Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  “Ugh,” Beth says. “I don’t think I can look at another schnitzel for the rest of the night.”

  I twirl her away from me, then back. “Hopefully you’ll change your mind when we get to the hotel room.”

  She kisses me. “I’m a sure thing. You know that, right?”

  I smile. “Now I do.”

  “Did you see my mom and dad earlier?”

  “You mean the laughing?” I ask.

  “The laughing, the flirting.”

  “What’s going on there?”

  “I don’t know, but they need to cut that shit out.”

  “Why is Joan and Stan’s being nice to one another such a bad thing?”

  “You don’t understand, Hank. I’ve never seen them like this. Remember our therapy sessions?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “You said my parents were nothing but glorified roommates. I hated you for saying it at the time, but you fucking nailed it.”

  “I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t mean to—”

  Beth douses my lips with a kiss. “No, no. You were right. Don’t apologize. I blame them for a lot of our problems, for not knowing how to love you.”

  We ease into our customary slow dance position, my left hand holding her right hand against my left shoulder, my right hand guiding the small of her back, her torso swaying in unison to mine. Every third or fourth beat of the song I pull her a little closer, bending at the knees just enough for my unabashed erection to rub between the insides of her thighs.

  “So, what you’re saying is, all our problems are your fault?”

  My wife raises her knee into my crotch. “So what you’re saying is, you don’t want me to suck your schnitzel when we get back to the hotel room?”

  I move my hand from her back to the bottom crease of her ass, pulling her up onto her toes and into me. “You’ve been quite the minx lately.”

  “To be fair, you’ve been quite the good husband.”

  “You’re rewarding me, then?”

  “No,” Beth says. “You’re rewarding me.”

  “You know my motto.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ladies first.”

  Beth eases back down to the balls of her feet. “I know and very much appreciate your motto.”

  “Okay, lovebirds, break it up.” Claire separates us with her arms like a referee in a prizefight. “I swear, whatever you two have going on here, you need to bottle and sell it.”

  “Where’s Hatch?” I ask.

  “He just got here,” Claire says. “In fact, he’s right behind—”

  “Hank, my boy!” Hatch grabs me from behind, lifting me at the waist. “Good lord, man. Fucking eat something. What do you weigh now?”

  “A lot less than you.”

  “What’s your secret?”

  “Still just running.”

  “Here, take this,” Hatch says. “Maybe it will put some fucking weight on you.”

  Hatch hands me a pint glass filled to the rim with a dark amber beer. I hold it to my nose, catching a strong smoked meat scent.

  “What is this?”

  “Bartender called it rauchbier, which literally translates as—”

  “Smoke beer, I know. My four years of high school German weren’t completely useless. What’s in it? Smells like bacon.”

  “Evidently all beers used to smell like this. The kilns would dry the green brewer’s malt over open fires, and so the grains picked up the smoky flavors of the wood and passed them on to the beers. Nowadays the process is much more controlled and breweries tend to just use clean malt. Rauchbier is such a lost art that only one town in all of Germany—Bamberg—brews rauchbier anymore.”

  “And you just learned all that from the bartender?”

  “Learnin’ ain’t nothin’ but listenin’, Hank.”

  “Which is why I’m surprised.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Hatch, if you ain’t talkin’, you ain’t listenin’.”

  “Drink your beer, asshole.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” I hold the pint glass just under my nose. “There’s more than just bacon going on here. There’s beech wood and charcoal, various cooked meats—bacon of course, but also grilled hot dogs and smoked sausage.”

  “Hey, Hank, are you going to drink it or fuck it?”

  “I’m getting there.” I lift the glass to my mouth, letting the amber liquid slide down my tongue. Like most quality beers, it’s served and tastes better at a temperature more cool than cold.

  “Well?” Hatch says.

  “I like it, a lot.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  “It’s a deceptive beer. The meat smells are not nearly as pronounced in the mouth. The finish is surprisingly clean and almost a little too thin, especially for a beer that initially portends something closer to an Islay Scotch.”

  “What’s that like?”

  “It’s like a campfire, a dense, barley-infused smoke bomb.”

  “And you smell all that in the beer?”

  “Initially, yes. But for all that smokiness that hits you upfront, the flavor profile on the backend is actually very accessible.”

  “Good to hear.”

  “Why? Do you owe the bartender a full report?”

  “No,” Hatch says. “I just like to know that my company is brewing good beers.”

  Beth sits naked on the executive table, sipping a glass of champagne. It’s four in the morning. We’ve had sex twice, and we’re contemplating a third time.

  Our next-door neighbor down in Empire Ridge—Lisa, the retired Colts cheerleader turned divorcée turned Hilton regional manager—hooked us up with the employee discount on the corporate suite. It’s a three-room suite, with a large main room flanked by two bedrooms. The front of the main room is the lounge area, with a wet bar, a television, a couch, a loveseat, and two Barcaloungers. The back part of the main room is dominated by a long executive table surrounded by eight chairs, and a floor-to-ceiling picture window overlooking Monument Circle and downtown Indianapolis. I feel we’re going to need to tip the maid service some serious cash, because we have really fucked this place up. Beth spilled almost an entire bottle of red wine while dancing on the boardroom table to the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps.” We broke one of the Barcaloungers when we rented Ass Worship 7: Assphyxiation on pay-per-view and tried to mimic some of the moves. And the executive table is covered with a thin layer of edible, Creamsicle-flavored massage cream.

  “Now take me through this,” Beth says between naked sips of champagne. “Hatch and his father, both of them alcoholics, went in together on a microbrewery up in Indianapolis?”

  “They’re more like silent partners really.” I walk over to the executive table, similarly naked. Beth hands me a glass of champagne.

  “What happened to the Navy?” Beth asks. “I thought he was looking at being a career officer.”

  “He was, up until about six months ago. Says he saw some things he wasn’t supposed to see over in Afghanistan, and the Navy paid him a lot of money to shut up and be honorably discharged.”

  “And that’s all he told you?”

  “That’s all I wanted to hear.”

  Beth jumps up from the executive table, her breasts bouncing. She stumbles forward, spilling her alcohol, again. “How about a toast?”

  “To what?”

  My wife of ten years raises her champagne flute. “To no secrets.”

  “To no secrets.”

  “I love you, Hank.”

  I sip my champagne, the bubbles tickling the back of my throat. I start to return the affirmation, but apparently there’s a disconnect between my brain and my mouth.

  “Right after we got engaged, I made out with Lila on the Mineshaft dance floor, but it didn’t mean anything. Be
fore the twins were born and you hated me, and I hated you, I had a Bloody Mary with Angelina Valerio when she had a layover at Indianapolis International Airport. Nothing happened, and it was a stupid thing for me to do. I also kissed Lila once more when I was living in New York when you and I were separated, but I didn’t really like it, and all I thought about was Sasha sitting on the end of the bed.”

  Beth spits more than a little champagne in my face. “Hank, what the fuck?”

  “Hey, it was your toast. You said no secrets. Do you have anything you want to say to me?”

  “No!”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “You know I have a lot of eyes and ears in Empire Ridge, right?”

  “Good grief,” Beth says. “It was like two or three horrible blind dates when I thought we were getting divorced.”

  “Two or three?”

  “Three.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re done here?”

  “I don’t know,” Beth says. “Are we?”

  “I’m getting conflicting vibes.”

  “What are they telling you?”

  “One vibe says we’re sleeping in separate bedrooms tonight, the other says I’m supposed to bend you over that executive table and fuck your brains out.”

  Beth finishes her sparkling wine and throws the empty glass over her shoulder. It shatters against the wall. She grabs the freshly opened champagne, taking a generous pull straight from the bottle.

  “We’ve been married for ten years,” she says, wiping the champagne from her lips with the back of her hand. “Figure it out.”

  2006

  Chapter ninety-six

  “Maybe we should slow down,” Jack says.

  “Slow down? We’re like five blocks from home.”

  “You’re pretty fit for an old man.”

  “I’m thirty-five, Jack.”

  “You’re closer to seventy than you are to the day you were born.”

  “Thanks for that dose of perspective, asshole.”

  “Ha!”

  “But at least I can take my wife to see an R-rated movie without having to show identification every time.”

  “Barely,” Jack says. “What is up with that anyway?”

  “With what?”

  “Our baby faces, you still getting carded for booze.”

  “Chalk it up to good genes and large pores.”

  “Huh?”

  “That oily skin and bad complexion you hate right now is a gift.”

  “A gift from whom? The Devil?”

  “Oily skin now equals fewer wrinkles later. All the Fitzpatrick men looked fifteen to twenty years younger than they really were, at least in the face.”

  Jack moved in with us late last summer, several months after everything went down at his sixteenth birthday party. It was Beth’s idea, but our transition from siblings to something else was surprisingly seamless.

  My wife has been very supportive, and not just because we have a full-time free babysitter. And by “free” I mean I slip Jack money when Beth isn’t looking. We still haven’t quite figured out how to tell Sasha and the twins that “Uncle Jack” is actually “Half Brother Jack,” so we haven’t told them. Debbie and Jack are still struggling to define their new mom-turned-grandma/son-turned-grandson relationship. He only just started talking to Mom again a few weeks ago.

  Gillman, for all his LDS quirks and fundamental flaws as a human being, has actually been my go-to mediator in this. He was the one who suggested that, with Jack now less than a year from being of legal majority age, we just keep a lid on everything. “Your choice, Hank,” he said to me. “Sue your mother for paternity rights and make the next year a living hell for everyone you know, or just be quiet for twelve measly months and Jack is yours anyway.” I think I might need to send Gillman a gift basket. Or maybe a can of red wheat for that weird-ass food storage he keeps in the basement because Joseph Smith told him to do it.

  Jack and Laura have grown close—or at least as close as the distance between them will allow. Ian took their daughters back to Pennsylvania a couple weeks after the funeral while Laura spent some time in Empire Ridge settling up her mother’s affairs and getting to know her son. She went back to Pennsylvania a couple months ago. Ian has a new job with PNC Bank in Philadelphia. Last I heard, he and Laura were in counseling and doing well. Jack says they’ve moved into an eighteenth-century townhouse in the Old City district that they’re restoring, and that it has a spare bedroom for when he visits.

  I’m not particularly happy at Gillman being a confidante in family matters or Laura managing to forge a connection with our son by being little more than his goddamn instant messenger buddy for a few months, but I’ve kind of lost the right to bitch about it.

  “How’s the college search going?” I say to Jack.

  “It’s going,” he answers in typical non-committal fashion.

  “You narrow down the list yet?”

  “The usual subjects,” Jack says. “IU, Purdue, Butler, Wabash, Notre Dame, a few others.”

  “Others?” I ask. “What others are there?”

  “We’ll see,” Jack says. “I feel like it’s all going to come down to Notre Dame.”

  I smack him across his back shoulder. “Damn right it is, but Mom tells me I might need to chip in for tuition.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Since when has that been part of the master plan?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, since you stuck your penis inside Laura’s vagina?”

  “Bitter much?”

  “You were the one who asked.”

  “I doubt you’re going to need my help. When was the last time you got anything less than an A-minus on a report card?”

  “The second grade.”

  “And how much money is coming to you via the annuity settlement with the auto auction?”

  “Twenty-six thousand dollars a year until I’m twenty-six years old.”

  “After taxes?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Hell, I’m the one who’s going to be hitting you up for a loan.”

  We approach our house, stopping at the end of the driveway. Beth is backing out. She rolls down her window. “Good run, boys?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I’m dropping the kids off at school,” she says to me. “See you for lunch?”

  “Not today, honey. I have to drive up to the Indy office.”

  “I thought you were working from home this week.”

  “I wish. The boss is flying in from New York this afternoon. He’s really on my ass about hitting my numbers this year.”

  “What are your chances?”

  “Slim to none. As they say in publishing these days, down is the new up.”

  “Well, good luck, babe.”

  “Thanks.”

  Beth rolls up her window. Just as the window is about to seal shut I hear her shout, “Stop licking your sister!” She backs the minivan into the street, then drives away.

  “Let’s go inside and get some coffee,” I say to Jack.

  “I don’t like coffee.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever.”

  “Can I blame Gillman’s caffeine-free Mormon ass for that?”

  “If you want.”

  “I do.”

  “I could go for a hot chocolate, though.”

  We walk inside the house. I start some water in the kettle for Jack’s hot chocolate, pour myself a cup of coffee.

  “Honey,” Jack says.

  “In your hot chocolate?”

  “No, you called Beth ‘honey.’”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You two seem to be in a happy place lately.”

  “I guess.”


  “You don’t sound particularly optimistic.”

  “I’m as optimistic as the sacrament of marriage allows me to be, Jack.”

  “Gee, that’s cheery.”

  Chapter ninety-seven

  Granted, most people associate the Deer Creek Music Center with July 2, 1995, the day three-thousand jackoffs tore down the back fence of the sprawling outdoor amphitheater at a Grateful Dead show and got in a rock, beer bottle, and tear gas brawl with local law enforcement. But for me, Deer Creek is the oasis of my youth. Back when I was younger, it stood alone among acres and acres of farmland. That iconic photo of Jerry Garcia standing in a wheat field, wearing all black and holding a guitar with his head bowed? That was taken at Deer Creek. I’ve seen at least three KISS “farewell” tours here and more than a dozen Buffett concerts, none of which I was sober enough to remember. The best live show I ever saw here was Metallica’s ’94 Shit Hits the Sheds tour, and the worst by far was Coldplay’s Twisted Logic tour last year. The younger kids call the place by its shiny new corporate name, Verizon Wireless Music Center. All the farmland has long since been paved over. Deer Creek is now merely the “you are here” dot near the top of the Hamilton Town Center map. And Jerry Garcia’s wheat field is a Bed, Bath & Beyond parking lot.

  Hatch pulls the minivan into the Deer Creek parking lot. We’re here for the Journey–Def Leppard concert, and Hatch is the only sober one in the vehicle. The rest of us—Claire, Beth, and I—are both drunk and stoned. We’ve been passing around a half gallon of Jim Beam and a two-liter of Diet Coke for the entire ride up from Empire Ridge. Claire fired up a joint just south of Indianapolis, which we proceeded to smoke before we even got to the Marion-Hamilton County border. Hatch is in the middle of trying to give me a music history lesson.