They lived in Paradise, his mom said. Because they lived in Florida. It was sunny in Florida, but not anywhere else in the world. In the summer it got hot so there was sweat between his toes. When it got really hot in the summer he played in the sprinkler and his mom sat on the patio behind the screen and she drank orange juice and vodka and his dad smoked cigarettes and filmed Lee with the video camera that had a mirror in front so it looked like a monster eyeball. One day when it was really hot Lee made the Sprinkler Olympics. It was a special day because he just saw a crocodile eye and he was going back and forth from the sprinkler to the water to check to make sure the crocodile eye was still there. His mom thought it was funny. She said, “A watched crocodile never surfaces.” She laughed.
Lee jumped through the sprinkler and he screamed because it was cold on the soft parts of his legs. He said, “Watched eye never surfaces!”
His dad laughed behind the camera. “Tell the audience what you’re doing, Lee.”
“Sprinkler Olympics!”
“Do you think you’re going to get the gold this year?”
Lee shook his head. “I dunno. I dunno … depends.” He went back to look at the crocodile eye and then came running fast through the sprinkler. He screamed again.
“Depends on what, Lee?”
He jumped back in and screamed so that he felt it in his head but also going down his spine into his stomach and the tops of his legs. His mom said far off: “Depends on whether he’s on steroids. He has to be if he’s a six-year-old gold medalist.”
His dad’s face got really serious, and he made his voice deep like a sports announcer guy’s. “Are you on steroids?”
The ground was hard on Lee’s feet where there wasn’t mud and soft where there was. His feet went down and down and up and up. Sometimes when he jumped they went one-up, one-up, and then one-down, one-down. He landed hard on the ground in mud and it didn’t feel hard. Through the water there was a big sun.
His dad gave the monster-eye camera to his mom so she could point it at them and then his dad came growling like a monster into the sprinkler and Lee ran away to look at the alligator eye again, but it wasn’t there.
“I got you!” his dad said real fast, and lifted him up.
Lee was getting tickled like crazy, and trying not to laugh made him laugh harder and harder.
“Rrrrrr,” his dad said. “Rrrrrr, I’m the Sprinkler Monster.”
“This is the Sprinkler Olympics!” Lee said.
“I’m attacking the Sprinkler Olympics!” his dad said. Then in a weird voice: “I ehm ze Svprinkler Munster fruum Rooshia!”
They were back in the sprinkler and it was wet and sunny and the Sprinkler Monster tossed Lee high in the air and Lee screamed and his mom said, “Looks like you’ll have to forfeit, baby.” Lee fell down from up high and the Sprinkler Monster caught him strong under his arms and Lee kicked his feet because he wanted to go again, so the Sprinkler Monster tossed him up again even higher.
2008
Cleveland
And then baby Lee was stopped in midair and hung suspended in the grainy, greenish fuzz of Diedre’s decades-old TV screen, the similarly ancient VCR humming quietly with the effort of the pause. The camcorder’s timestamp read 7/6/1996, the last of Lee’s baby videos. It was twelve years since then and nine years since Lee’s dad jumped, and here he was with Maria Timpano, watching the video on the couch in the living room of the Cleveland apartment where he lived with Diedre (whom he rarely called “Mom,” but more out of habit than disrespect), through whose windows one could see a billboard advertising Pall Mall smokers on a beach, a loud bottom-left surgeon general’s warning announcing that SMOKING IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH. And so was Cleveland, Lee thought, but Diedre had been under the impression that moving here would mean a “fresh start” after his father’s death. Starting fresh in the dead man’s hometown.
It was Lee’s Senior Ditch Day and he’d talked Maria into ditching with him—which she didn’t need a lot of persuading to do, only marginally in school was she anyway (“was she”? God, he was fucked up), her genius ass already off taking classes at Case Western—and they were high and a little hungry but intent on ignoring both those feelings in favor of sex. Lacking a proper childhood of her own, Maria was a sentimentalist for kid arcana, always demanding to flip through Diedre’s old photo albums of Lee and watch video after video after video of him learning how to walk and eat and sound out the words in his board books. Diedre had been a dedicated videographer—that much he had to give her credit for—and his father a committed performer. But the videos were pretty boring (kids are stupid, Lee knew, and prone to repetitive behaviors), and even Maria got bored after they’d incinerated a nug or two, and they usually moved on to undressing pretty quickly thereafter.
This Senior Ditch Day would go on to earn a top-three ranking among the worst days of Lee’s life. The number one worst had been the day he learned that his father had committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a hotel in Tampa. The second-worst had been the day of his father’s funeral, when his Sith Lord half brother had followed them home and rummaged through his life and repossessed all the things in their house he thought they owed him. The third-worst would be this day, because it was on this day that he fucked things up with the love of his life.
They began doing what they’d intended to do right there in the living room, raven-haired Maria asking him if maybe they should be more careful because his mom was about to come home, Lee reminding her that Diedre had seen much worse in the span of her strange time on earth. And Maria—who was actually kind of a freak when she wanted to be—had rolled her eyes and stood, stripping naked and beckoning him to the floor. When that was over he’d lain in a fetal position at her side, whispering that he never wanted to get up. But one of her friends from drama club was having a party later and she had to go back to her place and sober up and get ready. Which meant he had to get up as well, to try to draw out their good-bye kiss for as long as possible.
When she left, he’d gone into Diedre’s room, in the drawer where she kept her Xanax, and had ground up a pill with the butt of his lighter and snorted it off her dresser. He then walked across the complex to his friend Max’s apartment. Unlike Lee, Max—just as poor (“economically challenged,” as the Shaker Heights mayor had once said of Ludlow) as Lee, with the same genre of “seen it all, done it all” mother, though buoyed financially and sexually by his social status as quarterback—had an Internet hookup, a dial-up one that made those weird late-nineties sounds like telegraphed Morse code. Lee didn’t really mind Diedre’s unwillingness to pay for Internet: they had TV; he was content checking out books from the library (currently it was Eastern European fiction in translation) and playing old N64 games. She was feeding and clothing them both on a $13.50-an-hour managerial salary from OfficeMax, so it would be asking a lot anyway. And it wasn’t like he’d been the perfect son, either.
He was going to Max’s to check his e-mail, which he’d abused on his eighteenth birthday—December 15, 2007, the drunkest he’d ever been—to write to Leland Jr., demanding reparations for the goods he’d stolen after the funeral. Leland Jr. had taken jewelry that would’ve looked nice on Diedre, he’d taken pictures that hung in the hallway, he’d taken the car and sold it for parts. It occurred to Lee on the eve of adulthood that the virtuous thing to do would be to get everything back. Not just for the money but for the principle of it. He would show Diedre and Maria and everyone who’d ever known him that he was in no position to be pushed around by the Sith Lord. But secretly he was, because it was months later and he’d been dreading Leland Jr.’s response since he’d woken up with a brain-throttling hangover on December 16.
He offered Max a Xanax for his troubles and sat down at his outsized monitor while Max played an ancient version of Doom on his laptop in bed. Lee saw—as he thought he would—the bolded re: that indicated Leland Jr. had indeed read and replied to his e-mail. To get his courage up, he searched through his inbox for th
e e-mail from Jocelyn: Hey, do you think you’d want to work at Lefébvre? In it, her apologies for replying to Lee’s (incoherent) e-mail that Leland Jr. had obviously forwarded her, her modest and unrealistic offer—forty hours a week, $8.25 an hour; how would he live off that, wherever Lefébvre was, and didn’t she know he had school?—her desire to get to know Lee better, her promise that Leland Jr. wanted to extend an olive branch as well. He’d wasted his time crafting a response, feigning interest for reasons he couldn’t explain to himself, and never sent it. Now he reread the e-mail that had started it all:
from: “Lee”
to: “Leland Bloom-Mittwoch”
date: Sat, December 15, 2007 at 2:13 am
subject:
Leland Jr.,
I am your half brother Lee writing to ask that you please surrender the asets that rightfully belong to m e. My mother, Diedre, whom yo u will probably rememmber from the funral, and I have been living in a state of near-povertty since you executed my father’s will. Diedre defaulted on the morgage of the house in FLorida and I am now living withher in Ohio, where our father hasd friendss. Yo u have personal assets belonging to us which you thought belongged to you. I dont think im being rude when I ask: why do you need these assets? II believe I have a right to know. You are well-off, as is your mother. Yur job is high-paying and has security. Ths is not the case with Diedre, who works at Officemax. What do u need this money to buy, exactly?
I wuld like to remmind yu that I am Leland Sr.’s son and he is my father just as much as you are his son and he is your fathe.r I believe that you are obligated to at the very least fairly divvide the assetts between us both if you will not aknowledge that I am the rihtful inheritor. If you do not comply with these requests I woill be forced to pursue legal action.
Sincerely,
Lee Bloom-Mittwoch
And now he had no choice but to read what Leland Jr. had written in response. He sighed, held his breath:
from: “Leland Bloom-Mittwoch”
to: “Lee” date:
date: Wed, April 23, 2008 at 4:19 am
subject: re:
Lee,
Let me start by saying that your kind words regarding myself and how I choose to live my life and what I choose to do with my money (and where it came from) are much appreciated. The last and only time I saw you, you were a kid at your father’s funeral; you seemed like a charming boy then and it’s obvious to me that you’ve grown into a young man of equivalent charm. I didn’t respond to your e-mail sooner because I promised myself I wouldn’t, but eventually I realized that you had a good point when you insisted that you have a right to know about “the assets.” Here are some answers to your questions:
1. I have zero doubt that you are your father’s son. You are probably more his son than I am; I gladly surrender him to you.
2. I settled your father’s estate in the way I did because (a) he didn’t write a will, and I’m assuming if he had, he wouldn’t have had testatory capacity anyway; (b) the sum of heritable assets included no property (you may not realize this, but the house you lived in in Florida was mortgaged beyond belief) and so totaled under $100,000; (c) many of the more valuable possessions in that house were stolen from my mother. If I remember correctly, you and your mother retained the assets that rightfully belonged to you and then some: your father’s savings including the money he took from my mother (I remind you that this sum was bequeathed to you at my mother’s request, not my own), valuables belonging to your paternal grandparents, etc.
3. Your threat to sue, while certainly intimidating, doesn’t seem like the wisest course of action for you.
Regards,
Leland Jr.
Worse than he’d expected. His heart’s thrum sped up and he stared into the screen, then at his hands. Then he propped his head in his hands and stared at his lap, his be-jeaned knees. Max’s voice asked from far off what was wrong and Lee let him look over his shoulder at the screen, then listened as Max went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of his parents’ whiskey. They took burning pulls from it and smoked again, Max saying that none of this was Lee’s fault, that he was dealing with a truly fucked-up person here and it was probably better to sever ties than keep on dealing with him. Lee nodded and nodded and said nothing, because anything he said would cause the fireball of anger at the base of his skull to supernova throughout the rest of his body, and then he’d have no choice but to cry. They smoked again to sober up and then Max mentioned he had Oxy, which they agreed they’d take before getting in Lee’s car.
He saw Maria had texted him three times, all some variation of when are u coming to pick me up?? She liked arriving places together—he loved it—and her friend’s house, if he remembered correctly, wasn’t within walking distance of hers. He was twenty minutes late already. Normally he’d do something—jumping jacks, stretches, deep breathing—to get soberer, but he was in a hurry and the weed and Xanax had already canceled out the whiskey and he was taming the Oxy’s head-float by chugging water. But when they got in Lee’s car (which was really Diedre’s car), Max had asked feebly whether Lee wanted him to drive. Lee glimpsed himself in the rearview mirror and saw that Max maybe had a point, but knew as well that accepting Max’s kindness would cause him to feel embarrassed, so he just shrugged and said, “Nah, man, I’m fine.”
This was how they ended up in the bottom of a ravine next to Maria’s house fifteen minutes later. Stern old Papa Don Timpano had seen them, called 911, and promised Lee he would never be allowed within a mile of raven-haired Maria Timpano again.
Late April 2009
Wisconsin
Lee sat at one tip of an ovoid formation of boys passing around a Pascal. He was thinking once again about Devi and how easy it would be to walk across the hall, say a sad-sounding and noncommittal hi, and drill her. This was an idea he’d been tossing around in his head all day, a head now dense and furry with THC in a way he liked to refer to as a “Mary Jane maze.” The ovoid formation went like this: Lee, Dallas (real name Jeff but he was from just outside Dallas), Abel (last name), a rando named Donny (possibly a friend of Abel’s?), and Lee’s best friend at Southgate College, Tarzan Phillips (Christian name: Edward Jonathan Phillips). Although Tarz claimed unparalleled expertise with most drugs—cannabis especially—and sometimes (albeit needlessly) assumed a parental or instructional role with Lee, it was Lee alone who’d thought of the Cockneyesque nickname: Pascal as in Blaise Pascal as in blaze, the former being far afield from words like roach, spliff, and blunt and their washed-out, mildewy associations with the early seventies. Avoided entirely was the noobish and embarrassing word “joint,” which you often heard deployed by adults who’d only ever taken one puff in their lifetime, or had felt briefly cool for a moment at some party when they were offered some burning paper and didn’t decline.
The Pascal was now being passed around with the sort of mad-loud enthusiasm Lee imagined must have prevailed in Heorot right before Grendel broke in and slaughtered everyone. Everyone in the oval (excepting Lee and Tarz) had done the Four-Twenty Challenge and was treating this afternoon like a Deadhead Christmas morning, delighting as they never had before in Tarz’s rolling ability, his strip-of-index-card roaches, and the foul tobacco he’d purchased in preparation for their catharsis. Midterms had been over for more than thirty-six hours and they’d all been drinking since around noon. Add to this the fact that since most kids at Southgate were pretty much scared of their own shadows and had gone home already to spend spring break playing video games, Lee et al. had the school to themselves. Lee had initially balked when Diedre pressured him to move away for college (You’re bored and restless and it’s annoying), but now he conceded that it had been worth it.
And across the hall, Lee knew Devi was sitting in her little jean shorts (jorts) in her chair in front of her bathroom vanity and fixing and refixing that bland-as-all-hell overstraig
htened hair. Lee held the blazing Pascal in his lips and began texting her: hrny as fuk.
Tarz plucked the Pascal from Lee’s mouth and licked his own lips, leaning toward Lee’s ear in a way that gave him goose bumps. Tarz sometimes acted like a little kid, and depending on who you were you found this either endearing or annoying. Lee, of course, would defend whatever Tarz did or said to his dying day.
Tarz opened his hands and inside were some shriveled mushroom caps. “For Hitler’s birthday,” he said.
Two texts on Lee’s phone. The first from Devi and the next from Jocelyn:
ya me 2 cum oer
We’re at the rest stop with the Starbucks before the last exit now so it’s going to be maybe another 30 minutes.
Everyone in the oval excepting Tarz, Abel, and Lee was majoring in physics; Abel had gone for chemistry and Tarz was computer science. Lee was English, which had been a foregone thing for a while. They’d had the grades and the test scores to get into Southgate (no. 23 in the nation), and Lee just had the test scores and a sufficiently depressing admissions essay.
Another text from Jocelyn: Did you get my last text?
Jocelyn, pathetically innocent, had been trying to broker a peace between Lee (Palestine) and the Sith Lord Leland Jr. (Israel) for a little under a year now. Lee knew she loved thinking of him as her charity case, had tried to intervene in that nasty e-mail exchange that fucked over Lee’s life (his emotional life at least) senior year of high school. She had sent tons of e-mails after that apologizing, calling Leland Jr. “moody” and “very defensive of his mother.” Lee tried hard to feel bad for her, but then he remembered she was a thin, rich white woman who had offered him what would very well have been the shittiest stir-my-coffee-and-file-these-papers job of his life. He was about to cut off contact with her and be done with the whole thing. But then he told Tarz about it.
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