay, you offend them all. They stick together, so you have to be careful. I never want to be on the wrong side of a queer parade because there is no fucking end to a gay political movement once they get their minds made up, which is another thing I admire about them. They are a strong people with a rock-solid resolve. Don’t fuck with the gays. Trust me.

  So I’m standing there outside the class when it ends and everyone starts leaving the room, headed for the showers, except the little Vietnamese lady. She’s talking to Timmy, and they keep touching each other’s arms like gays and women do when they are close, which is when I realized that the gook must be friends with Timmy. I figured she was probably okay if she was Gay Timmy’s personal acquaintance, but I wasn’t sure I could control myself if I got another strong whiff of the mind-altering gook condiment known as nuoc mam.

  Just as soon as I turned away, trying to avoid an awkward and potentially dangerous situation—trying to “de-escalate,” as my VA shrink says—Timmy calls my name and says he wants to introduce me to his “good friend.”

  I was in a tough fucking situation there. The scent of nuoc mam in my nose is like pressing the button that launch
es a nuclear warhead, and I knew it. But I also really loved this spin class, and gays can be super touchy when it comes to social etiquette. If I walked away, I couldn’t exactly call Timmy later and say “I was afraid I’d kill your gook friend who smelled like nuoc mam.” No one is going to understand and condone that sentence unless they were in the Vietnam jungle back in the sixties. And certainly not Timmy, who has thrown people out of his class permanently for walking in thirty seconds late. You do not fuck with Timmy once you “make the commitment” to be in his “spinning family.” That room full of spin bikes is his domain. Where he gets to be God, and I respect that. I had made the commitment.

  The last time I stopped going to spin class, I gained twenty pounds and had a heart attack, which forced me to give the thieving doctors big-time money, so I couldn’t afford to even accidentally insult Timmy, who was literally keeping me alive at that point in my life.

  All of this led to me trying to hold my breath as I walked back into the spinning room, but of course, eventually I needed more air.

  I could still smell traces of nuoc mam, but the scent was much fainter, which sort of disproved my theory about it being the gook whose pores were venting that vile fish sauce.

  “David,” Timmy said, “I’d like you to meet my good friend Sue Wilkerson. Sue, this is David Granger.”

  Sue stuck out her little yellow hand, and because of my respect for Gay Timmy I shook it. As our hands went up and down in between us, I got a whiff of her. I braced myself for a violent outburst, but there was no nuoc mam in the air. Instead, I got a nose full of vanilla with maybe a hint of lavender.

  “You smell surprisingly nice,” I said.

  “Surprisingly?” Timmy said, in a way that let me know I had violated one of his many secret homo rules. An agitated gay is a lot like a king cobra rising up, flaring its hood, and hissing at you. Yes, the cobra can kill you. But the dramatic reaction is just a warning, and there is never a problem if you back down. Gays are peaceful by nature, and I had learned this long ago.

  So I said to Timmy, “After an intense workout, I always stink like shit.” And then to Sue I said, “I can see you’re Vietnamese.”

  “I am,” she said. “And I’m impressed. Most Americans think every Asian person is Chinese.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not a fucking racist,” I told her, “and I spent some time in Vietnam. A few decades back. Before you were born. And today’s average American civilian is a moron anyway.”

  Sue laughed in this confident and easy way that I immediately liked, and then she told me that her father was a Vietnam vet.

  So I said, “I hope he wasn’t Vietcong.”

  But it turns out her father was US Army and white. She had been adopted. So I immediately told her to thank her father for his service, on my behalf.

  “I’m sure he’ll thank you for yours too,” she said. Letting me know Timmy had already told her I was a veteran, just like her father.

  Timmy chimed in here and said, “David, you should meet Sue’s dad. We’ll have you all over for dinner. How does that sound?”

  I don’t know if you have ever gone to a gay dinner party, but let me tell you something—they are intense and last for fucking ever. I always end up taking too many cigarette breaks outside alone, and I often have to leave early because trying to keep up with lively gay dinner-party conversation makes me so fucking tired. On the plus side, I always enjoy speaking with my fellow Vietnam veterans, and this Sue Wilkerson had me curious.

  This next statement will piss off the liberals for sure, but there is a big difference between a gook and a genetically Vietnamese woman raised here in the United States of America by a US Army veteran. Sue is as American as can be. Just like I’m not Irish or German or English, even though my Irish, German, and English ancestors passed down their genes to me. When you are raised in the USA and act like it, you are American, which makes you the best type of person in the entire world.

  I’ve often wondered exactly what spin class attendee had eaten nuoc mam on the day that I met Sue Wilkerson. The rest of the people in that class were white, which probably meant that the nuoc mam eater had dined at a trendy Vietnamese restaurant prior to entering Gay Timmy’s domain.

  I wondered if a Caucasian could actually enjoy nuoc mam. Was that even fucking possible? I was betting no, because of the genes gooks have, which make their tongues different than ours. But I never did find out the answer to that little mystery, because I wasn’t about to conduct a fucking survey. There was no good way to explain to the entire spin class why I wanted to know who was eating nuoc mam without getting into everything I’m telling you here, which is not exactly for the ears of the general public, to say the fucking least.

  Anyway, Timmy and Johnny had that dinner party. Alan and I hit it off big-time, as you might imagine we would. He was a smoker too. Had downgraded to Marlboro Lights, just like me, but unlike me, he still had his lucky Zippo from the war, which was inscribed with the same exact words that were on my lucky lighter, which I lost somehow when I went rogue with Tao. It was a pretty common saying back in Vietnam, so the odds of us having the same Zippo weren’t that amazing, but even still, the match was good enough for me. Here’s the little Zippo-size poem:

  WE ARE THE

  UNWILLING

  LED BY THE

  UNQUALIFIED

  DOING THE

  UNECESSARY

  FOR THE

  UNGRATEFUL

  Once I saw that lighter, I knew Alan was a true brother. He understood. And he became one of my closest friends. All because two homos were thoughtful enough to throw a dinner party for veterans.

  And the more I saw of Alan, the more I saw of Sue, because she and her father were close. She started arranging outings for their family and me—fishing trips, weekend getaways, target practice at the gun range, stuff like that—and it all seemed completely normal. We also started eating a lot of meals together—Sue, Alan, his wife, and me. I didn’t think too much about any of this until one night when I was smoking my last cigarette of the day on an Ocean City front porch, under a green awning attached to the house we had rented a few blocks away from the beach. Sue came outside and just started talking about how I made her father feel comfortable, and how she had never seen him so at ease in her entire life.

  I told her combat veterans can only ever really trust other combat veterans.

  Then she said, “My dad’s never really had a friend before. As long as I’ve known him. I’m glad he has a friend now.” Sue kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks,” she added, before she went to bed.

  Besides the business contacts I had made millions for, not too many people have said thank you to me and meant it. I knew Sue was special right then and there. I was damn lucky to have her in my life. And as I puffed on my cigarette under that Ocean City awning, I thought that sometimes just showing up consistently is enough to get the job done.

  Unfortunately, Alan’s wife died not too long after that conversation. Was hit by a taxi when she was crossing Market Street in broad daylight at City Hall. Fucking tragedy. The taxi driver was a Muslim, by the way. But not an asshole jihadist, according to the papers, who painted him out to be a nice family man. The brakes had gone. Freak accident. Or maybe someone had tampered with them, I don’t know. But the police said it wasn’t the Muslim’s fault. He and his family came to the funeral, and he sobbed the whole time, which made me feel something for him even though he was a Muslim. Maybe it was because he was wearing a suit, like a proper American, instead of a bin Laden desert bathrobe. His family actually seemed nice too. The women covered their heads with colorful scarves, but they didn’t cover their faces with those black torture devices that only show the eyes, which was an improvement, at least.

  None of that mattered much to Alan, of course.

  Good or bad Muslim, accident or murder, his wife was dead.

  Then my worst fear for Alan came true. He started spending entire days stumbling around his house half drunk, mumbling all s
orts of depressing awful things about how he wanted to die. In spite of the fact that he had an amazing daughter to live for, Alan bought the bullet because his wife, Shelly, had been the great true love of his life. She was the one who had kept him level regarding all the Vietnam shit. Saved his life when he came back from the jungle and then gave him the civilian life he didn’t think was possible. She did all the legwork when they adopted Sue. And adopting Sue was smart. Gave Alan closure in a weird way. Allowed him to turn something bad into something positive. Intelligent woman. Shelly was a goddamn saint, just like my dead wife, Jessica.

  Less than a year after I met him—and only a few weeks after we buried his wife—my Vietnam War buddy was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, which did not surprise me at all, because like I said before, he had bought the bullet. He got his wish and died shortly after getting that death sentence. The Grim Reaper is an efficient motherfucker. Give him an inch to work with, and it’s lights out.

  When he was on his deathbed, Alan asked me to watch over his daughter, and I, of course, said it would be an honor. I’d do just about anything for a fellow Vietnam veteran. And I wasn’t about to buy the bullet anytime soon.

  Sue got real lonely and depressed after her parents were gone. Took it hard because she didn’t have too much experience with death.

  Alan died a few months before my son disowned me at the Phillies game. I’m still upset about wasting such good seats right behind home plate, not that my highbrow son would care about something as lowly and common as professional sports. The prime view would have been wasted on him even if we had actually stayed to watch the remaining innings. But anyway, after all that had happened, Sue and I were both in need of a family.

  We started going to the Ritz Movie Theatres together a few times a week to watch cerebral art-house films, which we both enjoy. We’d always have dinner—never Vietnamese food, no fucking nasty nuoc mam—afterward and discuss the flick. Sue would say I reminded her of her father. Like how I was always accidentally falling asleep during the movie, and Sue would worry about whether she should wake me up or not. And how she sometimes had to remind me what certain dishes were, especially at Italian places, because of my fucked-up brain, only we didn’t know I had the tumor back then. And how I was always getting food on my shirt when I ate. She would say she used to call her dad Menu Man, because you could tell what was on the menu by reading the stains on his breast pockets. When she started calling me Menu Man, the significance was not lost on yours truly. And I’d tell Sue she was the absolute best Vietnamese person I had ever met, hands down, which made her smile sadly, because her genes would always make her a little sympathetic toward the little bastards in Vietnam, no matter how American she was at heart. I understood and accepted that fact. Let it slide, because Sue was value added.