Binge

by Douglas Coupland

  “Wait—where was this? What corner?”

  “Franklin and Covington.”

  “That intersection is a death trap. Sooner or later something had to happen.”

  “Well, it happened to me.” I was fidgeting badly, the shock unraveling me. “Patti, get me a drink, okay?”

  Patti is my brother’s ex-wife. We always got along, and when she left Brent, I was on her side because Brent is a riptide who destroys everything that dares go near him. Patti thought she could change him. Seriously? People don’t change. They decay. They adopt ridiculous beliefs to pretend they have control over a world that is utterly indifferent to them. But they don’t change.

  Once I had a drink in my hand, I told Patti about an accident I saw when I was really young in which an old-fashioned car, like from the 1970s, plowed into another 1970s car, and afterwards, both cars resembled balls of tinfoil covered in barbecue sauce. “It really fucked me up. I think I had PTSD or something like it for years afterwards. But in today’s crash, that woman wasn’t wearing a seatbelt—how is that even possible these days? The kids in the car seats looked like nothing had happened to them at all, but all the doors and panels and the roof of the van vaporized into confetti. Like they’d never existed.”

  “All these government safety regulations.”

  My phone buzzed. It was Joelle from the local police department. I picked it up and she told me that the soccer mom had just died.

  “Holy fucking—”

  “Dave, calm down,” Patti said. “You’re fine. You’ve been through a big trauma. Breathe. In, out, in, out, in, out.”

  “Get me another drink. Something strong.”

  “I don’t know if that’s the smart thing right now,” Patti said.

  “Please, just give me a drink, Patti.”

  “It might cloud your emotions.”

  “Cloud my emotions? Christ, I just want to be clubbed on the head and have all of this go away.”

  “Dave, you don’t understand. I can’t sit here and listen to you tell me that the crash might not have happened if you hadn’t been drinking. It’s my duty to let the authorities know the truth.”

  My blood froze. “The authorities?”

  “I think that’s why you and I have always been friends, Dave. We can see the truth when others can’t.”

  I hadn’t seen this coming. “Patti, you mean you’d narc me out?”

  “Don’t be so melodramatic. A woman was killed. Her children are motherless.”

  “She’s dead and they’re motherless because she drove into Covington Road without stopping at a blinking red light! That’s why this happened.”

  “But you said it might not have happened if you hadn’t been drinking.”

  “Patti, where is this coming from? The woman drove her car at right angles directly into a main traffic artery. They have footage from two dashcams to prove it.”

  “You were definitely over .08 and you know it.”

  “So fucking what? It wasn’t my fault!”

  “Or was it?”

  “Patti, why are you going down this path?”

  “This path is called my conscience, Dave, and I don’t have any choice.”

  I went over to the cupboard where she kept her hard liquor. I opened it and poured myself a coffee mug of Stoli, swirled it around and chugged it. “You’d do that to me?”

  “I’d also have to tell them that you chugged six ounces of Stoli right there.”

  “I have no idea who you are, Patti. You’re about to ruin my life. My job. My benefits. My ability to travel out of the country on business. My ability to do just about anything. Once you have a DUI on your record, your life is burnt.”

  “I’d like to think you saw me as someone who had morals and valued truth.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously. So drink a few glasses of water, gather your wits and let’s go down to the cop shop together.”

  “Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “The shock is what came over you.”

  “Yes, you really are right.”

  I walked over as if to give her a big hug, then grabbed her head and wrenched it around almost 360 degrees, killing her on the spot. How dare she be so preachy? I dragged her into the garage and lifted her body up into the cargo carrier on her car’s roof. She’d be safe there for at least a short while until I figured out a next step.

  Afghanistan does this to you.

  60

  Norovirus

  I WAS ALWAYS THAT kid in class who was such a Fruit Loop that nobody, even the cruelest bullies, could be bothered to torment me. The teachers took pity on me and, during lunch hour, gave me the job of running the coffee machine and bussing tables in the staff room. I loved it because I didn’t have to talk to other children. Instead, I’d collect used Styrofoam cups, check out the lipstick marks and raise my eyebrows at my teacher friend, Vice Principal Rathbone. I’d say something I’d stolen from Hollywood Squares or Password, along the lines of “Miss Clark’s summery new shade of lipstick tells me she’s left Mr. Right…and she’s looking for Mr. Right Now.”

  Then she would ask me, “Erik, what happened in your life to make you so perceptive?” And it would be time to change the subject.

  “Quick: why do bikers wear leather?”

  “Why?”

  “Because chiffon wrinkles.” (I stole that line from Paul Lynde, RIP. I had to go to the library to learn what chiffon was, and it is a beautiful thing indeed, but also so very, very flammable.)

  You’d be amazed at how easy it is to become cynical, or maybe you wouldn’t. I think most people are cynical, but some don’t realize that’s what they’ve become. At least I actively went for it. An acid tongue was my shield. Lord, I can’t even count the number of acid comments I’ve made to guys who could have been The One. But there I’d be, out in the parking lot, hyperventilating in my Camry, wishing I could have said something sugary instead. At least I owned a car back then.

  I fondly remember my little Wedgwood-blue Rubbermaid elementary school bussing tray. I could pile any mess onto that tray and dump it: mess gone! I wanted my life to be a Rubbermaid bussing tray.

  Sometimes even Mrs. Rathbone would try to be “real” with me and share some life advice, but I’d have none of it. “If you really cared about me, you’d help me get into one of those Fame schools where everyone’s just like me.”

  “I think you need to be able to sing or dance to get into those, Erik.”

  “Nonsense. They just pretend everyone has talent. Fame schools are dumping grounds for freaks.”

  I stopped going to gym class when I was maybe nine. Instead, I went to the library. Once that became my secret deal with admin, I never hit another speed bump in that department. The other students assumed I was in someone else’s gym class, and it was bliss.

  For some reason, my school library had bound back issues of Sunset magazine, which was this 1970s magazine about middle-class Californian houses and people. I wanted to live inside that magazine, where it was always slightly above room temperature and guest bathrooms were covered in tasteful cedar slats and had squeaky-clean avocado-green fixtures. In my house, there was one bathroom shared with my four brothers that always smelled like puberty. No, wait, that’s not true. It was worse. Especially in summer it could smell like a kitchen fridge in New Orleans three months after Hurricane Katrina, the ones Homeland Security wrapped in duct tape and spray-painted UNHOLY on the doors.

  I realize this isn’t even an actual story, with a beginning and end, I’m telling you here. It’s bits of autobiography, but if our lives aren’t stories, what are they? Glorified microbes on a petri dish? Funny, I look at the words “petri dish” and I’m reminded of one of my worst jobs ever, which was supervising entertainers on a Holland America cruise liner. We had a no
rovirus outbreak so severe that we had to berth in Panama City for two days. I didn’t get sick but almost everyone else did, and it made me feel superhuman. But the ship did start reminding me of my childhood bathroom, even with the endless mistings of bleach and industrial decontaminants.

  For everyone except me, working on a cruise liner was one massive fuckfest. Lord, anywhere and everywhere. They should have renamed that liner the SS STD. But all I could really do was look on. In my senior year of high school, I went from imp to blimp, and I have been overweight ever since. I’ve never made the sexual grade with others. You don’t miss what you never had, I guess. That’s a lie. I want sex as much as you or anyone else.

  For the brief moments when people put me and sex together in the same thought, they usually pause for a long moment and then say something like “You know, Erik, you are loved.” Not “I love you,” but that passive, friendly, indifferent “you are loved.” God, that makes me angry. But reality eventually registers, and I’ve given up hope that way. I’ve recalibrated my expectations from an endless willingness to settle for less and less and less to a cold willingness to settle for nothing at all. Oh, boo-hoo, you dumb queen.

  I’d best finish up here by saying that the norovirus outbreak in Panama City did give me my first big break. When the ship’s magician, Gerrard, got sent to Emerald Coast Urgent Care, there was a Hollywood moment where I had to ask “Is there anyone here who can do something/anything on a stage to shut people up for twenty minutes?” When I heard no reply, I borrowed a Cher circa 1976 wig from Stella, who ran the liner’s gift shops and who was also in Emerald Coast Urgent Care. I became Trashe Blanche, and the rest is history.

  Maybe you’ve heard of me. You better have heard of me, given how hard I’ve worked my ass off for forty years. I am what’s called a workhorse queen. And fuck you, darling.

  Since 1991, when he published his debut work of fiction, Generation X, DOUGLAS COUPLAND has written thirteen novels published in most languages. He has written and performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company, is a columnist for The Financial Times of London and is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. In 2000 Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Munich’s Villa Stuck. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. In May 2018, his exhibition on ecology, Vortex, opened at the Vancouver Aquarium. Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.