He picks up his bucket of blood again and splashes it on my back, on my skin. “We need some real critters,” he says. “These bunnies are bullshit,”
I can’t believe it either, Mary Kay. Your Friend is pouring blood on me to lure innocent woodland creatures and so far it’s just tiny ones, rabbits and squirrels, but he lets them get close. I am sniffed and I’ve been nipped and then he kills these living things and I am safe but I am not fucking safe. What if a bear comes? There are bears, if I’m to believe him, and Dying for love is so bittersweet, I’m asking you how the fuck you didn’t see through this psychopath? You fade. I can’t see your face. He kicks the back of my knee. “You pissed yourself like a little bitch.”
I hear his Timberlands pounding, he’s walking away again and the bucket is in play, more blood on my body and he’s howling for coyotes and if they come in a pack—and they do move in packs; they’re like Friends—we are dead. Both of us. He hoots and he makes catcalls—Come on, cougars, I know you’re out there—and he is a fourth-grade boy picking out his favorite wild animal for no good reason.
He sits somewhere and he mews at the cougars and are there cougars in these mountains? He laughs. “Are you crying, pussy? Oh man, you know I wish we did put some meat on your bones. Cougars gotta eat too!” He mews again and he says that Robert Frost was right and no poetry. No. “Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy… I love that movie, man. I do.” It was a book, you fucking moron, and he snorts. “Fucking bullshit ending, though, because Ponyboy shoulda croaked like his little bitch-ass friend. The soc’s… they were the good guys but the movie makes ’em all out to be so bad just cuz they got good families.” He shoots something. A bunny? A squirrel? I don’t know. I can’t know. “See, you’re what happens in real life, fucking hoodlum, how long you been here and not one friend comes to visit? Fucking freak.”
I hate when he talks because I can’t hear the branches or the footsteps of God knows what might be approaching and Shortus finally does stop talking but then I hear the branches and the footsteps of God knows what and the theme of my bar fucking mitzvah is death and he’s on the move. Running. In my face.
“Don’t even think I’m gonna let some little squirrel peck atcha, pussy. You need to bleed. Just like all the little bitches do when they man up and become women.”
I am fucking bleeding—the ropes are cutting my wrists—and I try to talk and I shake my arms and he spits at my arms. “That’s rope burn, you pussy. You need to bleed like a man.”
He’s on the move again, Timberlands on leaves, crunch crunch crunch, and I see you in a hall of mirrors and you sing to me, you want to save me—There’s a man I know, Joe’s the one I dream about—and you are safe in a cushy hall of mirrors where nothing bad can happen to you and I am here in the woods. There are jaws on my leg. Teeth. That’s my skin cracking and that’s my blood leaking onto my pants and then Pop. The jaws let go and it’s another bunny down but I am wrong. Shortus whistles. “Huh,” he says. “I think this fox was pregnant.”
He killed a fox and you are my fox and he’s doing something different, shaking his phone. “Man,” he says. “When I get back down and I see her, I’m gonna tell her she was right to bitch about the shitty Wi-Fi. I can’t even get the score on the Sounders game.”
You were here with him—how could you do that to me?—and the image of the two of you in these woods is a shark inside my shark and he’s a liar. Shortus lies. This I know for a fact and I have to decide that you were never here so I do that right now. He killed my fox and he drops his phone. He heard something. I heard it too. Something larger than a squirrel and this is the Stephen King book Gerald’s Game and unlike Gerald’s wife, whose husband was dead and bad, I have someone to live for: you.
I beg and I plead with the universe to call off the cougar—or is it a bear?—and I promise if I get out of this I will do better. I will be the best goddamn man on planet fucking Earth and Gerald’s wife had it easy. No bag on her fucking head. My senses are hot-wiring and I can’t hear and I can’t see and I feel the tongue of something wild, something incapable of knowing the difference between a good man like me and a scorpion salamander of a man like Shortus and is it a wolf? Pop and the living thing whinnies and drops and Shortus sighs. “Duck duck goat. Goddamn hippies and their goats. Just do your yoga and leave the animals out of it.”
RIP goat—no supernatural forces coming to save me in this dull fucking neck of the woods—and Shortus drops his weapon. The flies are all upon me now, loud and close. Mundane.
“Whole shit ton of girls out there, Joe, and you just had to fix your eyes on mine.”
You’re not branded. You don’t belong to him. I scream into my sock.
“The worst part about all this, oh man, she tells me she wants you and she says that me and her can be friends.”
That’s your right, Mary Kay, and when you said that to me did I kidnap your husband? No. I accepted your terms and this is what I get for it and I scream again. It’s no use.
“One week ago, one fucking week ago she was in my cabin with me and you come back outta nowhere and boom. Finito. She’d be here right now if it wasn’t for you, you bookworm piece of shit.”
It hurts to think of you in these woods with him and this is not how I want to die. Knowing that you slept with him when you were seventeen is one thing. But last week… no. You should have told me that he pines for you, Mary Kay. We all get weak, we all make mistakes and I could have martyred your saint and then I wouldn’t be tied to this tree and he digs his rifle into my back.
“Stop crying, bitch. This is nothing compared to what I went through with my soccer team or my frat or my old man, so man up already.”
I am caught in the toxic cycle of masculinity, the one quietly tolerated by the American System of Miseducation and he was hazed so he wants to haze me and Dying for love is so bittersweet. He shoots another living thing and he whines—fucking squirrels—and every dead animal is a reminder that the days really do go too fast. My life is ending and I don’t want to die. I don’t want my son to be an orphan. He lost his mother. He can’t lose me too. I try to picture him older, and I can’t, too scared, and I try to remember being with you on our love seat and I can’t do that either. The Pain Pong tournament ended and the flocks of rabid fans are long gone. I will die here and I can’t even hate him, because like you, I am too good for my own good. The Empathy Bordello has been ransacked and burnt to the ground before it even existed and he heard something and he hisses.
“Hey,” he screams. “What is that?”
My eustachian tubes go to high alert. I heard it too. Is it you? You know about this cabin. You rejected him today and you’ve been to this cabin and did you come back?
“I’m warning you, buddy. You’re on my property.”
My heart pounds and I can’t hear so well and I want it to be you—save me—and I don’t want it to be you—he could kill you—and I don’t know what to want. Cops. Yes. Let you be the savvy fox that knows better than to come here alone.
“I’m counting to three,” he says. “One…” Please, God, let it be her. “Two…” Please, God, don’t let it be her.
He doesn’t make it to the number three. His voice is thwarted by the pop of a gun. Not his pop. A different gun. I can’t see and I can’t hear but I see dead people because in my heart I know that Shortus is dead. I scream into my sweaty sock for help—thank God for guns—and the footsteps are getting closer but my heart is beating faster. I want my nervous system to catch up to my brain and I tell myself over and over that it’s over. You need to calm down.
And then the shooter is at my tree. Breathing heavily. Close. He is not a cop because cops are loud. They announce themselves. The bag is still on my head and a police officer would have pulled the bag off my head by now. Here goes my heart again—tick tick tick—and I was so afraid of animals that I forgot about the worst of all predators, the most power-hungry predators on this planet: humans.
Urine runs down my leg once
more and the shooter puts the barrel of the gun he used to kill my enemy against the back of my head as if I am the enemy. I am crying now, my pleas about my family muffled by the sock in my mouth and then he laughs and drops the gun. “Relax, my friend. Show’s over. Score one for the Poor Boys Club.”
Oliver.
46
The bag is off my head and it’s over. Oliver saved my life. My son won’t be an orphan and you won’t have to mourn, wishing you’d told me that you love me when you had the chance. Oliver is a hero and Oliver kept an eye on me because he was worried about me. RIP Shortus was a fake friend but Oliver is a real friend and that’s what they say, that you’re lucky in this world if you have at least a couple of real friends. True friends.
But all friends are flawed and I’m still tied to the tree and he’s in Shortus’s cabin and this day in the mountains needs to end. “Oliver! Any luck with finding a knife?”
“One sec, my friend!”
RIP Shortus is dead, yes, but the Pain Pong tournament is starting up again, no more nice adrenaline to lift me out of my body, and it’s impossible not to think about what Oliver did wrong. That fucking video of me and RIP Melanda and I say it again, calm. “Oliver, I don’t want to rush you, but I’m pretty bad out here.”
He hops down the front steps of the cabin and he’s carrying an Atari game set like he didn’t just end a man’s life. “Check it out, Goldberg. I was just looking for one of these on 1stdibs!”
He takes a picture of his new toy but he can’t send it to Minka—no Wi-Fi—and my skin suit crawls because oh that’s right. My friend Oliver is a sociopath private dancer slash screenwriter and without him, I die in these woods, just like RIP Shortus.
“Oliver, I don’t know how to thank you.” Oliver, move your ass and get me off this fucking tree.
“No need,” he says. “We talked about this. When you win, I win. When I win, you win.”
Then why did you show Ray that fucking video? “Well, still, thanks.”
He pats me on the back, as if I’m not tied to a tree. “And I’m sorry about Love,” he says.
What about THE VIDEO, you fucking asshole? “Thanks,” I say. “I’m just still in shock right now.”
Oliver begins slicing the ropes and he’s no naval-boys’-camp-trained RIP Shortus. He’s terrible with a knife—fucking gun people—and he keeps dropping it on the ground and what if he has a heart attack? What if he dies before he finishes his work? “So I got news. I got a new agent.”
I AM TIED TO A TREE AND I GOT SHOT IN THE HEAD, YOU ANGEFUCKINGLENO. “That’s great.”
He drops the knife and it grazes his hand and now he is bleeding and how the fuck did he hack it in the kitchen at Baxter’s? “Yeah,” he says. “And we’re taking my show out next week.”
And no one will buy it and it won’t be because of karma. That’s just how it works in L.A. “How’s your hand?”
“Oh right,” he says, and at least he’s back to work on what matters: Me. You. Freedom. “So my show, you wanna hear the pitch?”
I had three “friends” on this planet, Mary Kay. My drinking buddy turned psychopath friend Seamus is dead. Ethan is engaged to Blythe, and this one is a malignant narcissist. “Sure!”
“Cedar Cove meets Dexter.”
The referee in Pain Pong calls a time-out and the blood stops circulating in my body. I look at him and he looks at me and he smiles. “I wasn’t lying to you, my friend. We do have each other’s backs.”
Oliver’s “show” is a roman à clef about my life—that’s stealing—and his protagonist is JOHNNY BATES—“You know, for The Shining and for Psycho”—and Oliver hasn’t just been stealing my money. He’s like your dead husband, stealing my pain. Oliver’s going to sell his show to FX or HBO or Netflix—not gonna happen, ideas are a dime a dozen and I can’t picture him actually writing the fucking thing—and he’s so slow with the knife, droning on about spin-off potential. You’re out there somewhere, thinking I’m not trying to win you back and I snap. “Fucking A, Oliver, why did you give Ray that video? You swore you wouldn’t do that.”
Oliver stops cutting the rope and that was not the result I was going for. “Well, you know why I did that, Joe. Because the Quinns bring out the worst in us.”
It’s a child’s answer and it was stupid of me to ask and I WANT OFF THIS FUCKING TREE. “Did he hack your phone?”
“Look,” he says. “Minka and I have a huge collection now…” YOU’RE WELCOME, OLIVER. “And we need more space. Ray was talking like he’s about to fire me. He said I’d get a huge bonus if I found something on you… I’m sorry, my friend.”
He doesn’t chase his apology with a but and he plays with his fucking knife, the knife that also happens to be the key to my liberation from this truth. “There’s a twist, though.” Fucking hacks and their twists. “Next day, Ray does his research. He realizes that I withheld the video and… he fires me. And that’s why I came up here, my friend. I couldn’t let anything happen to you…” Maybe his heart is bigger than I thought. “You’re my only source of income until I sell Johnny Bates.”
He’s lucky I’m tied to this tree and I summon the last of my fucking empathy and thank him again and he goes back to saving me—finish the job, you prick—and describing his male lead, as if that’s what the world needs, another sociopath on TV—and he says that Johnny Bates is mysterious and well-read but a little rough around the edges. Finally Oliver gets the top rope but my body lurches back, my muscles are broken from Pain Pong and I lose my balance and again he has to save me from falling. Again I have to thank him.
“You okay, my friend?”
No, I’m not okay. I got shot in the head and hit on the head and now this fucker is twisting my life into some gleaming, steaming pile of shit for TV. “I’m good. Just really need to rest.”
Oliver shuts up about his shit show and he’s getting better with that knife and now my legs are free—Hare Oliver, Hallelujah—and he clips the zip ties and I have hands again, two feet instead of one stump. I am dizzy and the car is not close and he says we can’t think about leaving until we clean things up.
“Come on,” he says. “It’s not as bad as that dungeon in your house.”
My Whisper Room is not a dungeon and I’m too weak to help him and he tells me to take a bath and did you fuck Shortus in this tub? I don’t know. I don’t care. I bathe and Oliver scrubs the floors, periodically interrupting his flow to tell me about his TV show and finally I am clean and the crime scene is clean and we are on foot, walking, limping.
“So,” he says. “You wanna come back to L.A. and help me on the show? Ray says he blackballed me but my agent says he’s full of shit.”
“No thanks.”
“Really? I’m offering you ground-floor access, my friend.”
Access to what doesn’t exist is access to nothing and I shake my head. “Gonna stay here.”
“Well, ultimately, I suppose that’s best for both of us. Ray doesn’t want you in L.A. and this way, well, hey, if Johnny Bates gets a third season, maybe we shoot up here.”
I can’t think of anything to say that he won’t interpret as an insult. He stops walking and he huffs and he puffs and he obviously misread my silence. We should be walking, Mary Kay. Animals in these woods don’t stop to chat but Oliver’s too fucking arrogant, human in the worst possible way, having just killed a fellow man. “Listen,” he says. “You took a hit back there…” Ya think? “But you gotta let that shit go, Goldberg. You’ve gotta see the error of your ways.”
I will punch him. “The what?”
“Hear me out, my friend. You moved up here to get soft and you did get soft…” I hate that he has a point but he does. I didn’t see it coming with RIP Shortus. “It’s like my agent said about my draft…” Say the word agent one more time, asshole. “There is such a thing as too soft, my friend. You can rock down to Menopause Avenue and spend every day in a library… but humans are what they are. And if you want something, you have to go h
ard, my friend. Always.”
I let Oliver high-five me and soon we’re in his Escalade. We’re on the way back to civilization, passing the casino, the tiny bridge that moves us from the mainland to Bainbridge. Oliver is on the phone with his agent’s assistant—I got a new scene for the pilot—and my friend is a sicko, but he’s a sicko who saved my life.
I thank him again—excessively, considering his ineptitude with the knife—and he’s on his phone again, probably searching for some How to Make People Think You Can Write article and he tells me that we did it. “We got out, my friend. Love… I’m sorry about that…” No he isn’t. “But she can’t mess with your head anymore and okay, so I no longer work for that family, but when my show goes into production…” Oh Oliver, my friend, do you really think that’s gonna happen? “Well, I’ll be making more money. In the meantime, though…”
My phone pings and it’s a link to a 1983 Smith Corona typewriter on 1st Fucking Dibs. “I know,” he says. “But I gotta tell you, Joe. Ever since I got back to writing, my mom’s doing better. She says she never wanted to say anything, but she felt like I gave up and she feels stronger knowing that I’m back at it. We gotta go hard, my friend. That’s the only way for the Poor Boys Club to succeed.”
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