Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  “A famous high-end strip club.”

  Urwah’s face practically lights up. “Continue,” he says.

  “Cindy had never been to one, so we took her. She got really drunk.”

  “Really drunk?”

  “Really drunk.”

  “What happened?”

  “Aaron disappeared into one of the back rooms with three girls and a wad of hundred dollar bills, so Cindy and I took a cab back to the hotel. The moment we got back, Cindy stuck her tongue in my ear in the elevator, told me she was going to her room to draw a bath, and asked me to join her.”

  “So she didn’t really come right out and say she wanted your dick.”

  I shake my head. “You’re right, Urwa. She didn’t say that. I guess she could have just been implying that my personal hygiene left something to be desired and that in the interest of being environmentally conscious we do some innocent tandem bathing.”

  The phone starts ringing again. Again the caller ID flashes Out of Area. “Just pick it up, Hank.”

  “Fine,” I say. I pick up the phone. “Hello, this is Hank.”

  “Hank Fitzpatrick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hank, how ah yuh?”

  My chest hurts. Hearing that deep Boston inflection for the first time in nine years makes me dizzy, short of breath.

  “Angelina?”

  “You muss think I’m so wid callin’ yuh like this.”

  “Weird?” I say. “I’m the one who wrote a letter and mailed it to four random Angelina Valerios in the greater Boston area.”

  “Foh-uh?”

  “Yeah, Angelina.” I close my eyes and smile, inhaling the memories. “Foh-uh.”

  “Yuh always knew how to sweep a gal off huh feet.”

  Urwah hovers over my desk. “Angelina, can I put you on hold for just one second?”

  “Shu-uh.”

  I stare down Urwah. “What?” he says.

  “Aaron coming in at all today?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Urwah says.

  “I’m taking this in Aaron’s office.”

  He swats his hand at me. “You’re no fun.”

  Chapter seventy-six

  “Welcome to Indianapolis International Airport.”

  I make my way through security to the Delta terminal. I take a peek at the arrivals listed on the video screen. Her plane landed at Gate A7 ten minutes ago.

  “Smoking is prohibited in the main concourse of Indianapolis International and is restricted to designated smoking areas.”

  The automated voice over the PA sounds strangely familiar, but I’m too nervous to think about that right now.

  “I’d be nervous, too, if I were you.”

  “Who said that?” I say, turning around. People are staring at me.

  “I think you know who this is, Hank.”

  “Jesus?”

  “It’s been a while. How about we go somewhere a little quieter so all these nice people don’t get freaked out by the guy talking to himself?”

  I hold my cell phone up to my mouth. “I’ll just pretend I’m talking to someone on the other end of the line.”

  “Suit yourself. Before I forget, what’s with that book Lila is writing?”

  “Sperm Bank Messiah?”

  “Yes. You really make it hard for me to like you sometimes.”

  “Sounds like somebody needs to reread his Sermon on the Mount.”

  “Don’t throw that back in my face.”

  “Hey, you’re the pacifist.”

  “What are you doing here, Hank?”

  “Relax, Jesus. Angelina has a short layover in Indy on her way to see some old college friends down in Tallahassee. She’s here for an hour, and we’re just having a coffee.”

  “Boston to Tallahassee by way of Indianapolis? Help me out with that one.”

  “It was like two hours out of her way, and we wanted to catch up.”

  “And your nearly nine-months pregnant wife knows about this?”

  “I’m not hurting anyone.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.”

  “Look, these last few months with Beth have sucked. I don’t have anything to feel guilty about.”

  “You apparently feel guilty enough to imagine your conscience as the voice of Jesus Christ who’s talking to you from the airport PA system although curiously no one else can hear me.”

  “Hank, izzat you?”

  “Uh, I gotta go.” I hang up my phone.

  Angelina drops her purse, runs over, and hugs me as if we just said goodbye yesterday as opposed to nine years ago. She steps back, smiles. “Look at yuh, Hank. Yuh haven’t aged a day. Yuh might even be a little skinny-uh.”

  I smile as I listen to the r disappear off the end of her words. “I’ve been running lately.”

  “It shows.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself.” I wish I was just being nice, just as a part of me wished on the drive up here from Empire Ridge that Angelina had let herself go. I’m convinced the two main reasons old flames are rarely rekindled are time and gravity. The passage of years makes you forget why that beautiful young woman was special, while gravity conspires with bad eating habits and a sedentary middle-age lifestyle to distort her figure until you start believing she never was.

  None of this has happened with Angelina Valerio. With the exception of some faint crow’s-feet, she’s still a knockout. Her hair is dark brown, nearly black. She’s petite but not rail-thin, reminding me vaguely of Cynthia Gibb, Rob Lowe’s love interest in Youngblood, but more reminiscent of Lisa Dean Ryan, a.k.a. Doogie Howser’s high school sweetheart, Wanda.

  “Want to grab a coffee?” I say.

  Angelina looks at her watch. “I only have about forty-five minutes. How’s about a Bloody Mary?”

  “Twist my arm.”

  We sit down at the bar. We both order our Bloody Marys extra spicy. Angelina clinks my glass. “Chih-uhs.”

  “Cheers,” I reply.

  And just like that, the forty-five minutes is over. We talked about our lives since we said our goodbyes. About how Dad died. About how she was my last girlfriend who really knew my father and that this fact had always stuck with me. She told me she’d saved every one of the letters and poems I wrote her in a shoebox beneath her bed. She told me she’s been bisexual for the better part of the last eight years for reasons I couldn’t quite understand, but that now she was “way in-tuh dudes again” and engaged to a “Bah-stun cahp.” She told me about her fiancé. I told her about Beth, Sasha, and the twins.

  I escort Angelina back to her gate. She leans in and hugs me again, kissing me on the cheek.

  “You know, Hank, yo-uh writin’ still makes me cry.”

  “What part?” I say, ever the sucker for validation.

  “All of it.” Angelina reaches into her purse and pulls out my letter. “‘As I stand once mo-uh on the vudge of fathuhood, about to again become that which I miss so much in my life, I want to find closhuh with someone who was once close to my haht, someone who knew me as just the fehlessly precocious son of Hank Fitzpatrick, and not the flawed, insuhcuh man I’ve become.’”

  “Did I write that?”

  “Don’t be so modest. Yo-uh one in a million, Hank. Yo-uh the one that got away.”

  “Right back at you, Angelina. But I have to say, the new guy sounds like good people.”

  “Uh, yeah, Hank. He’s good people.”

  We giggle, acknowledging a moment from our shared past. Myrtle Beach in just the early cusp of spring. Air temperatures still dropping into the thirties after the sun goes down. We ran naked out of the ice-cold ocean. I gave her my towel even though I had lost all sensation in my extremities. As we warmed up in the hot tub, she kissed my shivering, purple lips and said, “Yo-uh good people, Hank.” Never
hearing this phrase before in my life, I of course looked around to see if my family had magically teleported into the tub with me.

  “I read him yo-uh lettuh, you know,” Angelina says. “Pulled out the shoe baw-ux and read a couple of ’em.”

  “Really?”

  “Yo-uh not mad, ah yuh?”

  “No, no,” I say. “Not at all.”

  “You shuh-uh?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Well, okay. Call me outta the blue and let’s do this again sometime.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I say.

  I kiss Angelina on the cheek and watch her board the plane. The tone of our goodbye is too casual, both of us pretending like we’d talk again, maybe as soon as tomorrow. But I know better. As happy as I was for these forty-five minutes, this is all I’m entitled to. Angelina is like the Notre Dame football autographed by the ’88 National Championship team I keep on my mantel—unblemished, tanned and oiled to a bright sheen, perfect. Never to fade in the sun. Never to be left out in the rain. Never to be thrown and bounced off blacktop until its dimples wore smooth. Never to be touched. Never to be carried to bed under the arm of an adoring child who dreamt of being the next Joe Montana.

  Huh. Go figure.

  I’m not jealous. I don’t love Angelina Valerio, or even the idea of her. As it turns out, I’m still very much in love with my wife.

  In all honesty, Beth probably doesn’t give a fuck either way at that moment. Regardless of my long-overdue epiphany, she’s two weeks from praying that modern medicine finds a way to stuff two watermelons inside her husband’s bladder and make him shoot them out the end of his penis.

  2001–2002

  Chapter seventy-seven

  Aisha adjusted the turban wound tightly to her head, her long hair bound up and dripping rivulets of sweat down the small of her back. She pulled the rough excess of her collar over her face, trying to shield herself from the drifting sand. The fake beard only added to her discomfort.

  Sand snuck into the folds and various openings of her drafty garment—little more than a burlap toga, tied at the waist by a rope. It had been a birthday gift from her sister, years ago, back when their parents thought they were merely recreational hookah users and not the biggest marijuana dealers in Dearborn, Michigan. Aisha was happy she wore the thing, actually. She was far from home, in need of a touchstone.

  She was six months clean, not that this helped her gain her bearings. It was just after daybreak. Strangers passed her on the streets of Jerusalem. A steady stream of Pesach pilgrims filtered into the city. A merchant towing along a caravan of camels laden with spices, fabrics, and dried figs. A peasant driving a small, curiously stoic flock of sheep—too hardy to die, too lean to ever make a profit. Three women balancing atop their heads baskets of donkey and camel dung to be later used as fuel for fires. Aisha rubbed shoulders with strangers dead two-thousand years in her world: Sadducees, Pharisees, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Arabians, Roman soldiers, tax collectors, merchants, craftsmen, peasants, beggars, slaves. Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were spoken intermittently, mixing in her head and rendering translation difficult.

  While pursuing her doctorate in theoretical physics, Aisha had befriended an exiled seminarian—exiled presumably for being too deist and too heterosexual—who tutored her in Greek and was familiar with the colloquial, first-century dialect. In exchange for Ecstasy-fueled, exceedingly non-missionary sex, Aisha had mastered the language from the modern Greek all the way back to Mycenaean, plus a little Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin.

  The smell of incense, the sound of trumpets and Psalms, the oxen, sheep, kids, and doves being sold for sacrifice. All carried with them a poignancy she had never felt. The sun danced over the Mount of Olives, brighter than any sun she had ever seen. The Antonia Fortress and Herod’s Temple veiled most of the city in their imposing shadows. Aisha reached down, pulling a weed from the ground outside the abandoned amphitheater. She smelled the weed, inhaling deeply and imagining troupes performing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or perhaps another even greater Greek tragedian history had forgotten. Two Jewish rabbis cursed at her in Hebrew, remembering the theater’s more sinister raison d’être as a gladiatorial killing field for thousands of pious men.

  “Shabot shalom,” she said to them in a plaintive but consciously masculine tone.

  Aisha made her way to the western edge of the city, keeping to herself as the day progressed. After the encounter with the rabbis she spoke aloud only once to buy a loaf of bread and some pressed olives. She waited outside Herod’s palace for her cue from the Roman soldier. He was a handsome man, a well-muscled legionnaire in his early twenties with medium-length hair that curled out from under his helmet. His armor comprised overlapping strips of iron that hugged his torso in two halves and fastened on the front and back by a system of brass hooks and leather laces. He carried a shield and a short sword.

  Late last night, Aisha had bribed him with several gold pieces and a handjob. She needed the practice. The legionnaire unlocked the palace gate and walked away.

  She checked inside her hip pocket for at least the tenth time in as many minutes. Everything was still there: the half-dozen empty vials, the cryoprotectant semen extender, the plastic gloves, the small bottle of mead laced with roofies. A hundred yards down the corridor, He sat in His prison cell…

  I stack the pages neatly on my desk. Trimmed down from one hundred and twenty thousand words to an even seventy-five thousand, Sperm Bank Messiah has taken up most of my professional time these last few months. I’m late for my twin boys’ first birthday party today. I assume Beth will understand, just like Beth assumes it’s perfectly normal for a couple married seven years to have sex once every two months.

  “Very nice,” I say.

  I can hear Lila breathing on the other end of the speakerphone. “You think?” she says.

  “Yeah, I do. You have a way with character and setting. I felt like I had a front-row seat to Passover in ancient Jerusalem. Obviously, the handjob scene with Jesus needs some more work.”

  “Agreed, but the general setup is better?”

  “Yeah, more or less.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’m still torn overall on Aisha.”

  “But I thought you were into exotic looking women.”

  “That’s beside the point,” I say, trying not to smile or picture my stepsister in a peach negligee—failing at both. “Why did you give your protagonist, who’s supposed to be a born-again Christian, an Islamic name?”

  “Truthfully?” Lila says.

  “No, just make something up. Yes, truthfully.”

  “I wanted to piss off all those misogynist fuckers in the Middle East.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that. But you couldn’t come up with a better name than Aisha?”

  “What’s wrong with Aisha?”

  “It makes me think of little black kids doing the running man in single-strap airbrushed overalls.”

  “Come again?”

  “You know, Another Bad Creation, aka the boy band ABC? Iesha, you are the girl that I neva had, and I want to get to know you bettah!”

  “Still nothing.”

  “You disappoint me, Lila.”

  “My profuse apologies, but other than my protagonist reminding you of early nineties hip-hop artists, what else don’t you like?”

  “Your setting.”

  “What’s wrong with Indianapolis? You love Indy.”

  “If you want this book to make any kind of commercial or critical splash, at least move Aisha out of the Midwest.”

  “Why?”

  “Because unless you’re Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides, the Midwest just doesn’t sell. It’s the Saved by the Bell factor.”

  “The what?”

  “The Saved by the Bell factor. Ever watch those old reruns of Sa
ved by the Bell?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Come on now, Lila. Either you have or you’re lying to me. It’s fucking Saved by the Bell.”

  “Okay, I’ve seen a few episodes.”

  “A few episodes?”

  “And by that I mean every episode at least four times over. I guess I was just hoping we had reached our nostalgia quota with Another Bad Creation.”

  “That’s better,” I say. “You remember the first season?”

  “Barely. It’s been a while.”

  “The series actually debuted on the Disney Channel in 1988 under a different title, Good Morning, Miss Bliss. The focal point was Miss Bliss as opposed to the students, and the setting was John F. Kennedy Junior High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. After one season, the show was retooled as Saved by the Bell and quietly relocated to Los Angeles and the now-familiar Bayside High School. The acting never got better. The stories never got better. There was always the laugh track and predictable ‘ooos’ and ‘ahhhs’ whenever Zack and Kelly kissed. But that one small tweak to the setting made a horrible show legendary.”

  Lila looks unimpressed. “That’s sixty seconds of my life I’m never getting back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I like the Midwest, Hank. It has an everyman quality that readers can relate to—like John Hughes’s Illinois and Judd Apatow’s Michigan.”

  “Readers don’t want to relate anymore, they want to escape. Why the hell do you think Freaks and Geeks got cancelled after one season? Not to mention, you have the critics to think about. And there’s only one surefire setting for the preening literati.”

  “Cue the New York rant.”

  “It’s been that way since Nick Carraway partied with Jay Gatsby in West Egg, and you know it, Lila. You make Aisha a Manhattanite, and critics will eat that shit up.”

  “How about Brooklyn?”

  “Even better. Hell, go for the jugular and put her in Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, or Dumbo—the more indie you can make the setting the better. And if you’re thinking about working in a Midwest anecdote about basketball, change it to something completely esoteric that nobody west of the Hudson gives a shit about, like cricket or cribbage.”