Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “The earth turns. Terms evolve. What passed for civilization before is an abomination to us now. Nostalgia is fear smeared with Vaseline. Think about it.”

  Pete turned, stalked off down the street, a new languorous gangster strut. He stooped to tie his shoe and I saw the bulging sheen of it tucked in an ankle holster: his cell phone.

  I HEATED UP some split-pea soup in the kitchen, thought about it. Maybe I could call Gary, borrow from his retractor trust. It’s a bitch to owe your best friend money, Catamounts. The awkwardness is bad enough, and then you have to pay the jerk back. What about Penny Bettis? I could beg her for an advance, throw in some extra FakeFacts, gratis. Clark Gable gargled with the stuff to stifle his halitosis. Skip James cut a rival pimp with a broken bottle of it. Or how about a TrueFact: It rots your fucking teeth.

  I called the Retractor.

  “Hey, man,” I said. “Just calling to see how you’re doing. I was thinking of you today. How are things with Mira?”

  “We’ve been making the beast with two separate parts that don’t touch at all.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “She’s playing hard to find. She shows up late at night. What’s wrong with me, Lewis? Guys my age have careers, children. I’m being toyed with by a twenty-three-year-old. I’m a joke. It’s the young skin. That’s all it is. Too bad she’s not fourteen. That would have been something. Something wrong, but still. What was that?”

  “What?”

  “The sound you just made.

  “A laugh. I laughed.”

  “Is that a new laugh?”

  “That’s my laugh.”

  “You’ve been working on a new laugh.”

  “The hell I have.”

  “Fucking poseur,” said Gary, hung up.

  The phone rang a few seconds later.

  “It’s definitely a new laugh,” said Gary.

  “Listen,” I said. “I need to ask you a favor.”

  “How much?”

  TONIGHT the evening news ran some footage of Mikey Saladin. The man stood shirtless, bandaged, before the press corps. These vipers hissed about a trade, their dry invisible tongues slithering over Mikey’s great veiny arms, his granite abs, though I can’t prove it, of course, their tongues being invisible.

  “I’ll always be a Jersey boy,” said Mikey, “no matter what uniform I wear.”

  A viper from the network of record inquired about retirement rumors.

  “Retire from what?” said Mikey. “From baseball or from banging your wife?”

  “And what about banned substances?” said another. “Have they enhanced your performance?”

  “About as much as that twelver of Schlitz you drink every night has enhanced yours, you fat fuck.”

  His insolence was warranted, Catamounts. These media fiends think their microphones are electric shock sticks. Sick of their softness, they hope to jolt their betters. Bat Masterson would be appalled. He’d strap his irons back on, catch the next coach to Abilene.

  As for Mikey Saladin, he might be old for an Estonian ice dancer, but not for a power-hitting shortstop. His slugging percentage is up because of anabolics, growth hormones? How about wisdom, maturity, the resolution of a grueling custody battle? Go ahead, drive Mikey from the game. Banish what shines, revel in the antics of dullards. Not only Mikey will suffer. Think about the kids from his Sacrifice Fly Foundation. I suppose you’d prefer they were back on the streets so you could buy your party favors from them, rent their hot little mouths on the West Side Highway. You’d best pray Mikey Saladin doesn’t catch you. The man has no mercy for your kind.

  Some of you are maybe wondering why I persist with these updates. A few of you, perhaps, pass the whipped potatoes at table, remark: “Is Teabag a fucking twit, or what?”

  Worry not, Catamounts. I might be a twit—I’m uncertain of the parameters—but I do not labor under any illusion my updates will grace the pages, or, scratch that, the screens, of our beloved alumni bulletin. Fontana was correct in his prediction that Catamount Notes, under the Ryson regime, would be an electronic affair. I received an e-mail today announcing the site was officially live. The same old lies. Now they are linked to other lies. You can leap between them.

  Instead, consider these ramblings an antidote, the antiupdate, continuous and true. Someday, perhaps, my missives will serve some edifying purpose. Archeologists will look to the Teabag Letters as a source text in their quest for Catamount meaning. Our lives and dreams may feel insignificant now, but the future could dispute our puniness. Menninger may become a universal synonym for glad-handing sleazeball. A Jazz Loretta might denote a sort of woolen legging. Our descendants could very well reside in a domed city-state called New Fontana, with statues of Mikey Saladin in every public square.

  Or, of course, not.

  Many are the ages of man that have meant nothing at all, as Ms. Tabor once put it in Introduction to World Literature. Maybe she was crashing hard on diet pills, but she had a point.

  It matters little in the end, Catamounts.

  Even the semiforgotten times have had their Teabags, their town criers, totem carvers, scribes, skalds.

  Here ye, here ye, the Jaguar King died in the sickle moon, the year Reed-Seven. The honey jars numbered ten and two. Leif Leifson jumped from the dragon ship, slew many shitloads of Jutes.

  These are the Catamount dead: Dean Longo (OD, disillusionment), Enrique Herrera (drunk driving, loneliness), Will Paulsen (drunk driver, bad luck), Tina Chung (cancer, radon), Shandra Baum (cancer, anger), Chip Gallagher (cirrhosis, pending).

  TONIGHT I took a walk down Venus Drive, cut through the woods to the Pitch-n-Putt parking lot. The stars were out, what stars we get in our dirty sky. Some old golf carts stood near the field house, more for after-hours ball retrieval than for play. Nearmont has an eighteen-hole course and a state-of-the-art driving range. The Eastern Valley Pitch-n-Putt, with its culverts of broken glass and unmowed greens, must have been designed expressly for trespassing, teen sex, vandalism.

  Gary and I used to come here to drink beer and smoke bones and talk about the future, when we’d drink beer and smoke bones with girls. Gary was going to be a rock star, or a rock journalist, maybe both.

  “I don’t want to be a superstar,” he said. “Just a star. I want to have influence. I want to be the visionary all the hacks steal from.”

  “Why would you want to be that?” I said.

  “It’s cooler,” said Gary. “Maybe I won’t even start a band until I’m twenty. You shouldn’t even attempt to rock until you’ve run the gamut of human experience. All of my records will include essays I’ve written about why the record rocks.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

  “Wilkerson liked it.”

  Glave was a joke to us even then, but he did have a nice Les Paul sunburst, and Gary had jammed with him once in Glave’s basement.

  “He’s got chops,” said Gary. “But no heart.”

  “No heart,” I said.

  “But chops,” said Gary.

  Sometimes others came to park and smoke with us. Randy Pittman would drive up in his Pittman Liquors family liquor van, offer us in-state vodka, bitch about his vicious father. He had a plan to run off with his sousaphone, join the navy marching band.

  “I need the discipline,” he said.

  One night he came by with a bottle of apricot schnapps and we got sick on the stuff while he told us how his father really wasn’t all that mean, just a little tweaked from his tour on a patrol boat in Vietnam. Old Man Pittman was only a cherry when another piece of new meat caught a bad case of nerves. Everybody got scared Charlie would hear the sobs, the whimpers. A corporal named Van Wort slit the kid’s throat, dumped him into the Mekong. Randy’s father made Randy swear to keep the whole thing secret, but Randy figured he could trust us. We didn’t know anybody in the navy, and who’d believe us, anyway, a couple of ass clowns from Eastern Valley?

/>   “What a load,” said Gary.

  “True fucking story,” said Randy.

  “Well, the patrol boat’s a nice touch, but really, I doubt your dad told you all of that. For one thing, guys who were actually in the shit talk squat about it. That’s just how it is.”

  “I’m his son.”

  “He still wouldn’t tell you.”

  “You can’t speak for everybody.”

  “No, I can’t, dude, and neither can you.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  We never really got to hear what that meant because suddenly there was a loud crack from out past the woodline.

  “Shit,” said Randy Pittman.

  The kid was bleeding from all these tiny shallow holes in his chest.

  We drove him to the Eastern Valley clinic in my father’s Dart. Randy bled all over the seats, but they were vinyl and I didn’t mind. He wasn’t dying and this was a nice vacation from our usual Pitch-n-Putt bone routine.

  The way the doctor figured it, or whoever the guy in the white coat who tweezed out the buckshot was, somebody had fired on us from far off. The pellets had petered out right as they hit Randy. The police never found the shooter, though they did undertake a token manhunt, once through the trees with a flashlight. They also issued a sketch of the suspect, a suave-looking black man with slicked-back hair. We had no idea where they came up with that one. It looked copied from an old Duke Ellington album sleeve.

  Later we figured it was Georgie Mays who’d fired on us, this nutjob from Nearmont who’d been bragging all week about his new shotgun. He’d never be brought to justice, though. Georgie’s family went back to Revolutionary War times, descended from the guy on the Nearmont town seal, Matheson Mays, who either spied on the British or spied for them, scholars have never decided. Matheson Mays was hanged before he could clear up the debate.

  It didn’t matter now. The man was on the town seal and the Mays name was under municipal protection. Besides, everyone was too riled up about the gangs of dead black jazz geniuses, apparently roving our district with heavy armaments, to give the Mays connection much thought. You may recall Glen Menninger’s editorials in the school paper about the need to balance tolerance with safety, arguing we should err on the side of safety. I wrote a short rebuttal, which he tried to pull, big surprise.

  But most of our times out here were not so eventful. It was usually just me and Gary and maybe Randy Pittman or Dean Longo. We’d sit around and talk about the unrelenting boredom of our town. The unrelenting ferocity of the world was a different problem. Only Dean Longo found a permanent solution, a bag of dope that, according to the coroner, would have killed a rhino. I think about Dean sometimes, not that I ever knew him so well, because we all dabbled in rhino death, and Gary did more than that, got himself a habit that was scary and embarrassing at the same time. We were all so grim and invincible then. I guess we figured we were trying so hard, there was no way we could die. But you can always die.

  IT TOOK ME AN HOUR to walk to In Your Cups. The notion of a car seemed newly appealing. Maybe my father was right about this being a car state, a car system, and how you can’t buck a system you’re not in, or under, that’s not bearing down on you.

  Daddy Miner was behind the bar with Victor, the new bartender. I considered sharing my ontological breakthrough with the old man, but I’m not an utter fool. I’m not an utter anything. I pulled a stool up to the leather-padded bar. Down the far end of it Chip Gallagher appeared to be having a lover’s spat with his double scotch. I decided to leave him to it, asked Victor for a beer.

  “That’s not on the house,” said my father.

  He was twisting a key in the register. He twisted it some more and the key broke off.

  “Goddamnit!”

  “Don’t know your own strength, Mister M.,” said Victor.

  “No, Victor, I do know my own strength. I’m a weak piece of shit. This key is just a weaker piece of shit. They don’t even make them out of metal anymore. I don’t know what this is. Some kind of alloy.”

  “That’s still metal,” said Victor.

  “What are you, a fucking smelter?”

  “No, but I blew one at a club once.”

  “You people are always bragging,” said my father. “I’ve had more flap candy than you could shake a stick at. You don’t hear me yapping about it all day.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Victor.

  “Well, I’m the exception. I’m the exception which proves the rule.”

  “What’s the rule again?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” said my father. “I’m all confused now. I can’t get into the register. I wish I could just smash it open. Get me some steroids. Like that Saladin kid.”

  “That’s just gossip,” I said. “Mikey’s the best player in the game.”

  “Yeah, but the question is, which game? It’s not baseball anymore.”

  “You’re dead on, Mister Miner.”

  “Thanks for agreeing, Victor, but you still can’t have Wednesday off.”

  “I’ll work Wednesday,” I said.

  “We don’t need a bar back.”

  “I’ll pour,” I said.

  “Sure you will.”

  “I know the drinks.”

  “You think that’s all this is?” said my father. “A rang-a-tang can learn the drinks. It’s not the drinks. It’s knowing what to do when the shit goes down. It’s about quiet strength. A light but firm touch. Ask Victor here.”

  “Touch lightly but firmly,” said Victor.

  “What is it with you people and innuendo? You’re out, you’re proud, I’m proud, calm down. You don’t have to reduce everything to the baloney pony.”

  “You don’t have to leer at every woman under seventy who walks in here.”

  “I said I was the exception,” said my father.

  “Okay, then I’m an exception, too,” said Victor.

  “Fine. We’re both exceptions.”

  “But don’t use the phrase ‘you people.’ You haven’t earned it.”

  “You don’t know what I’ve earned,” said my father.

  “Let me pour,” I said.

  “Absolutely not,” said my father.

  “Dad, nothing ever happens here. Everyone’s pleasant.”

  “That’s how they lull you.”

  “Who?”

  “The bringers-down of the serious shit. And I can’t be here to protect you. I have a vast empire to survey.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Forget I asked.”

  “I may need you at the Moonbeam soon. I’ll let you know.”

  “Fine.”

  “Maybe I won’t, though, if that barracuda Don Berlin keeps it up.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  My father went back to his office, fled the rush of suits from the bus station. These were family men, or else anxious types who’d lost their nerve, their wolf moves, for the city bars. One of them I’d seen before, a bond specialist who favored worsted vests. He sat in the corner talking to a familiar cascade of hair.

  “Mira!” I called.

  Catamounts, I must confess, I had thoughts of carnal betrayal vis-à-vis Gary when Mira came over to greet me, that thrum she gave off, her tawny arms hooped in silver, the voluptuous green wit of her eyes. People say the truly beautiful don’t know how beautiful they are. People also say the meek shall inherit the earth, that anybody can be president, that someday they’ll make androids you’ll want to fuck. Maybe they will, but where are you going to get the money for the androids? Those prices, you might as well be president.

  “Teabag, how are you?”

  “A-okay, Liquid Smoke.”

  “Are you going to buy me a drink?”

  Victor swept by with a bottle, topped off Mira’s vodka tonic.

  “On the house.”

  “Thanks, V-Man.”

  “V-Man?”

  “We go back. I was here last night.”

  “With Gary?”r />
  “No, not with Gary.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know what I read yesterday? Well, I didn’t read it, but the man who told me, he read it somewhere. You know starfish?”

  “Is that a band?”

  “No, I mean, like, starfish. The ocean creature.”

  “Resting on the ocean floor.”

  “Right. This guy told me you’re not supposed to call them starfish anymore. It’s, like, derogatory. You’re supposed to call them sea stars.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because they’re not really fish. They’re something else. Mollusks, maybe. That type of genus. I don’t know the technicalities.”

  “That’s weird,” I said. “But I guess it’s reasonable. If they’re not fish, I mean.”

  “Fucking thought police,” said Mira.

  I laughed. It wounds me to admit it, Catamounts, but my laugh did sound different now, a tad fakey. Was it due to some reaction when it hit the atmosphere, a sine-wave vapor-type deal? Damn me for not paying more attention to Mrs. Strobe sophomore year. I guess I just tuned out after I aced that quiz darkening bubbles at random. Mrs. Strobe kept me after class, hovered over me in her serape, her heavy jewelry, told me I had a future in science. This scared me, Catamounts. I kept picturing myself stuffed into a mist-shrouded pod, genetically spliced with Vinnie Lazlo.

  I tanked the rest of the semester.

  “Still seeing Gary?” I said to Mira now.

  “Here and there. Mostly there. Now and then. Sometimes. I’m still intrigued by him, sort of.”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  “He’s a basket case, maybe? You know what he’s been talking about? Retracting his retraction.”

  “I know.”

  “Will he have to give the money back?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I told him he should go find Doc Felix, confront him.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I told him he should bring you along. He’s not well. He needs an interest. Something beyond the pursuit of immediate gratification. A passion.”

  “Like model boats?”

  “Not a hobby. A passion.”