Lake City

by Thomas Kohnstamm

  He is a courageous figure, clawing his way up from the mud and blackberry thickets to become a great humanitarian. Fighting to give back. To create social change. There’s no way he’s about to let it slip through his fingers. He’ll be the first person in his family to go to college, let alone earn an MA and a PhD. Academic success has allowed him to transcend class, and soon he’ll be free to live a sophisticated life governed by ideas and unburdened by the petty quotidian concerns of life in Lake City.

  As for the conversation with his academic advisor, Lane avoided mentioning that he was, in reality, spending all of his waking hours battling the image of his wife getting penetrated by some dude named Bray. First name. A guy who’d played squash since he was a kid and not as a way to get ahead at work. The asshole had all he could ever need, so why did he have to take everything from Lane too?

  Lane also failed to note to his advisor that he lost the rent-free status of living with his wife in the three-bedroom apartment she inherited from her mom. The advisor wouldn’t understand how it felt to go from having a guest room and a home office and a key to Gramercy Park to unsuccessfully scouring Craigslist for apartment shares in Ditmas Park. Or how an Ivy League PhD candidate couldn’t even get a call back from a temp agency, let alone for busing tables during that autumn of uncertainty, those shaky months when New York City was an armadillo jabbed with a sharp stick. Furthermore, he didn’t want to admit that Mia was the primary investor in his doctoral degree. Or another way to say that would be: Mia was paying his tuition with her trust fund. All of his tuition.

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, WHOSE birthday?” Mia fires back, emotion returning to her voice.

  There is a stretch of dying and then dead air.

  “Yours. No, I totally knew that.” How to explain? “I thought, under these circumstances, that . . . either way . . . I totally got you a present. I was waiting to—to give it to you in person.”

  Lane knows that his birthday lapse is the kind of thing Mia’s dad latches on to. But her dad looks for anything he can use as a proof point to bolster his predetermined narrative of Lane and Mia’s relationship.

  It’s not as obvious on the surface level, but Lane has been helping Mia become her best self as much as she’s been helping him to do the same. That, to the best of Lane’s knowledge, is the foundation of a sustainable and fulfilling marriage. How he’s helping her isn’t as tangible as the quantifiable financial support that she gave to him. But money is just money and he, by being who he is, is uniquely suited to complete her on an emotional, intellectual and spiritual level.

  She too wants, or at least wanted, to fight for social justice, to make a difference, but lacked follow-through, her resolve blunted by the thickness of her own financial cushion. That and an ever-shifting set of goals and influences. Monday was Naomi Klein. Tuesday was Marc Jacobs. Wednesday, Deepak Chopra. Her greatest act of both rebellion and ambition was eloping with Lane. A former welfare recipient. A student of mushy social sciences. A Democrat.

  Her father views their union as further confirmation of Mia’s long track record of impulsivity and pathological free-spiritedness. Once her father reentered their lives, it was a straight path to Mia and Lane finding themselves on the opposite ends of this collect call.

  MIA TELLS LANE TO NOT worry about forgetting her birthday. She hadn’t been planning to celebrate. It just came up. She’s had a tough time too, whether he believes it or not. Some friends wanted to make sure she got out of the house. Enjoyed her special day and all.

  He wants to know who “some friends” are but holds his tongue. There are clicking noises in the background. Lane assumes she is applying makeup.

  Then Mia thanks Lane. For what, he isn’t sure. Maybe she isn’t either. There’s a short pause when they both struggle to come up with the next thing to say. She hangs up the phone.

  He refuses to associate any sense of finality with her thank-you. But he is forced to consider that his plan might not be working. Unless drastic measures are taken, he might not have everything resolved by January. By the start of the new semester.

  He contemplates how he can find out which restaurant or bar her birthday party is at in Chelsea so he can phone in a bomb threat. To cancel it. She can’t be having fun while he’s suffering. Nothing more sinister than that. Really. But he realizes that most restaurants won’t accept a bomb threat by collect call. Even if they do, the White House is getting all serious about this stuff and might trace the call back to his mom. Or worse, to him.

  He decides to walk up to the pay phone at the liquor store on Lake City Way. That said, people in New York don’t have much of a sense of humor about fake bomb threats these days, even ones that are justified. And it’s a twenty-minute walk to the liquor store. Each way.

  He opts instead for another Rainier.

  A few hours later, it’s time for his next scheduled collect call to Mia. Lane is drunk and wearing nothing more than a pair of boxers he picked out of his dirty laundry strewn across the floor. He’s watching The Road Warrior on TV and crying because he loves the touching bond between Mel Gibson and that little feral boy who lives in the hole by the fence. Even though they never share an intelligible word.

  If only Lane and his own father had even had that much of a relationship. His pops dropped dead of a heart attack in his late thirties after a double shift on the lot at Bill Pierre Ford. It happened right before Christmas; they were coming up on the anniversary though neither he nor his mom ever mentioned Perry Bueche. Poor bastard went facedown in the December slush next to a used ’84 Tempo he was hawking to a Vietnamese family.

  Lane can’t remember a single specific conversation he’d had with his father, and the man never connected with Lane’s interest in reading and wanting to know about the world beyond Lake City, but—right up until the point that Perry’s diet of Gordon’s Gin, Dick’s Deluxe cheeseburgers and filterless Pall Malls exploded his heart in his chest—he sure as hell never played the victim.

  Lane makes up his mind. Instead of collect calling Mia, he too is going to go to a birthday party.

  Tonight. Right now, as a matter of fact.

  TWO

  LONNIE THE WEED DEALER LEAVES another message, and Lane decides to call him back. That’s his single option. It’s not like he still keeps in touch with other people in Seattle or even has any other phone numbers.

  Sure, he has some good friends from the neighborhood. Childhood friends, friends who have and still would jump into a fight on Lane’s behalf with no questions asked. But he’d had to distance himself from all of his Lake City boys by the time he met Mia, or in the following months.

  What would he even talk about with them? Which high school classmates have now impregnated which? How Vin Baker seems like a nice guy but will never fill the hole left by Shawn Kemp? How Gary Payton can’t return the Sonics to being NBA championship contenders all on his own? Lane had read a bunch of Foucault (and understood some of it, maybe even half) and made a twenty-minute PowerPoint presentation on political ecology this last semester. He could drop words like discourse, dialectics and semiotics into any conversation. If he called his old friends, they’d give him crap about how he is a fake, how he thinks he’s too good for them. But that’s not his concern.

  “Why don’t you call J.C. or Robbie?” Lane’s mom asks him over and over again. “They’d love to know you’re back.”

  “I told you, Ma, I’m not back,” he answers.

  As for lasting friends from undergrad: he had zero. Lane had always been a commuter student with a full-time job. He did his first two years at North Seattle Community College, living with his mom and knocking out the cold cut preslice shift at Lake City’s Fred Meyer superstore deli department. Lane had believed all of his dreams would be achieved when he got enough credits to transfer to the University of Washington, but once there he still found himself as a commuter student but now with a longer bus ride, larger classes and needing to work ever more hours to pay basic tuition and bills. During
his limited hours on campus, he turned his attention to professors, TAs and program coordinators: people who could help him get ahead to whatever ahead meant.

  Of course, he’d yearned to be part of the student community, to have UW friends. After months of searching, he found a rare opportunity: a small shared apartment on the edge of the U District that he could (almost) swing and that was close enough to the bus line that he’d be able to reverse his commute and continue his shifts at Fred Meyer. On the day he was to close on the apartment, the super informed him that, without a suitable cosigner or better credit, he’d need both first and last . . . and a deposit. He had enough cash saved up for his first month and his last. It was the deposit that put independence beyond of his reach. The super gave Lane forty-eight hours to come up with the rest.

  Lane attempted to amass the deposit by selling two ounces of Super Silver Haze to the white-hat Wrangler-driving frat daddy from Bellevue who was always pestering him about weed hookups in their Sociology 213 study group. Turned out that dude was working down his own Rohypnol and ketamine possession conviction. The worst charges didn’t stick and Lane used up every faculty connection he had to make sure he didn’t get kicked out of school, but he ended up buying himself a three-year suspended sentence, a felony conviction and, therefore, a lifetime disqualification from federal student aid. Not to mention he didn’t get the apartment and, after fronting all his savings on the doomed weed deal, was flat broke.

  The last thing Lane needs right now is to be calling up a known drug dealer, but at least Lonnie will know about a birthday party. He knows everyone and everything going on in North Seattle. They used to call him the Lando Calrissian of Lake City Way. Except he’s white, unattractive and awkward around women.

  Lane’s unsure how Lonnie knows he’s in town, but he doesn’t have to guess what he wants. He’ll have to play Lonnie’s game and say he’d like to purchase an intent-to-distribute amount of weed. He’ll make the plan to meet up the next day and then cancel a few hours prior. The excuse will have to sound dramatic, perhaps something involving law enforcement.

  Lane winds Lonnie up with the prospect of making a few hundred bucks and then asks about birthday parties. He asks about friends and friends of friends.

  “Birthday party?” Lonnie puzzles at Lane’s request.

  “I’m showing a colleague around. A foreign—European colleague. He’s doing an ethnography on American microcommunities and endogenous influences such as . . . well, you know, social construct, cultural identity stuff. Sorry if that sounds kinda out there.”

  “Yeah, but, nah, that’s cool. I’ve been calling you ’cause there’s this rich lady. She asked to meet some of my friends,” Lonnie says. “She’s at this Hawaiian bar tonight. Like a luau place.”

  “You know I’m married, right?”

  “You should talk to her.”

  “She’s at a birthday party?”

  “Maybe somebody there’s having a birthday, right?” Lonnie continues on about some other details, but Lane more or less stopped listening after he heard there was a birthday-like party.

  Lane’s mom demurs at letting him borrow her Chevy Celebrity station wagon because she knows how much of her wine and how many of her boyfriend’s tallboys he’s massacred. Of course, she has some excuse about an ex-boyfriend and a drunken hit-and-run while he was driving her car.

  She offers to drive Lane to the party instead. It’s the least she can do considering she hasn’t washed any of his clothes and he’s forced to go out with no underwear. He’s made sure she’s aware of her malfeasance.

  He accepts her offer with the stipulation that she drop him off a block away from the bar so nobody’ll see. And the poor lady would do it too. She’d do anything in her power for her only child, always has. But after watching the triumphant final scene of The Road Warrior, Lane decides to take the bus instead. He prides himself on the decision not to lean on his mother. Not exactly drastic measures, but it’s an initial victory. Another bit of proof that tonight is about building his own momentum.

  On the way out the door, he convinces his mom and her boyfriend to loan him ten bucks each so he can have something to spend. “Super short-term,” he guarantees them as he pockets the boyfriend’s last beer to nurse on the bus.

  LANE RIDES FOR THIRTY-THREE MINUTES in the back of the sixty-one-foot articulated Metro bus and then walks another eighteen minutes in the misting December rain to get to the luau bar. The walk doesn’t need to be that long, but Lane yanks the cord on the wrong block and is too prideful to stay seated when the empty bus pulls to the curb. As a true Seattleite, he wants to save face and not inconvenience the driver.

  Although he can’t see as he walks in the dark, Lane’s mom told him that Green Lake is no longer besieged with its eponymous avocado-colored algae. He notices that the car mechanics and Vitamilk factory that ringed the east side of the lake are shuttering and giving way to new condo developments.

  It seems that people are realizing that a neighborhood with a huge lake in the middle of the city is a desirable place to live and not just a puddle of green sludge with a minefield of Canada goose shit on the shores. sold signs punctuate the parking strips like billboards along a freeway. Most are adorned with a headshot of the same blond TV-weathercaster look-alike.

  Once at the bar, Lane finds that the party looks more like a group of intoxicated coworkers than a birthday. Two men have their ties flipped over their shoulders and are arguing about the trajectory of mortgage rates. Lane squeezes in at the corner of the long, rectangular table without saying a word to any of the dozen or so people. After these weeks holed up in his mom’s TV room, after the blowup in New York, after all of the drinking and crying, he needs some time to get out of his own head.

  He focuses on all of the fun that Mia must be having right now, flirting and drinking Bellinis with her friends. Friends who work at Condé Nast and Publicis to supplement their clothing allowances and gain access to better parties. Maybe Bray is there too.

  He has a sudden impulse to run into traffic. Not to kill himself; he is too talented and too destined for eventual greatness to do that. But he needs something tragic enough to happen so she will have to stop everything she is doing and occupy all of her thoughts with him. She will have to medevac him to New York, where she can tend to his bandaged body in a well-appointed, if not outright stylish, suite room in an Upper East Side hospital. Maybe he can even get a view of the East River.

  He busies himself playing with his new cell phone: the one he upgraded to on Mia’s family plan during that short window between destroying his earlier phone and her father taking over her finances. This is the phone he imagines pulling out to take a call from the head of an international think tank or NGO, or perhaps Secretary-General Annan himself. The phone is some cutting-edge shit that he figures people still didn’t have out here in provincial Seattle. His Nokia 8310 has an internal antenna, FM radio, a calendar and predictive T9 text messaging that speeds the process of hitting the keys three times to get to the letters C, F, I, L, O and V or four times to get to S and Z.

  Getting brunch in Nolita after the holidays is the subject of the numerous texts he taps out. Even if he had service on the phone, he has no one to send the texts to, except Mia.

  The woman next to him watches with a mix of interest and bemusement as she finishes a cocktail that reeks of grenadine. She is a good ten years older than him and more than a touch bigger than he usually likes, but she has an attractive face: arching smile and dimples, even if her expression conveys an aggressive intensity. Her hair is bleached blond, a bit fried from the chemicals and cut into an executive-looking bob.

  He nods to her. “Having trouble getting a signal out here.”

  She gives him a West Coast Courtesy Smile™.

  “Roaming . . .” He flashes the phone to her, holding it between his thumb and index finger to showcase its size. “East Coast cell plan.”

  “Smoke?” she asks, opening her crinkled black lambski
n handbag to fish out a pack of Camel Lights.

  He waves off the cigarette. But his eyes are drawn to the wadded bills, at least one of which is a hundred, mixed in with a mess of makeup compacts, receipts, notebooks and glasses cases in the purse. Some white boxy thing with a tangle of white headphones also catches his attention. He’s never seen anything like it.

  She catches him staring. “It’s an iPod.”

  He mouths the syllables: eye-pahd. He sucks in his cheeks in the way he knows make his cheekbones more pronounced, juts his jaw forward and clenches his eyes into his determined, if not a little bit dangerous, look. Since the tail end of puberty, a not insignificant number of women have told him that he is charming, if not good-looking. He doesn’t believe it but often counts on it being true.

  “MP3 player,” she rasps between drags. “Like a Walkman, but this is like ‘a thousand songs in your pocket.’”

  Lane is smitten with this piece of technology and intrigued by, if not jealous of, this woman who possesses it.

  “Just came out. Five gigs of storage. Crazy, huh?” she continues, weighing the John Varvatos black leather slip-ons that Mia bought for him, his dark jeans and long-sleeved black T-shirt. “You’re not from the East Coast.”