It turned out he torched cars for a living. He probably did other stuff, too, but I was never really sure.
The practical side of torching a car is interesting. To make sure it burns right down to its core, you have to place a lit box of barbecue fuel chunks on the right front tire. If you’re a control freak, you do the same with all four tires, which is what Nathaniel did this one time when he took me with him. Did I mention there was a body in the car? Also, being a pro, he made sure he ground out all the serial numbers. Then he stuffed the car with the foam peanuts and crumpled-up newspapers. It was really nice, actually, bonding with Nathaniel while unfolding and crumpling a stack of papers we took from community newspaper mailboxes—ones we made sure were out of range of CCTV cameras.
When Nathaniel lit the barbecue chunks, it looked so romantic in the darkness, like candles in a swanky restaurant. Suddenly we were having a swoony make-out session, and then fwoomp!
We had to get out of there really quickly, which was a bummer because it would have been so hot making it in front of a burning car, but we can’t always have our cake and eat it too. Wait…is that the expression? Like, you can’t have two good things at once?
I found my boyfriend dead on my toilet when I got home. It’s sort of rude to say it, but it felt like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a jacket pocket or winning ten bucks on a lottery scratch card—which means I probably didn’t love him. But you know, I’d just been huffing and was riding a high, so maybe it was the high that made me kind of heartless. I do think I’m a little bit heartless. I get it from my mom. It’s her fault, actually. I’m the victim here. Wait—maybe I’m actually a hero.
46
Fentanyl
I HANDLE THE OBITUARY section of the local paper. You’d think it would be depressing, but it’s not at all. I’m always dealing with people in heightened emotional states, and I enjoy being the calm one. My boss has also made it clear to me that since the obits make the paper money, my job is to subtly encourage more words rather than fewer, so I end up in a lot of intense and interesting conversations.
One of the first things I noticed when I got transferred into obits is that people often send in photos of dead men/fathers/husbands holding up a huge fish, like a trophy salmon. Why always a fish? It drives me crazy. My sister-in-law, the hippie, said it’s because, spiritually, fish represent our souls, and a man holding a trophy salmon is a man in control of his own destiny. I don’t want to be sexist here, but I have yet to have anyone submit a photo of a woman holding up a fish.
I like it when people provide both a young shot and an old shot of their loved one to run together. It gives you a sense of a life’s span. Why, oh, why do people send a photo of someone at seventy-five, when they look like a warty shrunken apple head? Is it some form of payback?
You have to submit a JPEG or fax of a death certificate before we can run your person’s obit. It always pisses people off when I ask, but if we didn’t do it, just imagine the prank potential. We also charge a lot. I used to get emotional when people accused me or the paper of extortion, but now it bounces right off me. In the end, it’s your dead person, and we’re the obituary section and you have no other choice.
A little while back there was this jogger who got killed in a hit-and-run. When his wife called in to place the obit, it was the only time on the job when I ever asked myself, Did she arrange a hit? She acted like a grieving widow, but she was chewing gum while talking (I can tell) and she addressed me like she was ordering a Subway sandwich. “I’ve never written one of these things before. Can you help me make it deathy but not too deathy, so people don’t get bummed out? In the end, he was kind of a dick, and maybe there are some folks who’ll be happy when they read that he’s gone.”
“Would you like a photo to run with this obituary?”
“How much is it?”
“Forty-five dollars for black-and-white and sixty-five for color.”
“Do you take me for a fricking moron?”
“Ma’am, I know you’re distraught.”
“I’m in no way distraught, but if you’re trying to tell me that in this day and age, color’s more expensive to print than black-and-white, you are taking me for a fool. I’ll pay forty-five for color and not a penny more.”
“Ma’am, we don’t negotiate. Our prices are our prices.”
“Must be hard for you to get to sleep at night.”
Then there are the other difficult deaths.
I’ve learned that whenever someone under forty dies, it’s because of an ongoing struggle, which means either cancer or opioids. This is borderline sacrilegious, but I’ve noticed that people who die from a fentanyl overdose are almost always more attractive than people who die in other ways. There has to be a reason for this.
I had a fentanyl death just recently: a tattoo artist, thirty-one. His mother phoned it in, and there was a lost tone to her voice as she said, “I’ve been writing this obituary in my head for years.”
“Ma’am?”
“He was a good kid, and then one day he wasn’t.”
This is the place where I know to sit back and listen. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. He wanted to be an airline pilot, and that always made me feel confident he’d do something with his life.”
“Huh.”
“And then he broke his shoulder painting a deck and they put him on crazy pain drugs and then cut him off, and that’s when he changed—at first I thought for the better. He became a jogger. He was always down to the mill and back, his daily five miles, but I eventually figured out he only jogged to the mill to score.”
Here’s where I did the unthinkable. I was supposed to keep people talking, but I wasn’t supposed to ask questions. “When did you figure out he was hooked?”
“Too late is when. I should have noticed earlier, but we don’t see what we don’t want to see. Then one evening he was over at my place watching the Academy Awards with me, and he stole all my Valium…not just some of it, but all of it. He wanted me to catch him. I know that now. Compared to what he was used to taking, Valium is like Pez, and it affects a different part of the brain than opioids. Last time I saw him, he was on his bike, headed to his shop. He’d just had a leaping sockeye salmon tattooed onto his left shoulder, where he’d broken it. He pointed to the moon, which was a tiny crescent, and told me we don’t look up at the sky enough.”
Silence. The sound of a small dog barking in the background.
“How much for two hundred words?”
“You’re in luck: we have a sale this week.”
47
Adderall
HAVE YOU EVER DROPPED a sock on the floor and then left it there for a few days until, finally, okay, you pick it up, and while you’re doing it, you think, Was it really that hard just to pick the damn thing up?
Welcome to my world. Everything in my life is a sock on the floor. I spend most of my waking hours having a fascinating conversation with myself along the lines of “Pick up the sock, pick up the sock, pick up the sock…” But of course, the dropped sock still lies there forever.
I live in a two-bedroom rancher built for $1.95 back in the 1960s that sits in a big, weedy yard. A 2004 Pontiac Sunfire has been parked on the front lawn for a decade. It’s now like a big rusty sock I can’t bear to look at. So much moisture has condensed inside the car that its interior is covered in blue mold. Two years back I had an anonymous note from a neighbor asking me to do something about it, which made it all the worse inside my head. That note essentially ensured the car would never be moved.
If you drove by my place, you’d probably assume an unscrupulous female dog breeder lives here. One with a weakness for the zodiac, type 2 diabetes and a disability scooter she uses when she has to leave the house, which is almost never. Oh! And she’s a hoarder, with mummified tabby cats inside all of her piles of stuff, like raisins in raisin bread. Except for the dog bre
eding part, you’d be right. But I didn’t choose to live like this; it chose me.
Wait…that sounds stupid. And lazy. I’m not lazy. I swear! I just haven’t been able to bring myself to pick up socks.
Until last month, when my much younger half-brother, Liam, came over with his new girlfriend, Jane. Liam works an hour away from me, developing apps, and Jane’s a brand manager. If you ask me, those are very boring job titles: brand manager; app developer. Snooze. But good for him for escaping our family’s multigenerational curse of failure.
I could tell Jane had been heavily primed before they arrived. When I opened the door to reveal a wall of yellowed newspapers, she didn’t blink. I tried to make light of it. “I know, I’m the crazy hoarder lady with a house full of junk,” I said.
But Jane replied, “No, Cory, this place is fantastic. You’re unique in an era when nobody’s unique. Just run with it.”
That was a new response to my life. I quite liked this Jane. She went on to ask me all kinds of practical follow-up questions: How long had I been there? Was I always alone?
“I’ve been here since 2011. I was with Denny, but then in 2015, she was killed in a car accident.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I never recovered, really. And then I started collecting stuff, and I can’t find the off switch.”
“Huh.”
Jane walked around my house like it was a museum, asking if she could touch something, or take pictures. I thought she was being very respectful, but Liam joked, “Don’t be so sure about that. This time next year there’ll be a hipster beer named Hoarder, and its brew pub will be a molecule-perfect recreation of your house.”
I thought about that. “I’d love to go to a bar that looked like my place!”
“Then Jane’s your gal.”
I offered to make coffee, then caught Liam waving his hands in a no-no-no-no-no manner. But Jane said she’d love some. To be honest, my coffee isn’t scary. Like many hoarders, I set aside a few dishes and some cutlery that I can find easily and that I keep somewhat clean.
To get to the point, we had a nice talk over our coffee. As Liam and Jane left, Jane gave me a pill bottle containing one blue pill. “It’s Adderall. Everyone in my generation eats it like trail mix. I think you have ADHD and don’t even know it. About thirty minutes after you take this, start cleaning a single room. Then write me a report about what happened and email me.” She wrote her email address on the bottle with a Sharpie.
This is a woman who keeps Sharpies on her person. She is special.
The next morning, I did just what Jane told me. I woke up, made instant coffee and took the pill. A half hour later, I told myself I’d tackle the living room to try to make one room non-scary for guests. So I started…and suddenly I had a pile of things going out on the driveway to get hauled to the dump. This was me? Jane’s drug was melting into my brain like butter into a slice of toast. For the first time since Denny died, objects no longer stuck to me like Velcro. I could look at a sock, pick it up and not think twice about it.
I was in love with a drug. Maybe you know the feeling. But I was. I felt the way I think normal people feel. Then, around midnight, I could feel it wearing off. Soon its effect was gone, like a ghost passing into a wall.
I was just stupid old me again, but…I’d been given a brief glimpse of hope. Hope!
48
Risk Aversion
ARE YOUR VEINS FILLED with ice water? Can you dump a pile of money into a stock and not look at it for months or years at a time? If you’re anything like me, you’re maybe three seconds away from stopping reading what I’m about to tell you. Trust me. I hate reading about money too. I know that feeling it gives you in the lower stomach: not a pukey feeling but rather an existential void fueled by every financial fuck-up you’ve ever experienced.
But would you continue reading if I told you this has a happy ending and you’ll feel good about life at the end? If so, carry on.
Me? Male. Forty-nine. White. Middle class. Married. Two kids. Employed. Bills. Mortgage. When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be in a band and then open a restaurant that sells margaritas to dying rock stars with syphilis. Didn’t happen. But at least my family eats well and I can afford to buy myself another Tommy Bahama parakeet shirt online when the first one I had sent to my office was too small for me and I was too lazy to return it.
So there’s this guy named Vince. There’s always “this guy named something or other,” and in my case it was Vince. It’s always a friend who introduces you to a Vince. Vince doesn’t make money jokes, and he has no cell phone. When you meet with him, Vince listens really well. He’s totally listening to you. How many people do that? Vince says he is amazed to see how informed your thoughts are on oil/tech/Dubai/airlines/Scandinavia. Vince validates your own inner conviction that you are one major player.
You know where this is going. It’s almost like Vince slipped a date rape pill in your drink, because suddenly he has an iPad and you want nothing more in the world than to PayPal him the $55,000 you’d put aside for that 1978 Corvette L48 you’ve lusted after since high school so he can make you instant krazy rich. Forget the Corvette—with the money you just gave Vince to put into a NASDAQ-listed rare earth mining stock out of Greenland called Ytterbex, you’ll soon be in Aston Martin DB5 territory.
Okay. So. Driving home after my session with Vince, I felt like I was going to be sick and pulled the car over to the curb. All I really knew about Vince was that Kenny, my racquetball partner, said he made ten grand from Vince’s tips. I swore to myself that my wife, Sadie, would never, ever, ever, ever know what I just did. I was most likely totally fucked.
I woke up after a bad sleep the next morning when the NYSE had just opened and, holy shit, Ytterbex was up 6.5 percent. WTF? I just made three grand! I went through the rest of my day with a spring in my step.
Over the next few days, the stock went up and down, but mostly up, and soon Sadie was noticing the sudden spring in my step. I’m special! I deserve this win! I’m not at all like the other losers who don’t have Vince on their side. Speaking of Vince, on day five, with the stock now up 34 percent, I called him to ask him out for another drink. I got no answer from text, email or voice mail. But with the stock up that much, I wasn’t worried.
I woke up with a peaceful, happy head. Ommmmmm. Life is great.
I poured some grapefruit juice and went online. Wait…my fifty-five grand of Ytterbex was now worth—three grand? WTF?
For the rest of my life, when I look back on this moment, an adrenal claw will grasp the back of my skull and I will taste acid in the back of my mouth as I relive the moment when my failure as a human being was laid bare—the moment I lost my 1978 Corvette L48.
Sadie walked into the kitchen just then. “What’s up? You look terrible.”
“Nothing. Just another bad sleep.”
By the time I made it from the kitchen to the den, my stock had gone down to fifteen hundred. I tried to reach Vince: no such luck.
I know I promised you a happy ending, and here it is. First, Vince was arrested for trying to scam a free wide-screen TV from Walmart—the fake receipt scam. Such a cheesy crime, and fuck him. I wish I could have witnessed his handcuffed perp walk.
The same day he was arrested, China did some weird fucked-up shit and suddenly Greenland became the new rare earth metals player. Soon Ytterbex was worth 4 percent more than what I’d paid for it. I sold it pronto. I could breathe again, but I know that for the rest of my life I can never look up the value of Ytterbex again, never, ever, ever.
I escaped, but only barely. Fear and greed. Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. For me, the map of the world no longer contains Greenland, and the sight of a 1978 Corvette L48 makes me look away as quickly as possible.
It’s a happy ending, but I’m now damaged goods. Please, dear God, don’t let Ytterbex be the next Ap
ple.
49
Hoarding
LAST MONTH MY BOYFRIEND took me to meet his quasi-elderly lesbian half-sister, Cory, out in that part of town where you start seeing those signs advertising dew worms for sale. The house looked like its owners kept a malnourished foster child locked in a bedroom closet. Okay, that’s harsh, but if you saw the place, you’d look at me and say, “Yup, Jane, you nailed it!”
Cory is a filthy hoarder. I’d never seen a hoarder except on TV, so the prospect was exciting. Before Liam rang the doorbell, he handed me a pack of Fisherman’s Friend lozenges and told me to keep three of them in my mouth at all times so I wouldn’t gag. I’m grateful he did.
Then he rang, the door swung open, and I tried not to look shocked. I’d never seen such a large woman. Her milk-white face was unanimated and masklike as we said cursory hellos and she and Liam chatted a little about family.
The house was filled neck-high with fantastically depressing yard sale junk. Some rooms were so jammed you couldn’t even enter. All of it had been doused in cat and rat pee. It was so fucked up, it affected me the same way art does: my brain hadn’t felt so stoked in years.
But I felt so sorry for Cory. Before Liam and I left, I decided to give her a twenty-milligram Adderall I had left over from last month’s Starbucks trust-building workshop. It couldn’t hurt her and who knows…
Two days later Cory wrote me an email:
Binge Page 14