by Jason Myers
After he pulled his lips away, he was like, “If you’re not busy sometime, maybe we could get together and hang out and rent some Kevin Costner movies. Maybe Waterworld, The Upside of Anger, maybe even The Postman. We’ll get some popcorn and some Junior Mints and maybe some Diet Coke. It’ll be really fun.”
And the chubby girl got really stoked and smiled and she was like, “The Bodyguard is my favorite,” and Buttrock was like, “Yeah, it’s one of mine, too.” And then they started kissing again and he cupped her left breast and kept trying to go up her shirt with his other hand, but she kept stopping him because she wasn’t ready to go there with him yet.
And the next day, on the way back to San Francisco, I called him out on it and he tried to deny it at first, but ended up admitting it, and then he was like, “I slept with a tranny on Polk Street once, too.” Then he started crying and talking about driving the van off the road into a ditch, so my cousin gave him two hundred dollars cash, right out of his wallet, so he wouldn’t do it. And then he dropped us back off at Eric’s pad and Eric let him crash there, and the next day Buttrock took a shower, and when he was through, he knocked on my cousin’s room door and was like, “Do you have a hair dryer?” And my cousin was like, “No.” And Buttrock went, “Really?” And Eric went, “You need to leave, Steve.”
And he did.
Claire is laughing hysterically. “That’s so awesome,” she cries, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Thank you so much for that.”
You’re welcome, I tell her, petting the soft skin of her arm as gently as I can, and not five minutes later she’s asleep and I smoke a few more cigarettes and listen to a few more songs before bailing from her pad.
27.
I’M SITTING AT A METAL table that’s been bolted to the white tiled floor watching Kyle as he emerges from a small doorway, stuffed into an orange jumpsuit.
I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, but the smell of ammonia and peroxide blaze the walls of my nostrils and make me nauseous. I exhale quickly and pull my eyelids apart.
It hurts.
The hard fluorescent lights stab my pupils. I blink wildly. Everything slowly falls back into place. My eyes are back on Kyle. Glued to him as he shuffles toward me with his head bowed and his arms hanging loose and apart, put back together where his hands meet, one palm pressed tightly against the other.
My heart slams against my ribs. A cool tingle runs down my back. My mouth gets dry.
Kyle pulls the chair out from the other side of the table and drops himself into it.
I squeeze my own hands together as tightly as I can.
Hi.
“Hi.” Kyle cocks one eye at me. “I was wondering if you were ever going to show up.”
Well, I’ve, um, been—
I cut myself off though. It wouldn’t be fair at all to start lying. Considering the circumstances, the two of us should be well beyond that.
I say sorry instead.
“Sorry is the last thing anyone should feel for me.” He snaps his head back and runs his scraped and scratched hands over his scraped and scratched face, through whatever’s left of his hair. Pushing an enormous breath out, he flips his head at me and asks me if I’m nervous.
Yes.
“Me too.”
Pause.
He drops his hands against the tabletop and squares his body perfectly in front of mine. “Every day,” Kyle says, “I wake up and I feel nothing but guilt and nerves. I’m really scared, Travis.”
Along with the two of us, there are exactly sixteen other people in the visiting room. Six of them are other inmates, all of them in the same jumpsuit, sitting with the same pose, but all of them are at least twice the age of Kyle.
So what’s the situation?
Kyle shakes his head slowly. “I have another court date next week. It’s just some proceeding. It doesn’t even matter. There’s nothing I can do at this point anyway.”
You could go to trial.
“For what, Trav? I did it. I killed my girlfriend. I killed two kids. My fucking car was in the side of the house. I deserve this shit.”
Don’t say that. You could go to trial and tell them—
Again, I cut myself off. Kyle is glaring at me.
I’m sorry, man.
“Don’t be,” he groans. “You’re not the first person that’s come to visit and tried to tell me how I could get out of this—how if I just do this and that then this whole thing will go away.” He runs a finger across the purple and blue bridge of his nose. “I always hated that shit when we were growing up.”
What shit?
“You know, like when we’d be at some party in high school and the cops would bust it and all those kids would be sucking on pennies because someone told them how their older brother said that copper neutralizes the alcohol on a breathalyzer.”
Pause.
I shrug.
And Kyle goes, “Or when someone would get a ticket and another kid would tell them that he had a friend who had the exact same thing happen to them, but got out of it because they decided to fight it, and found some strange loophole in the law that no one’s ever found before.”
I know what you’re saying, man. Everyone’s got a friend who’s got a friend who’s done something gnarlier than you, more fucked up than you, and beat the rap.
Kyle nods, scrunches his lips together, says, “And the thing is, the only person I know who has ever gotten off of anything because of a technicality is Michael.”
Michael?
“Yeah,” he snorts. “Don’t you remember senior year? When he got picked up leaving Bottoms Up bar?”
I’m not sure I do.
“The cops pulled him over like a block after he started driving, and during the first sobriety test, I guess he gave up and went, ‘Okay, you got me,’ so they took him in and booked him. But while he was being released the next morning, they gave him the ticket to sign and instead of signing his name, he signed it ‘I’m in jail’ and no one even noticed until his lawyer brought it up and that’s how he got out of it.”
Huh? Maybe I remember.
Pause.
A little bit.
Kyle exhales. “I guess I’m the last person who should be talking lightly about driving around all loaded.”
I lean back in my chair and crane my neck around a few times over.
“Are you all right, Trav?”
I’m cool.
Leaning forward, digging my arms against the table, I stare at Kyle, this kid I’ve known since second grade.
“What?” he asks.
This is probably gonna sound all sick and stuff, but I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t wanna know.
“Ask what?”
Huge beads of sweat form along my hairline and I wipe them away.
What was the accident like?
Kyle buries his face into the palm of his left hand.
Seconds pass.
I can actually see his chest thumping up and down.
You don’t have to tell me, Kyle. It won’t make a difference anyway. Sometimes not telling people anything is a good thing.
Kyle slowly lifts his head. His face is full of tears.
I say, If no one else knows what happened, at least you have a chance to get past it.
“But I don’t really know what happened,” he says.
Really?
“No,” he sniffs. “Me and Emily had been out partying all fucking day. Bloody Marys that morning at Casanova’s. Doing bumps. We scooped up a pair of Bronx tickets and went out for more drinks.”
Kyle stops. He presses his lips together and looks into the light above us.
Me, I almost say, Hey man, I thought we were all supposed to go to the Bronx show together.
But I don’t.
Thank fucking god I don’t.
I catch myself and run my hands through my hair and lean back again.
What’s the last thing you remember?
“We were at this weird party one of my customers
was at. Steve Albini was supposedly there or supposed to be coming and I guess some of the dudes from the Shins were already there, or on their way there. Anyway, I was on the roof selling to this chick and she was telling me how she’d once walked in on her older brother fucking a blow-up doll, trying to get off as fast as he could because he’d punctured a hole in it and the doll was deflating.”
Kyle stops and jams his fingers into his forehead.
That’s it?
“No,” he says. “Then I was running. It was daylight. And blood was gushing from my forehead. I had no idea what was going on.”
Pause.
“So I just kept running.”
Damn.
I choke down the huge lump in my throat.
“Then,” Kyle blurts, sucking back the saliva rolling out of his mouth. “Then they told me about Emily.” He turns his head to the side. His whole body starts to shake. “They told me what happened to her. How I took her life, and one of the detectives even showed me a picture of her dead body all tangled up in the frame.”
Kyle chokes back more tears and more spit. The veins in his neck bulge.
He says, “Then they started in about the two kids I ran over inside the house.”
Pause.
“Oh fuck, man,” he sobs. “And the next day in court, they charged me with all kinds of shit, and now . . .” His voice drifts away for a moment. He wipes his face with his arm. “And now the only thing left for me to do is plead guilty and that’s it. That’s my life. Gone.”
A moving picture of Kyle jumping some stairs on his skateboard for the first time smashes through my head.
And I hate this. I hate being here. I hate sitting in a jail. I hate myself for coming to a jail.
For everything I’ve done.
Listen, Kyle, I blurt out. I have to go. I have to meet some people.
Kyle shakes his head and looks back down at the table.
I forgot, I tell him.
“It’s fine,” he snaps.
I really did forget, Kyle. I have things to do.
Kyle swings his eyes on me again. “It’s okay, Trav. Don’t be sorry. I know you. I know how you are. You don’t have to explain anything. You’ve always been like this.”
I say nothing and Kyle stands up. He turns and walks back through the door he’d just walked out of.
• • •
I leave the jail shaking. I’m standing in the parking lot under the blazing sun and it’s like I’m covered in this thick blanket with no air. I bend over and I start heaving. Nothing comes out but black colored spit. My armpits are soaked.
Crawling into my car, I crank it on and blast the air conditioner and light a cigarette.
I don’t know what to do. I’m absolutely hopeless. I need someone to be with me but I don’t want to be around anyone.
I call Laura.
“I’m going into work, Travis. What do you want?”
I need to see you. When can I see you?
“I’m closing. I’ll call you when I’m done.”
Tell them you’re sick and you have to go home.
“No. I can’t do that. I need the money.”
No you don’t.
“Yes I do.”
I’ll fucking pay you.
“Travis, stop. We can talk later tonight.”
She hangs up.
I have nowhere else to go but home.
This is how I felt at the end in Arizona.
No one is home when I get there. I need to do something with myself. Fuck someone or work out.
I try jacking off to this gnarly Nicole Sheridan porno but I have trouble getting hard. My mind is too busy. I’m sitting in front of a computer screen with my pants around my knees, pounding my limp dick. My face is bright red.
Nothing is working.
I look down at my lap and get depressed. My dick looks like some burnt red hot dog that fell out of its bun as it lies idly against the top of my thigh.
I sigh and take a break. Walk into the basement bathroom and find a bottle of Vaseline and walk back to the computer and try something else.
I go for a celebrity. I type in the name Evan Rachel Wood on a Google search and this page pops up with a whole shit-load of her photos on it. I double click on one of her in a pair of garter panties, a bikini top, and a pair of black leather boots that run all the way up to her thighs.
The photo triples in size and I squeeze a ton of lotion straight onto my penis and start going at it again.
I jerk harder and harder and harder but I cannot get a boner. Nasty thoughts begin to pound through my skull and I have to stop because it’s so gross. Really fucking gross. Chucky Manson gross.
Fuck this!
I put the lotion back and wash my hands and change into a pair of shorts and run outside and do a hundred crunches and fifty push-ups, and then I start doing laps. Somewhere after seventy, I lose count, and when I can barely lift my arms above the water, I drag myself out and lie down on the gray cement with my eyes closed.
I listen to the world and I don’t hear anything. No birds chirping. No wind. Nothing like that.
I open my eyes.
My body is dry from the heat.
The sun is dropping fast.
I feel much better and go inside the house, and see my sister. She’s sitting at the dining room table, her head between her hands.
What’s wrong, Vanessa?
I must scare her because she jumps. “Huh?” she goes.
My sister looks sick. She looks thinner than she did a week ago and has these intense, dark colored patches under her eyes and brownish scratches on her neck.
Are you okay, Vanessa?
She grins. “I’m fine, dude. I’ve just had a rough couple of nights.”
Maybe you should lay off the partying for awhile.
“Maybe you should stay the fuck out of my life, man.”
I’m just saying, is all.
“Well don’t,” my sister snaps. She jumps to her feet and blows past me, outside, then pulls her cell phone from her jeans and lights a cigarette.
I could try to do something but I don’t even know what to do with myself. I go upstairs. Take a long shower. And listen to every live Modest Mouse CD they ever put out, listening until Laura comes over.
She lies with me in my room and I tell her about visiting Kyle and she listens to everything without saying a word. And when I’m through, she undresses for me and tells me everything will be all right, and then we make love, but even though it feels awesome to be back with her, to have her next to me silhouetted by the stars, there is still a certain emptiness here, and something still feels a little bit off.
28.
MY FATHER CALLS ME AT the house while I’m watching this old videotape full of Guns N’ Roses live footage and music videos that I stole from my coke dealer in Arizona. He tells me to meet him for lunch at the Golden Buddha, this Chinese restaurant not far from Harper’s Square.
Fine.
“Be there.”
I will.
“You better.”
I will.
A half hour later I’m driving to the restaurant blasting the Coachwhips album Bangers vs. Fuckers.
Circling endlessly around one downtown block after another, I can’t find a single goddamn parking spot. I end up flipping a nut in front of some tour bus crammed with old people and park in the garage I passed two blocks ago.
Five minutes later, I’m being seated across from my father, who is wearing a light blue buttoned Versace top with a white collar and white wrist cuffs, and a pair of dark blue Versace slacks.
I sit down and watch my father look at his watch instead of me. “You’re twenty minutes late,” he says.
That’s how long it took me to find parking.
He turns his eyes at me. “Why didn’t you park at the office and walk down?”
I don’t know.
“It would’ve saved us both some time.”
I didn’t think about it.
“Obviously,” my father rips, picking up his glass of scotch. He takes a huge swig from it. “Do you even think about what you say anymore before you say it?”
Sometimes I do, Dad.
I pick up the menu sitting in front of me, and our waitress, a very pretty Asian girl who looks about my age, comes over and asks me if I want anything to drink.
I’ll have a Budweiser.
My father shakes the ice around his otherwise empty glass. “I’ll have another scotch.”
The waitress smiles and tells us she’ll be back and I set the menu down after deciding on the sweet-and-sour chicken.
My father loosens his tie. “I must say, Travis, you are looking better,” he tells me.
How’s that?
“Well, you’re not nearly as pale as you were when you first came back. Your face looks healthier, and it looks like you’ve put on some good weight.”
Pause.
My father saying these things makes me very uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the fact that I never knew he was paying that much attention to me, or maybe it’s the fact that he is paying that much attention to me. Either way, I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know what to say. So I say nothing.
He grabs his empty glass again and twists his body in the direction the waitress walked and I slide a pack of Parliament Lights from the front pocket of my faded Levi’s and light one up.