“His essential movement is to seek unconsciousness,” Clete said.
Our booth had bad springs, which put our heads close to our eggs, a handy convenience this morning. A scrambled bit of egg escaped my mouth and hit the plate. Its brief contact with my palate had turned it an unnatural red, the color of maraschino cherries.
“Do I look funny?” I asked Clete.
Clete shrugged. “I’ve known you too long to say.”
The food sated something in me deeper than hunger. Three walls of the diner were made of plate glass that needed cleaning, and we spent a long time watching a smeary light shift over the pines and aspen and wide stretches of high grass. The waitress had big eyes and narrow shoulders. Her name tag read “Kale.” She knew Clete and would only talk in his ear, which made me a little paranoid.
“I’d introduce you,” he said, “but she doesn’t like talking to strangers.”
“Is this really the right line of work for her?”
She went from table to table, listening and nodding, pointing to the menu. She’d whisper to one person, who’d speak to the others.
“Her legs are nice,” I said.
“Every man in here is half or more in love with her,” Clete said. He got her to scrape leftover eggs onto our plates.
“This guy’s omelet has a weird spice,” I said.
Clete forked a bite and savored it a moment.
“Cigarette ash,” he said.
We stayed in the diner until the eggs and coffee had worn down my chill. Clete paid the shy waitress, and we hit the pavement again, happy for the heat of the sun. He carried a white paper bag bearing the diner’s logo—a possibly cross-eyed elk. Inside were packets of salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, and nondairy creamer.
Twenty minutes down the road, the peak of a tall black construction crane appeared. We watched it a long time before we got close enough to see the van. At the end of the crane’s long metal wire was a big round magnet, which snapped onto the van’s roof. Tireless and thoroughly defeated, the van rose up into the air. We joined the others—a crowd had gathered—in applause when it was set down on a flatbed truck. This was a terrible loss for us, but it was a great spectacle.
“We can kiss that one good-bye,” Clete said.
“My worldly possession is in there,” I said.
There was nothing to do but get the bag of mushrooms and hike back to Val’s.
This series of events—losing my coat and the drugs and other secrets and luxuries of my life, along with being given a new name by someone mumbling out of a coma, and encountering the not-quite-naked-or-dead girl to whom I gave the shirt off my back—combined in an almost scientific way to make me swear off drugs. I was twenty-nine years old and wanted to change before I hit thirty. Clete and I developed a plan for me as we ambled back, a plan that would work all that summer and beyond. Even after I left the mountain, it stuck. The plan had four parts.
One: I would not get a job. There’s always some guy with a goatee and great weed to turn you on during a break, or some friendly braless girl tired of washing dishes or mowing the graveyard or sweeping up the pencil shavings in Rosa Parks Elementary School who lights a joint or drops a line and offers to share. Work was a haven for drug users and I couldn’t risk it.
Two: I’d use willpower and the help of friends who, even if high themselves, would discourage me from joining them.
Three: The mushrooms, being organic and free, didn’t count.
Four: In order to be realistic and give the plan half a chance of working, I would stay drunk as much as possible.
A few people—including you and the therapist they assigned me when you had the flu—have since pointed out that as many people are done in by booze as by any drug or family of drugs. But Clete and I saw it differently. Being drunk was a momentary lapse into happiness, like drifting off while listening to a song about sex, whereas the drugs I craved were symphonies. They played at that low level just below the timbre of thought, a mattress of sound you could sleep on for days or a lifetime. Liquor relaxes the brain and lets the fool in you rise up, while the drugs I loved kept me still inside myself, permitting me to reside there in something like peace.
That’s a hard thing to give up, and it’s easier if you’re drunk.
We moved in with Val and lived in the dog-sitting house three months. Without rehab or an arrest to keep me in line, I became Keen and did no drugs.
You asked for a happier time. That was it.
Assignment 2: Considering Others
A lot of people lived in the house that summer. It was hard to say who did and who didn’t on any particular day. I had the boy’s room, and almost nightly I had to kick strangers from my bed, which was made to look like a sports car.
Our regular lineup, however, included only a few of us.
Stu: Except for Val, Stu had lived in the house the longest. He had the teenage daughter’s room and a job at the library, which lent out videos as well as books. He stole tapes he thought we might like. (The big-screen television was gone, but we had a portable hooked to the extension cord.) He had a nervous habit of chewing his toenails with his teeth, the indecent fragments littering the carpet like exactly what they were—little scraps of us we no longer needed. When I complained, he claimed I was jealous.
“Of what?” I was genuinely stumped.
“I can put both my feet all the way behind my head,” he said.
I shrugged. “I can wiggle my ears.”
This comment earned his contempt. “You can’t pick up girls wiggling your ears.”
The obvious question occurred to me, but I was shy about asking.
Stu went on, his voice dipping confidentially. “Your ears are not your best feature, Keen. You shouldn’t draw attention to them.”
Lila: She was the girl all the boys wanted to fuck. In any community of a certain size, there is always such a girl. I once worked in a landscaping crew, and we all wanted the foreman’s wife. She wasn’t beautiful or even particularly acceptable, but she was present and we liked the way she carried her tools.
Lila was pretty, but something about her life kept her discouraged and a little sour. She moped from room to room as if looking for her keys or purse, too preoccupied to respond to the typical direct address. Her body was bottle-shaped, but not Coke bottle. More like a flask. Yet every guy there wanted to get her square butt in bed. It might have been her slutty eyelids and the dark eyes they hid—eyes the color of bark but with a luster her attitude seemed to deny. I had a powerful sex drive in those days. My brain, bored without drugs, let my body have full rein, and it demanded Lila.
One day she told me that her first language was German, but she quit speaking it when she started kindergarten. Now she couldn’t remember any of it—a whole language lost inside her. I thought maybe that was what she was looking for when she meandered about the house, the language she’d been born into.
After I’d lived there a month, and only then because she showed up in the green tube top, I realized Lila was the dead girl.
The dogs: Ruff, the golden retriever, was always happy to see you and generally optimistic about life, the way a dog ought to be. Ready, the terrier, reminded me of my third-grade teacher, who had her nose in our desks during recess, looking for something she could use to dim the day. Ready barked at the mailman. He barked at the neighbors. He barked at every single one of us who lived in the house. He barked at the sound of the toilet. A red hummingbird feeder in the backyard sent him into mad barking convulsions. Let in the house, he did laps around the kitchen, sniffing out disorder.
Ruff would wait by the tub when I got out of the shower and gently lick my legs, but Ready would sniff my toes, bark, and occasionally gnaw my Achilles tendon. Many evenings he would latch on to a pant leg and growl while whatever chump who got nabbed—often me—swung his leg back and forth, the little dog careening.
Val: A familiar kind of sweet-hearted addict who couldn’t say no to anybody. She loved heroin because it
let her remain kind. Her junk-sweet heart opened the house to any loser who came along.
Clete summed her up best: “Her dilemma is that she’s alive.”
One day she and I were in her room (the master bedroom, which seemed only fair), running a chisel around a window that wouldn’t open. Without electricity, we relied heavily on breezes. After we got it loose and propped up a ski pole to keep it open, she told me she had learned the secret of masculine behavior.
It sounded like something I ought to know.
Her ex-boyfriend, a Mexican guy from Oklahoma, had told her that some nights he’d say anything to get a woman in bed and other nights he wouldn’t fudge the truth at all. It could be the same woman, and he could be feeling the same desire.
“You’re all bastards and saints,” Val explained. “It’s just a matter of luck which day matters—the one when you’re being good or the one when you’re bad.”
I found out the Okie Mex confessed to this after breaking Val’s nose in an argument over something stupid like who did the laundry last or what kind of vegetables are okay to feed a dog. The confession was his way of apologizing and letting himself off the hook.
When she finished her story, she went to the drawer in the nightstand where she kept her junk. She cooked the stuff in a glass tube over a Bunsen burner. (The boy had a chemistry set.)
“I’d offer you some,” she said, “but Clete says I can’t give you drugs.”
“I don’t shoot up anyway.”
I’d only ever snorted heroin because I had a stubborn and wholly genuine fear of needles. Val listened while tying off with a paisley necktie from the closet, smirking only slightly and trying to hide it. I was touchy about this subject. As a teenager, I’d driven a hundred miles an hour in residential neighborhoods to prove I wasn’t afraid of dying, just of needles.
I helped her slap her arm and hunt down a vein, but I couldn’t watch the needle go in. She still wasn’t convinced. Even when the rush hit her and she fell back on the floral bedspread, the look she gave me had near equal parts of ecstasy and doubt.
I told her about waiting in line at a county clinic to get a vaccination. I was maybe six and watched each kid ahead of me burst out crying. They give shots better now, but back then it was just swab and stab. When it was my turn, I lost it, kicking the doctor in the head and eyeglasses.
“I blacked out. My mother had to tell me what I’d done.”
It had taken awhile to tell the story. Val had sunk into the lowest parts of her reclining body. She had to turn her head to make her lips work.
“It’s not fear,” she said. “Just weakness.”
She meant it in a nice way, trying to defend me and doing such a lousy job of it that she pulled me on top of her and let me screw her.
While we were fucking I thought about how this junkie friend of mine from high school had died shooting pool. He fell onto the table after making the three ball. I think he was dead a couple of shots earlier, but his body kept on eyeing the cue ball and following through. He hit face-first, breaking a tooth, which I found and stuck in my pocket. We took his body to his parents’ house and left it in the yard. I memorized the address, put the tooth in an envelope, and mailed it to them.
That experience let me see how weakness (we’ll call it that for now) can be strength. None of that crowd went to his funeral but me. The family tried to have me arrested. “He was a friend,” I told the cop. I didn’t mention that mainly I wanted to see that tooth, which, sure enough, they’d glued back on. I know that sounds cold, but I couldn’t really see his death as a tragedy. Not for me, anyway. I did almost cry a little, but the sunlight on his coffin had a spunky kind of brilliance, which made me happy to be alive and weak and wearing a suit.
I didn’t tell Val this story while we were screwing, but I may have been distracted because when she couldn’t come and could barely, for that matter, stay awake, she said, “Just go ahead. Don’t wait for me.”
A few minutes later, the ski pole slipped loose and the window slammed down with a bang, and I came so suddenly I didn’t manage to pull all the way out.
“Don’t worry about it,” she told me. “That was really great.”
Clete: Some months before Clete moved to the mountains, he and I went to our ten-year high school reunion and found ourselves at a party in somebody’s crowded house. Twelve framed photos lined the dinner table, one for each of the dead in our class—all from drugs, or driving stoned into the giant saguaro by the post office, or drowning in a bathtub (that was about drugs, too), or falling over face-first onto a pool table. These were people we thought of as friends or at least people who wouldn’t screw us over when we were too high to know better. They were all dead and it was a dull party.
Someone called Clete’s name and then mine. It was a guy who we’d named the Flirge in high school because he was a liar and he’d smoke your pot without ever bringing his own or offering to go in on some. His family had a swimming pool, so we put up with him but no one liked him. One time we were in the pool (on acid but that doesn’t have anything to do with the story) and the Flirge starts in all nonchalant about raping a girl, like it was this thing he’d done and he wasn’t going to lie about it.
Clete gave me a doubtful look, then said, “Where’d this happen?”
“A parking lot,” the Flirge said. The girl had passed out. He leaned her over a hood and did it to her from behind.
“What kind of car was it?” Clete asked.
“Black Mercedes,” the Flirge said.
“That has a hood ornament.” Clete is the kind of person you can’t slip much past. “You wouldn’t bend her over a hood ornament.”
“We were on the side by the driver’s door.”
“Too high,” Clete said. “You’d have to fuck on your tiptoes, which is fatiguing.”
My point is, the Flirge was the kind of guy who lied about whether he had raped a girl, and he didn’t chip in for drugs. You know the type.
He found us in this crammed full room and said, “I’ve been looking for you guys.”
I was thinking, Let’s flee, and giving Clete Let’s flee looks. But Clete was thinking, People can change, and he gave me a look that said, If even the Flirge can shape up…
“I got married last night,” the Flirge said. He wanted us to meet his wife. “Wait right here?”
Sure, we said. The Flirge knifed through the crowd, so excited to introduce us to his wife that I was willing to believe Clete was right. We started enjoying the party more. Clete and I talked to a girl who’d had a thing for me in high school. Her husband had just got a job with NASA, and their firstborn was walking but not talking except for “muh” and “duh” for “Mom” and “Dad,” and she had another bun in the oven right now. All the time, I was recalling how crazy she’d been for me and how that baby could be calling me “duh” and how that could be my bun in her oven, and it seemed like somehow I’d even given up a chance to be an astronaut.
I was straining to figure out why I hadn’t liked her back when, but then I realized she was still talking and I remembered: she had a big mouth.
Was it worth not walking on the moon to avoid this fat mouth for the rest of my life?
Without question.
But it was a sacrifice, too. It seemed like I’d given up some portion of the heavens in order to have integrity and look for true love and avoid endless small talk.
About then the Flirge reappeared. The woman with him wasn’t beautiful, but she had on a sweater that fit in a certain way, short happy hair, and a face you’d always like to see. I could tell she wasn’t a big mouth by the way she smiled at people and walked close to her husband, and I thought, What a weird honeymoon.
I was also thinking the Flirge had made out all right. He’d turned a corner and would never pretend he’d raped a woman again, even if maybe he might bring cheap wine when you invited him to dinner or make waitresses figure separate checks. What’s the big deal about that? In my head, I was commending Clet
e for recognizing this and thinking what a rare friend he was and also how I’d like to screw the Flirge’s bride. I wanted to marry her. You can tell sometimes.
Here’s the unbelievable part: I was happy for the Flirge. I felt a wide-open kind of gratitude that rarely descends on a person. I’ve been that happy maybe three times in my life. It thrilled me that such a loser could turn it around.
He led her right to us, but at the last second he looked away. He bumped into us as if it were an accident. Right then, I knew. He was still the Flirge and about to prove it.
“Hey,” he said. “I want you to meet my wife.” He leaned in close to us, made a quizzical face, and said, “What’s your names again?”
Without even a second to register this, Clete moved his head right past the Flirge to his wife. He said, “You’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life.”
She smiled for less than a second, less time than it takes for the television to come on after the remote is punched—that’s how fast the human brain is—and then her features made tiny complicated twists and small turns. We left them like that.
I could tell you about a thousand other nights like that one, but the point is always the same: Clete is the kind of person who knows what it is to be alive and the knowledge causes him no shame. How many people in your acquaintance can you say that about?
The others: Many other people did stints in the dog-sitting house. A guy we called Skins slept on the couch without a sheet for a month and turned it brown. When he left he stole Stu’s boom box, a weedeater, and two decks of cards. One guy—I don’t remember his name—pretended to be an opera singer and made voicey proclamations about art. Another one—we called him Heller, which might have been his name—tried to prove he could levitate by sitting on the bathroom scales and showing us how his weight diminished the longer he meditated. Clete saw through the act. “His butt is sliding off the feet marks,” he told me, but we didn’t say anything to Heller, who had only that one trick. Another guy who insisted we call him Hawk liked to argue about whether the world was flat. “What?” I said. “It’s a big conspiracy?” He explained: “Put a level on a field and that shows it’s flat. That’s what flat is. Sure, the planet is round, but the earth is flat.” There was a chunky girl I won’t name who went down on every guy in the place during her weeklong stay. Some of us tried to like her, but she had her own agenda.
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards Page 23