Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

by Bob Smith

  “Your world sounds kind of exciting and depressing,” Taylor said.

  “It will be,” I admitted. “But that’s the other big change. In twenty years everyone will be on antidepressants. America’s about to become a pharmacological wonderland where there’s a pill for every mood.”

  Ravi came over and rested his head on my knee. I reached down to pet him.

  “It’s strange,” I said. “Most people will claim their pills work and that they’re individually happier, but no one will claim that humanity is collectively happier.”

  “Am I on ’em?” Taylor asked.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Do they help?”

  “Yeah, they do.” He seemed relieved. Like just about everyone I knew, Taylor was prone to depression. They say depression runs in families, making it sound as if some folks’ DNA is tied in a hangman’s noose. The women in my family suffered from depression, as did Taylor’s older brother. From anecdotal evidence, it sounds like depression has always been part of humanity’s genetic heritage; we all have two eyes, two legs, and two moods: dissatisfied and unhappy.

  “Am I on them?” Junior asked.

  “No. The depression gene seems to have skipped us.”

  “It’s ironic that science is proving one of mankind’s oldest superstitions,” said Taylor. “Some people are born damned.”

  “Can you guys be ready to leave this afternoon?” I asked. I had to change the subject, as talking about depression seemed to be engendering it.

  Junior and Taylor seemed surprisingly fine with leaving for Buffalo that day. Taylor could get a refund on his plane ticket to Albuquerque, and admitted his mother would believe him if he told her a prestigious assistantship spot had opened up in Los Alamos at the last minute. I told him to go home and pack, emphasizing that he shouldn’t tell either of his parents the truth of his whereabouts for the next two weeks. We arranged for Taylor to meet us at Sylvia’s gallery at four o’clock, since I still had to go into Manhattan to buy a car. I’d never paid cash for a car before and wanted to give myself plenty of time in case there was a problem. However, I assumed the sale would go smoothly, as there had to be plenty of shady types in the city who went shopping with a suitcase of C-notes.

  After Taylor went home to pack, Junior called Carol to ask if he could visit her with a friend.

  “He’s a comic book dealer,” I overheard. “No, not that kind of friend. Yes, he’s one of the gays.” I forgot that Carol and I always referred to “the gays” after our mother once used the term. “He asked me to accompany him on a cross-country buying trip. It’s good experience and won’t cost me anything. Yeah, he’s paying for everything.” Money was a good selling point with Carol. She didn’t like the idea of spending yours when someone else could and should pay. “I’ll finally get to see your house.” They talked for a few more minutes about when she should expect us, then said their good-byes and hung up.

  I started washing the dishes and Junior dried.

  “Why don’t we get a convertible?” he asked.

  “I don’t want the sun beating down on me.”

  “We’ll be out west. It would be fun to drive with the top down.”

  I held out my arm. “This is why.” I ordered him to hold out his arm for comparison. “Do you see those spots? Do you see those fine wrinkles? Notice how my skin’s slightly crepier compared to yours? It’s called sun damage.”

  “I’ll wear sun block.”

  I remembered something I wasn’t sure I remembered correctly, one of those memories that looks real but could be a mirage.

  “I think I read something about how sun blocks don’t actually work now.”

  “You think you read? You’re starting to sound like a bad psychic; if you’re going to predict the future, don’t start your sentences with ‘I think.’ You lose all credibility.”

  I had to restrain myself from telling him about my skin cancer. “I’m sorry if I don’t have instant recall of everything I’ve ever read. But I do remember reading something about sun blocks. We’re not buying a convertible.”

  Junior looked grudgingly accepting of my intransigence.

  “So . . . no convertible?”

  “No.”

  Junior shrugged off his disappointment and suggested we buy an environmentally conscious Honda Civic. “It burns less fuel and will help stop global warming.” I was taken aback that he was aware of climate change. I recalled being concerned about the disappearing ozone layer, but couldn’t recall or perhaps didn’t want to remember being concerned about global warming. “How do you know about that?”

  “There was a story about it in the Times last year.”

  Had there really been over twenty years of inaction? It angered me that global warming had been acknowledged as a front-page threat to our planet in 1985 and yet our country had done absolutely nothing to stop it. It made me disgusted with myself and everyone else.

  “What’s wrong?” Junior asked.

  “I’d forgotten how long we’ve been talking about global warming.”

  “Well, they must be trying to stop it in your time.”

  “No. Our president doesn’t believe in science. None of the Republicans do. And the Democrats have been afraid to do anything. They didn’t want to stop people from driving their beloved gas-guzzling SUVs.”

  “No one’s doing anything?”

  I shook my head and felt ashamed. “Not really. SUV should stand for Selfish Uncaring Vehicle.”

  “What about that guy from Tennessee?” Junior asked. “He held congressional hearings about climate change.”

  “Gore?”

  “Yeah.”

  I explained that for the next two decades Gore would be the only political leader to talk about global warming and would often be ridiculed for it.

  “Gore ran for president in 2000 against Bush and won the popular vote, but Bush stole the election.”

  Junior stared blankly, and I questioned whether I could explain the Florida recount accurately.

  “The election ended up in the Florida Supreme Court, which voted for a recount. Then Bush took the case to the Federal Supreme Court and they voted against a recount. I still think Gore might have won had they gone forward, but at this point it’s a case for conspiracy theorists.”

  “Dad must have loved that.”

  Our father loved a good conspiracy theory, but he was dead by 2000. I stammered for a second. “Oh, yeah. He does.” Then I added, “We shouldn’t talk any more politics.” I didn’t want him to know the entire history of the United States for the next twenty years. I was afraid that he would become bitterly cynical.

  “I don’t get it,” Junior said. “I thought our country would become more progressive. There’s been a backlash against Reagan’s anti-environmental policies. I joined the Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society, and so have thousands of other people. The environment shouldn’t be partisan; we all live on the same planet.”

  “Not really. We live on Gaia while the Republicans live on Liar.”

  Junior’s eyes became piercing. “You’re still a member, I hope.”

  I remained silent as I tried to think of a valid reason as to why I’d let my memberships lapse. It would’ve been easier to present him with a flapping ivory-billed woodpecker. Sloth and intermittent spasms of frugalit weren’t an acceptable excuse for my apathy. Junior’s face turned bright red.

  “Jesus Christ, in your time is everyone in America a fucking moron just jerking off to porn on his computer?”

  “Yes.”

  It was a relief to admit it.

  7

  LATER THAT DAY, around four o’clock, I drove our brand-new red LCamaro onto the Westside Highway. Junior told us how Sylvia had revealed that her father had committed suicide. She had urged Junior to do everything he could to help his sister. Sylvia reassured him that she knew he wasn’t quitting, but taking a leave of absence, and even insisted on paying him for the entire week.

  “Well, I’m
not surprised,” I said. “I remember her fondly.”

  “You remember her?”

  I could sense Junior’s body going rigid in the passenger seat.

  “You make it sound like she’s dead.”

  “I didn’t say that.” He didn’t need to know that Sylvia died of an aneurysm in the late ’90s.

  “You don’t have to. I can hear it in your voice.”

  A Bronski Beat tape was playing. I’d tried to buy a Camaro with a CD player, but the dealer only had one Camaro, with a tape player, in stock. It turned out to be fine. Junior still owned a lot of tapes. He had brought along a stack for the trip, music from the ’80s, reminding me that pop songs are my most efficient means of emotional recall.Whenever the first chords of a cherished song such as “Smalltown Boy” started, it guaranteed three minutes of nostalgia that lived in a perpetual now.

  “Are Mom and Dad still alive?”

  “Yes!”

  “You’re lying. I know it.”

  Junior switched tapes, appropriately enough to Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round.” That song roused a toe-tapping, head-bobbing Pavlovian response, memories of me dancing on Sunday nights at the Palladium on 14th Street. I was glad Junior couldn’t read my mind, because while I was engaged in a serious conversation with him, in my head I was carefree.

  “Is it Dad? The men in our family always die first.”

  “No! It’s no one.”

  “You’re a walking obituary page. I don’t want or need to know about everyone who’s died.”

  “Then stop asking,” I said. He was right. I needed to be more careful. Over the course of a normal life, deaths are often random and appear unannounced. Junior didn’t deserve to have a lifetime of headstones dumped into his lap.

  In the rearview mirror I could see Taylor playing with Ravi. I was glad we brought Ravi with us; otherwise, we would be driving a Honda Civic. Once I mentioned that Ravi would make a napping target in the backseat for Cheney’s bullets, and that a Camaro had more horsepower than a Civic, Junior dropped his concern for the environment as quickly as a redneck would chuck an empty out the window of his pickup. It made me feel guilty manipulating Junior, but I also felt a sense of accomplishment, which was pathetic. Not knowing how to press your own buttons would be as lame as not knowing how to masturbate. In order to win Junior’s acceptance of my gas-guzzler, I vowed we would cross the country planting ponderosa pines and living off roadkill. Junior yeah-yeahed me before making me pony up some real cash for the Nature Conservancy and Wilderness Society.

  In afew hours we were upstate and started passing cast-iron blue-and-yellow historic markers along the route that were impossible to read from a moving car. Instead, we had fun imagining what they commemorated. “Former site of the Schumann farm,” said Junior, “the first family in Oswego to think the winter’s too fucking long.”

  “Site of the Battle of Herkimer Falls,” Taylor announced, “where for six months in 1812, Heidi Schiffmacher refused to have conjugal relations with her husband, Otto, until he agreed to move somewhere warmer.”

  “On this site in 1786,” I declared, “the Mohawk Inn was built where travelers and local settlers unsuccessfully tried to drink until they forgot where they lived.”

  Upstate New York proved that you will jinx a place if you name your towns after cities like Carthage and Troy that peaked thousands of years ago and have since fallen into ruins. We passed dozens of ailing small towns with going-out-of-business districts, roadside farm stands selling fresh-picked misery, and greasy spoons where you wanted to tip the waitress a one-way bus ticket. The few prosperous upstate towns seemed to fall into three categories: prison towns where the inmates were bitterly resented because most of them had a chance of parole while all of the town’s inhabitants were lifers; mediocre SUNY college towns where the gym is always larger than the library; and towns that desperately capitalized on a singular claim to fame: Cooperstown had baseball, Corning had glass, Ithaca had Cornell, and Seneca Falls honored its feminist heritage with a Ladies’ Night at the Stumble Inn.

  The sun set around nine, and the boys fell asleep after we stopped for dinner at a diner. The darkness delayed the onset of my mixed emotions about visiting western New York. My family had lived along both sides of the Niagara River since the Revolutionary War, when my loyalist Canadian ancestors had fought in Butler’s Rangers with the British and Iroquois against the Americans. My mixed heritage of being a Canadian Patriot and an American Traitor seemed to reflect how I felt about where I grew up. I truly loved Buffalo and western New York, visited at least once a year, and would always feel they were intrinsic to my identity. I was proud of Buffalo’s lack of pretension, where civic pride in being the birthplace of Buffalo wings exceeded its also being the home of Louis Sullivan’s architectural masterpiece, his Guaranty Building. But whenever I’ve read or heard the expression “You Can’t Go Home Again,” my gut response has always been “Thank God!”

  After passing Rochester and approaching Batavia, where my father worked every day at the state police headquarters, Junior and Taylor woke up.

  “How close are we?” Taylor asked.

  “About an hour,” Junior and I answered simultaneously.

  I thought it was too late to meet my parents for the first time, and suggested we stay at a motel near the Amherst campus of UB. The boys were as tired as I was and agreed. It would have to be all motels this trip, since we were traveling with Ravi. We weren’t sure if the Amherst Stardust Motel took pets and had already decided to sneak him in.

  The front desk clerk told us there was a conference at the university and they had only one room available, with two double beds. I took it since we were exhausted. I didn’t comprehend how awkward our sleeping arrangements would be until we were in our room and I saw the two beds. There were a few flirty glances directed at me from them as we undressed, although I did notice Junior and Taylor focused more on each other once they were down to their briefs. Junior wouldn’t suggest sleeping with Taylor because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings, and I knew from experience that Taylor preferred someone else to take charge of all matters relating to sex. He was one of those works-all-the-time, mentally preoccupied guys who gave the impression that having an orgasm was always intensely satisfying, as it was one less thing to think about.

  “Why don’t you two share a bed,” I suggested. “I’m bigger than either of you.” They appeared to politely consider my suggestion, pretending that the idea had never occurred to them.

  “You should get your own bed,” said Taylor. “You did all the driving.”

  Junior added, “I’ll share with Taylor.”

  I’m not sure if anything happened between them, since I passed out immediately. But I did notice at breakfast the next morning, the two of them were bleary-eyed and groggy. They could barely manage to order poached eggs and dry wheat toast, although when I ordered sausage and French toast, Junior’s eyes momentarily perked up with disapproval. I’d forgotten that I didn’t become a morning person until my early thirties. Accordingly, I began to think about the age difference between us.

  “Did you tell Mom about Taylor and me?” I asked after the waitress refilled our coffees.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know Mom. She’ll assume we’re boyfriends.”

  My mother then wasn’t the mother who would later prefer to celebrate Christmas Eve at my house with twelve gay men rather than spend it with my straight brothers and their families. “They’re boring!” she claimed. When I first came out, my mother temporarily adopted a strategy of opposing my homosexuality by using the simple method of deciding it was not homophobic to dislike all homosexuals if you found specific things to dislike about each one of them. After meeting one of my boyfriends, she’d comment with a semblance of geniality, “Does he do anything else besides lifeguarding?” or “His shirts are too tight.” She tempted me to respond, “Well, I like my boyfriends’ bodies to be as thinly veiled as your con
tempt.” Admittedly, I dated some truly dumb hunks in my early twenties, but I had no doubt that if I’d introduced my mother to someone homely but sweet, she would have complained that I could do better.

  “I think she’ll like me,” I said, concerned that my own mother wouldn’t like me. My fear exposed the unspoken shame of all families: if you didn’t know the people you were related to, would you befriend them? In the days when families hunted and gathered, this wouldn’t be a question worth pondering, but once butchering a mammoth stopped being a household chore, we began to suspect families are chain gangs held together by manacles of DNA.

  “She’ll think you’re some strange old gay guy,” Junior said. “We’ll remind her of Gary and Roxanne.”

  Gary and Roxanne were a married couple who moved in across the street from my parents. He was twenty years older than his wife, and the difference in their ages kept my mother’s neck firm and flexible from all her disapproving head-shaking every time their names came up.

  Junior suddenly blurted out, “What if she figures out you’re me?”

  “She didn’t figure out you were gay. How’s she going to figure out I’m her son from twenty years in the future? Time travel isn’t something she thinks about. She hates science fiction.”

  Junior smiled. “That’s true. She calls every science fiction show Spook Alley.”

  My mother had always let me watch whatever science fiction television series I was currently infatuated with, but she was too pragmatic to enjoy fantasy; if she gazed into Alice’s Looking-Glass, she’d notice streaks and immediately wonder if she’d get stuck cleaning it.

  “Well, Dad won’t have a problem with me,” I said.

  “Even if he did, he wouldn’t say anything.”

  One of the most comforting things about our father was that he never pried into his own feelings, and, out of a sense of fairness, he extended the same courtesy to everyone else.

  “Do you want to just drop me off ?” Junior asked.

  “What am I? A pariah?”

  “More like a grandpa-riah,” we both said simultaneously. It was astonishing to see that we did occasionally think exactly alike and also gratifying to see that my mind still worked as quickly as Junior’s did.