“There’s nothing for me out there.”
“There’s nothing for you in here, either.”
He drank. “At least here, there’s no pretending.”
“There’s nothing here but pretending.”
He sat there for a while pretending not to pretend. Then the door opened, and Vance stood beside him, hands on the bar, looking straight ahead in a way that, again, reminded Richard of Carole; she would sit right next to him and stare off silently, as though he couldn’t have sensed her displeasure from farther than three feet away.
“You okay?” Richard said, finally.
Vance shook his head and said, “I believed in you.”
“Well, there’s your first mistake.”
“Was it all made up?”
“No.” He sipped his drink and thought about his words carefully—he didn’t think he’d say it again, and he wanted to say it right. “I was drafted, and I went to Vietnam. I drove a supply truck for a few months. We mostly delivered stuff that got airlifted into Cam Ranh Bay around to smaller bases. Bao Loc was one. Food, bottled water, beer, medical supplies, ammo, maps, foot lockers, flares, radios. Canteen supplies—pots and pans and ladles, knives, colanders, potato peelers. Boxes of books for little private libraries in the officers’ clubs: lots of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Michener and Hemingway, maybe a little sci-fi—Heinlein was a biggie. And we sometimes delivered mail when the Army Postal Service got too busy.
“I got a general discharge in July 1971, same as in the book. But mine was for being drunk and erratic, imagine that. Unsuitable for further duty. Threw a punch at an officer in the canteen, that was the last straw. My CO liked me, or felt sorry for me, and he put me in for a general, just to get me the fuck out of there. Same as in the book, too.”
The kid stared at him, waiting. He went on, “So that part of it’s true, I guess. Fucking up, and not knowing if I could do the thing they were asking me to do. I was scared to death driving that truck, every time we went on delivery. I know what the fear is like. We got pretty close to being zapped one time, too, a mortar went off in the road a hundred yards in front of us. I don’t know if someone was aiming for us or if it was just a random shell or if a monkey jumped on a landmine. Whatever the case, I shit my pants. Literally shit them, drove the rest of the way with shit in my pants.”
“But you never fought. You weren’t infantry. You didn’t go to Saigon.”
“No.”
Vance shook his head, as if trying to clear it out, make room for a concept that was too big to fit, even though there wasn’t really anything to understand. “I just don’t get it.”
The whiskey tasted metallic and greasy, and he signaled for another. “I’d thought about doing a memoir forever, played around with stuff. When my second marriage was breaking up, when I moved out to the desert, it felt like the right time to really dig in, tell my story. I started writing about my time there, and you know what I realized? Nothing. When I thought back to it, nothing really happened, nothing that dramatic or interesting, and what I remembered was just me. Same as always. My dumb thoughts, my little postage stamp of awareness. Nothing anyone would be interested in. Hell, I wasn’t interested in it. I guess, looking back, I wished that there had been a real story, you know? Something that mattered.
“So just for fun, I started writing the version where something big, something real, did happen, like it did to lots of guys over there. Like Berlinger—he was a guy I knew from Bao Loc, this big, funny asshole, like in the book. He saw some bad shit on patrol, freaked out, and deserted. Got captured in Saigon three months later, strung out on dope, living in the back of an evangelical church. He did five years. Another guy I knew got his leg blown off. I wrote their stories. I wrote other stories I’d heard about—guys who went nuts, guys who lost friends, lost their minds, guys who had to make half-second decisions that changed their lives forever. And I got into it enough that it started feeling like it was mine, you know? When I sent it out, people assumed it was a memoir. I didn’t even have to lie, I just kept my mouth shut, let them believe it happened to me.”
“But it didn’t.”
“No,” Richard said. “The only thing that ever happened to me was me.”
The kid turned and walked out of the bar, into a rectangle of softening afternoon light. He paused outside for a moment, framed in the window, a still rock in the rush of people streaming by. He seemed to be making his mind up about something, or maybe he was just trying to orient himself before he started walking. Then he turned left and was gone.
The bartender came over with the bottle and put it in front of him. “Here,” she said, collecting several of the bills fanned in front of him. She poured them both a shot, knocked hers back, and raised the empty glass. “To your health.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“You can’t sleep here.”
The voice was male and not particularly friendly sounding. The statement itself was demonstrably false, as Richard had been sleeping undisturbed in the back booth of the bar for what felt like a long time. Obviously you could sleep here—that someone didn’t want him sleeping there was an entirely different issue. He began formulating a response to that effect, when he felt rough hands grabbing his green sports jacket, hauling him up from the bench. Anyone strong enough to lift him from a prone position would have to be terrifyingly enormous; he opened his eyes and verified this fact.
The bouncer, a bearded leviathan encased in jeans and a black Zildjian T-shirt, deposited him with gentle condescension on the sidewalk in front of the bar. Before closing the door, the man clapped his hands together as though dusting them off, a bit of gratuitous cruelty that drew a laugh from somewhere inside. Inside where? The bar had no sign, just a giant, ornate letter M stenciled on the window that Richard could barely make out in the dark. Of course, not knowing the name of the bar was the least of his concerns. He also didn’t know where he was, past knowing he was somewhere in, or near, New York City. A man in a charcoal business suit with a phone to his ear skirted balletically around him without a downward glance. Richard slowly pulled himself to his feet and looked around, bleary. There were no skyscrapers here, no identifiable landmarks. A gust of wind blew a sheet of newspaper past a row of storage units next to where he stood. He imagined picking up the paper and discovering, Twilight Zone–style, that it was some impossibly distant date in the future.
What had happened? He wasn’t sure. It felt like his brain had been replaced by a urinal cake—he was having difficulty remembering anything that happened longer than about ten seconds before. His ejection from the M Bar already had a reported quality, as though it was someone else’s anecdote. Vaguer still was an earlier memory—more of a ghostly afterimage—of walking down the street drinking from a paper bag, singing, babbling to himself, getting pushed over by someone. He was just sober enough now to have a sense of how incredibly drunk he’d been, and how unbearable sobering up the rest of the way would be, if he let it come to that.
He moved slowly down the sidewalk, toward the black shard of water visible between buildings, just to have something to move toward. Like life, he thought, immediately hating himself for always having the same thoughts; his mental landscape was like the background in one of those cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoons he’d watched with Cindy when she was young and he was unemployed, in which the same five background frames—a house, a rock, a bird, a car, a dog—cycle past again and again, although in his case: pointlessness, deception, regret, and so on. The shimmering, sinister glass of a storefront momentarily reflected his image, and he thought how incredibly tired he was of this guy, this scuttling lump.
He wasn’t so much tired of his defects—they were so old and familiar that, like a tattered quilt, they brought with them a certain shabby comfort—as he was tired of the splinter of his consciousness that recognized these defects yet refused to do anything about them. This, in fact, was the truly defective part, the part that knew better but didn’t care, or didn’t care enough,
or had just given up a long time ago. The derelict mansion of his life had been built from bricks of fear and weakness, but wholesale surrender to his own worst instincts undergirded the whole rotten edifice.
The sidewalk petered out into cobblestones and a sort of open-air plaza near the river. Stumbling through it, he was dimly aware of other people doing things: walking their dogs, talking, laughing, playing music too loud, eating, drinking, sleeping. Dimly Aware of Other People: now there was an epitaph. A gray concrete retaining wall impeded his progress, separating him from what, despite his brain fog, he recognized as the East River. It had to be, because Manhattan glowed behind it, a smeared stadium of light. Somewhere in Brooklyn, then. The interior of a taxi flashed in his mind, but his motives for coming here were lost to him. Movement for its own sake. Escape. He threw one leg up on the wall, then leaned forward and leveraged the considerable remainder of his person up. Though he could have simply lunged or rolled his way over the side, some ridiculous part of his ego—as though there was an unridiculous part—commanded him to stand and enter the water like a man. This took some doing, but he eventually was looking down at his own feet, then farther down to the greedy froth churning at the base of the concrete wall below, garishly lit by the streetlamp overhead: plastic bottles, beer cans, used condoms, candy wrappers, dead pigeons, mud, and other stuff floated in the water, topped by a sparkling blue bacterial foam. A whirlpool of junk, like your own life.
Someone yelled, and he jumped.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The subway car emerged from its tunnel with an operatic shriek and slid to a halt at the platform. Wet-looking mosaic on the wall read: BLISS STREET. Bliss Street, Sunnyside. He got the joke but wasn’t in the mood. He’d gotten increasingly lost on the subway over the last two hours, until he’d finally asked an off-duty MTA employee who seemed to intuit the magnitude of the mental breakdown he was about to have and personally escorted him to the correct platform. From there, he’d only gotten lost once more, before backtracking and taking the correct 7 train to Queens.
Instead of mitigating his anger, the Odyssean journey had somehow concentrated and ratified it. Bouncing around somewhere on the Lower East Side or perhaps Harlem, watching a junkie contort himself in a gymnastic display of balance, bent backward on the nod, Vance felt the righteousness of the task before him in his bones. The task was this: he was going to find his father, and he was going to fuck him up. He wasn’t sure exactly how, but he figured he’d figure it out when he got to Sunnyside. The important thing was getting there, and getting there with this cold, purifying rage unmelted in his gut. He exited the train and bounded up the station’s concrete steps, accompanied by a blast of warm air, like a junior demon released from hell on his first assignment in the world.
He was soon lost again. He’d thought he was walking north, and it took him five blocks to figure out the cross-street numbers were going down, not up. He pivoted and nearly knocked over a small woman carrying two armfuls of groceries but did not apologize because he was through apologizing. Behind him, he faintly heard imprecations, spat out in some closed-mouth Asian tongue. He didn’t care—fuck her, fuck everybody. FUCK THE WORLD, as per his brother John’s tattoo, rendered on his bicep in cheery cartoon script.
Fuck his father: though this phrase had crossed his mind at various points throughout his young life, he’d never really meant it (his brother had often said it out loud, and meant it wholeheartedly). In the back of his mind, he’d always appended a Yes, but…to any perfectly justified anger at his father’s failings. Fuck his father: yes, but he was a drunk and not entirely responsible for himself; yes, but Steven’s own father—Vance’s long-dead grandfather—had been a famous tyrant, next to whom even Steve looked kind and circumspect; yes, but he was doing his best; yes, but his best was just not very good. As recently as yesterday he’d done it, excusing the worthless asshole for pretending he was just some kid from work. Thinking about it now—standing in that living room, dumbly nodding, playing along, as he always had, wholly complicit in his own abandonment—made him livid, made him walk a little faster past brick row houses, past a bodega advertising ten-buck burners, past three little girls in a postcard-sized patch of green playing some obscure little-girl game. He had spent his entire childhood apologizing for adults who behaved like children, bearing their inadequacy and failure as his own due. Richard’s deceit and general crumminess, while not directed at him, had somehow been the last straw. He was done playing the fool.
The fourth-floor, corner apartment of the PIANO building was brightly lit, a false lighthouse in the Sea of Queens. He jammed the button for 4C and waited, but there was no response. He jammed it again, this time holding it in for ten seconds and listening for a sound from upstairs. Still nothing. He could imagine his father—itinerant handyman that he was—unscrewing the front of the buzzer box and detaching the relevant wire. It would be easy. Just for while he was in town, no more surprise drop-ins.
The stoop and façade of the adjacent apartment complex were under construction. A passel of building supplies—rebar, some two-by-fours, and several boxes—had been left inside the gate behind the cordon. He entered the gate, ducked under the tape, and grabbed a handful of roofing shingles. One after another, he sailed them up, up, at his father’s apartment. At first, they uselessly bounced off the wall or boomeranged backward into the tree behind him, but after the first few, he got the hang of it. They Frisbeed easily through the air and hit the window with a satisfying clatter. A teenage couple walked by, murmuring with trepid amusement. He felt other passersby watching him as he threw, but couldn’t see them because his head was craned back. After the third or fourth hit, a window opened, and a pomaded head gleamed in the high shadows.
Twenty seconds later, Steve Allerby, wearing black track pants and a white V-neck T-shirt, slammed through the door. He didn’t say anything, simply lunged forward and swiped the shingles away, scattering them against the wall with both hands. “I tried to be nice about it before,” he said, “but since you can’t take a hint—get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”
Vance turned around and walked to where the car was parked, its cream-and-white coat gleaming like voluptuous fur. The thing sat on its whitewall tires with an air of contented self-regard, like a jungle cat licking its paws after a big meal. He climbed up on the hood, and for a moment just stood there, as shocked as his father at this development. He hadn’t had any plan other than to confront Steve with the uncomfortable fact of his fatherhood, since he had spared him the night before. But this felt good, this felt right. With exploratory hesitance, he did a little impromptu jig, feeling the paint scuff and scratch under his feet. He danced more, leaping into the salty air once, twice, gratified by the look of amazed horror on his father’s face. He kicked the windshield hard and was again shocked as it shattered beneath his heel. It took him a moment to free his foot from the steering wheel, and Steve was grabbing at his legs, but he extricated himself and danced away. Steve got ahold of his ankle, and Vance kicked again. His father fell backward, fresh blood lining the pursed O of his mouth like the slapdash lipstick of a little girl playing dress-up. He gazed up childishly from the sidewalk at his son. Vance danced his way up onto the roof of the car, jumped up and down a few times, and felt the metal buckle a little. He stomped on the rear window, breaking it out whole with a satisfying pop.
Through the clogged mist of his rage, he became aware a crowd had gathered, and of several people holding their phones in the air. His awareness of being photographed lent a performative quality to the destruction and a tidal urge to destroy bigger and more. He ran back to the building site, grabbed a piece of rebar, and again advanced on the car. The thing looked wrinkled and baggy, like a drunk the morning after an especially hairy night. Steve had gotten to his feet and assumed a defensive position next to the car, and he was shouting something, but Vance’s ears seemed to have filled up with blood, and all he could hear was a dim echoing sound, like yelling heard fr
om under the surface of a pool. And when his father saw the look on his face—or perhaps it was the piece of metal pipe in his hand—he reassumed his previous position on the sidewalk. In the back of the crowd stood Liselle, her hand over her mouth. Over the next two minutes, they all watched as Vance systematically beat the car to pieces. The windows, the headlights, the taillights, the side mirrors—even the radio antenna, which he bent to the ground. Having done as much damage as he could do to the exterior, he climbed back onto the hood and drove the rebar into the refurbished control panel, using it as a lever and prying out the speedometer and odometer. He was just uselessly banging the pipe off the top of the car, like a child with a tin drum, when the cops arrived. The crowd cheered. He did exactly as they said—got off the car and got down on the ground—but still the one yelled at him, still the heavy knee in his back, still they dragged him away and threw him in the car.
———
The backseat was dark, the vinyl smooth and cool. An ammoniac whiff, now and then, the stale piss of previous occupants, but it was otherwise surprisingly comfortable, and all things considered, he was enjoying the ride. The handcuffs were a bit tight, true, and his ears still rang, but it was fading and the sounds of the world—the police scanner in front, the hum of the engine—began returning.
The cop in the passenger seat, the one who had cuffed him, half turned and said, “Jesus, kid, did you ever do a number on that car. Do you know what that was?”
“No.”
“Fucking ’fifty-seven Bel Air.”
The cop driving said, “Oh, shut up, Jesse.”
The cop looked at the cop driving and said, “Man, you know what a classic that thing is? Was.”
The Grand Tour Page 29