by Jon Methven
This is a Genuine Barnacle Book
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2018 by Jon Methven
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address:
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,
Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Warnock
epub isbn: 9781947856851
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Methven, Jon, author.
Title: Therapy mammals / Jon Methven.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Genuine Barnacle Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2018.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781945572999
Subjects: LCSH Rich people—Fiction. | Private schools—Fiction. | Businesspeople—Fiction. | Parenthood—Fiction. | Animals—Therapeutic use—Fiction. | Manhattan (New York, NY)—Fiction. | Black humor (Literature.) | Humorous fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Humorous | FICTION / Satire
Classification: LCC PS3613.E885 T54 2018 | DDC 813.6—dc23
For Lib
Contents
Part One
Morning Drop-off
Gopa Lobby
Dead Chipmunks And Wine
Tom Pistilini With The Weather
Kidnapping An Emotional Support Animal
How To Build Suburbs
Neighbors Just Other Friendly Tribes
Backyard Lagoon Killing Fields
Giveth Us Our Daily Bread
Tug Doppelganger
Saturday Morning Chores
What Happened To Us
Navigating A Cooperative Marriage
Lieutenant Misch
Another Blackout
Polyethylene Living With Fiberglass Poles
Mornings Are For Fistfights
Economic Benefit Of Dead Kids
Breakfast With Tungsten
Sailors Lost To The Seas
Nine Out Of Ten Demographics Are Not Your Demographic
Here Comes The Fan Club
Part Two
A Walk Down Murder Lane
How To Create A Standcake
Some Kind Of Record
Cut One of Us Do We Not All Bleed?
Transgenerational Therapy With Gus
Fucking Annihilate the Pawns
Something Good This Way Comes
A Little Rain Must Fall
Little Tugger
Cold Blood Or Just Cold?
Adjusting To Our Reckoning
Forces Of Failure
Prosthetic Spoils
We Shall Know It By Its Meaning
Drinks With Parents
Don’t Call It A Comeback
Jammy With An Earthy Finish
Imperialists Of Youth And Idealism
Clint Eastwood’s Latest Rampage
Sex Lives Of Dead People
Dark Tourism
Seventy Percent Chance of Vengeance
Marriage Is A Strange Institution
Part Three
Memorials For Drug Dealers Are Like Normal Memorials
Adultery Talk, With Ray McClutchen
Juice Of Broken Dreams Makes Sad Wine
Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune
Cells Must Fuse To Grow
Break A Leg
Storms We Cannot Forecast
Ray And I On Wives
The Beatings We Deserve
Existential Weather
Video Footage The New Achilles’ Heel
Bouts Of Insomnia
Operation Touristcide
My Unborn Are Taken Hostage
Economic Benefits Of Sex Tapes
Hypocrites Anonymous
Thundersnow
Messy Commute
Pistilini-Dalton Drug Cartel
Feline Bedrest
Tragedy Abounds
Stealing Back My Unborn Children
Deliveries At The Hendersons
Red Herring
Gus Murders Millicent
If Our Peace Was Everlasting
And Many More
Do Terrorists Kiss Their Families Goodbye?
Here Come the Worthy
Cum Laude
Acknowledgments
Part
One
Morning Drop-off
“Teachable moments, Toby,” I say. “The fundamental component of progress.”
The things we do for our children. This is my predicament as I come out of the darkness to find my hands wrapped around Toby Dalton’s warm neck. The notion is residue from an earlier blog post on the Gopa website on the topic of sacrifice and commitment, my knuckled fingers a demonstration that our words as parents translate into actionable guardianship. Everyone likes Toby. He is popular, handsome. Like much of the student body, he comes from wealth, which gives him an optimistic sheen, a glorious yelp that privilege has its merits, nice hair, immaculate teeth, a dapper glow. His neck is bronzed and soft, a teenager who understands the benefits of luxury moisturizers and can afford them. I feel the restorative properties from his skin surge through my fingers as I shove his head against the cement wall. Captain of the Gopa lacrosse team in his junior year, Toby is going places.
The restroom is located toward the rear of the school’s lobby. On the far side of the door I listen for the morning arrival, the familiar prattle of students and parents and nannies and the security guards hired to prevent this exact lawsuit, the viscera of the Gifted and Purposed Academy, Gopa for short. According to the website, we are “a premier private school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side devoted to the growth and accomplishment of its student body.” Toby would mark the building’s first homicide.
A Wednesday morning in April. I do not remember following him into the bathroom. I am just coming to terms with my strategy. Perhaps a discussion about the unbecoming pictures of my daughter I am told he possesses. An understanding of whether they exist and, if so, what is it they show of Iliza, and how such images might impact all of our futures. An apology, a handshake. Instead Toby stares me down too emphatically, tips his chiseled chin at an unbecoming angle, What can you do about it, old man?
I have the little shit pinned against the paper towel dispenser, his jaw pressed hurriedly upward as the motion sensor incorrectly perceives dampness and litters the floor with napkin, a subtle iniquity to my position on the Gopa Parents Think Recycle committee. A light flickers. Snot drips, balances on my lip, and pirouettes to the tile. My body is freezing, unable to control the shakes, my hands blue with struggle. Toby underestimates my pear physique, my suit and tie civility, thinking that I value my standing in the Gopa community, my career as a meteorologist. He has allowed me to strangle him with a detached coolness, that not even confused murder can deter his divinity. But he has come to terms with the rage a father feels for his children, wholly immersed in defending them against a creeping wickedness beset on the world. I am incoherent as I squeeze, a bystander to my misanthropic diligence. Blackouts, a doctor calls them in my personal infomercial, side effect of my medication along with dry mouth, dizziness, forgetfulness, and erections. The medicine mixes with the adrenaline and my inner voices causing something to break inside, pipes bursting and scattering liquids of me that
I secretly loath: docility, understanding, nonpartisan approval. Let it drip.
He swings meekly at my shoulders, his sneakers grasping for tile, his voice a whisper over the squeaking rubber. “Pisser, stop.”
“What is it, Toby?” My pocket buzzes. I cannot take the call.
“Listen to me.” His voice is desperate breath.
“You see, Toby, you have come to a point of incalculable danger, what weather nerds call the storm surge.” I shiver out these words, arms shaking. “A man will go some lengths to protect a daughter, abiding by societal rules, of course, principle, logic, the gist of the whole if you follow. But a creature, Toby. A tribe of creatures. Things that reside in the indentations of our bosom. They know not comfortable rules of kinship. They know only starvation and repercussion and survival.”
Enter Doug Whorley, all-league defenseman of the lacrosse team and deus ex machina from the lobby. His morning dump, of all things, will preserve Toby’s life and rescue me from what would be a well-publicized jail sentence. If a grown man is strangling you in a bathroom, Doug is the friend to have. He sees our embrace, the growing hill of paper on the floor, and his fists intrinsically clench. Six foot something, the benefits of steroid use come to mind, he resembles an upright bulldog awaiting a meal. Suddenly he demonstrates his “go team” attitude when he realizes his captain is fading, punching me squarely in the forehead. I fall to the floor, cold and snot and laughter.
About the medication. It has been suggested that failure, in both my marriage and career, is due to a deficiency in playfulness. Not happiness, but rather an innate frolicsome that children demonstrate, an ability to cavort in spite of age and social fatigue and unpaid bills. Because of this I lack qualities that would make me a better husband and weatherman: humor, personality, a firm grasp of the female demographic. I contracted with an independent pharmaceutical representative for trial pills of Luderica intended to tap into my psyche and locate my playful aura. Side effects also include uncontrollable laughter.
My body is silly with the chortling, the slate tile crisp against my heavy face, the dispenser a paper waterfall of recycled efficiency. Toby coughs, wanders the restroom massaging his soft neck.
“Mister Pistilini,” Doug says. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Fuck, Pisser.” Toby spits and clenches, wanders with distance, judging whether he can safely kick me in my head now that Doug is here to protect him. “What are you smiling about?”
In fact, I am not smiling. I am laughing, hard and urgent so that I cannot catch breath or halt considerable drool, my body repressing vomit. When I try to stop laughing it comes in lavish bursts, the dizziness from Doug’s fist, the bruise I feel welting on my forehead. A foreign cell phone lies beneath the sinks, buzzing and spinning and drawing attention. It is not my phone. My phone does not work. I need to order a new model, which I cannot do without my old one because my deft retail provider demands all purchases be made by mobile contraption. I place the contraband item in my pocket. The sound of my retching has carried into the lobby until the bathroom is filled with Gopa dads, younger kids enthralled at the massive pile of paper, a five-year-old leaping into the joy as his guardian senses filth, recycling material, parental engagement.
“Now, David, was that a good choice?”
Someone helps me to my feet. Toby and Doug have fled, leaving me to explain the laughter to the hovering parents. They are smartly dressed for morning drop-off, soldiers of a foreign campaign over a fallen comrade, everyone armed with hand sanitizer and cell phone. It takes a moment to transform from tribe into Tom Pistilini, failing husband, father of two, homeowner, semi-known meteorologist. A face I recognize is beside me, Josey Mateo, an administrative assistant who volunteers with the drama department.
She resets the dispenser. “What’s happened, Mister Pistilini?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Just a dizzy spell.”
“You need a doctor.” I am the victim, not the aggressor. She holds my arms, standing on her toes to peak into my dilated eyes, bony hand on my forehead, her skin littered with pen drawings of animal totems: a stick tortoise on a forearm trampoline, two emaciated pigs wrestling or fucking near a bra strap. “You’re freezing. And sweating.”
“I’m fine, Josey, really.”
“Your face.” She tries to hold my stare. “It’s all scratched. Let me call the nurse.”
“That’s not necessary. A silly misstep is all.”
I should mention that Josey Mateo, twenty-seven, has an unhealthy affinity for the weather, and what I believe is an innocent crush on me. Thirty-one days. That is how long she claims my consecutive streak has grown of successfully predicting the weather for Channel Fourteen, neither Manhattan’s go-to nor relevant source of news and climate condition, a stroke of wily luck that began in the throes of March and now grips Manhattan’s unpredictable April. I am an average weatherman at best, though Josey claims to watch me each morning and plan her wardrobe on my prognostications. She suggests I have the flu, more questions, a water bottle is placed in my hand as she re-rolls the towels. She studies me thoroughly, more questions, and leaves it with a whisper.
“I’m a friend, Mister P. I know something happened with the little fuck.”
Gopa Lobby
I am ushered back into the lobby now swollen with pre-enlightenment vigor. No one acknowledges there was an attempted murder in the bathroom, a falling out between myself and the lacrosse team that will have implications for the remainder of the season. The Gopa Worthy is favored to win New York’s private school league championship and knock off some impressive out-of-district schools from Long Island and New Jersey. Had I murdered the captain and best faceoff man in Gopa history, it would have been a blow to the offense, though possibly a good thing for team unity. Nothing coalesces a republic like tragedy, a fledgling band of athletes engaged in a righteous mission for the fallen.
Everything is normal, the lobby entrance predictably cheery; I am reluctant to believe my morning dispute ever occurred. Perhaps it was another episode brought on by the medication, which our family therapist, Devin Brenner, has cautioned can be dangerous. The lacrosse coach and my business associate, Russ Haverly, is also my dealer. I will have to decide whether to mention my morning when I see him as I know he is fond of Toby and would look unfavorably on my strangling the boy. I search the room for a platoon of lacrosse meatheads or security guards mobilizing toward me, but everything is calm.
Toby is a friend of Iliza, an ex-boyfriend perhaps, although I have been cut out of my daughter’s romantic entanglements. He is arrogant but maybe someone I do not hate the way I thought I did moments earlier. The photograph rumors likely originated with the nannies, known locally as our nanny chain, but they do not always get it right. They once conjured an affair between Howard Willis and Monica Rhimes, a rumor that was untrue until it brought the two families together to discuss it, which initiated the actual affair.
We have been without a nanny since the accident in January, which gives Laura and I a disadvantage when it comes to gossip. All our friends have domestic help. Nannies guard their employers’ children against malicious gossip. They offer up overheard rumors about other families without being prodded. If there was any truth that Toby Dalton possessed photographs of Iliza, we could validate the news much faster if we had an insider on the payroll. As it is, I may have murdered our nanny with a claw-tooth hammer in the backyard, staging it to look as though she tripped and slammed her head into the stone patio before drowning in the Jacuzzi lagoon. The 16-ounce titanium claw-tooth hammer retails for a $189 on VillageShop.com. Our former nanny was stealing from us. It is conceivable she made off with my hammer prior to her accident.
I feel better now that I am among my people—a stinging in my forehead that I could be imagining. I enjoy the morning drop-offs, the coming together of the Gopa community as we bid our children goodbye and greet one another with tender affinity that is
somewhat fake and bearably genuine and maniacally envious. We share similar habits, what might have passed for smoke breaks in another era—hand sanitizers, eye drops, moisturizer, hair gel, sunscreen, bottled water, a series of liquids with which we douse our children so they are disinfected and hydrated following the morning commute. We barely listen to one another, the same conversations, all of us communicating our own agendas and feigning interest in other families’ plights. “Yes history and Bushel nearly took her first step the Hamptons this weekend did you know about Tuesday the kids have homework I hate your son irrationally.”
The line of SUVs and taxies is orderly today. The Gopa flag floats haughtily, drifting in a persistent waft so I am never able to read the Latin wording. We bask in the heavily armed security that covers the front entrance governed by Lieutenant Misch, former NYPD who oversees bygone soldiers and SWAT officers and one Navy SEAL, trained killers lured into the private sector of defending children of wealth while they learn arithmetic and yoga. There is free coffee near the elevators. A dog barks toward the southeast, from where we can expect a mild breeze for much of the morning and into the evening commute.
Our community fosters a fairly intense population of animals—therapy dogs, security dogs, remedy Chihuahuas riding inside handbags not to be confused with miniature dogs that ride in handbags as accessories and not for their healing value. They all hate me. A rough estimate, forty percent of Gopa families own therapy creatures; the rest get their therapy in inorganic form. I represent the human version of fireworks, distractions that spook bestial sensibilities. When I am near an animal they yip and pant and cause their owners anxiety, which is why I stand off to the side and watch the morning activity.
All the kids, even the parents, are on phones catching up on text correspondence and the popular website, Lustfizzle. Iliza and her best friend, Tungsten Sedlock, hover over devices. In her junior year, my daughter is an aspiring actress, starring in the spring production of Our Town. Tungsten, her understudy, sports a bandage on her left hand that I do not recall from a week ago but could be a fashion statement instead of a compression. I wave to Iliza but she ignores me. This morning she is playing the part of cunty teenager who does not know the lengths her father will go to protect her innocence. Gus, my twelve-year-old, chats up a security guard. Foreseeably, he is dressed as an elderly woman, Millicent, fallout from the January death of our Tilly.