by Sam Lipsyte
“Got a minute?” says Chief Howie.
“Busy,” I say. I roll the almost empty spray can under the dumpster with my foot and lean up against the tag, hoping the paint’s as quick-dry as advertised.
“Wrong answer,” says Chief Howie, and gets out of the car. He comes over like a TV cracker sheriff and administers the beat-down, cuffs me and throws me in the back seat, careful to press my head going in like they do on all the shows. We drive up Spartakill Road, past the Burger King and the Hobby Shop and the Pitch-n-Putt, until we’re going by all the big houses with the huge lawns I used to mow and the big bay windows that you can look through if you want to see people alone or in groups feeling like shit and not knowing why.
“People up here treat me like the garbage man. Which is what I am.” Chief Howie winks in the rearview. “Know what that makes you?” He takes a pull from something in his hand. I can hear bottles clinking together on the rubber floormat.
“Don’t worry about me,” I say.
“Why would I worry about you?” says Chief Howie.
We turn on Venus, cop wheels crunching on the gravel edge of someone’s driveway. I make out the shapes in the darkness, gigantic mounds of earth, big sleeping tractors, rows of brand-new houses wrapped in moonglow plastic. I’ve been up this way already tonight because at the end of the drive is the model house where Dana and her father and her father’s eyeballs live. It’s Dana’s cousin’s company’s development, but so far they’re the only customers.
“That dumb hebe,” says Chief Howie.
I don’t say anything because I don’t know what he knows about me and Dana, if he’s actually trying to fuck with me or we’re just up here because he felt like driving, because if you are just driving around it makes some sense to end up here if you’re curious about what all the dark shapes are and then one with a few lights on in it.
The lights are out in Dana’s living room and you can see the TV screen reflected in the big front window. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s on the screen, but what it looks like it is is pussies. That’s right—in the plural, shaved and flaming, smooching in a close-up grind. What’s a blind man doing with porn? Or is it Dana? Stretched out on the couch, spelunking with one hand and pinching her little sno-balls with the other.
I see Chief Howie has taken a sudden interest in the cinema. I see he’s staring at the window, too.
“My, my,” he says. “There ought to be a law about that.”
“There is, Sheriff,” I say. “It’s called the fourth amendment. Privacy and shit.”
“You little fuck!” says Chief Howie, whips a bottle back over the seat at my head. The ability to duck is a perfect example of why the nature-versus-nurture argument Dana’s always yapping about is a pile of crap. It’s both. Still, what does it get you? There you are, cuffed in the back seat while your pissed-off retard cop-uncle pulls off the curb and drives you far, far away from the big soft couch where your girlfriend is all alone with her juicer on frappé, just hoping you’ll come back like you half-assed threatened to, and now you are driving cruel distances from anything that could be reasonably called joy. So the bottle doesn’t open a big red smile on your forehead. So fucking what?
There’s no question left in my mind that this Saturday night is shot, is history, is a tiny meaningless point on the time lines Ms. Fredericks makes us copy down in World Studies. Chief Howie dumps me down at the bottom of the hill, takes off the cuffs, “impounds” my shake, my papers, a few bucks from my wallet.
“Go home,” says Chief Howie, and peels off like somewhere there’s a crime being perpetrated besides his own sorry-assed life.
A brisk nipplebreeze jaunt across the moonlit links of the Nearmont Country Club and I find myself once more in a familiar spot, leaning on the big white birch in front of Steve Redillia’s house, wondering whether I really want to go in there again.
As part of my project to ascertain whether I really want to go in there again, I crouch down in the bushes next to Steve Redillia’s house and peek through the basement window. Bilious smoke of the kind hangs nimbus-like in the half-lit room, and there’s Steve Redillia flopped out on his ratty couch, headphones on, Zildjian sticks flying in tight four/four air-drum formation. Steve Redillia is the third best speed metal drummer in New Jersey, or so he was told by Archbishop Chickenhawk of the Non-Dead, when he tried out for them and didn’t get the gig, and so he has repeatedly informed us.
I hate listening to music with him, not only because so-called speed metal is slow as shit as far as I’m concerned, but because he’s the type who when you listen to a song with him will in the middle of it nod his head and say, “Nice,” like in the middle of all that double-kick-drumming and guitar he heard some subtle shit your dolt ass could never comprehend. Then, if you don’t immediately smile and agree with him, Steve Redillia gives you this look, goes off on how nobody actually listens to music, and then maybe starts throwing shit, with you, as closest representative of a species he detests, the target.
“You fucking twats don’t get it at all!” he’ll say. “Goddamn puppets on a string!” And then objects, sharp and heavy, will receive the gift of flight.
Fuck it.
I book.
I’m coming home to a beat-down either way, so why procrastinate? I’m standing outside the kitchen door looking in, and now it’s like the third time tonight I’m sneaking around windows like a perv. Dad’s on the phone, probably with the Big Chief himself. Dad’s leaning up on the refrigerator—and I swear to God I catch him pulling one of those stringy boogers out of his nose, the kind with the dry handle and the gooey tail. He pulls it all the way out, holds it up for inspection, and then, I swear on Dana’s dad’s missing eyes, my fucking progenitor reaches under the edge of the Formica and deposits the snot jewel.
When I was a crawling babyboy, I used to hang out under that Formica, tagging the cabinets with my orange crayon, and whenever I looked up, I always saw these dried snots like tiny cave spikes dangling down. Once Mom found them there and chewed my ass but I denied it, which just got her madder, and Dad was sitting there the whole time shaking his head even though we both knew they were his boogers. I remember a look on his face like it’s a shame the world is like this before he got up with his belt.
Not to say this event was some big revelation, like before this he was taking me to the hobby shop on Saturdays and teaching me how to fly kites and shit, and then suddenly everything changed. It’s just another point on the time line.
So I go around to the garage door, hoping to get in that way—but Dad must have cloned himself, or built replicants, because by the time I get there I see another one of him through the garage window standing under the lightbulb with the only sound the hum of the meat freezer. He’s surrounded by all his tools, his hands on his hips like he’s the royal torturer taking a moment to reflect on the hot debate of the day, the rack versus the thumbscrews.
I guess this occurs to me because for Ms. Fredericks’s class I made that report on the Spain Inquisition situation. “A bit over the top, but informative,” was how Ms. Fredericks described my report, because I went into detail about the various devices any good torturer was familiar with, like the special skillets to fry up your testicles and the two-handed saws they wedged up your ass to saw you in half with.
Some of the Jervises in my class were all offended or something, like I approved of the whole thing (though no doubt Steve Redillia, if he hadn’t been expelled, would have), like I wasn’t fucking going out with a Jewish girl anyway, wasn’t sensitive to what her feelings might be in regards to Torquemada, if anybody were to tell her what the man thought of her, instead of seeing that I was just trying to do what any decent historian would try to do, too, namely to describe all the sick shit that went down, which Ms. Fredericks says must be done so we learn from our mistakes and so history doesn’t keep happening again and again. But I have my doubts about that theory. Because like remembering or not remembering your last beat-down has shit t
o do with the next one coming at your ass. And what help is a skinny black line with dots on it besides just to say this sucked, and that sucked, and do not doubt it all will suck again?
Less Tar
Out on the street I’m thinking, “Who needs life, people?” I stop off at Gupta’s to buy cigarettes. I’ve quit quitting them again.
“Two?” says Gupta, goes to the carton on the shelf, my carton, the soft-packs, lays them on the countertop. Forty sticks of friendship there.
“How’s your brother?” I say.
“Doing the same as you,” he says, pinches thumb and finger to his lips. Gupta was a journalist somewhere where it’s okay to torture one for prying. Lucky he had a brother set up in America. Now he sells Salems and bongs and screw-top one-hitters to the kids cutting trig at the prep school down the block.
“Your brother and I,” I say, “we must have a death wish.”
“Don’t be a fool,” says Gupta, “no one really wishes it.”
First smoke in a week. My lungs are good and rested, strong and wet. One drag, another, and the great dense mist of things—the company, Katrine—drifts up, away. When the butt burns down to my fingers I’ll flick it into the street, light another for the short walk home. I’ll put on some records, reread my junk mail, scour the clause minutia in the sweepstakes offers, call Katrine’s machine. I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke.
Smoking at work, that’s another story. We are outlaws of the state. We have a hideout, a floor forsaken partway through remodeling. Ghost cubes, glass-walled tombs. We all found our way here somehow. Martha runs the newsstand in the lobby. Mikhail is the Russian super’s lackey, possibly his son. Rich teaches real estate a few floors up. I do ad sales for an on-line magazine. I let them think I’m some kind of player, a silicon prince on the make, but Rich knows enough to see the fear in my eyes. I’ve been tracking numbers of doom these days.
“Don’t worry,” he tells me, “maybe you’ll fail upwards.”
Comments like this are why I’m always encouraging Rich to quit smoking. Who needs a smart-ass during your moments of stress-reduction?
Here’s Mikhail in a busted chair, some ergonomic locus of swivel and command. He flicks ash into a plastic cup. It’s a corner office, nothing here but dead carpet. I think of Gupta, wonder if it was a room like this where they did what they did to him, whip and wire and bamboo shoot, a rubber bucket for the human run-off of him.
Mikhail is runty in the big chair.
“Yo, I’m the CEO,” he says. “Your ass is fired!”
“You’re going to have to buy my shares, Mike.” I tap a cigarette out of the pack and tug it free with my teeth. Mikhail does silver magic with his Zippo, cups me flame. A team. A family.
“How’s the boss treating you?” I say. “Working hard or hardly working?”
Up here, I’m only good for pleasantries, the national patter.
“Work is for bitches,” says Mikhail, puts two fingers out, ash tweezed between them. His thumb is hammer-cocked. “A cap to the motherfucking dome. Know what I mean? Fuck toil, bro.”
“I’m with you,” I say, my words weak, unmeant, me here in French blue, an office-brightener tie. There’s grit in the combs of his thermal shirt, dull smears in his pants. His father, the super, sends him crawling through the ducts and tunnels of this heap. Asbestos hunts. The job, he told me, is to tack up false partitions, fool the Haz-Mat guys.
“I should learn computers,” says Mikhail, “they use them in the big buildings, niggers like me be using them for air-conditioning and shit.”
“Niggers?”
“That’s right.”
Mikhail gets up on the window sill, chops the air, slips a wire back into the smoke alarm.
“What about me?” I say.
“Guess you done slid the python eyes, G.”
We bump fists like ballplayers do.
I’m down.
Every few months I get another newsletter from the National Smokers’ Brigade. How do they know? An eye in the sky? An intercepted e-mail? Each time I have to remember the last time I was drunk, the last time I ever even drank. There was a guy at the bar, goatee and a patriotic T-shirt, “Don’t Tread on Me,” that colonial snake. He had a clipboard with a pen on a string. He rambled on about Jefferson, Rousseau, jabbed that pen around. I guess I must have signed the form. This was years ago. I don’t remember much. The night ended the next morning in the emergency room, a doctor with another clipboard, a metal one, hinged.
“Why do you do it, son?” the doctor asked.
“Go shoot a speedball,” I told him, “and you’d never ask anybody that question again.”
Some people give up the cigarettes with everything else. Me, I was pretty sure that without nicotine I’d be swinging from the shower nozzle in no time. You have to keep something between yourself and the truth of yourself or you’re dead, was how I figured it. Still do.
The upshot is that I get this newsletter from time to time, bumper stickers, membership pins. The Brigade, I gather, is funded by the tobacco lobby, but they play themselves up grassroots, an astroturf campaign. It’s always the same lead story in the newsletter, a trucker bar somewhere that won’t comply with the local smoking laws. The goose-steppers, the anti-smoke Gestapo, they’ve shut the joint down. We threw all of our boys and Patton at them, but the Reich has finally won. Or maybe it’s the Reds. Either way the barmaid can’t make rent and the Constitution is a paper scrap borne off on criminal winds. No veterinary school for the barmaid’s son. He’s headed for the mills.
Those anti-smoking bastards, I’ll think, spark up another square. Then I remember there is no barmaid, no son, and I start to hack up sour chunks of myself, toss my cigarette in the can. Still, it would be nice to stay pissed, to get my hands on a Ruger, or a Desert Eagle, join the brigade. We would puff away in a toolshed and plot the nicotine secession. Let us not forget, one of us would rasp, there are millions like us, ready to die for freedom.
Dying for something, anything, is tricky, though. You’d better be sure you believe. There was a time, I must admit, I might have been willing to die for Katrine. Or at least, as she would say, discuss the possibility. We had a good amount of discussion before we called it quits. Breaking up, she said, should take at least as long as the together part. Otherwise, what was the point? Even when we knew it was over, each of us was waiting for the other to make the move, to assume the mantle of villainy, to blink. She blinked, I told myself when she finally left, like maybe here I was—Jack the Man. I was watching a lot of the History Channel then. I pictured footage of me in deep conference with my close advisors. What if there’s a CIA inside the CIA? What if she screwed that guy at work?
The greeting on Katrine’s answering machine, it’s so honeyed, so wise. Anyone would marry that voice, those cadences, those warm conjunctive halts. Sometimes I call just to hear her sing her poem, the one fashioned of a certain disappearance—“I’m not here right now”—and her deep sweet oath to “get back real soon.” Like the solution to a riddle that will spring the maiden from the dragon’s lair, all you have to do is speak the digits, say your telephone number into the machine, but even that’s too much for me. I let the tape roll out. I am the insufficient son, the older, gruffer one that fails at the cave mouth, back broken on the stones, guts strung up in trees. My type has a seemly sibling who will prevail.
I hang up, draw another smoke from the foil.
All it takes is a morning with the spreadsheets to glimpse the four horsemen of fiscal apocalypse thundering toward our dream of an IPO. There’s Plummeting Ad Sales, in his scorched robes, on his maggot-shot horse, waving a scythe. I bolt from my desk, pass two design guys in the next room arguing about the new homepage art. Don’t bother, I want to tell them, but in this business you can trash a perfectly good career leaking catastrophe an hour before it’s official.
Martha is in the corner office, cooing smoke. It’s hard to tell Martha’s age, but the drop of her face, the veins
in her hands, remind me of my mother right before she got sick. When your mother is dead, maybe every woman over a certain age reminds you of her. You’ll find it in an eyebrow, the varicose nova on a stubbly calf, beckoning you to bury your head on her breast and weep.
My advice: Don’t do it.
“How are you, Martha?”
“Fucking pricks don’t pay for their newspapers,” she says. “Grab one, say ‘Get you next time, honey!’ Get fucking this next time! I got rent, you know.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I am, you moron.”
“I know that, Martha,” I say.
“Fuck you, too,” she says, flips her More to the carpet, grinds it out with her espadrille. “You pricks are all the same.”
True, and probably I owe Martha a few bucks myself, but the way things are going I’ll need them. Now Rich walks in, a silver pin stuck in his lapel, his hair slicked back in the style of men who seem to be saying, Hey, go blow, my hair is slicked back, and on weekends I know joy.
“Big doings on your floor, buddy. I’m smelling napalm.”
“What?”
“My only advice for you is to remember to tape the bottom of the box. Got a light?”
