by Bill Peters
“Tam,” Sverg says. “Listen, do you know Dale? He’s an old friend of yours.”
You look at Real Dad, and the room’s getting dizzy with him. His lower lip moves. He makes a gun out of his fingers and presses the imaginary barrel into his chinfat.
“He knows you, Tam, knows you real well,” Bop-Shop Carl says. “You guys used to play lacrosse, or kill cockroaches. This guy hung out with you all the time.”
Expression flinches out of Squeezebeagler Tam’s face. “Which one are you?” he says.
You can feel stadiums in Real Dad’s brain collapsing, his eyes getting shinier, like there’s an Oh Shit coming big enough to explode the Bible. But listen to what Real Dad says, only this once, because no way am I ever bringing this up again:
“Listen, guys, Tam, Sverg, Carl, it’s. What I meant was, sometimes, your voice; you just end up saying ‘I,’ and what you mean is, it was your boss, or whoever it may be, in a given situation, and, and, and, but you just start saying ‘I,’ instead of whoever’s actually—and it’s just—and I’m only being honest, here, because at this point what can you even expect to—there’s no point in, you know—you cut out the middleman! I believe: I am a person who believes: that the world should be entertaining, that regardless of, you know, you look at, I knew a guy at Griffiss; he’s doing flyovers in Iraq—and, and, the world, the dreamscape; the alchemy—it, it’s all, just—life! Storytelling!”
Sverg and Bop-Shop Carl look at each other, almost concerned now.
“I’m gonna take off,” Garrett Alfieri says.
“No, wait, no!” I go.
“It was good to see you, though,” Garrett Alfieri says. “Colonel Hellstache? ‘Never change.’ I wrote that in your yearbook, man. You kept your word. We need more of that out there in the big world. Throw-down-closing-time; that’s what it’s all about.”
I shake his hand out of reflex.
If that weren’t enough to morph you to your bed permanently and turn you into a Bed Centaur, here, still, is Real Dad:
“Dale,” Bop-Shop Carl says, standing chest to chest with Real Dad now, pupils narrowing. “How about I ask you something?”
Real Dad pretends to laugh, still friends. “Okay, what’s that.”
“How about, we don’t know you,” Bop-Shop Carl says. “How about, a guy came to see a show last week at a place down the street. Nobody knew him, and he was, like you, following everybody the fuck around. That guy stabbed a friend of ours in the bathroom,” he slashes his leg with his index finger. “Femoral artery. All next morning: mopping up the stall.”
Real Dad raises his palms, padding the air. “Look: on a better day, friend, I swear: You and I would be toasting to live music and friendship.”
“On a better day, we wouldn’t,” Bop-Shop Carl says.
“Dale,” Sverg unwedges his wallet out of his jeans and hands Real Dad a twenty. “Get yourself a cab. Not your night, okay?”
Once, in kindergarten, Real Dad and I were playing Frisbee in our backyard. Several people, wearing bright orange vests, wandered onto our lawn from the woods nearby. I figured out, a few years later, they were hunters. “Get the hell out of here,” I am very sure Real Dad said. I’m hoping for Part II: The Proto-Stachening of that to happen, say, right now.
But the doorman’s already leading me and Real Dad out, and we’re already walking out into the bar crowds on Monroe Avenue. Steam from the late-night sausage cart in front of the bank is extra visible, with a line of dudes wearing those zip-up sweater turtlenecks I could never pull off wearing. The bruise-colored light from the street lamps makes all the closed novelty shops seem foggier or grainier, like when you see dark, synthesizer-y MTV videos from 1983.
“They’re just joking—they’re stressed out,” Real Dad tells me, hands in pockets, looking at the sidewalk. “They’re musicians, journalists—deadlines.”
I shoulder around a group of college women who are carrying their shoes.
“It actually looks bad on the whole club, that we’re leaving first,” Real Dad goes on. “We’re customers. Those guys never pay a dime in there; they do nothing to support the Bug Jar economy. The irony lays claim to them, in actuality.”
We stop at the corner of the side street where Real Dad’s car is parked. His face is knotted up.
“Well what?” he says.
“What do you mean what.”
“What are you thinking about, right there.”
I tell him I’m not thinking about anything. But I’m really thinking: Had God sent Garrett Alfieri from the Biblecopter tonight to make me ask if I should still be making jokes about Holy Grail Points, about Colonel Hellstache, to lock me in the Sad Archives Basement with regards to Necro Maverick Jetpantsing?
But here’s what Real Dad is thinking I’m thinking: “Why are you looking at me like I’m some guy who has to retreat into my Tweed Panic Room, with my Pet Sounds outtakes?”
“Why would I look at you like you have a Tweed Panic Room?”
Except then, the Dam Breaking Loose. Because, out of complete nowhere, Real Dad goes: “You want to see something? You want to see Rock and Roll? Here. Watch.”
“Okay, Dad, what are you going …”
“You don’t think I can do it, do you?” he says. “You’ve been looking at me the whole night like I’m stand-up-comedy material, like Hi, I’m Nate, you know, The Pop Culture Essayist; the Deferential, you know, Normal-Guy Writer—let me just sit back in my flannel shirt and fold my arms and let the dramatic irony play out among the earnest. What if I told you I’ve thought about starting my own music magazine, sort of building on what Suck is doing? With raw, balls-out-of-fly commentary?” He pulls his fly zipper outward, toward me. “I talked with Carl about it tonight, talked about it with him two months ago.”
He exhales toward the sky and quiets his voice: “Just—let me show you what I am going to need to do.”
And suddenly I really start to really worry. As in, is he going to say: “Sometimes I think I might not make it through this life,” and am I going to have to tell him: “Well, hang in there!” Because, the last time he was back at Mom’s house was to do laundry, four trash bags of it. And, what if, is he going to kill himself? Is he going to hold his hand out to me, and say, padded-cell-gently: Son, watch your father, and then pull a gun from his pocket and brain-spray his head all over the storefront behind him?
So, within seconds, I have my First-Aid Rays fully charged. I care about my parents. Real Dad’s not a Tweed Panic Room Hashbrown Gargoyle. We have fun together. I’m ready to Go Off the Top Ropes, ready to do a diving save if Real Dad reaches for a gun in his sock, ready to Drop an Elbow for Life.
Instead, he goes: “I’ll bet you I can kick the receiver hook off that payphone at the corner.”
He points to the payphone half a block down. At that point, all you can think is: Fuck.
“One clean kick, clean break. Hook: off.” He smacks the heel of his right hand into his left palm. “Clean break. Twenty dollars. You’re taking the bet.”
He stands over me. “Can’t we …”
“I am your father and we are not going to discuss it!”
I sit on the curb. A few blocks up, a man with longish hair—lacrosse-long—bends over and vomits into a storm drain. I’m not even looking when Real Dad takes the phone off the hook, looks both ways, gives a running start from around the corner, jumps, and jams his boot into the payphone. He does it silently, clean break, like he’s been practicing all his life. The hook plinks on the ground. He drops it in my lap.
“That’s great Dad, thanks,” I say.
“Oh no thank you, Nate. Because I wouldn’t be a man unless I changed your goddamn diapers. Have to let them know who’s boss.”
Back in Penfield, the house with Real Dad’s room is this large, peeling, cotton-gin-era thing with a single broad, white wall as a front. The sign above the maroon front door, which is slanted in its frame, says PENFIELD MANSE.
The stairs are maroon-carpeted and
squishy going up to the second floor, and the maroon changes the light to a color that, if it were a Crayola, would be called Dying Cantaloupe. Real Dad nods as he passes maybe a priest, or any one of the alone-a-thon of divorced husbands that might occasionally open their doors and lean out, in their bathrobes and flip-flops. He opens his room’s sliding wooden door, where there is no lock. The showers, I remember, are communal and down the hall.
Real Dad brushes his teeth while he sits on the sofa and flips on the TV. Some old movie comes on, with Groucho Marx in it. He starts laughing, really hard, through the toothpaste, at the punchlines. Which means he’s done talking for the night, and I’m leaving. “Have fun,” he says, and spits into his kitchen sink.
Back home, Mom is postured like geometry on the Woolly Mammoth. Her one glass of Sam Adams, foam drying to the sides. “How was he?” she says.
“We tried to see this band Squeezebeagler and got kicked out,” I say. “Then he bet me he could kick the receiver hook off a payphone.”
She puts a hand to her mouth, crossing her leg, a spring echoing through the couch’s hollows. “He’s funny,” she says. But then she narrows her eyebrows, angering down a smile.
And then, according to the God Hates Nate Act of 1931, I change into my Bills pajama pants, go to the den, and look at NecronicA.
Mom’s bedroom door closes. When I hit refresh, I flinch: The word SOLD appears in red across the thumbnail of a painting of a naked woman with a legion of army soldiers on fire behind her, faces peeling off, tongues broiling.
Which makes me think, really, the whole time so far, maybe I was lying to you about Bringing the Funny and Holy Grail Points. Maybe I’d rather not joke around with Real Dad, and maybe sometimes I’d really like to talk to Real Dad about what Garrett Alfieri told me, about how I’m still the same and I talk the same, and how I’m not good at anything, and how Necro has NecronicA and Weapons of Mankind and all this money, and Lip Cheese has a Home and a Cash and they’re all happier than me.
Back when I was happier, even an hour ago, at the end of my night with Real Dad, he went to bed, and I went home. When I got in the car to drive back to Gates, from outside the Penfield Manse, Real Dad’s window was the only one with a light on. Through his window, I saw him take off his shirt, posture frumped up. There was no expression on his face, no Wall of Comedy. He folded some piece of clothing, downed a glass of water in one gulp, and turned off the light.
THE NINTENDO POWER BUCOLIC FARM
A waitress at Applebee’s hovers her hand over a phone behind the hostess stand when Lip Cheese comes in and slides in across from me and next to Toby at the Airplane Booth. Static prickles his hair when he rips off his pull-down mask-hat, and he smells vaguely like hard-boiled egg. He removes a rolled-up stack of papers from the pocket of his Bungee Cord Drop-Zone jacket and places it on the table. The top page says Quitclaim Something or Other and has the word “hereby.”
“Lip Cheese: What?” I say.
“I was at the County Clerk,” Lip Cheese says. “I thought if you were still mad at Necro, that I could do some research to, you know.”
Toby and I look at each other. I bite into a hollowed-out French fry.
“These copies cost forty-three dollars, guys!” Lip Cheese says. “It took me two hours to figure out what a deed was!”
“Lip Cheese: I just meant follow Necro around,” I say. “Hang out with him until he says something Uncomebackable.”
“What?” Lip Cheese says. “Llewellen the clerk was really helpful. They have a nice, quiet table there where you can sit.” Toby laughs some fries out of his throat and has to store them in his left cheek. “Sorry if I suck at everything else, Toby. Sorry that I’m not good-looking and that I wasn’t born with …”
Lip Cheese adjusts whatever paper towel or napkin he’s stuffed into his armpit.
“I tried to call Necro a bunch of times,” he says. “I have no idea where he is. But I checked online, and the administrative contact for the NecronicA domain name is a Mr. Bambert L. Tolby, 300-A Ridge Road. I checked that address at the County Clerk.” Lip Cheese flips through some pages. A salt grain forms a bump and pinpricks through the page when he runs his index finger over a line of text. “It says on December 31st, 1998 that Kurt’s Laundromat, a New York corporation having a principal place of business at 300-A Ridge Road, in the consideration paid of one and more dollars, grants to Bambert L. Tolby the land and building at this place on Ridge Road in Webster.”
A lightbulb appears over my head. Because, didn’t Rambocream say something during Weapons of Mankind Night? Our manager or our supplier Bambert? And didn’t Necro say some guy Bambert was going to give him a grant of financial permission for NecronicA?
Lip Cheese runs a napkin through his hair and flips a page. “Does this all mean Bambert L. Tolby bought a building?” he says.
Toby plucks the page from Lip Cheese, looks at it for a second, and slams it facedown on the table. “This is all symbolage to me,” he says, rolling around his car keys in his hand. “But it gives me an idea.”
Which is the exact same sound the world makes when it ends. Every time Toby gets an idea, children fall asleep and never wake up.
Luckytown Hastings’s house is as compact as an Easter basket. His front yard—on a green, trinkety, miniature golf course of a street—is small and hemmed tight. Toby idles his car past the mailbox, turns around at the cul-de-sac, and parks a few houses down along the curb. The sun, through the trees, is the color of wifely white wine. Two squirrels chase each other up a tree like they’re running up an imaginary spiral staircase.
All of this looks strange because I’m used to seeing this street at night, like that one time me and Necro collected all the garbage bags full of leaves set out for trash collection and threw them in Luckytown’s driveway.
“Necro’s about to get Jungled!” Toby says.
Lip Cheese punches the back of my headrest. “You got Jungled, Necro!”
“You got Jungled,” Toby says.
“Jungled,” Lip Cheese says. Which isn’t even their phrase; Jungled was this thing Garth Heffernan used to say!
No question: Necro has been textbook Colonel Hellstache. He still needs to be fucked with. But when Toby brings Lip Cheese’s documents with him and walks toward Luckytown’s house, that’s when I know why we’re here.
“You know, Necro is right when he says moral masturbation, Toby,” I say. “Are we really being serious?”
Which is already the error. That question has never been answered once. So Toby whips around at me and says, either in Cockdrama Anger or, maybe, actual anger: “Necro doesn’t like you anymore, Nate. He set your room on fire in that picture and yet you would be one to Mommy? your way out of confronting him about Pinning Bow Ties on the Dead?”
I blush like the dam breaking loose. Total Comeback Shutdown, Part II: The Proto-Stachening, when Mommy? should totally not bother me anymore. Mommy? is the oldest Uncomebackable Insult, the Training-Wheels-Level Uncomebackable. But even Lip Cheese goes: “Mommy? Mommy?” And then Toby goes, “Mommy?” right in my face, and I swallow some of his cereal breath. None of which is fair or respectful. Some things—things you said in your sleep at a sleepover that you have no control over—you only stay living just so you can forget them.
So, crossing Luckytown’s buzz-cut grass, I convince myself that, since I have nothing else to do this week, maybe it would be funny to see Necro’s face when police show up at his house and he has to tell them Oh hi, I’m Necro, I didn’t take and blow up that building; I was too busy taking and having a Kangaroo for a Kid. And then after police leave, and there are no arrests, me and Toby and Lip Cheese could swoop in and yell: “Surprise! You got Jungled!” and we’d all be friends again, even though that’s Garth Heffernan’s phrase.
Toby wipes off his boots on the welcome mat and rings Luckytown’s doorbell. Me and Lip Cheese stand back a bit, on the scrubbed-white sidewalk leading to the front doorstep.
The seal of the wo
od-grain door unsuctions. I prepare my face.
But right when you expect Luckytown to process Toby’s lard into canned food, Luckytown opens the door wearing oven mitts and an apron that says M.C. GRILLER. “You are under arrest,” he says.
Toby half-flinches.
“You ponyboys! I’m kidding!” Luckytown says. “Please come in.”
Luckytown’s dining room is clean and unused, colored like embroidered china. His kitchen has a stainless steel refrigerator where the freezer’s actually the bottom drawer. A finger-shaped smear of blood, just to the right of the garbage disposal switch, looks twisted into the kitchen wallpaper.
“We come to you head in hands, believe me,” Toby says. “But we wanted to let you know about some suspicious things, about our friend Andrea, and about the broadcast building explosion and several recent fires, now that we’ve had time to remember them more, you know, formally.”
Luckytown looks away from us and raises his eyebrows quickly.
“After Necro’s show ended that night, Necro was sort of shoving us toward the building, like he wanted us to be close to the building when it exploded?” Toby says.
And, I force myself to say, since This Is Going to Bring the Funny, Murman-Mango Jitney-Level: “And earlier in the evening? Before that explosion? Necro and Wicked College—John Violi—had this argument on the way to the Weapons of Mankind show?”
Luckytown removes a casserole from the oven, which throws me off a little and makes me feel like I need to explain more when I don’t want to.
“Because, Necro always hates it when you say Kangaroo for a Kid, because he has all these German Shepherds in his house?” I say. “And Necro left these drawings in his car, and Wicked College John—he and Necro have never really gotten along, because once, Lip Cheese found this sweater in this abandoned home and gave it to Wicked College John as a gift. And Wicked College John didn’t want it, but Necro convinced Wicked College John to wear it—you know, to be nice to Lip Cheese. But after Wicked College John put it on he got this rash—like, a whole Rash Shirt for three weeks, and he blamed Necro, so ever since then they hate each other?”