by Rob Roberge
But he just nods and starts toward his ridiculous red motorcycle. You watch him walk away until his black leathers and the dark night blend.
You stand in the empty lot, feeling like a failure. Every good writer and every good person in the class had been scared off and it was your job to create a space where that wouldn’t happen. Still, you had no idea what to do, then or now, with Karl.
Him, or someone like him, at any rate.
1977: In fourth-grade science class, where you are Nicole’s “science buddy,” there are two white rats named Starsky and Hutch. You will never remember what they were for—probably some horrible tests a fourth grader should never be allowed to perform. You will wonder if she ever told you, though you will remember for years the two of you holding one rat each and then putting them back on urine-soaked wood chips in their filthy cage. After you put them back, it is another pair’s turn to hold them. You have no idea what happened to those rats. Were they still alive that last day of school, June 23, the day after Nicole’s murder, the day of cop cars escorting all the school buses, the day very little tends to get done anyway but the day you will only ever remember as the day you heard about the murder on the radio. You will remember the cop car. You remember her empty seat. You remember the science teacher, Mr. Karr, openly weeping. You will remember the school’s floors already buffed and shined, ready for summer break.
—
2013: Scientists estimate that human language will survive human beings for only two to three generations of parrots. The last human words ever spoken will not be spoken by people but probably by a third-generation parrot following the extinction of human beings. Many linguists identify “becos,” meaning “bread,” as the first word spoken by the human race. No one will know what the last word will be. But we know it will happen thirty to fifty years after we are gone.
—
1981: You are at a keg party at some rich kid’s house when his parents are out of town. You know his parents. You wait on them at the country club on the other side of town. His father treats you like shit.
After breaking a lamp in the master bedroom, you steal a handful of pills from his parents’ bathroom—you have no idea what they are, so you start with only two, a responsible and moderate decision—a blue one and an orange-ish one you will come to know well. Valium. In the living room, someone hands you a guitar. You play the intro to the Who’s “Substitute.” It’s a three-chord intro, and you play it twice and Karen Lewis starts making out with you. You’re in the school band together and you’ve had a crush on her since the start of the year, although she’s never seemed to notice you before this.
In band, you play the oboe. No one has ever, not once, made out with you after you played the oboe for fifteen seconds. Guitar players, you realize, don’t have to talk much. They can play someone else’s music and sing someone else’s song and everyone acts like they’ve created something. Karen Lewis grabs your crotch hard through your jeans while biting your lower lip. You wonder why anyone plays the fucking oboe.
—
1990: You read an interview with a dominatrix in one of Broke Dan’s underground zines. You had no idea there was such a thing as a dominatrix. In the interview she talks about beating a man’s ass. You are alone. Dan’s in Puerto Rico visiting his girlfriend. You want to know how this feels. You close the shades and the apartment goes dark. You strip and try to find something to hit yourself with and end up using one of his thick artist’s brushes. You’re on your hands and knees, and you reach behind and swing the thick wood of the brush against your ass as hard as you can. At first, there’s nothing but pain. Then you feel the heat on your skin and the tightness from the welts you are raising. You do this for more than ten minutes. Until there’s no pain at all—just heat and calm with every swing. You wish you could ask Mary for this, but you are afraid. You stop and jerk off. Afterward, you lie naked on your couch, your ass sore and tingling, watching dust specks float in the sunlight let in through a crack in the blinds, feeling as lonely as you can remember ever feeling.
—
1991: You and Mary are still together, but you don’t live together and you rarely fuck anymore. One night, you are drunk and you finally get the courage up to ask her to tie you down and hit you. To your horror, she doesn’t even answer. You were braced for a possible no—though that would have been devastating. This is worse, though. She changes the subject and you both get another drink. You feel a fire of shame somewhere in your core. You think you’ve just guaranteed that she will leave you. And you have been close for so long. You don’t know how you will face a world where you’ve been rejected by Mary, the person who knows you best. The person who now knows you just a little better and didn’t seem to like what she learned.
—
1975: You are nine years old. You have saved your money from allowance and mowing lawns and harvesting potatoes at Johnson’s Farm, and you have purchased Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run at the Sam Goody at the mall.
You look at the cover. Bruce Springsteen is cool. He’s got a guitar. Guitar players are cool—even at nine years old you know that much. Your dad, who’s a narcotics officer, says Springsteen’s dressed like a homeless fucking hippie. By nine, you have already decided where “homeless fucking hippie” falls in relation to “narcotics officer” on the bell graph of cool.
You take the album out of its plastic. You look at the sleeve, checking both sides. You see that Springsteen, on the front cover, is leaning on a chunky black guy you later find out is Clarence Clemons, his sax player.
You put the album on. Your sister—two years older and, therefore, cooler than you—accuses you of going “straight to the hit.” She means that you’ve ignored the track listing and done what you always do, which is go straight to the song you know and love from the radio. Which is true. You are guilty of this. But this time, the hit, the title track, just happens to be the first cut on side two of the album. So she’s right. You did go straight to the hit, but you lie to your sister: “No! I started it on the first song. I didn’t go straight to the hit.”
She says, “You would have gone to it first if it was the third song.”
She is correct. You would have.
Later, while the sax solo on “Jungleland” plays, your dad walks through the room, where you sit cross-legged, listening to the album for the third time through as loud as your mother will allow. He stops for a second, listening. He says, “This guy’s sax player sounds like a cross between King Curtis and Duane Eddy’s sax player.”
You have no idea what he’s talking about. “I don’t think so,” you say, convinced that your narc father couldn’t possibly know anything about rock and roll.
He goes downstairs, grabs Have ‘Twangy’ Guitar Will Travel by Duane Eddy and some record by “King Curtis and His All-Stars.”
“Listen,” he says, handing you the vinyl. “This guy sounds just like them.”
You don’t want to give your dad, the narc, the satisfaction. But later, while he’s working on a car down in the garage, you put on this King Curtis. Your father, you hate to admit, is right. Cool Bruce Springsteen’s sax player sounds a lot like someone in your father’s record collection. This seems wrong.
Then you put on “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy. It’s one of the greatest sounds you’ve ever heard. How the hell does your dad know about this?
Your parents, you will realize much later, actually have pretty good taste in music—especially compared to your friends’ Perry Como– and Pat Boone–loving parents. Yours have a lot of Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Eric Anderson, and a bunch of great comedy albums as well.
Plus, they have all of Carly Simon’s albums. You don’t listen to these, but you jerk off while looking at the covers several times a day, whenever possible. No Secrets and Playing Possum being recurrent favorites.
—
1986: You have given two blow jobs in your life. The first was purely out of curiosity. You wanted to know what it was like. And
it was, if not something you really wanted to repeat, interesting. You think cocks are pretty interesting. You think they would be a lot more interesting if they were attached to women.
The second blow job is because you feel guilty. Some law student at a party keeps giving you cocaine all night long. You have no idea that he may be hitting on you. You’re just thrilled he’s giving you free coke.
Later, he offers to get you a cab home. You are broke. It’s five degrees out and you don’t even have enough money for the T. You accept the ride, and in the back of the cab he tries to make out with you. You are uncomfortable and aren’t sure what the best manners are in this situation. You don’t want to kiss this man. But you feel guilty. He’s been filling you with coke all night. You feel like you’ve violated some social contract. Like you were some tease and you didn’t know it. You go down on him because sucking his cock seems a lot less intimate than actually having to kiss him.
—
1986: You are at the free clinic in Boston. Your cock is leaking something that looks vaguely like tartar sauce and it feels like your urethra is itchy at its core and you can’t reach it. You’re worried you could have something serious. You could die. Hell, other people are dying.
“Would you prefer a male doctor or a female doctor?”
You say, “Whichever.”
The woman says, “It’s four hours to see a male doctor. A female doctor can see you now.”
The doctor sees you. After a few minutes, she tells you that you have chlamydia and she starts writing you a script.
You say, “So this goes away, right?”
“Yes,” she says.
You let out a deep breath and say, “Great. Thank you so much.”
She looks down and shakes her head. She says, “I remember when this was bad news.”
—
1990: You have a scar under your left eye—about a centimeter long and straight. You do this to yourself one night when you are very drunk. You take the lid from a can you have opened and hold it at the top of your cheekbone, just underneath your eye socket. You push it hard into your face until you feel its pressure on the bone and you slice open the skin covering your cheekbone.
The next day people see the dried blood under your left eye. Naturally, they ask what happened.
You say, “I was drunk. I don’t even remember.”
The first part is, of course, accurate. You’re always drunk, though. The second part, your lie, you wish were true. You do remember what you did. You always will. You just won’t understand why you did it.
—
1992: You and Mary break up.
You have been best friends for a decade. You’ve been sleeping together for maybe eight of those years. You’ve been a couple, on and off, for three years.
And now it’s over.
She tells you she’s worried about you alone. “The world just hits you full in the face every day,” she says.
You will remember being so moved that she is worried about you and not about herself when you break up. Though, objectively, just about anyone would be more worried about you than they would be about Mary. You are a mess.
—
1984–1988: Michelle Easter is indirectly responsible for your whole career. You meet her when you are both acting and movement majors. She’s an ex-dancer who wears men’s Levi’s button-fly jeans rolled over low on her hips and wifebeaters and she has the first pierced nipples you’ve ever seen—even if you only see them through the wifebeaters. If Audrey Hepburn shaved her head and looked like you should never, ever fuck with her, she might have looked like Michelle Easter. You are smitten. She, at best, doesn’t seem to be. You get it in your head, though, that with enough exposure, she will come to realize that you are a sweet, damaged young man who is a little, or a lot, lost in the world.
In the middle of freshman year, Michelle transfers from acting and movement to tech theater. So do you. She ends up designing sets. You crawl through with grades barely good enough to keep your financial aid. You spend sophomore year in Holland, saving you the trouble of transferring into whatever Michelle transferred into that year. Junior year, Michelle takes poetry. You do too, and discover you are truly one of the most dreadful twenty-year-old poets in the history of the form. Michelle gets As and the professor tells her she’s brilliant. His only critique of your work is to ask you in front of the class, every single week, “What makes you think this is a poem?”
You love this poet—he’s a genius. It stings how much he seems to dislike you and your work. Late in the term he asks you again what makes you think what you’ve written is a poem.
You may like him as a poet, but you hate him as a person. “I don’t know. It’s all skinny and on the left?”
You think you might die of stunned pleasure when Michelle Easter cracks up. You go out for drinks and she repeats It’s all skinny and on the left while laughing. You could, you think, spend a large part of your energy on this planet making Michelle Easter laugh.
Often, while you follow Michelle Easter from major to major, you are dating women who have no idea you are following Michelle Easter in her academic sampling of everything your school has to offer. You think a lot about trying to be a better person. You do very little to become one. At the time, you would have used the word romantic to describe your attempt to win Michelle’s affections. Later, you will realize there is a more accurate word and legal term for what you were doing: stalking.
Michelle transfers to journalism. This you’re good at. Except you invent every news story you report.
“You can’t just make shit up,” your editor tells you.
Michelle, who must realize by now that you are somehow ending up in every one of her classes, becomes a creative writing major. You are finally in a room for a better reason than following Michelle Easter around.
—
1992: After your breakup with Mary, you move back to your grandmother’s old hoarder house, which is still not totally cleaned out, even years after her death. You could and should have done more, but you have hauled more than a thousand pounds of her garbage to the dump and the house still looks pretty much the same.
—
1980: You are finally old enough to be left home when your parents go to a party some friends are throwing. Your sister is sixteen and out with her boyfriend. You get drunk on your parents’ liquor. They never notice. Your father never drinks hard liquor and your mother drinks disgustingly sweet Rhine wine every night. Your father buys his Marlboro Reds by the carton, so you take a pack and chain-smoke. You take out your grandfather’s fishing tackle box. You tie his heaviest fishing line around your balls and hang a series of eight- and sixteen-ounce weights from the fishing line until it hurts. Then you jerk off. You have no idea that what you’re doing is strange, or why you’re doing it—you only know that it feels good.
—
1983: After eight minutes of agony during his botched execution in a Mississippi gas chamber, struggling to breathe, in obvious and dreadful pain, Jimmy Gray kills himself by repeatedly smashing his head into a pole behind the chair he is strapped to.
—
1990: In Florida, you are in the middle of a psychotic episode and you become convinced that you and only you have a plan to end all the world’s suffering and you need to get the message to the president immediately.
This profound message, of course, is lost now. There is no chance it was a plan, let alone a good one. And there is no chance that you could have ever reached the president of the local Knights of Columbus, let alone of the United States.
Your roommates try to talk you down. But, no. You know, you just know that you have come up with a plan to end the world’s suffering and only you can articulate it and you need to reach the most powerful person in the world and then you will have saved everyone.
You will be a hero. Your roommates are still trying to talk to you and you end up running out of your apartment. You’re barefoot, wearing only jeans. It’s August and Flor
ida is soupy. Old people and babies drop dead on nights like this. Sweat stings your eyes. You must stay focused on getting to the president with your message. There’s a police car turning toward you and you’re on red alert. You are in a psychotic episode, but even in these states you never, never, never lose sight of what cops and hospital people can do to you. You duck around a corner and pray they didn’t see you. Just being out without a shirt and shoes can get you a curb sit and they will not understand what you have to say to the president and they will lock you up. Once you turn that corner, veer off track, you keep going and you end up walking five miles south to a beach, looking over your shoulder the whole way.
Your feet are cut—there are bits of crushed windshield glass stuck in your skin—and it hurts to walk. You are still in the episode, but you no longer believe you’ve got this plan to save the world. You just know now that you must have had a psychotic episode, because of how different they feel from waking up from a blackout. Waking up from a blackout, you need to puke. The hangover from an episode is different because you come out of it gradually, still hearing and seeing things but knowing they are not real.
You have no idea what you did or said during this episode—and you don’t until people tell you about it. You hate that you’re usually too drunk or too crazy to know how what you’ve said or done—that your memories are at the mercy of the eyewitness accounts of your friends. You don’t really know which you hate yourself for more—the oblivion you can control or the one you can’t. Though you always, of course, feel more shame at being crazy.
You sit cross-legged on the beach, facing the Gulf of Mexico, which is choppy with a red tide that has kept everyone away, except the poor who fish to eat. Along with the glass are bits of shells and sand embedded in the cuts in your feet. You walk down to the water and try to clean out the cuts. The gulf is bathtub warm. You hear voices.
You look around. No one is anywhere near you, yet you are hearing several voices talking just out of range of being able to understand what they’re saying. The wind talks. The water talks. You answer in nonsense phrases. This happens near the end of an episode. You try to ignore the voices. You know they are not there. You know they are not real.