The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  “Ugh,” said Gloria. Nothing else. Just “ugh,” but Ronnie got the message.

  “Okay, okay. As the facts stand, my parents came and took me home, end of it. I resumed my old life, Malt-O-Meal and Fruit of the Loom, model glue, cut grass. Feel of soft flannel and coarse denim, crackly leaf piles and thumbed comics. Our dog Ansich and our cat Fürsich. Everything was normal again, except that I suffered from occasional headaches. And when I twiddled the knob of my shortwave radio, tuning in to late-night transmissions under the blankets, the Tongan news hour or Sumatran music, I closed my eyes and rode the equator, like I was living my own lost life.

  “Then, a few years ago, I was installing an artwork at Helen Hellenberger’s and this elderly woman walks into the gallery. She puts her old hands on either side of my face. ‘Julian, Julian, it’s you!’ she cries. ‘I’ve found you after all these years!’ Apparently, during our time on the boat, they named me after their dead son.”

  “Heavy,” Gloria said.

  “Or I think he was just dead to them, disowned or something, maybe for being gay. I can’t quite remember. We went to a restaurant together and over lunch she filled me in on the details of our brief life at sea. I had forgotten a great deal of it, in the interest of reconnecting with my family. She actually had a photo of me in her billfold. I looked like myself, but bronzed and barefoot, in ragged shorts. Also, this was the weirdest thing: I was wearing a sturdy-looking four-point leather harness over my chest.”

  Saul Oppler said, “This is like Robert Louis Stevenson meets Tom of Finland. I never would have guessed, Ronnie.”

  Ronnie either pretended not to hear or wasn’t interested in responding.

  “I asked about the harness,” he said, “and she claimed it was a safety precaution, in case I fell overboard. A memory, the clammy feel of wet leather on my bare skin, came back to me, but I didn’t know if she was telling me the truth. In the photo, she and the commodore weren’t wearing harnesses. ‘You were a minor,’ she said in accounting for this, ‘we were responsible for you.’ There are a lot of unanswered questions. I close my eyes and see either electric blue water and wind-flapped sails, feel a sense of sunny goodness, or I see something else, nights spent with the commodore and his wife, lessons that continued into something I can’t revisit. But I could be making that part up.”

  “That part?” Stanley asked. “And not the whole goddamn thing?”

  “They still send me a Christmas greeting every year, those cards that are on color photo stock, with a sprig of holly printed on the white trim of the photo paper. It’s strange. They never get any older in the pictures. I think it’s actually the same picture they’re sending every Christmas, but reprinted with the updated year.”

  “How bizarre,” Gloria said. “That’s so odd they would do that. Send the very same Christmas photo every year.”

  “You think that’s bizarre?” Stanley said. “What about the fact that Ronnie was in bed with two naked people, for Christ’s sake, yachting around the world as their semiadopted son?”

  “But that sounds exactly like something Ronnie would do,” Gloria said, and she got up to begin clearing dinner plates.

  I needed to talk to him. That was how I felt as we ate dessert and the subject shifted, Didier poking his smoked-down cigarette into the center of an uneaten chocolate truffle and listening intently to Stanley, who was saying something about the old Indian in fringed deerskin who canoes past offshore oil rigs in that public service announcement on television, which ends with the Indian’s single shed tear when garbage is dumped at his feet from a car window.

  “Iron Eyes Cody,” Ronnie said. “Actually Sicilian, but it’s a good ad, this uncaring world of garbage flingers. And their garbage is not even in a bag. It’s actual garbage, crumpled debris that fuck-you’s to a stop at the old chief’s feet. The message is clear.”

  “What is the message?” Stanley asked.

  “The litterbug is responsible for the genocide of the American Indian.”

  * * *

  Ronnie was the last to leave that night. I walked him out, said I needed to make sure I’d locked the Moto Valera.

  “I plan to work for a bit, but do you want to come over?” he asked. “Keep me company, as they say?”

  On the walls of his studio were cut-out images and articles from a magazine called Boy’s Life, all about sailing and what to do if you capsize.

  Don’t abandon your boat! It may float

  long enough for someone to rescue you.

  An empty bucket can work as a flotation device.

  Take off your pants and blow air into them.

  Tie off the waist and ankles.

  On the far wall was a sheet of butcher paper with a long list of phrases. They were titles, Ronnie said.

  “For what?”

  “My autobiography,” he said.

  “Why do you invent?” I asked, scanning the list of titles. “Invent, and tell lies?”

  “They aren’t lies,” Ronnie said. “They’re a form of discretion.”

  He was organizing his worktable, putting things into piles.

  “Ronnie,” I said, “what were you trying to tell me tonight?”

  “I wasn’t trying to tell you anything. It was just a story. To entertain those moneyed rubes Erwin brought to dinner.”

  “The woman toweling her hair. She . . . it could have been me and you know it. Tell me the truth.”

  “It could have been you, yeah. And then what? You think you want to be with me? Act on some desire you felt long ago, that we both felt?”

  I bit my lip.

  “Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”

  My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.

  “You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained? Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. It wasn’t just Giddle, either, who, well, see Giddle is like a piece of furniture, necessary but ultimately insignificant, something to lie down on occasionally. And it wasn’t merely Gloria, who has been Sandro’s leftovers for at least a decade, picked up and discarded when he wants. In fact, gee. Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that—”

  “Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

  “To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

  17. MATCH MY MOOD: THE LIFE OF RONNIE FONTAINE

  Table for Two for One: An Autobiography

  The Other Side of Tender: A Life

  Married but Looking: My Story

  Manhandled: An Autobiography

  Who Ate All the Pussy? One Man’s Journey

  Friendly Fire: My Trials and Triumphs

  Potato in a Ski Mask: The True Untold Story

  They Took the Liquor but Left the Girl: My Life

  Partial View, Obstructed: A Memoir

  Third Place (Victory Is a Seven-Letter Word)

  Hamburger in Paradise: My Adventures

  Bars and Stripes: Doing Time

  Green Onions: Getting Out Alive

  Can a Brother Get a Table Dance? My Life, Uncensored

  Still in Love: A Confession

  Patent Pending: My Becoming

  Too Rich to Be Bothered (The Life of Sandro Valera, as Told to Ronnie Fontaine)

  Suicide by C
op: The Path Not Taken

  Suds and Duds: Clocking Time with Beer and Laundry

  How to Pray and Get Results: The Diaries of Ronnie Fontaine

  I Lived (He Died)

  You’re Soaking in It: My Secrets

  18. BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR

  I was alone again, like when I first arrived in New York, but it was a different alone. Things had happened. I’d walked under the plane trees with Sandro in the gardens of the Villa Valera in Bellagio. I’d tried to chew inedible bread under a fresco of drowning popes. I knew what it felt like to be teargassed. I’d been drawn in by three different men, Ronnie, Sandro, Gianni, and one woman, Giddle, and it would seem that I knew nothing about any of them. I owned a motorcycle. I rode it all over town. It wasn’t just transportation, it was an experience. I was a girl on a motorcycle. And I finally discovered what was behind the green door.

  * * *

  One overcast July evening when the heat and humidity became unbearable in my top-floor walk-up on Kenmare, I filled my tank at the Gulf station on Lafayette under a low and heavy sky and went north, not looking in the windows of the Trust E Coffee Shop, a place I now avoided. I didn’t hate Giddle for sleeping with Sandro. It was one more performance, a performance of betrayal. You couldn’t hate someone who saw the world so differently. And I knew she must suffer. I had never encountered anyone so alone as Giddle. Really alone, no audience to what she was doing, since it was so much like life, and no real friends, since they were merely an audience to her performance.

  On Twenty-Third Street, traveling west, big humid gusts blew against the bike. Lightning flashed, the city sky clicking from off to on to off. Pedestrians scattered as the thunder cracked. I went north, up Sixth Avenue, and at each light wondered if I should turn south, go home, and avoid the downpour. I kept going north.

  At Forty-Second Street, I headed west toward the orange colors of Times Square, so bright against the blue-gray of storm clouds. There was another flash, a distant rumble. Drops began to fall.

  I pulled the Moto Valera up on the curb, thinking I’d find someplace to wait it out. I rolled the bike onto its centerstand, took out the ignition key, and there I was, under the face of the soap-flakes model.

  Behind the Green Door

  I looked at her and at the old ticket vendor, the showtimes. The next viewing was in twenty minutes. I traded two dollars for a stub.

  No one buys popcorn for a porn film. They didn’t sell it. I passed through the lobby curtains into what looked like a regular movie theater, red vinyl seats, slightly sloped floor, a stained screen, smaller than I expected. Sparse audience, all male, each with a safety buffer of empty seats around him. A few glared at me, rustled bags, which lone people were for some reason required to do in movie theaters, to rustle paper bags no matter what genre of film, Chinese opera or Mature Audience Only.

  I sat on the aisle in the last row, close to the exit.

  * * *

  In the beginning, a truck, a truck stop diner. A woman who could have been Giddle, gray uniform with crisscross-backed apron. But unlike Giddle, who was, in essence, a crypto-bohemian pouring coffee, this woman was just a dour-faced waitress, not ironic. This woman, I thought, was what Giddle impersonated. It somehow did not occur to me that the waitress in the film was even more of an actress than Giddle was. She was acting. In a movie.

  The daytime television voices of porn actors.

  A man in resort wear, white shoes and yellow socks, saying, Sour cream, borscht, herring, chicken, and bananas. Gimme a break. Sour cream, borscht, chicken—

  Cut to the soap-flakes model driving a Porsche 356 cabriolet up winding mountain roads. Not with a dubious clandestine, a Gianni. On her own. In a ski hat, maxing the gears on hairpin turns. Smiling, private, solitary, in her cutely boyish wool hat, red like the car.

  These things were behind the green door:

  Rules and codes.

  Crotchless white stretch-Lycra tuxedos. Somehow not funny, not meant to be.

  Fat people in masquerade ball masks. The people in masks seemed to believe they were hidden, like a baby who hides its face. “When baby Kotch covered his own eyes,” Nadine had told me, “little thing thought he’d disappeared to everybody else. Where’s Kotch?” The fat people up on the movie screen acted hidden, leaned back in their chairs with the unselfconscious posture of watchers, their hands unzipping their own zippers and pulling up their own skirts, shifting in their chairs for maximum access to self. Efficient hand flicks.

  What the masked masturbators behind the green door watched:

  Live sex, the soap-flakes model and a man in tribal makeup. She and the man both seemed deep in the moment but also hyperalert to how they looked deep in the moment. There was something stoic about them, a shared feeling between them that sex was miraculous, that it was a strange and incredible thing people did to each other, that it never lost this strangeness, its thrill. They had that reverence, she and the man in tribal makeup. It remained, even as the sex became pure repetition, gliding and hardness and softness and pushing, their faces up close, his beads swinging, the masked voyeurs who surrounded them, the small and obscene movements of their hands, local movements, and we, the Times Square voyeurs, in the theater, and who knew what the men seated sparsely around me were up to, their own local movements, and then the screen went dark.

  Paper bags rustling. Someone saying, Hey. Hey.

  A few minutes later, the film started up again, the sound warbling to life, and then almost immediately it shut off once more. No image, just the projector’s insect rattle.

  An usher’s flashlight bounced down the aisle, his voice next to me, intimate in the dark, echoless against the carpeted wall.

  “Movie’s over. Save your ticket. We’re having a power short. Exit slow and calm.”

  I felt my way up the sloped aisle, moving through the curtain into what I expected would be light, but it was only more darkness. The men who’d parked themselves far from one another in the theater were all crowded together, finding their way to the exit. Emergencies bring people together. The porn theater was not a place for that. The men dispersed like rats, fleeing through the theater doors into the dark.

  No lights shone or jumped in Times Square. There was no skyline of gridded, glowing windows, no blazing billboards, no silken glide of LED.

  A half-full moon, egg-shaped, glowed up above, polished and white, the dull white plastic of dark theater marquees visible in its light.

  People flooded the sidewalk. It was dense with the heat of them, clustered in large groups but speaking in hushed voices.

  Taxis and trucks moved slowly and did not use their horns. Not a single car honked. Traffic edged along in caution and doubt. Horns were about the opposite, righteousness behind the wheel.

  The vehicles passing through Times Square were the only light sources, except for the prostitutes who had flashlights, which they swung around, calling from doorways, It’s good in the dark.

  It’s everywhere, someone said. Cigarette cherry zigzagging as he spoke.

  Lightning knocked it out.

  The murmur of a transistor. Wait, I’m tuning it in.

  Shit. I thought the Russians nuked.

  I wove through the crowd, crossing the sidewalk to my motorcycle. A woman brushed by. I felt but didn’t see her, a body moving past, and when I looked again I saw only white short shorts. A black woman whose body melted into the darkness, her short shorts hip-height and bodyless, the leg openings stretched wide like rigatoni.

  I could have stood there watching and deciding for hours. There was no city actively guiding me, the shops and walking masses and traffic lights giving their deep signals of what to do, where to go, who and what to see, what to buy, how to feel, what to think. All flow and force as a city had been suspended. People on the sidewalk talked in quieted tones as if darkness called for a new level of discretion. Some of it talk of the moment, the blackout, but most of it just life.

  She’s already committed herself. />
  The thing I learned was I’m my own worst enemy.

  Well, I tried writing her a letter.

  I started the bike, flipped on the headlight, stupidly amazed for a moment that it worked, as if all units of power were directly connected to the city’s grid.

  I popped from the curb and joined the shy traffic inching south on Seventh. We were like those vehicles that roll along the floor of the ocean, marking out volume with their headlights against a dark void. Everyone drove haltingly and slow. An eerie echo of sirens, louder the farther south I went.

  At Union Square, women were pulling shopping carts out of Mays, multiple carts tied together and crammed with merchandise, their metal wheels making the clattering bright sound of poured money as the women dragged them along the street.

  Merry Christmas, motherfuckers! a man shouted. Then he shouted it again.

  Merry Christmas, motherfuckers!

  Satin sheets, one woman called to another. Always wanted them.

  Satin sheets, a fantasy cooked up for the poor. Rich people slept on cotton, dried in the sun, ironed and fresh like at the Valera villa.