It might have helped my spirits to try pickpocketing for old times’ sake, but my pilot light had been extinguished. The will to pick had been lost with the old shoes. Now that I myself had a wallet, I was too full of dread and guilt to contemplate even recreational thievery. I had become one of them. Every day I went out and placed myself in danger’s way, but no matter how much I tried to get someone to pick, stick, ‘nap, or otherwise nab me, I always walked the streets of Pauly’s town unmolested. I let the leather lip poke out of my pants on the bus and pretended to fall asleep, but no fellow came along to tug. Not even by rattling a sock full of fifty-dollar coins in the most anemic light of pre-dawn, back-alley, mid-summer suburbia could I summon a charitable soul to unburden me. I couldn’t pay someone to rob me.
Early on, I had tried misplacing the wallet, dropping it in a dumpster, knowing even as I did so what a pathetic maneuver it was.
“Mom?”
“In here, honey,” she called from the study. She was on the exercise machine, a tantalizing sight: Merry, in low-neck leotard, scaling the side of a mountain that wasn’t even there. She pushed a lever and the entire contraption dipped her into some all-fours variation, a cross between stalking cat and knocked-up cow. I tried to look away, but my discomfort was just redoubled when I realized she had set up two full-length mirrors: one a few feet in front of the machine, the other right behind. I had strayed in a pumpkin patch of reduplicating boobs, reiterative tits. Lost in her funhouse, I could see my mouth hanging open in the infinite reflections. There was no closing.
Breathless, forced to focus on her esoteric ascent, I was trying to explain: “Pickpocketed … busy street … can’t be sure how it happened…” when the phone rang. It was the chief of police calling to say a billfold had been retrieved and my operator’s license was inside. Did I want to come pick it up or would I prefer to have it delivered?
“How about losing those glasses while you’re at it?” Merry teased. “Pauly will pay for the laser correction. Fifteen minutes and you’re twice as handsome.”
When we went to pick it up at city hall, the cool, new ten-G note was still there. Pauly’s supercilious smirk made me paranoid he was deliberately doing all this to drive me crazy. The Ho-Ho-Kus sanitation worker who had found it received a decoration for faithful service.
Audiences with a few local toughs made it clear to me that, although Pauly was mayor, Ho-Ho-Kus and most of the region around was not-so-secretly controlled by that crime boss of old, familiar alias: Apple Jack. Nothing went down without his say-so. Apple Jack ran operations large and small out of a dusty old virtual reality parlor in Paramus, on the other side of the river and the wrong side of the tracks, but the badass boss was rarely seen in the dim, blinking light of Adelle’s Penny Arcade.
He had named it after his old flame. At the entrance, a faded poster memorialized the fabled figure, a fortune teller of ancient fame with auburn hair, drawn face, and hollow eyes who, while blind to the material world, could reputedly perceive the future with flawless acuity. Her unearthly visage loomed over the image of an opaque ball composed—as suggested by the illustrated glint—of exquisite crystal. “MADAME ADELE,” read deco lettering, “astounding oracle .” Adelle’s “pennies” were credits on plastic cards with imbedded debit chips. Her silhouette was embossed on one side; printed on the other, the dictum: DEUS EX MACHINA.
Apple Jack’s Paramus outfit was built on an army of imps a little like road rats. His penny pickers—juvenile cybernauts hooked on VR—ran numbers, perpetrated break-ins, and vandalized the property of delinquent debtors in exchange for the occasional crust of bread and a few arcade credits. In an ingenious piece of personnel management, Apple Jack paid kids with the dummy debit cards he manufactured himself for use in Adelle’s Arcade. Even hustlers, bookies, and smugglers gave him shit for so shafting his supplicants, though they were just jealous of how effectively he exacted tribute while in return providing only a fickle flight of fancy for the strung-out cyberaddicts. Already made of gold, Apple Jack didn’t stand to profit much from anybody’s demise. The freaky despot got involved in others’ affairs just for the sake of fucking things up. The principle of asserting his dominance, meanwhile messing with the many lives of the little people, was pretense enough. However much commoners complained, nobody, not even the mayors and cops, ever challenged him. Pauly, having pulled himself up by those fabled bootstraps, identified with his electorate by promoting old-fashioned values and made Merry keep down with the Joneses by doing her own house cleaning, but he, together with thousands of other rats and masters, was just another one of Apple Jack’s marionettes.
The first time I went to Adelle’s Arcade I became fascinated by the eerie part of the parlor specializing in antique games, from turn-of-the-millennium first-person-shooter all the way back to pinball. This would be a good place to keep my fingers limber, I considered, in case I ever chanced to return to the old trade. Rumor had it that Adelle, all washed up, lived in a back room between burnt motherboards and plywood casings, boxed in by the obsessed Apple Jack, who kept her hidden from life and light. The door was supposedly left unlocked, although in fact one could not be sure, nobody ever having been observed going in or coming out. A hand-lettered sign was posted there, a dreadful dare to the fool who might entertain the idea of passage: THIS MEANS YOU, MOTHERFUCKER. It did not say do not enter. It didn’t have to. Nobody even risked walking close enough to accidentally brush up against the door. This was the beauty of Apple Jack’s eloquent authority. It never occurred to anyone to toy with the idea of what might happen. We exchanged our twenties for Adelle’s pennies and went from game to game, content to traverse virtual wildernesses and battle imaginary evils rather than mess with anything so hopelessly unknown as Apple Jack’s back room. After all, only onscreen did a man have multiple lives.
I don’t know where the money went, but I managed, at first frugally, then recklessly, to spend it. Ten thousand was more than had been dropped on my account in the fifteen years preceding. Granted, a soda in the suburbs cost fifty bucks and a slice of pizza a hundred, but I was not used to stopping for these indulgences between two such superfluous activities as, say, sleep and arcade. Dropping off, I always left the contents of my pocket there on the bedside table. One morning, after I had managed to nearly empty the wallet, I awoke and discovered it contained a fresh note. All the worthlessness I had reclaimed was ruined by one stroke of Pauly’s reckless generosity. Every week or so, when the load became light and I had nearly succeeded in squandering the unsolicited gains, the funds were deviously replenished. This happened again and again. I lost track of how many grand.
The bed, the sneaks, the sunlight, and the wallet were bad enough, but in a short time I became aware of the most awkward reconditioning factor by far: the underthings. On the day I had arrived, the chest had been stocked with two plastic-wrapped ten-packs. Since the day Merry had insisted that I deposit dirty underwear there, in the bin by the bathroom door, the prospect of her defiling her nostrils by lifting out a florid passel of socks and briefs had sent me into paroxysms of self-revulsion. I had not counted on this obvious process when acceding to the drawers full of white stuff. From the information on the labels, I perceived that the items were manufactured nearby. Maybe Pauly had political ties on the inside—he got them for me for free, I reasoned, and they were disposable, the bin emptied straight into the Ho-Ho-Kus incinerator. I changed daily in an effort to use up the neatly creased pieces in my drawers and call their bluff. I believed that if I hurried through these, new packages would appear. Instead, the same pairs started coming around clean. This underwear scenario had all other humiliations beat. It made me want to die before emitting another by-product. It was nobody’s business but my own to handle my skivvies. However frequently I managed to start fresh, I could not ponder objectively the imprint of shame on each article. As a rat, I had spent too many years wearing the same pants for too many weeks ever to wash the stain from subconscious. Like the homicidal lady wh
o can’t shout out the phantom spot, I saw skid marks every day I stripped to the bare essentials. Although I never chanced to observe Merry emptying the hamper, imagination reeled at the prospect of her bent over the washer, mouth turned down in disgust to find, dried on the fly, little dandelion patches of my pee. How harrowing the prospect of the innocent woman handling the perennially mud-tracked fabric that got pinched at my perineum!
Want to mess with a boy’s head while he’s hitting the peak of puberty? Move him in with a mother-stranger who’s got a proclivity for exhibitionism. Merry had a habit of leaving her hand-washed bras drying on the downstairs bathroom shower curtain rod. Whenever I was on the can my glance grazed that way. I was stricken by ruminations on the bloom of her breasts. Had I suckled those mammaries? If so, I had no memory, and this poverty enraged me, fanning an anguish that in turn stoked the coals of my longing. I daydreamed for hours about what it might have been like. Brain boiled with humiliating names: Percy, Fauntleroy, mollycoddle, mama’s boy. There were a million terms, medical and menial, for my condition. Thoughts about Merry consumed what insular serenity was left. Somewhere back there, the big sneakers had introduced the irrational inkling that, much in the same way I sullied rugs, I might be at risk of upsetting Merry’s chastity. Gods, help me! What was it, newly blossoming in subconscious, that caused me to obsess so over her chest? Mother who birthed me, betwixt whose legs I had burgeoned! Mother who had presumably, at least until her paternal intervention, nursed me! Mother!
Merry continued to peek in on my reading, sleeping, brushing, washing, and kept on suffocating me with breakfasttable embraces. Over and above the already-arduous job of surviving sixteen, it seemed especially dangerous getting to know a mother this late in the game. When a baby is a baby, then babying is innocent, but since I had skipped all the dodo doing and weenie washing, dormant solicitude had metamorphosed into something sick and sinister. Now I could not bask innocently in all the stifling affection. Testosterone had taken care of that. Latency had turned natal innocence into a very adultish lust. No doubt Merry’s attentions were well intentioned, but the sickeningly sweet odor of my perverse reactions permeated the air and summoned legions of black flies. I was rotten, corrupted. All day I dreamed about sex.
Merry’s fawning just aggravated my antagonism for Pauly, whose pretense of obliviousness in the face of the maternal indiscretions made him an indifferent accomplice, a latent fetishist, or—worst of all—a blind ignoramus. “Dad” became a tough concept to wrap my head around. It had to do with all the little, nit-picky things that I should have worked through harmlessly as a toddler and juvenile and probably gotten over with by the time I was a teen. According to all the books, I would have become jealous, bitten his finger, hit him, cried, rebelled, et cetera, all in the first eighteen months. But now, after years of sublimated patriphobia, the all-too-real old sot really started to bug me. The delight with which he simpered, “Cool shoes, huh?” engendered in me what I imagine to be the most toxic of filial attitudes: arrogance. How could Merry stand the man? The thought of our underpants commingling in her washer hurtled me into private fits of sanguinary hostility.
Dejection kept sending me across the bridge into Paramus, where I spent most of my days vegetating at Adelle’s Penny Arcade. I became a burnout, an adolescent with a vengeance, sublimating my murderous tendencies into slumping, smoking, sulking, and (by the dexterity I had developed in my former trade) excelling at manipulation of all the buttons, track balls, flippers, joysticks, pistol grips, and power gloves Adelle’s had to offer. Whenever I snuffed a man on screen, I pretended it was Pauly.
With a wallet always full of money to blow on pennies and a lot of time to kill, I fell in with a brat who, if not my kind, was at least kindred, a penny picker who hustled petty gamblers on corners claim-staked by the boss. His name was Sumner, but the rest of the penny pickers called him Some Nerd. He slept inside a cardboard box that by day served as a bent-out-of-shape three-card-monte table on Paramus sidewalks. At Adelle’s, I often played doubles and sort of became chums with him. Some Nerd’s reflexes sucked, so usually he would stand around and get fed up waiting for me to finish with my umpteenth extra life.
“Time to die, four-eyes.”
“Shut up, Some Nerd. I need some simulated slaughter. My parents are getting on my nerves.”
“Don’t sweat it, Eddie. So your folks are jerks. You’re lucky you ended up in Jersey. There’s a tradition here of saying things like ‘parents suck’ and meaning it.”
Instead of just playing MP, the juke box at Adelle’s was loaded with old-fashioned compact discs featuring an ancient mode known as rock ‘n’ roll. On one popular selection, a gentleman named Jim, long-since disappeared, crooned a spooky poem about obsolescence.
I asked Some Nerd whether this was what people used to call hip-hop.
“Hell no. Heavy metal, which came much later.”
In an eerie spoken section, the singer, one of the weirdest werewolves to self-destruct under the influence of all the odd drugs they had back in his day, performed a little schizophrenic oratory. “Father?” “Yes, son.” “I want to kill you … Mother? I want to–—” The accompaniment crescendoed and what he said in the end was unintelligible, but I sure sympathized with the sound.
Walking back from the arcade across the Saddle River bridge, I saw a promising sign. Pauly had urged me, as the mayor’s son, to do some kind of public service. (“Nothing too arduous, preferably not blue collar.”) At first I had moodily refused to respond, muttering under my breath where he could put his public service, but a billboard gave me an idea of one place I might enjoy clocking some hours. I volunteered to be a crisis counselor on a suicide hotline.
The coordinator explained that the job hinged upon an ability to distinguish cranks and crackpots from at-risk selfimmolators. A common question to slip in early might be: “Have you thought about killing yourself today?” followed by “Have you thought about how you would do it?” We had to be able to triage whether each call was a) a lonely liar tying up the line, b) a depressive sort who should be urged to pursue treatment, or c) a real candidate for the bridges where the phone number was found. On the training exam, one section tested the counselor’s discrimination on the basis of the caller’s opening line. EXAMPLE: “All my plants are dying?” CIRCLE ONE: High Risk, Possible Risk, No Risk. Born blessed with a nose for nuance, I was the only one in the volunteer pool who identified correctly: Get dibs on the music collection, friends, ’cause this one is going to jump.
Fielding calls was a crash course in pop psychology, and I defied the guidebook by psychoanalyzing. I could swap self-destructive scenarios with the introverts, trade bluffs with the exhibitionists, conjure laughter in the depressed, cheerfully convince the psychotics they were just being paranoid, and hedge bets with the real paranoids to make them believe they were merely neurotic. Although I cannot be sure about the long-term effectiveness of my strategies, I suspect that, if nothing else, I did some of the callers good by demonstrating a personality that was, even more than their own, cracked, crumbling, and rapidly washing away. I did not tell them about my own insane parental situation, although many of the callers were teenagers living at home who “hated them,” “wished they were dead,” “couldn’t take it any more,” and in a few cases had already become embroiled in dark and dangerous relations with one adult or the other. Instead, I accomplished my pathological passion play by instant and uncanny identification with the mechanisms of the caller’s morose ruminations. I knew all about toxic thought, and accurately described the nuances of different sorts of psychic sizzle that accompany each aberrant mind cycle.
I learned that, among teenagers, potential for trouble has a lot to do with creativity. Newly possessing all the overpowering insight and energy of adulthood, a teen can in his restlessness either become skeptical of all the institutions (educational, legal, parental) that have up until that time been taken for tacit authorities, or else attempt an idealistic embrace of a
dult society and its conventions. Either way, the shift involves terrific risks, because despite his enlightenment, imagination, and will to respond to everything he sees, the adolescent is not yet equipped with the emotional means. It is one of the arduous asynchronicities of youth, a retarded ability to harness creativity in spite of extraordinary energy. The worst-case upshot: Constructive potential sours, turns rancid, and becomes the curds of destruction. Every vandal is a Van Gogh, each thief Marcel Marceau. Even in the most violent gang you have the potential for an ingenious klezmer band. Suicides are almost always promising poets.
I came up against every kind of pathology in the book. More often than not, the dominant complex also concealed its complementary opposite: inferiority/superiority, persecution/castration, Electra/Diana. There were not a few callers who in the first minute I could tell had imbibed a jigger of recombinant disorders. As for existential cynicism, I was king. People accidentally presume that the dilemma of being involves implicit persistence and requires extraordinary justification—even under great adversity—to settle on stopping, whereas in reality we enjoy a rare and privileged prerogative, that light switch dangling in front of our noses, to die at any moment. The real absurdity, a by-product of almost bovine conformity, is when an individual confronting the question of whether to live one more day presumes the choice prescribed. The matter is not why go on? but why not die? I could speak convincingly about that place where a person was ready to shoot, swallow, slice, jump, what have you. Not only had I been there, the more I thought about it, the more I seemed to toe that edge every day.
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