All Families Are Psychotic

by Douglas Coupland

  ‘Hi. This is Wade calling Florian about the letter from his … mother. I spoke with you yesterday.’

  This seemed to cause the slightest twitch of enthusiasm in her voice. ‘I’ll patch you through. One moment.’

  Wade was glad to have passed the gatekeeper.

  A sarcastic German accent, filtered through umpteen cell towers, satellites, optical fibers and copper cables, came on: ‘Well, hello, is this really young Wade?’

  ‘Hi, Florian.’

  ‘Oof! This is too rich. How on earth did a little piss-ant comme toi end up with my delivery?’

  ‘More to the point, what’s a bag of Eurotrash like you doing ransacking my family’s goddamn hotel room?’

  ‘Temper, temper, Wade. You’ll notice I waited until nobody was there. Was anybody hurt? No. Was anything stolen? No.’

  ‘Only because you couldn’t find it.’

  ‘Why pay for something I can have for free?’

  ‘You immoral scum—’

  ‘Oh, shut up. I’m not immoral, I’m merely very, very rich, and because I’m very, very rich I live by different rules. It’s the way things work.’

  I will keep my cool. I will keep my cool.

  ‘Wade, do speak to me, because I can practically hear your therapist’s voice coming through the receiver telling you to contain yourself.’

  He is a European shitbag. He is not worth my time.

  Florian went on: ‘You’re still keeping silent, so I must be correct. What are you enrolled in – an ‘anger management’ workshop? Lots of winners there, I imagine. By the way, the Bahamas misses you. I heard via the tom-toms that you ended up in Kansas City. Excuse me while I gag. Dear boy, you should have phoned me – whoops – sent me an e-mail – and told me of your plight. I could have sent a packet of culture your way – tickets for regional dinner theater, paintings of weeping clowns painted by celebrated funny man Mr. Red Skelton.’

  ‘Florian, shut up. Do you want the bloody letter or not?’

  ‘So butch.’

  ‘Well?’

  Florian changed direction. ‘It was brought to my attention that there was a prescription bottle for ddI in your hotel’s bathroom, Wade. Hardly a recreational drug.’

  I forgot my ddI. Shit, shit, shit. ‘Does your nanny still spank you to sleep at night?’

  ‘Gee whillikers, Wade, hit where it hurts. So what’s with the ddI, huh?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Mumps? The croup? Tonsillitis?’

  ‘You’re a real wit, Florian.’

  A tractor-trailer belched by. Florian asked, ‘Was that a truck I just heard?’

  ‘Yeah, it was.’

  ‘Wade! You’re in Zimbabwe, aren’t you? Having hot, steamy unprotected sex with central African truckers.’

  ‘Florian, talk business.’

  ‘So manly!’

  Best not to tell him Norm’s dead – best not to mention Norm at all. ‘Before you start razzing on me too much here, Florian, I’m just the courier on this deal, OK? I’m just the messenger.’

  ‘You mean to say Donald Duck brought our friend Stormin’ Norman back from the dead?’

  Shit.

  ‘You know, Wade, all those dancers prancing about Small Town USA – young gypsies with a song in their heart and a cell phone in the changing rooms – of course I found out. Your shit could come out sideways while sitting on a Disney latrine, and every freshman inside their Minnie Mouse costume would know before you’ve even flushed. And tell me this, Wade, did Norman tell you there were other people who wanted this letter badly?’

  Wade said nothing.

  Florian continued: ‘I’m assuming that’s a “yes”. And did Norman also hand you a line about royal stationery being made out of titanium and the Queen’s recycled panties?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘You are such a chump, Wadie-kins.’

  ‘There was a blackout at Disney World and suddenly he was … dead.’

  ‘Wade, I’ve done some iffy things in my life, but I have yet to either infiltrate the Disney World power system or shoot poison darts at morons who own a bunch of money-hemorrhaging sports franchises. And the only reason poor Norman couldn’t come to the Bahamas himself was because last year he got caught fencing stolen Cézanne sketches, which, granted, in the Bahamas is as common as jaywalking, but not when the buyer is one of the governor’s best cricket buddies.’

  ‘It’s a cash deal, Florian.’

  ‘Wade, you’re starting to bore me.’

  ‘I’ve gotta go, Florian.’ Bye.

  Click

  ‘Well?’ Bryan was trying to stand inside the thin lazy shade cast by a telephone pole. ‘Can we go?’

  ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ Wade realized he’d forgotten to ask about Howie.

  ‘We’ve gotta buy Mom some pads for her heels. She said her heels are hurting’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘That German guy really pissed you off. Sounds to me like you know each other really well. What’s the deal? Did you work for him?’

  … applying defibrillators to the dolphins being smuggled into North Carolina …

  ‘Wade?’

  … Wade, the only thing heavy enough on the boat to make a body sink is the anchor …

  ‘I’m right – you do know him.’

  … Yes, she’s sixty, Wade. So close your eyes and think of Fort Knox …

  ‘Yeah, OK, I’ve worked with the guy before. No big deal.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  … Keith just poured liquid nitrogen onto his goddam hand. Throw him out of the truck before the Dukes of Hazzard find our trail…

  ‘Doing nothing. What’s it to you, Bryan?’

  … It was either eat the packets or spend the next thirty years in a Montego Bay correctional facility. So we ate the packets…

  ‘It’s pretty bad stuff, otherwise you’d have told me what you’d done.’

  ‘Bryan, I oughta—’

  ‘No, you don’t oughta anything, Wade. Let’s just find Mom’s heel pads and I’ll forget we had this conversation. Zheesh.’

  The two men found a drug store a further walk away than they’d anticipated. Wade was preoccupied with Sarah, interspersed with worries about his forgetting his ddI, wondering whether its absence would speed up his body’s slow, sure unraveling. He remembered as a child removing the smooth white skins of golf balls, watching the neurotic disintegration of the little rubber bands inside them. Stupid, stupid, stupid to forget it.

  On the hotel’s twelfth floor, they entered the room, Wade saying, ‘We bought you your—’ and there were his parents, asleep together like two ageing sheepdogs.

  Janet opened her eyes. ‘Oh hello, dears.’

  Wade found himself unable to muster up the words to meet the situation, and his mother said, ‘What were you expecting, Wade, that we’d be in here bashing each other over the head with a door ripped off the bathroom cupboard? We’re people, not cartoons.’

  Ted was still asleep, snorting intermittently as moist folds of skin within him relaxed and convulsed.

  ‘But—’

  ‘After the life you’ve led, you find this surprising?’

  Bryan said, ‘Wade called that German guy – the Flower dude – and Wade used to do all sorts of nasty shit for him.’

  ‘I rest my case,’ said Janet. ‘Decades’ worth of sinful doings, but Mom and Dad in bed retains the power to shock.’

  Ted bolted awake: ‘Is he giving you a hard time?’ His demeanor suggested to Wade that a beating might be imminent.

  ‘Everybody get off my case. Geez, it’s like I’m suddenly on trial.’

  Bryan asked, ‘What was the baddest thing you ever did?’

  ‘Bryan, shut up.’

  Janet said, ‘No, why not answer, dear? I mean, face it, we’ve been a bit curious these past two decades.’

  ‘I am a married man! I have a wife and soon a child – my past is no longer the issue it once was!’

  Ted said, ‘H
a!’ and Janet giggled.

  ‘What? What’s so funny?’

  ‘Dear,’ said Janet, ‘your past isn’t something you escape from. Your past is what you are.’ His parents propped themselves up on pillows.

  Bryan was comfy on a side chair. He asked Wade, ‘Did you ever, like, actually kill somebody?’

  ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’

  Janet said, ‘Well?’

  ‘OK. Fair enough. Yes, but not intentionally. It was an accident, and it occurred in international waters, so I’m innocent and blameless.’

  ‘What happened?’ Janet asked.

  ‘This moron, Ron, got beaned on the head with a jib pole during a run into Cuba.’

  Janet asked, ‘A run into cuba?’

  ‘Yeah. We had about five thousand Wonder Bras we were trading for cigars. This was before the Wall came down, and the Soviets were extra prickly about smuggling ladies’ products because they’re so much harder to fence. This neighbor of Florian’s bought a Da Vinci sketch with the profits from a Greek sardine trawler loaded with Kotex. And this other guy, Rainer, retired after delivering a boatload of canola into a private facility south of Havana. He bought a 1936 Cord with that one.’ Wade didn’t want to go any further into his past. ‘Shouldn’t we go find Shw?’

  ‘I suppose yes,’ Janet said. ‘Up you go, Ted, upsy-daisy.’

  Ted lugged his body upright then lumbered off to the bathroom to vomit again.

  Janet put on her shoes and massaged her wrists. ‘I want to phone Sarah.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Wade blurted. ‘Now’s not a good time.’

  ‘No? Why not?’

  ‘I was just talking to her – downstairs, on the pay phone. She’s, uh, uh’ – think, think, think – ‘loading tadpoles into a special tank, I think.’ Hey, that sounded good.

  Janet didn’t press the issue. ‘Oh. OK. Ted, come on, let’s go find the mother of your grandchild.’

  Once in the orange van, the Drummonds seemed almost half asleep, drugged by the flattening afternoon sun. All birds had vanished, and traffic was approaching zero. The hotels seemed beyond dead – hotel mummies. Wade wondered how a place like Florida was settled in the first place – the thorny, insect-infested scrub and swamps; rancid waters; predators – the lack of air-conditioning and freeways – with machetes and Bibles. In Wade’s mind, Florida wasn’t so much a place where one went to reinvent oneself as it was a place where one went if one no longer wished to be found.

  ‘Turn left there.’ Janet pointed at a street up ahead. ‘It should be on the left, in the middle. Yes – there it is – 1650.’

  ‘That’s Shw’s car!’ Bryan slipped out the moving car’s side door.

  ‘Bryan, you frigging idiot—’ Ted snapped fully to life.

  Wade hopped out of the car, ran Bryan down and tackled him on the driveway.

  22

  Life is just so much easier if we simply wing it. Maybe if we wing it properly, we can trick ourselves into winging death, too. Or is that too simple a strategy?

  Janet was looking out the van’s window at Wade, tackling Bryan on the terra cotta brick driveway of a Floridian muffler king. Janet thought a bit more about the muffler king and what she’d read about him on the Internet back at the library: Well, he isn’t really a muffler king, per se. He’s really more of an in-dash cigarette lighter king, or an injection-molded-vinyl-insert-that-fits-into-the-window-rolling-up-knobby-available-in-any-color king – or the king of standardized automotive snippets that can be made in one of those itty-bitty equatorial countries with no human rights or distinct regional cuisine. Mufflers? But to manufacture nothing but mufflers – an undiversified product line? How archaic. How sentimental. A formula for failure.

  Ted, meanwhile, seemed to be kicking both his offspring with equal vim. Isn’t this just peachy – whatever next?

  Next was a German shepherd seemingly shot from a cannon on to Bryan’s leg, its fangs and jaws like a wood-chipper. Behind the dog appeared Shw, clad in a white terry-cloth robe, her hair in a white towel, at the top of a set of palm-kissed stairs. ‘Kimba! Stop!’ Kimba undamped from Bryan’s tibia and sat down and made a relaxed happy-dog face, while Bryan was transformed into a concentrated, twitching clot of pain. This pain, however, garnered him no sympathy from Shw. She skittered down the stairs, threw Kimba a Milk-Bone, and said, ‘Christ, Bryan, count on you to bring your family along. Look at you all – you look like a bunch of carnies.’ She stuck an emery board in her right front robe pocket. ‘Scram. Now. Before I give Kimba the attack signal. Now.’

  ‘Shw – you can’t sell our baby – it’s sacred. The baby’s my love for you made into a person—’

  ‘Bryan, put a gag in it.’ Shw noticed Wade and Ted eyeing the rental car. ‘What are you two looking at the car for?’

  ‘I left my prescription list in the trunk when you gave us a ride yesterday.’

  ‘A prescription list? What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a printout of all the medications I have to take.’

  ‘Big deal. Get a new one.’

  ‘I can’t. That one is—’ Wade was obviously fumbling for a lie.

  ‘That one is what? Look at me – you’re shitting me, aren’t you? You’re lying. What did you leave in there, money?’

  ‘No.’

  Shw was evidently X-times more shrewd than Wade, and immune to his charms. ‘No, you’re not the money type, are you? Well, whatever it was, Gayle probably hucked it in the trash. She cleaned the car for me.’

  ‘Gayle?’ Bryan asked.

  ‘Yeah. The mom-to-be. They worship me, and they wait on me hand and foot. I have a good gig going here, and you losers are going to screw it up, so scram.’ She turned to the dog: ‘Kimba!’ The dog stood erect, awaiting her command.

  Bryan cried, ‘Oh, God, I love you, Shw, I love you. Don’t you remember we set fire to the Gap together? We destroyed a field of Frankenstein beans together – it was real. Did all that mean nothing to you?’

  ‘Bryan, we had a moment, but it’s over.’

  ‘Okay, sic the dog on me, do what you want, but don’t sell the baby.’

  Kimba’s bloodbath was forestalled by the sound of a jolly ‘Ahoy, mateys!’ in the darkness-free vocal tones of a cruise director.

  ‘Shit—’ said Shw. ‘It’s Lloyd. Act normal. If that’s possible.’

  Janet happily watched the show.

  ‘Emily!’ shouted Lloyd, ‘I can’t believe you brought the Drummond family along. I’m’ – he placed his hand over his heart – ‘deeply, deeply touched.’

  In unison, Bryan, Wade, Ted and Janet said, ‘Emily?’

  ‘Emily is the most thoughtful womb donor I could ever hope to meet, and you’ – with his arms he took in the whole of the Drummond family – ‘as the genetic forebears, are the embodiment of kindness. Come! Come into the house. Oh my! What a feast we’ll have tonight.’ He turned around. ‘Gayle! Gayle! Little Emily has brought us the entire Drummond family!’

  Gayle, a pretty fortysomething, poked her head out the window. ‘God bless you, Drummond family! Come in! Come in! But ignore the mess. The place is a disaster.’

  It was all Shw could do not to spontaneously combust, as the group entered Lloyd’s house, a spanking new showcase of software modernism: ‘I designed the place from a kit I bought at Office Depot,’ Lloyd said. ‘Something else, huh?’

  The room’s contents all seemed to be … shiny. Or pink. Or fuzzy. Or brass. Not a right angle was to be seen anywhere. ‘Lovely,’ Janet said.

  Gayle appeared in the room and spread out her arms and curtsied as if in a children’s ballet: ‘The grandmother of my Chosen Child!’ She hugged Janet with animal force. ‘Oh my, the child is going to be so smart – and so pretty.’ She turned to Ted. ‘Or handsome. Lloyd! Lloyd! Let’s have drinks for everybody – open the bottle from France.’ She turned to the Drummonds: ‘It’s French.’ Then she turned to Shw: ‘Emily, come help me pour.’

  The family could only cr
ow at Shw’s humiliation, as Gayle hovered over her. ‘Careful now, you’ll topple the fluted glasses. And don’t shake the bottle or else you’ll make that lovely expensive Champagne spew, and it’ll be wasted. And apple juice only for you, mother-to-be.’ Shw looked at the Drummonds and gave a martyred smile. Janet assumed that the loving daughter act was a sham, and that more money was still to come Shw’s way. Thank God Bryan has the presence of mind to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘I want to use your phone to call my wife,’ said Ted.

  Gayle turned to him with a brief but unmistakable icicle of a stare.

  ‘It’s a local call,’ he continued, turning to Janet for confirmation. ‘Right?’

  ‘Nickie’s long distance, Ted.’

  ‘You have a calling card?’ Gayle asked.

  Janet said, ‘Ted, I’ve got your phone, but the phone number’s in the van. Nickie and Beth are just fine in Kevin’s trailer.’

  ‘When did Nickie say she’d call again?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ted.’

  Bryan, who was swooning from the pain of the dog bites and sunburn, caught Lloyd’s eye. ‘Looks like you have one major ouchy-doodle there, Bryan – son – I don’t know what to call you. I feel so close to you.’

  ‘Codeine. Vicodins. Percocets. Now,’ Bryan wheezed.

  ‘I’ll see what I can rustle up.’ Lloyd left the room.

  Wade said, ‘Hey, Gayle, Emily’s been saying so many kind things about you.’

  Shw’s body visibly clenched, but Gayle beamed with delight as she passed the Champagne flutes around. ‘Oh, now really, she didn’t have to …’

  ‘No,’ Wade went on, ‘she couldn’t say enough good things about you, right, Mom?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She even said she felt guilty accepting so much money for being a Chosen Mother. She said that all that money didn’t feel right – that she’d become too close to you, that it’d feel wrong – un-Christian.’

  ‘Did she now!’ Gayle’s bargaining radar was in full operation.