by Sam Lipsyte
"Of course I'm joking. But of course I'm not really joking. Ultimately it's nothing like a joke. You know, now that you're trying to act sober, I can see how drunk you are. How many of my potatoes did you eat, freak? And what about my steak? Did you think I wouldn't notice? Do you always grope other people's meat? It's cute when you're twenty, Milo, but come on. Get a grip."
"I will."
"Will what?"
"Grip it."
"Grip it now, kid."
"Okay. I'll try. Really."
"Good. Now. Let's talk our talk. Your beloved institution seems like it wants to step up to the next level. Be a culture player. Crank out all those smug nullities who can make the stylish, insipid, top-notch crap. Stuff we can jerk off to but that will also make us sorry, but not too sorry. Sexy sorry. Am I right?"
"Sorry about what?"
"I don't know. Imperialist wars, torture, poverty, disease. How we've gotten past slavery except that we will never get past slavery, no matter who's the CEO. How the immigrants are good hardworking people, except for the lazy border-violating ones, except that it was their land to begin with and they work even harder than the hardworking ones. That kind of stuff. And also how we are such third-raters at this point, but what does that really mean? And what happened to being Rome? Seems like we didn't get much of a chance to be Rome. Seems pretty fucking unfair."
"Bitches of the First World," I said.
"Nicely put."
"That's Horace."
"Is it? I don't quite remember that. But I think you know what I'm saying."
"I know that you're saying something," I said.
"And by the way, FYI, I share all of these thoughts with you as somebody descended from both slave-owners and struggling immigrants. In some cases, they were the same people. It might sound cynical but I'm not cynical at all. I believe in the sensitive jerk-off stuff. I get off on the jerk-off stuff. But am I right? About your school? About wanting to ratchet things up, bring on the brand consciousness? Piss with the big art fairies? That's what that slick Southern kid intimated. What's his name?"
"Llewellyn."
"That's the one. He's impressive. What my dad used to call a comer. You must hate his guts."
"He's okay."
"Sure he is. Anyway, that's what he gave me to believe, when I met him at this sort of art happening. An historical re-enactment of the dotcom bubble. Some guy rented a loft and hired actors to pretend to be designing websites. Have to say he nailed the details, the clothes, the snacks, the drugs, the toys. Thought I was in a time machine. But the point is he said you guys wanted to go big. Stop pussyfooting, as he put it. Here's your mojito."
The waiter laid a tumbler at my elbow. I stared into the crushed ice, the muddled mint, and thought, oddly, of Scandinavia, of hissing, mist-sheathed fjords. It must have been the crushed ice.
"Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show."
"You texted the drink order?"
"What do you think?"
"I think I should have ordered an aquavit. You texted the drink order. Just before."
"Maybe."
"But to whom was the text addressed? The waiter? The bartender?"
"We'll cover that next time. This is a process. What I want to make clear tonight is that despite the hits my portfolio has taken, I am committed to exploring the possibility of a serious give. Now might be an appropriate time for one last question."
I was halfway to the morning's hangover. Boozewise, fatherhood had bounced me to the bantam ranks. But I wanted to keep going. I wanted to know things, like what Purdy really thought of our former friendship, whether he sensed how much he'd changed, or if he believed this was what he'd always been. Also, did he happen to know the whereabouts of the vintage Spanish dueling knife I lost in college?
"Why did you insist on me?" I said.
"Sure," said Purdy. "That's a suitable closing question. And here's the answer: because you're my pal. Because, like I said, I held you over the toilet a few times. Was it liquor or smack? I can't remember. Did you call it smack?"
"But you don't need me for this."
"Yes, I do."
"Why?"
"Because I trust you. Because you're not the only one with an ask. I'm going to ask you to do a few things for me. And you won't betray me."
"I won't?"
"You're the opposite of Judas."
"You're the opposite of Jesus."
"So, we'll be fine. You okay?"
I've never been much for drunken wakefulness, always admired those blackout artists who seemed perfectly alert while entirely unconscious, who rode trains and conducted real estate deals and pleasured lovers in a technical sleep state, who woke up in the Cleveland Hilton with inexplicable amounts of river silt in their pants cuffs. My overhooched evenings tended to expire with a lone ax stroke to the motherboard. Lucky nights I'd get one last surge of consciousness, like those precious seconds of life savored, if certain movies are to be believed, by severed heads.
"Anybody there?" said Purdy. "Let's get your ass home."
"Hell, no," I said. "Let's drink! Let's get some coke! Text it to me! Text me some fucking coke!"
I remember saying this, anyway, and I remember Purdy's laugh, his trademark trace chuckle. I remember digging in my pockets to see if I'd be able to cover the dinner, the imaginary blow, expense it later. Of course, I didn't even have carfare, which was rather unprofessional. This was my party, my check, my ask. Purdy pushed some buttons on his handheld again and I wondered if he might be ordering an eight ball, or dumping shares in Singapore, or calling Melinda, or calling a call girl, or calling a car, or checking a West Coast baseball score.
Next thing, I awoke alone in a cab rocketing over the Queensboro Bridge with fifty bucks in my fist like it had been wedged there with great fuss, which I figure it must have been, because even a piker like me knows you don't cadge cab money from the ask. It's a central tenet of development.
You don't even have to research that one. You just feel it in your asking bones.
Of course, there was a credit swipe in the back of the cab, but we both must have known my card would be denied.
Six
Once I could drink all night and, if not spend the next morning charming a potential donor over low-fat scones, or better, reinventing the color field with my best sable brush, still manage to pass the morning vaguely upright in my Aeron. Now, as I slumped across the sofa and watched my child play and my wife dress for work while I sipped my Vitamin Drink from a Bernie-deceiving coffee mug, the best I could do was suppress a decent percentage of the moister retches and wonder how long this hangover would last.
Maybe the hangover would never leave, just fade from immediate detection, hide like a deep-cover hitman, some human killbot who works the graveyard shift at American Smelter, takes his family to mass every Sunday, until the moment the baddies flip his switch. Then my hangover, "activated" by further alcohol consumption, would return, step out of the shadows in surgical galoshes, press the muzzle of its silencer-engorged Ruger to my skull.
The Milo Sanction would be complete.
I made like I was picking my teeth, dropped another of Maura's pills onto my tongue.
Bernie flew by on his wooden scooter, one of those beautiful Danish objects the Danes must foist on the world out of spite.
"Watch it," I said.
My son flung a wet wedge of fruit at the wall.
"Mango attack!"
"Bernie!"
"Togsocker! Macklegleen! Ficklesnatch!"
Nonsense words had become impromptu mantras for the boy, just pleasing bursts of Anglo-Saxon sound, though occasionally he'd hit on one with inadvertent resonance. The last word just uttered, for instance, did describe his mother at certain regrettable points in her history.
"Ficklesnatch!" he said again.
I went to fetch a rag for the wall.
"Bernie, no throwing!" said Maura.
Today wa
s an emergency vacation at Bernie's school, another of those hasty cancellations of service we had come to expect from the dingy neighborhood basement where some young people with fancy education degrees and a tin of Tinker Toys had founded Happy Salamander. We did not understand their dense pedagogical manifesto, emailed to us upon acceptance, but had enrolled our son anyway.
"It's like a student haircut," I had said, and Maura laughed, a new, slightly apocalyptic tinge to her snicker.
So far, Bernie seemed no more miserable than he did anywhere else, and the school was close by. But the Salamander people canceled class quite often. They gathered, rumor had it, for retreats on somebody's father's farm, to debate amendments to their manifesto, snowshoe.
Now we waited for Christine, the neighborhood babysitter. Any moment she would roar up in her minivan and I would take Bernie downstairs, stuff him inside the vehicle with the other kids Christine watched, or maybe abandoned to watch each other while she scouted fiesta-mix specials at Costco. We knew the price of Christine's criminally low price, namely that under her supervision, or lack thereof, Bernie was becoming a criminal. Child care was like everything else. You got what you paid for, and your child paid for what you could not pay for.
We hoped his school's fuzzy fervor might afford some balance. Still, even now, after so much Salamanderine propaganda about kindness and cooperation, no peer encounter began without a toy grab or a gut punch.
I would despair, thrill, each time.
A few seasons in Christine's cement yard with Queens County's puniest toughs and Bernie had the strut of an old-time dockside hustler. It was hard to imagine the boy completing kindergarten, remarkably easy to picture him in a tangle of fish knives and sailor cock under some rot-soft pier.
Now Bernie continued his mango-slickened Danish circuit. Maura did her primps, her mirror checks, her grooming despotic through the scrim of my hangover.
"What are you going to do today?" she said, whipped her wet hair, buttoned her blouse.
"I've got errands. Might try to get some stamps."
"Don't overextend yourself."
"I'll be careful."
Maura pointed to her skirt, her nearly assless habitation of it: "Does this make you look fat?"
An old joke. I mimed my old-joke chuckle. Maybe it was some version of Purdy's.
"What are you going to do today?"
"Whatever Candace tells me to do, that bitch."
Candace supervised Maura at the marketing consultancy. They were currently working on a memo about need creation for a women's magazine. I'd never met Candace but I'd often found myself with a need to create a picture of her. The picture was different each time. Sometimes Candace was a little dumpy, or knobby. Sometimes she was muscular and sleek. Sometimes she licked Maura's knees in a supply closet, though I had no idea if their office had a supply closet.
"Sorry?" said Maura.
"Nothing. I love you, that's all."
"Ficklesnatch, you bad ones!"
Bernie had more mango wedges.
"Make sure you clean the walls before that stuff dries," said Maura, kissed Bernie, ducked out the door.
It was just me and my destroyer now. I looked for signs of human feeling in his dead, wet eyes.
Let go, let go.
We both jumped at the honk. Christine's corrections wagon idled at the curb. I walked Bernie out, strapped him into a car seat just notionally fastened to the seat back. They were only going a few blocks. Why be rude? A little girl in a tank top, with a washable tattoo of a monster truck on what would someday be her bosom, put Bernie in a headlock, bit down playfully on his carotid artery.
"Young love," said Christine. "Say goodbye to Daddy, Bernie."
My son whimpered and Christine laughed, fired up a DVD for the backseat screens. It was sacrilege in these precincts to drive even a few minutes without cinematic wonders for the passengers. What played now appeared to be that movie about the crucifixion, the one everybody got so worked up about, so heavy on the blood and bones and approximated Aramaic.
"Do you think the kids are ready for this?" I said.
"Was He ready?" said Christine, shot from the curb.
"I'll pick up at four!" I called.
Seven
The deli near Mediocre had a new wrap man. He rolled my order too tight. Turkey poked through the tan skin. I studied the damage through the translucent lid of the container. It was a bad way to begin my first day at my old job.
I rode the elevator up with Dean Cooley.
"A new start," I beamed.
He nodded, appeared unable to place me.
"Milo Burke," I said. "Back in action."
Cooley stroked his mustache. The door slid open and he stepped off, glanced once over his shoulder as he went.
The development office looked about the same, with certain modifications. My desk, for example, had disappeared, or else been annexed in some office furniture Anschluss orchestrated by Horace. There he lounged now near the window, spread out in an L-shaped command nook of his own, eating ribs from a foil bag.
"Dude," he said into his phone, "I just know I'm going to bag this old biddy. She's got to be good for some serious paper heroin… Yes, I mean money… Dude, I don't know if that's the latest slang, it's my slang. We all have our own nowadays… Anyway, I'm deep in her geriatric ass. I've sort of become her protege. Her son died cliffsurfing a few years ago and I'm like her new son. No offense… Well, it's sort of like base jumping. But more radical."
I could tell Horace was talking to his mother. He spoke to her daily. I had always been a little envious. My mother and I hardly conversed. Since Bernie had been born, we had not gone often to the house in New Jersey where I grew up and where Claudia now lived with her partner, Francine, but things had decayed before that. I traced it to the year my father got sick and we argued about his treatment. Though I was the first to admit I resented the man, preoccupied as he was with his pleasures, adrift in some dream of sleaze, he was still my father, and after the diagnosis I championed all the heroic measures, the experimental chemos, the scalpels and rally caps, any long shot on tap. Maybe I demanded those things precisely because I resented him. But my mother had his ear, convinced him to go gentle into that shitty night. They had caught the cancer late and it had spread quickly, but I wondered if he agreed to slip away out of weariness or a sense of penance.
Meanwhile, the liberation Claudia had felt since the death of her mother and her husband, the nearly Bataan march terms with which she described the slog and heartbreak of her pre-Francine existence, grated. My father had been a scumbag. There was no counter-argument. He cheated on my mother, bragged about his "nooners," seduced my babysitter, sold her quaaludes. Between work and infidelity, he hadn't even been around that much. Mostly it was my mother and I in that house on Eisenhower Road. We'd had hard times, but also some beautiful ones, full of oatmeal cookies and scary stories, the floor covered with butcher paper and us painting murals of pirates and dragons and roller-skating wraiths. We spent hours curled up together with books on her husbandless bed. Did she remember those occasions at all? Were they no consolation? Was I an ass to think they could be?
Yes, I'm sure I was an ass. Maybe I was jealous of her bliss. She took terms like "self-actualize" seriously, or even actually, had a toned senior body, a monumental sense of certainty. She trained for ultra-marathons. I got winded on the Mediocre stairs.
She was not much of a grandmother, refused even the name. Claudia and Francine, that is how Bernie was to address his grandmothers those rare occasions he saw them. I didn't mind this. I liked Francine, appreciated any instant granting of progressive status. Less work for me. But I guess I just craved, in my twitching little-boy heart, for my mother to want us around, to maybe even nudge and nag the way grandmothers did in advertisements for stewy soups.
Now she came off more the charismatic aunt. Maybe she had actualized into my father. Perhaps a magic portal existed that I needed to step through, too, so I could leave
the planet of the weak and whiny, which I imagined at this moment as a humid orb stuffed with pinkish meat and warmed-over chipotle dijonnaise, though that could have been my lunch talking, or imagining, for me.
I pulled a chair up to the far edge of Horace's elongated workstation, popped my wrap lid.
"What's the matter," said Horace. "Your pussy hurt?"
"What?"
"You look like you just got kicked in your pussy. Or like some commandos kicked down the door of your pussy and just rushed in there with machine guns and concussion grenades. Or like your pussy is being used against its will as a staging area for a large-scale invasion by a nation with which your pussy has long had strained relations, even if certain markets have opened up in recent years."
"What the hell are you talking about?" I said.
Horace had his desk phone pressed to his chest. He put it to his ear again.
"I've got to go, Mom. Burke's here. You should see him. Such a sad case with his little wrap and a few gherkins in a ketchup cup. I know. Cornichons. I was going to say cornichons but I bailed. I got nervous. Yeah, I'll tell him. I just asked him if his pussy hurts. He's mulling it over. Okay, love you, Mom. See you later. Around seven. Okay, bye."
Horace hung up the phone, tipped the rib bag into his mouth. A rivulet of greasy sauce ran down his chin.
"Hello, lover," he said. "Come for your desk?"
"Horace, look, since I'm working here again-"
"I heard it was just provisional."
"Since I'll be around the office some, I think we should try to communicate better in the future."
"I think flashing your fuzzy nip at me was communication enough, Wolf Man."
"Horace, I'm sorry. I think I misread some cues or something."
"That's one way of putting it."
"No, really, I never meant anything untoward. I just thought we were goofing around, being jackasses together. I never meant anything sexual, or imagined you felt harassed."
"Who said I did?"
"Vargina."
"Crafty. Divide and conquer. All Gaul, baby."