Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

  “Jazz Dancing Jasmine?”

  “With those fucking … what do you call them?”

  “Leg warmers?”

  “No, those wristbands. Remember those spangled wristbands? She used to drive me crazy with those things. I wonder what she looks like now.”

  “No worse than you or me.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “How’s Batch?” I asked.

  “My old man? He’s dead, dude.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Last May. Caught a stroke.”

  “He was a good man.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “He was a good groundskeeper.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I can still smell that smell. Fresh cut grass. Burnt oil.”

  “He was a shit mechanic.”

  “Hey, Chip.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Still have that rottweiler? The one that ate eighty million bucks?”

  “I loved that dog,” said Chip.

  Victor shot me a look. Apparently the lost lottery ticket was not a favored topic here.

  “What happened?” I said.

  Chip downed his drink, flipped his glass on the bar.

  “Cut the bitch open. Couldn’t find the ticket.”

  The phone purred.

  “Like I said,” said Victor, clicked off the receiver. “Driest on record.”

  “Say what?” I said.

  “That was your father. Don Berlin’s Party Garden is on fire.”

  I’M SURE many of you Catamounts caught the nightly news that night, work shoes kicked off under your coffee tables, ties loosened, bras unhooked, tattered concert tees slipped into, pistachios, beers in your laps, hands wheedling their way into your sweatpants to adjust a tampon, a testicle. I’m sure most of those watching saw Glen Menninger’s younger brother Roger with his Channel Four News Team News microphone standing yards from the blaze, shouting above the sirens while some neighborhood kid held a handmade sign reading “Dingleberry” above his head.

  Black smoke pouring into the blue night.

  Roger reported the arson rumors right away. Maybe more than a few in Eastern Valley wondered if Daddy Miner was the firebug. None that knew him, though. Hours later they were leading Don Berlin away in handcuffs. Gasoline stains in his car. Fumes in his suit. Insurance claim in his home office hopper. A real Murnighan scam.

  Berlin told the police the whole truth, but it hardly sounded like a confession, more a deposed king’s lament. His stateliness never deserted him, even if his buddies at Borough Hall did. His wife, the prettier twin, stuck by, too.

  During the perp trot to the cruiser, one of those unnecessary evils we’ve come to depend on as a viewing public, Roger Menninger poked his Team News microphone at Don Berlin’s defiant face.

  “Don! Did you do it? Why did you do it?”

  “I built it,” said Don. “It was mine to burn.”

  “He means that metaphorically!” screamed a fat man trailing after them.

  It was another thrilling Catamount moment, alums, because that fat man was Lee Nygaard, class of ’87, Fordham Law graduate and current counsel for Don Berlin.

  “A damn good lawyer, too,” said Daddy Miner, when I called him at the Moonbeam.

  “He once drank a fifth of crème de menthe before a school assembly and puked on Miss Robinson.”

  “I thought that was you,” said my father. “I tell everybody that was you.”

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, did you hear what Don said on the news?”

  “That man is a tough cookie,” said my father. “He had me beat all these years. I hate to see him go out like this. He was a warrior. But now the age of the Moonbeam has begun. Your friend already called.”

  “What friend?”

  “Stacy what’s-her-name. The doctor. I don’t remember her from your graduation. Did she have big tits? Was she that hippie with the tits going on about some oil spill?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. What do you mean she called you?”

  “The Togethering. It’s at the Moonbeam.”

  “What about the shamans?”

  “Pushed it up. Obviously, you don’t have to work the shift, if you don’t want to. You might want to spend quality time with your old classmates.”

  “Fuck them.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Hey, Dad,” I said. “I got my license back.”

  “Hazel would have been proud. She always said you would drive a car someday.”

  “It’s her birthday, you know.”

  “I know, Lewis.”

  “I’ve been thinking about her today, that’s all.”

  “You’re a good boy, Lewis.”

  “Are you proud of me?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said you were a good boy.”

  MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER was a horse thief in the Ukraine. So his son could run numbers in the Bronx. So his son could go legit with liquor stores in Queens. So his son could build bars, catering halls, in New Jersey So his son could be a busboy for his father? Was there supposed to be a glorious continuum to all of this striving? I guess somebody had to break the glorious continuum chain. Even at twelve, thirteen, sitting in my bedroom, imagining myself a man, a man sitting fierce and lonesome at a strip joint at last call, I knew that somebody would be me.

  Not to say I never had any plans. I had plans. I could picture myself in various places. But I was never doing anything in these pictures, these places. I was just sort of standing there, being congratulated for something. Sometimes I had a glass of punch in my hand. It was important I finish my punch, not just swish it around in my mouth. The parade was about to begin.

  Teabag Day is a big deal around here.

  HOLLIS WOFFORD was telling us about his narcissism.

  “I’m a fucking narcissist,” he said. “But I’m in serious awareness about it.”

  He squeezed his balls, sucked his teeth.

  I’d come over to the Retractor Pad to tell Gary about the Togethering moving to the Moonbeam. Hollis had answered the door, his eyes tracking the slope of my skull.

  “Larry’s here,” said Hollis.

  “I can come back later,” I said.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  There was something in the air, Catamounts, contrails of evil talk.

  “Hollis and I were just discussing secrets,” said Gary.

  “We’re only as sick as our secrets,” Hollis said. “Secrets are what destroy us. That and blowcaine. My secrets consume me. Almost as much as my hatred for Larry’s cocksucking buddy Fontana.”

  “Hey, Hollis,” said Gary. “I thought we were doing step work, here. I think you’ve gone off message.”

  “It’s all one message,” said Hollis. “Many paths leading to one truth.”

  “Lewis,” said Gary, “how’s the day treating you?”

  I felt funny talking with Hollis in the room, but he seemed to have sunk into his own harm-happy stew. He was huffing on his sunglasses, wiping them down with his shirttails. I told Gary about Don Berlin’s Party Garden burning down, which he knew about, and the Togethering now being a Moonbeam affair, which he didn’t.

  “Will Fontana be there?” said Hollis.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “Well, I can’t go anyway. In case you haven’t heard, I’m a wanted man. But Fontana better steer clear of me. I’ve got nothing to lose now. Crimes of passion are where I’ve drawn the line over the years, but my chalk is getting down to the nub.”

  I wondered if Gary was hurt by the word nub. Maybe Gary didn’t know he had a nub.

  “Listen,” said Hollis. “You better not tell anyone you saw me. I can trust Gary here because we are bonded by our recovery. But you’re an active. You’re in denial. People in denial do stupid things. I can assure you our mutual friend Pete will undertake more than eviction procedures on your sorry ass if you speak word one. Is this dug with appropriate depth?”


  “I guess so.”

  “This is no age for guesswork,” said Hollis, stood, turned back to Gary. “And as for you, Slippy Slipperton. Renaldo Relapse, Esquire. I know what kind of game you’ve been running. It’s a punk’s game. I’m no Mother Teresa. I’m no Venerable Fucking Bede, either, but I’ve heard your shares in the meetings lately and I just sit there in my folding chair with my little Styrofoam cup and think to myself, ‘Hollis, that boy is making a damn fool of himself. His step work is shit and he’s surrendered to nothing. Even now, as he rambles incoherently about his higher power and one-day-at-a-time and easy-does-it, that motherfucking ship is going down.’ Easy will do you, my friend. And I’ll do you, too. I know I’m partly to blame because I keep selling you the stuff, but you’re not being cool about it. You’re besmirching my reputation in the fellowship. Don’t you understand, when you come to me as a buyer I have to sell to you? I’m a dealer, it’s who I am. But it breaks my heart every time. It breaks my heart as your sponsor, and as your friend. And to have to sit there and pretend to everybody that you’re clean! All those chips and coins and key chains! There are starving kids in Somalia who’ve been sober their entire lives! They don’t get a fucking chip, and you do? Shame, brother. Shame, shame. Keep it up and we’ll have it out once and for all, you and me. I’ll dance on your teeth in my stiletto heels. My fuck-you pumps. Adios amigos.”

  When Hollis was gone Gary took his bong out from under the sofa, packed a pungent bowl.

  “He’s right about my step work,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s time for a new sponsor,” I said. “People grow, change. Don’t they?”

  “He’d kill me.”

  “He’d get over it.”

  “After he killed me.”

  We smoked up, popped some beers.

  I tried to lighten the moment by breaking Gary’s heart. I told him about Bob Price and Mira. He seemed grateful for the opportunity to worry a lesser wound.

  “That bitch,” he said. “And that bastard, too. I read that book you gave me. What a load. Well, I liked the softball story. But in the great scheme of things it was still a steaming load. Who are these people? Come to our town, think they can steal our women just because we sit on our asses all day. We should go kick his grin in.”

  Seemed like everybody wanted to have it out with everybody, Catamounts. There weren’t enough goodies to go around. What is this thing life that keeps batting our hands away, our hooks, even? Harried grabbers, all of us, even the slack. Feign torpor, you still want the groovy stuff. Torpor itself is a kind of greed.

  For time, maybe.

  Or that pitiful grail: the absence of pain.

  I left Gary to his lesser and greater wounds, went walking in the night. A peel of moon over Cassens Pack. Pole lights over it, too, oblong bulbs fitted to the ends of swanning steel. A race of giant grays from Galamere Five. Night watch, cyclopean. Eyes on the nubiles.

  This park had a lot of memories, Catamounts, and not just of hot dogs, incontinence.

  Witness tiny Lewis, spidering around the monkey bars, or gouging the dirt with a stick.

  Later there’s Claudine, the dentist’s daughter. Her bony hips poke out from beneath her canvas running shorts. She’s twelve, has laid her body out like a succulent corpse on the painted slide.

  “You can touch around it,” she says.

  This is happiness, relief. He wants with all his heart to touch precisely what’s around it.

  Others gather for games. Smear-the-Queer. Kill-the-Guy-with-Ball. They are the same game, really. The first name is forbidden in Hazel’s house. The second makes him tremble with the beginnings of knowledge. Even if you get the ball, especially if you get the ball, they will kill you. Why bother getting the ball?

  The Goldschmidtt brothers throw coins at his feet, say, “Pick it up, kike.” Gary says they do it because they’re called Goldschmidtt. They worry people won’t know the difference.

  Years on, boys huddle beneath the birches. A place of congress when the Pitch-n-Putt’s narcked up. Car trunks full of tallboys, funnels, tubes. Junior scientists on the verge of invention. A major breakthrough in shitfaced. Girls arrive later to gauge the damage. One night Jazz Jasmine holds Lewis’ head in her lap while he dribbles Hazel’s casserole between her legs. He thinks it could be the start of something, but she never really talks to him again.

  It’s Cassens Park, Catamounts, need I go on? It’s the great green field in your hearts!

  I WALKED to the plaza, to the pay phone near Eastern Valley Video. I wanted to call Roni, watch her pull up in her dented sedan, sit with her in cream leather singed with her mother’s cigarettes. She was off tonight. I’d studied the schedule. I wondered if she’d even come. Maybe it was better to leave whatever we had in the Moonbeam stockroom.

  A Dumpster stood nearby with its lid half-loose from its hinges, some kind of troop ship, blasted, beached. I could picture a baby-faced Auggie Tabor rumbling out of it with his rifle, chunks of pavement flying up around him. The great plaza landing. Years in the planning. Now the invasion was over. The bodies had been collected, or paved over, the sidewalks, speed bumps, scrubbed of blood.

  “It gets eerie here,” said a voice.

  The Kid leaned up on a lamppost, his pants unzipped, tugged idly on himself.

  “You should see it crowded,” I said. “In sunlight.”

  Togethering

  THAT MORNING I’d risen early for my new fitness regimen. Five push-ups, five sit-ups, no excuses. I brewed some coffee in Hazel’s Silex, a bowel-blazer of a pot, awaited thick exodus from tube town. I had new toilet reading lined up, too, a dense, glossy bird guide. No more howls and shrieks from the dark crevices of experience, no more histories of Barbary pirate slaughter, monographs on bubonic plague. Those were the porcelain comforts of the old Teabag.

  Now I’d have the dope on my beaked buddies twittering on the AC.

  Tonight’s Togethering, though, there was still that to endure. What the hell had I been thinking, Catamounts? Bussing flatware for you, my former classmates, had seemed a gesture of brusque defiance when I’d demanded the shift on the telephone. This morning I knew it for what it was: the dumbest idea I’d ever had in a wretched and ceaseless cavalcade of them.

  “Suit yourself,” my father had said.

  What I think he meant, Valley Cats, was that we never really suit ourselves. We suit a notion of what we dream we could be in the eyes of others, when in the eyes of others we are at best a blur, at worst a sty, or corneal abrasion.

  How do Daddy Miners have so much wisdom? How do they hide it so well?

  It was too late to switch my shift, but at least Roni would be working. I was looking forward to some napkin retrieval.

  I SPENT SOME HOURS padding my resume. It’s strange to see your life laid out cold on a page. There are all these tricks the resume people teach you to account for the gaps. I had a good amount of gaps. I figured instead of fudging them I should make the gaps a selling point. I’d tell interviewers to judge my employment history like a piece of music. It’s all about the space between the jobs.

  For references I listed Penny Bettis, Salvatore Fontana, the undeniable and ever-anarchic beauty of true punk rock and a strangely delectable concoction Moonbeam Rick had introduced me to: bacon-wrapped prunes. I figured the first two would suffice.

  I nearly got derailed cruising for some yarn porn, Catamounts, but I’m delighted to report that though I failed to manage complete abstinence, I did embrace some tantric notions of stricture. My leashed load assumed the properties of a distinct life force as the day progressed. Civilizations rose and fell. City-states emerged. Later, nations. There were holy wars, followed by feverish periods of reason worship. Then more holy wars. So much creation and destruction and partial rebirth, and all because I hadn’t blown my wad into a quilted sheet of paper towel.

  It would be the first of many revelations that day.

  AROUND NOON I walked over to the Bean Counter. Mira was out front on her
break, sipping from a can of mango juice, leafing through a leather journal.

  “Hey, Tea,” she said.

  “What’s that, your diary?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you have anything in it about how you screwed over Gary?”

  “Why don’t you just marry him, Tea?”

  “It would ruin our sex life.”

  “Look, I’m on break. Donna can get you something if you want.”

  “I’m sorry, Mira. It’s not your fault. People grow, change.”

  “Tell me about it. Bob split. Took off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said he was done with his research. He was going up to some house he owns in the woods to write the book.”

  “Didn’t invite you, huh?”

  “Did you know he was married?”

  “No.”

  “She’s an investment banker. He’s been trying to keep it under wraps.”

  “I’m sorry, Mira.”

  “You said that already.”

  “So, is that really your diary?”

  “I found it in back, under some sacks of Kona. It must be Craig’s.”

  “The Colette Man? Can I see?”

  Mira pushed the journal across the table. I read a few stray passages, jotted them down on a napkin:

  In Joe Picarcik’s epic fumble there is an exquisiteness, a grace, a nobility no touchdown bomb, delicately threaded upfield strike or even deftly prosecuted handoff can emulate …

  There was a time, a better time, when from beneath the helmets of these gladiators flowed the long locks of Apollonian vanity. These boys weren’t just faceless football jocks pounding the bejesus out of each other. They were beautiful young men with beautiful hair—blondes, brunettes, redheads, or else members of the negroid vanguard with Afros efflorescing out the reenforced plastic edges of their Bikebrand helms. They all possessed the aspect of giant armored schoolgirls, full of spite and power and play. Possibility was in the air. But then came retrenchment, supply-side economics, the resuscitation of the buzz-saw haircut …