I step dripping into my bedroom, feeling hungover and old, to find Jared clipping his toenails on my bed. “Look at you,” he says with an inquisitive smirk, taking in my battered face and bruised ribs.
“You look. I'm too tired.”
“You know,” he continues disinterestedly. “Statistically speaking, blocking at least some punches in a fight will usually lead to a more favorable outcome.”
“I'll take that under advisement.”
There's another bang from downstairs, and we both look out the window to see a green station wagon disappearing around the corner. On the lawn there is now a second copy of Bush Falls splayed out fairly close to the first one. “What's up with that?” Jared asks, not concerned, just mildly curious, and then leans back to resume clipping his toenails.
My cell phone rings, and Jared picks it up off the night table and tosses it to me. It's Owen, calling to see how things are going. I update him on my father's condition, and he clucks and murmurs in all the right places. “And how has it been otherwise?” he asks pointedly. “You know, your return to the Falls?”
“Pretty crazy.”
“I knew it!” he exclaims gleefully. “Do tell, do tell.”
I quickly relate all of the events of the past day, listening to Owen's delighted gasps while Jared watches me, listening raptly, smirking when I include the incident of his coitus interruptus. “So let's review,” Owen says when I'm done, not even trying to conceal his merriment. “In the last twenty-four hours, you've returned to your hometown, where essentially everybody hates you, you've been reunited, however awkwardly, with your estranged family, you've walked in on a sexual liaison, gotten in trouble with the law, been assaulted on two separate occasions, and met up with an ailing friend and gotten drunk with him. Am I leaving anything out?”
I consider telling him about the flying books, but I haven't gotten my mind wrapped around that one yet, so I leave it out. “That's pretty much it,” I say.
Owen whistles softly. “I wonder what you're going to do today.”
“You make it sound like I planned all of this.”
“Au contraire, mon frère. For the first time in god knows how long, it's spinning wonderfully out of your control.”
“And what the hell does that mean?”
But Owen has to go. “Listen, I'm late for something. We'll talk later.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Did you finish the manuscript?” I ask hesitantly.
“It's interesting that you refer to it as ‘the' manuscript,” Owen says. “Most writers, passionate about their work, will always refer to it in the possessive, as in ‘my' manuscript.”
“What's your point?”
“It seems you're already distancing yourself from your work.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I say. “Did you read it or not?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“I have,” he says, inhaling as he searches for the right word, “issues.”
“So I gathered,” I say dejectedly. “What do we do now?”
Owen sighs. “Well, we could make some changes and I'm sure I could still sell it, but I'm not convinced your interests are best served that way.”
I allow the implications of that to sink in for a moment. “It's really bad, isn't it?”
“You're a good writer, Joe.”
“Oh, for Christ's sake. Just say it sucked.”
“If I thought it sucked, I would tell you it sucked.” Owen takes another deep breath. “Listen, we've discussed this. You know the second one's always a bitch. There's too much riding on it. It's almost worth writing just to get it the fuck out of the way.”
“So we just forget about it and move on to book number three?”
“That idea is not without merit.”
“And why won't book three be just as bad? I can't even figure out where this one went wrong.”
“Ah, but I already have,” Owen says grandly. “That's why you pay me the big bucks.”
“Would you care to enlighten me?”
“I could, but muddling through on your own is a critical journey for you as a writer.”
“You are so full of shit,” I say, annoyed.
“It's true, it's true,” he admits.
“Then what good are you?”
“That, my friend, is a whole other conversation,” he says with a chuckle. “I'll call you back.”
I snap the phone shut and toss it onto the bed in disgust. “Problems?” Jared says.
“Just the usual.” I notice his T-shirt again. I know I'll regret it, but I ask anyway. “What's ‘Bowling for Soup'?”
“A band.”
“Never heard of them,” I say. This doesn't appear to shock my nephew in the least. And there it is, out in the open for all to see. I am officially an old fart. “What kind of band are they?” I ask, determined to prove that I'm at least generally up to speed.
“Kind of a mixture of pop and SoCal punk.”
“SoCal?”
“Southern California,” he explains. “Take the punk rock from your generation, like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols—”
“They were before my time,” I point out weakly.
“Whatever,” he says. “Anyway, take that stuff, add better musicians and production values and better songwriting, and that's basically SoCal punk.”
“Like Blink 182,” I say.
“Like Blink before they sold out,” Jared says, wrapping up his toenail clippings in a tissue and tossing it into the wastebasket behind me, and for a brief instant I hate him.
“Fenix TX?” I try.
Jared looks up at me, surprised, and I feel a little better. “You listen to Fenix?”
“Doesn't everybody?”
My cell phone rings again while I'm tying my shoes. “Could you get that?” I say.
Jared flips open the phone, and even from where I'm crouched across the room, I can hear Nat's voice shouting through the plastic. “Oops,” he says with a grin, leaning forward to hand me the phone. I listen for a few more seconds, and then she hangs up. “Man,” Jared says. “Does anybody like you?”
“You like me, don't you?”
He grins sadly at me and says, “I don't count, man.”
My arrival makes the front page of The Minuteman, above the fold, no less. Jared has retrieved the paper from its plastic blue mailbox at the edge of the driveway and now tosses it onto the counter in the kitchen while I'm mixing some Folgers into a mug. “You're famous again,” he says with his trademark grin. “Controversial Author Returns” is the headline in the top left corner. Below it is a grainy reproduction of my book jacket author photo. With mounting unease, I sit down and read the article.
After a 17-year absence, author Joseph Goffman returned to Bush Falls yesterday. Goffman's best-selling novel, Bush Falls, angered many residents here when it was released in 1999. The book was loosely based on a number of incidents alleged to have taken place in Goffman's senior year at Bush Falls High. Although the book is classified as fiction, the author's use of these incidents, as well as characters clearly based on well-known residents of the Falls, caused a great deal of controversy when the novel was first published. Many locals viewed the book as nothing short of libel, written with deliberate malice and the intent to damage reputations. The novel and its author were widely condemned in raging editorials in this newspaper and on local radio and television stations as well. The recent film version, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kirsten Dunst, has done nothing to assuage the collective anger felt toward Mr. Goffman.
Coach Thomas Dugan was one of those singled out for a negative portrayal in the novel. “I don't care about what he wrote about me,” commented Dugan at the time. “But the condescending, offensive way in which he wrote about our beloved team and its history, which has meant so much to so many of the good people of this town throughout the years, is unforgivable. He's insulted every boy who ever played for the Cougars, and all of the good people wh
o support them.”
“This is a guy who's gotten rich by lying about the people in this town,” said Deputy Sheriff Dave Muser, a former classmate of Goffman's who feels he personally suffered from a negative portrayal in the novel. “It's a slap in all of our faces that he thinks he can just walk back into the Falls. He should know he's no longer welcome here.”
Alice Lippman, whose women's book club meets monthly at Paperbacks Plus, was similarly outraged. “We selected Bush Falls when it first came out, and I don't think there was a single member of the book club who wasn't morally outraged by it. I hope I run into Mr. Goffman, so that I can tell him in person what an awful, destructive man he is.”
Goffman's father, local businessman Arthur Goffman, suffered a stroke this past Monday while playing basketball in the Cougars alumni league. Although father and son are reportedly estranged, it is his father's condition that is presumably the reason for Goffman's return to the Falls.
There is no byline, and I wonder if Carly wrote the article. If not, as editor in chief she'd at least have reviewed it before it went to press. I scan the article carefully, searching for any slant, any choice of words that might render some clue as to what her attitude toward me might be, but I come up empty. I discard the paper and, for the first time since my return, really allow myself to think about Carly, something I've been deliberately avoiding up until now. I would be hard-pressed to conjure up the images of women I dated a few weeks ago, but reconstructing Carly's face on the canvas of my mind takes absolutely no effort.
And now, sitting in my father's kitchen, I recall easily the taste of her kisses, the expression on her face as I clumsily worked to undo the buttons of her blouse that first time, a delightful combination of naked desire and affectionate humor. I told her I loved her, my chest quivering from the absolute truth of it all, and she kissed me deeply and said it right back. We lasted eight months, barely a pinprick on the overall time line, but when you're eighteen, time isn't nearly as crotchety and relentless as it becomes soon thereafter, and eight months is nothing less than a lifetime.
I push myself away from the table and head outside, stepping over the battered copy of Bush Falls lying faceup on the front walk, resolved to leave the books where they've landed. I'm opening the car door when I see that sometime during the night someone keyed my Mercedes, a handful of nasty, jagged streaks that traverse the car door in a clumsy, serpentine path, decimating the paint job. I study the scarred metal for a moment, the indecipherable hieroglyphics of vandalism, then climb into the car, taking pains not to disturb my bruised rib cage any more than is absolutely necessary. I drive off, still thinking about how far I've unwittingly drifted from the boy I used to be and wondering at how little I have to show for it.
sixteen
1986
Things quieted down for a while after the copy machine incident, but Sammy remained inconsolable. I didn't know whether he was despondent over Wayne or still smarting from an assful of Xerox glass, but he walked the halls between classes with a resolute glumness, his normally irrepressible smile nowhere in evidence. He no longer broke into little spontaneous dance routines or serenaded people with Springsteen lyrics. And while Sean and Mouse no longer attacked him physically, they continued to taunt him regularly. Hey, cutie, how's your ass healing? Don't worry—you'll be bent over again in no time!
Sammy, for his part, seemed utterly committed to being victimized, submitting to each new barb with a sense of tragic resignation, a slave to what he perceived as his immutable destiny. Something about his determined lack of resistance, the stoic manner in which he embraced his suffering, was taken as a challenge by Sean, who became obsessively determined to get a rise out of Sammy, to see him fight back. The two of them became helplessly entangled in a tragic cycle where Sammy's submission served only to enrage Tallon, escalating the level of his cruelty, which in turn caused Sammy to retreat inwardly even more.
Although I tried to be a friend to him, it wasn't very long before Sammy's predicament started to suffocate me. I resented him for so obstinately remaining a loser in the face of my best efforts to help him out. Besides, I had Carly now, and there was only so much time in the day, so much room in my brain. Later I would tell myself that there was nothing I could have done anyway, and that might have been true. Sammy seemed fatalistically determined to follow the course that was charted for him. But there was no getting away from the fact that as time went on, I deliberately saw less and less of him, simply because something in his abject misery made me feel inexplicably guilty, as if I were somehow responsible for his predicament, and I didn't want to be guilty or responsible. Things were finally going my way, and I would be damned if I wasn't going to enjoy myself.
I had a girlfriend and a best friend, which might not sound like much, but it was everything I'd ever wanted. The simple act of walking the school grounds during lunch holding Carly's hand, on display for all to see, filled me with an overwhelming sense of well-being the likes of which I'd never experienced. We would sit together in the cafeteria, stealing little kisses, occasionally sneaking into the deserted backstage area of the auditorium when kissing just wasn't going to cut it.
Wayne was leading the Cougars in scoring that year, and Carly and I went to every game, home and away, where we cheered him on comically, like rabid fans. It felt so good, sitting in the stands with Carly, laughing, screaming, hugging, and throwing high fives whenever Wayne scored, that I forgot how much I'd hated Cougars games up until that point. They no longer felt like a glaring reminder of my failure as an athlete, but just one more place to go and enjoy being a boyfriend. After the games, we'd take Wayne out for a victory dinner, and the three of us would hang out until closing time, giddy from victory, our voices hoarse from screaming and laughing. Later, we'd drop Wayne off and then drive down to the falls, Carly's hands already rubbing and grabbing at me as I drove, her tongue in my ear as she told me to get there already.
I'd always been under the impression that there were nice girls and sexy girls. Carly was an honor student, the editor of the school newspaper, and a favorite among the faculty at Bush Falls High. But she was also capable of grabbing my hand and sliding it down into her opened jeans and pressing up urgently against it, moaning without a trace of self-consciousness as she bit down on my lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
Carly spent the first half hour of homeroom every morning scribbling copiously in a worn leather-bound journal. She was terribly concerned with the general transience of things and the imperfect, random nature of memory. It was the one compulsion in her otherwise laid-back disposition, this notion that particular feelings and thoughts could be irretrievably lost to the vagaries of time and distance. “This is the age,” she explained to me once as we walked home from school, “when we're the purest forms of ourselves we'll ever be. We haven't been complicated by everything yet. I want to keep a clear record of who I am, so that down the road I'll be able to see who I was. Maybe I can avoid losing myself completely.”
Although I admired her larger consciousness, there was something vaguely troubling about it, as if she were an oracle discerning ominous portents to which I remained oblivious. “But you'll always be you,” I said. “Won't you?”
She sighed, biting her lip pensively. “Things happen,” she said. “Small things and large things, and they just keep changing you, little by little, until there's no trace of who you used to be. If I get lost, this journal will be like a record of who I was, a trail of bread crumbs to find my way back.”
“In that case, could you keep track of me in there too?” I said. “It would be nice to know there's someone looking out for me if I ever get lost.”
“But what if we're not together anymore?” she asked, ever the practical one.
“Then it will mean at least one of us is lost,” I said. “Just get me a copy of that journal, and it will lead me right back to you.”
She stopped walking and hugged me, pressing her forehead against mine, her eyes closed. “It w
ould be nice if it really worked that way,” she murmured.
“Stranger things have happened,” I said.
“All the same,” she said. “I think it'd be better if we just stayed together.”
I kissed her nose lightly and said, “Deal.”
seventeen
Brad and I resume our awkward vigil over my father's bedside as if the previous night's events never happened. He takes in my battered face and bloodshot eyes, and I can see a sentence forming behind his eyes, but some internal censor, the sort I sorely lack, mercifully stops the words before they can get to his mouth. He simply nods and remains silent. We sip at our vending machine coffee, thumb through magazines purchased at the sundry shop downstairs, and take turns offering the odd, flimsy conversational gambit that invariably tapers off into an embarrassed silence, encased by the enduring clockwork hiss of the respirator. The nurse's periodic visits to exchange the full plastic catheter bag for an empty one or record my father's vital statistics are welcome breaks in the monotony, providing us with an outlet, however brief, for superficial inquiry and discussion. Brad arrived alone today, offering no explanation for Cindy's conspicuous absence, and I know better than to ask. If the past twenty-four hours have taught me anything, it's that everything is a trap.
At around one, Brad yawns and announces that he has to go check on something at the factory. He scribbles his cell phone number on the back of a magazine in case anything should happen and then heads out, brow furrowed, lost in his own cloudy ruminations. I am both sorry and undeniably relieved to see him go.
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