Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

  “Is this a real diner?” I said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. I’m having one of those moments.”

  “Moments?”

  “Everything seems a little off. A shade wrong. I thought it was this place but it must be me. I’m misfiring.”

  “Are you on drugs?” said the counterman.

  “No, are you on drugs?”

  “Not real drugs.”

  Some summer-school girls trooped in with their backpacks and headphones, jubilant nipples puffing through their tank tops. Hilarious, I thought, in homage to Gary, if one can think in homage, and then I suddenly remembered my first literature-induced boner, if literature can include The Girls of Galamere 5 by Lincoln A.H. Duvalier, a novel about a planet in another solar system where nubiles cavorted in the dying light of a dwarf star. I’d read the book a half-dozen times without locating its fundamental flaw: How could a dwarf star sustain nubile life?

  Now I dug into my eggs, wondered at the myriad connections the mind could make. Meanwhile, in another sector of my mind not prone to wonderment, I felt some lurid urge to blow the whole mess out onto the smeared steel awning above the Fry-O-Later. I’ve never paid these noises much heed. Sometimes, alums, I’ll be walking down the street, catch myself chanting softly, “Blow my friggin’ head off, blow my goddamn friggin’ head off.”

  Doesn’t everybody, Catamounts?

  The voices, I figure they’re just a kind of roll call, a homeroom attendance of the soul. Delusional Confidence? Here. Underlying Sense of Worthlessness? Here. Cycle of Emotional Abuse? Step off, motherfucker!

  Stacy? Stacy Ryson?

  Most of my voices are too vain for harm. There are exceptions, of course, inner tyrants who chuckle at naive notions of pluralism and fair play, or attitudinal zealots, like those life coaches on TV. One of these latter bellowed from some high moist pulpit of a lobe.

  “Gravy boat!” It said. “Stay in the now!”

  I looked up at the counterman, then remembered my father barking those words one Thanksgiving years ago, my mind wandering as it was wandering now, making its maybe-not-so-beautiful-nor-extraordinary connections while a row of aunts and uncles waited for me to pass what wasn’t technically a gravy boat but more on the order of a mason jar filled with pan-spooned turkey juice.

  “Gravy boat! Stay in the now!”

  My father, he’s still my deep commander, which is odd because he’d tell you himself his life has been a sham, and not just the sneaking around, the nookie-hunts. All he’d ever wanted was to play his horn in a cool jazz quintet. He could wail, too, had been offered a spot with some West Coast white boys on the brink of glorious elevator music. My father demurred, begged off, wasted his shot. Yes, those jazzbos spiraled into smack hells of their own devising, but not before slapping down some landmark lite wax.

  “Failure of nerve,” my father had once said, the words hard, soothing candy in his mouth.

  “That’s a good phrase for it,” I said.

  “I didn’t make it up.”

  “No, but it’s still good. I usually just tell myself I’m a pussy.”

  “Me, too,” said Daddy Miner.

  I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

  I’m like most of the men in my family, I thought now, or think I thought then, mopping up egg yolk with toast crust, which I’ve read is a sign of bad breeding. We’ll chance anything to destroy ourselves, but we’re such chickenshits when it comes to happiness.

  Were the women any better? Maybe braver, a bit more eager to pick fights with zoning boards, garbage collection route administrators, or, back in the old neighborhoods, with greengrocers and bookmakers, but what gets called feistiness might just be a fallback mode for the thwarted.

  Before she died my mother told me she’d vowed to avoid that curse. She was Hazel Dubnow then, a modern girl like the girls in the modern movies. She had a college degree, semibrazen lipstick, knew some Keats, a few knock-knock jokes. She’d come by bus to New York City, found a furnished room, an advertising job in Midtown, friends who took her to the theater, the philharmonic, to openings, happenings, any kind of occurrence at all.

  She made notes for one-act plays on office letterhead, dated account reps she detested, sots who’d suck her breasts in taxicabs, but she could stomach their ineffectual slobbering because she was a tough girl from Pittsburgh and at least these fools had more dough than the apes of the Allegheny. She was always gazing over their shoulders, anyway, off into some future soft blur where she’d dine on quail and caviar with the wits of her era. These men would bow to her mind before their sensual, precise, perhaps European mouths ever got under her sweater.

  Hazel skipped a lot of lunches, saved up for a ticket to Rome, rode through the countryside on the backs of motorbikes with grappa-slugging painters who were probably also in sales, felt that familiar drool slide down her chest, flew home. She had ideas at work for ad campaigns, but who wanted to hear them? Not Swint, her supervisor. He shoved her down on his desk one night, commenced something novel, went for her panties, outright. Hazel fought him off, ran down to the street, hailed a cab, resigned by phone the next day.

  “Good girl,” said Swint.

  There she sat in a coffee shop with some stolen stationery trying to fashion this heartache into a play she’d never finish when Daddy Miner walked in, slid wordless into her booth. That was his big move back then, Hazel told me, to sit down without asking, light a smoke, smile with a worldly tenderness, as though he’d just found what he’d been seeking but wondered now if the journey had not sapped him of his power to love. Who could resist such charms of weariness? The rest, as they say, was history, or herstory, as Hazel would later put it, repeatedly, never quite able to hide the pickle juice pucker it made of her mouth.

  Next stop, our very own Eastern Valley, Hazel stumbling through a waking dream, a kerchief on her head for the supermarket like all the other mothers and mothers-to-be. The split-level Marty and Hazel finally decided upon was some jumbo model much admired in the region, and they had more yard than most, and they had me, Baby Lewis, whose developmental fumblings, I pray, bought Hazel enough joy to offset the depression for a while. But Marty was gone for weeks, scouting locales for new schemes to ruin them, and Baby Lewis was probably more chore than beguilement and the neighbors, even the Jewish neighbors, didn’t quite get her jokes.

  And you’d think that would be the end of that, but that’s never really the end of that, or only in the modern movies. Because Hazel was tough, Catamounts, and, as you might recall, a sorceress. She decided to live her life, but not die of it. That’s what she told me, anyway, and what she told me is all I’ve got to rely on.

  She said she became a witness to what she’d come to conclude was her bondage, found books by like-minded women, found women with like minds, too, started groups, newsletters for the groups, a theater collective to perform the plays she wrote for all the groups. Laugh at it now, Catamounts, God knows my father did, but it was dangerous and new to Hazel, and what can you admire more in a person than the will to danger? Sure, her rants could be ridiculous, stridency smothering wit, and yes, she took it too far with me, who wasn’t her enemy, just her son who happened to have a cock, but even so, she’d saved herself, or at least altered the terms of her internment.

  It couldn’t last forever, of course, and after Marty was done finger-banging his waitstaff, came home to rest, he noticed that the Hazel who lived in his house was not much like the Hazel he’d hauled out from city years before. He decided to fall in love with someone else, and did. The ravishing flatware rep would leave him soon enough. He stayed in our house for a while after, never quite the philandering husband again, more a boarder with occasional cuddling privileges. Then came the sad-sack condo nearby. I tried to pretend I didn’t know what was going on, but Hazel made sure I knew.

 
“Your father’s a fucking bastard,” she said, handed me her new play to read, “A Fucking Bastard.”

  It was a one-act, in verse.

  Spite was good succor. Hazel lost weight, her big shabby sweaters, picked up cigarettes again. Somehow they made her golden, lifelike. It was hard going, though. The world she figured she was finally rejoining was long extinct. The women executives at the agency, where she’d gotten temp work more out of loneliness than insolvency, ignored her bra-burner harangues. The Ivy League assistants gave grave mocking nods. The cradle-robbing septuagenarians she met through her Proust-fraught singles ads didn’t get her jokes, either. Her groups had disbanded. Nobody would read her plays.

  She had the house, though, decent alimony, a few friends left from the old days, divorcees all, puttering around their kitchens, nibbling on unsalted saltines, trying to disentangle themselves from telephone cords. Sometimes I wondered if Hazel had become a lesbian, hoped that she had, but I knew she’d lost the spirit to learn new skin. Hers was rather wan now. The cigarettes hadn’t helped, after all. There was wilt, spoilage to her. I figured she was maybe due for another resurrection. Then she invited me over for meat loaf, told me the latest.

  Metastatic, she said. It sounded like a funk band.

  So, yes, Catamounts, the day finally came and I kissed her cold dead calves, the ones that would never take her anywhere dangerous or new again. Kissed her cold dead calves, I always say, but did I, Catamounts, or do I just say I did? I heaved myself onto her cold dead calves, I’m certain, bolted out of the chair I’d been dozing in when the doctor patted me awake, said to me, “She’s gone,” all that monotony of format in his voice—dim room, dead woman, numb son. Certainly I heaved myself down upon her then, her calves, sobbed into the stubble there. (No courageous vanity for Hazel, no razors, rouge, no mascara.) But did I really kiss her?

  “Gravy boat! Stay in the now!

  Who’s there? Where’s now?

  It was still just me, a guy at the end of his eggs, his runny suns.

  Good-bye, nubiles. Good-bye girls of Gala—

  “They hauled it up from Georgia.”

  “Huh?”

  “Georgia, I said,” said the counterman.

  “What?”

  “They bought this shithole diner and didn’t even fix it up. Just hitched it to a truck. Authentic. For that authentic shithole feel. It’s not your brain.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s not your brain. People worry it’s their brain. They shouldn’t worry.”

  “No,” I said. “They shouldn’t.”

  His Truth Bazooka

  OKAY, Catamounts, enough with the morbid stuff, the dark unanswerables. The monumental questions will never be laid to rest. For instance, if God exists, why did He kill my mommy, or even Thurman Munson? Or how do morons make so much money? Or why were the Nearmont High Vikings mostly Italian kids, Armenian? Gary and I had a good laugh about that today on the way to the Bean Counter to visit Liquid Smoke.

  “Korean and Vietnamese, too,” said Gary. “And that Montagnard kid, Vance.”

  Gary said Montagnard as though he’d hacked through jungle with them, worn the sacred bracelet of the Rhade like John Wayne on the Unjust War Channel.

  But we weren’t hacking through anything. We weren’t even humping kliks to the next ville. We were driving past Cassens Park to the old downtown, the sun cooking through Gary’s windshield, the ball courts, ball fields, deserted.

  “Remember that time in farm league you shit your pants in the outfield?” said Gary.

  “Food poisoning.”

  “Didn’t we all eat the same thing that day?”

  “I got a bad hot dog.”

  “Right, I remember. A bad hot dog.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “There’s no point. It’s a reminiscence, man.”

  “Reminisce about something else.”

  “Roger that, pants-shitter.”

  Catamounts, have you noticed all the empty storefronts downtown these days? Dugan’s Drugs is gone. Manny’s Dry Clean, too. Greco’s Meats is boarded up with plywood. Eastern Valley Plaza is still humming, of course, all those cappuccinos, DVDs. That fat lady boutique thrives, too. Main is a wasteland, though. Most of the signage dates back to SALT II. That neon jackboot still hangs over the door of Dino’s Shoe Repair, but Dino is dead. His sons gutted the store years ago.

  The Bean Counter, with its fake antiques and framed clippings from the old Eastern Valley Gazette, it feels like a taunt at the dead part of town. I’m not sure which history the Bean Counter means to borrow its ambiance from, but it has something to do with dark varnish and doilies, paraffin lamps, freight trains packed with gewgaws and taffy and nobody forgetting the Maine.

  Liquid Smoke’s real name is Mira, if one is given to believe name tags, and she’s seeking the attentions of a suave older gentleman, if one is given to believe Gary. It’s not hard to see why he’s smitten. This girl has a straight silk drop of hair like all the teenie sirens on TV. Her bare skin achieves a sort of golden strobe effect when her apron sways out from her halter top.

  Today the Retractor stepped up to the counter and sighed his order in the manner of some jet-setter marooned in New Jersey by circumstance—“You’ll never believe where I had to spend the night!”—a man perhaps suicidally bored by the lingonberry muffin and half-caf hazelnut ice coffee he’s about to consume.

  Liquid Smoke looked annoyed, filled his order with sullen speed.

  “How are the scones today?” said Gary.

  “You want a scone or a muffin?”

  “No, I was just inquiring after their quality. I’ve yet to find a suitable American scone.”

  “So get the fuck out of America.”

  “Do you have a young chap?”

  “Like a blister?”

  “A beau. A boyfriend.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I realize I’m a bit older. My body is probably softer than you’ve come to expect, but I can make you very happy.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Because the world is both simpler and more complex than a beautiful woman like yourself could ever imagine.”

  “Have I seen you here before?”

  “I love your coffee.”

  “You’re one of the crazy Horizons people, right?”

  “Depends who you talk to.”

  “No, I mean from down the block. Near the old lumberyard? That place? That home for the mental? What’s it called? Nice Horizons, right? They come here all the time. It’s okay. But don’t creep out on me. And don’t ask me for the bathroom key. I’m not cleaning up any more crazy person poop.”

  The Captain seemed a little shaken. I led him over to the cream and sugar.

  “She’s just a kid,” I said.

  “And we’re geezers,” said Gary. “Washed up at the age Jesus was just getting rolling.”

  “Look what happened to him.”

  “Fucking Romans. Fucking New Romans, too. You know, the problem with women today is that so many of them have worked out their daddy shit. Guys like me have no shot. Goddamn therapy culture.”

  Gary crunched his ice, spit it back into the cup.

  The only other customer, an older guy in a vintage New York Giants football jersey, coughed. He was reading the Collected Colette, a lit cigarillo in his teeth. He peeked out from behind his Colette.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said to Gary.

  “No, it won’t.”

  “It won’t?” I said.

  Gary stood, gazed out the window.

  “Didn’t they used to sell dope back behind Dino’s?”

  “Gary.”

  “Not for me, man. I’m just taking sociological note.”

  Outside, a man stopped at a traffic light leaned from his Jeep, blew something chunked from his nose to the blacktop. A few state troopers stood under the awning of Abel’s Bagels, hooting. One drew his pistol, mimed a shot at the snotsman. Gary peeled t
he cakey lid off his muffin, took a bite, handed it to me.

  “Best part,” he said.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Not yet.”

  “New plan?”

  “I’m going back to the Gary thing,” said Gary. “It’s who I am, what I’m about.”

  “You’ve never stopped being Gary.”

  “Never will, brother,” said Gary, walked back to the counter.

  “Mira,” he said.

  “What.”

  “My name is Gary.”

  “Hello, Gary.”

  “I’ve got to go to the bathroom. May I borrow the key?”

  “You know the rules.”

  “I won’t poop anywhere, I promise.”

  “Now you’re definitely not getting the key.”

  “I came here because I think you’re beautiful.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I didn’t even want the muffin, or the coffee.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “I’m not that scone guy I was before. I’m not from the Horizon.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Would you like to go out with me sometime?”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “My apartment?”

  “That’s not really going out.”

  “For you it would be.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. How about … . I don’t know. Dinner?”

  “You’ve got money to take me out?”

  “I’ve got money.”

  “What do you do, Gary?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “You sell drugs.”

  “No.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I thought my mother and father raped me. Then it turned out they didn’t.”

  “And you got paid for that?”

  “I did okay.”

  “That’s wild. But what if they did do it? Do you still get paid?”

  “No.”

  “Damn.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “Will you go out with me?”

  “I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Cool.”

  WE LEFT with Mira’s phone number, if you’re given to believe women who give them out. Digits, I think the Mikey Saladins of the world call them, not that he’d need them, a handsome giant with soft hands and otherworldly bat speed. What does a man like Mikey need with numbers? A hero like that, women simply appear, unbidden, in his bed at night, with calves of moonstone, or so I have heard. Or heard myself tell myself.