The Book of Joe

by Jonathan Tropper

  He turned away from the television to look at me, an event that should have been heralded by trumpets it was so unusual. “You really have no other friends besides Wayne?” he asked, frowning incredulously. That was my father, sensitive to a fault.

  “None that are interested in working in an oven,” I said.

  “It's a good wage.”

  “No need to convince me. After all, I wasn't given a choice.”

  My father appeared ready to retort when his head suddenly jerked back to the television as someone hit or slid or did something clearly more important than the second fruit of his loins. “Okay,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “If you really have no other friends . . .”

  “Thanks for pointing that out once again,” I said, but he was already submerged in his baseball fog. The goddamn Mets might actually go all the way this year. I stood there for another moment to verify that the conversation was truly over, and then, with a sigh, headed into the kitchen to forage for my dinner.

  The first time I met Sammy, he was standing in my father's office, looking atrociously colorful in a brown cotton vest over a mint green T-shirt, gray Gap chinos rolled at the cuff, and black penny loafers, nodding nervously as my father frowned skeptically at his gangly form. “This is Samuel Haber,” my father said dejectedly, as if pointing out a troublesome wart on his toe. “He's here about the press job.” My father was a broad, hulking six foot three, thick Polish stock, with a square jaw set just beneath his perpetual frown, and a wrestler's neck that looked as solid as a tree trunk. Next to his intimidating bulk, Sammy looked like a twig.

  “A pleasure,” Sammy said, extending his hand and shaking mine crisply. “I don't have any friends yet, but if I did, they'd call me Sammy.”

  “I'm Joe,” I said. Looking at his skinny frame and his hairless baby face, I understood my father's skepticism. I wondered how often, if ever, Sammy shaved. “I guess you're new to the neighborhood.”

  “Just moved in,” he said. He turned to my father. “So, big guy, when do I start?”

  My father's eyes narrowed to slits. He was not the sort to appreciate jocular familiarity from his own children, let alone a strange boy. Arthur Goffman didn't relate well to any boy who wasn't an athlete, as I knew so well from painful experience, and Sammy was definitely a whole other breed. I liked him immediately.

  My father grunted. “Listen, Samuel, I'll be honest with you,” he said, which is what he generally said when he was about to put you down. “That's a big machine, and you're a skinny little guy. If you can work it, the job's yours. But if you can't handle it, you'll just gum up production, and I can't have that.”

  “Understood. Understood,” Sammy said, nodding emphatically. “Don't worry. I'm stronger than I look.”

  “You'd have to be.”

  “Good one, sir.”

  “And you lower those guardrails, you understand?” my father continued, before turning to me with a stern look. “You show him the guardrails and watch him lower them, you got it?” I nodded and he turned back to Sammy. “If you leave your arm on the bed when that press comes down, you'll be going home with a stump.”

  “Duly noted,” Sammy said. “The management frowns on amputation.” And then, lowering his voice theatrically, he added, “Thank you for the opportunity, big guy. I won't let you down.”

  My father stared at him for a long moment, trying to determine if there was some joke he might be missing. “Don't call me big guy.”

  “Understood, Arthur.”

  “Mr. Goffman.”

  “That was going to be my next guess.”

  My father sighed deeply. “Okay then, you're hired.”

  Sammy said, “Cool.”

  “You lower those rails.” Sammy imitated my father's growl surprisingly well as I walked him over to the press. “We can't have a severed arm gumming up production. Jesus! Was that guy toilet trained at gunpoint or what?”

  “Now might be the right time to tell you that he's my dad,” I said, not sure whether to be offended or amused.

  He stopped walking and looked at me uncertainly. “You're kidding, right?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Fuck me very much,” he said emphatically.

  I decided to go with amused. “Don't worry about it.”

  “No, really. I'm a schmuck. Sometimes in my efforts to win friends and influence people, I just make a complete ass of myself.”

  “Forget about it. It was a good impression.”

  “And for my next impression, a skinny putz with his foot in his mouth.”

  “It's really okay.”

  “I really am sorry. I'm sure he's a great guy.”

  I shrugged. “Not really.”

  Sammy studied my face intently for a moment. “Well, then,” he said with a grin. “Fuck him if he can't take a joke.”

  Sammy's father was a music professor at Columbia University. His mother had divorced him because of his unfortunate proclivity for bedding his female students, aspiring musicians being highly susceptible to passion and therefore easy prey. I learned this and many other things about Sammy during his first few days on the job. Working side by side for eight hours a day, we got to know each other pretty well. Sammy was a huge Springsteen fan and would unabashedly break into song as he worked the press, bobbing his head to the beat, serenading the immigrant women when they walked by, oblivious to their averted gazes. “Rosalita, jump a little lighter,” he would sing out without warning. “Come on, Carmen—sing it with me! Señorita, come sit by my fire.” He was fiercely passionate about Springsteen and would often lecture me on the profundity of a particular song, reciting the lyrics and punctuating them with his own commentary. He was terribly concerned about the recent commercial success of Born in the U.S.A. “I'm not saying it isn't a great album, but it doesn't compare to Greetings from Asbury Park or Born to Run. And all these airheads dancing to it on MTV are totally clueless. He's singing about the plight of our Vietnam vets, and the youth of America are shaking their asses like it's Wham! or Culture Club.” He punched the air with his finger for emphasis. “Bruce Springsteen is not Wham!”

  The summer of 1986 was on record as the worst to hit Connecticut in over ninety years, a hot, bleeding ulcer of a season. The air was laden with a cloying humidity and the pervasive stink of melting tar as the sun beat down mercilessly on the streets and roofs of Bush Falls. The neighborhood vibrated with the combined hum of the hundreds of central air compressors, nestled in side yards, that ran at a fevered pitch day and night, serving to further raise the already blistering outside temperature. People generally stayed indoors, and when forced to venture out, they moved sluggishly, as if under a greatly increased gravity.

  In the factory, Sammy and I toiled in pools of our own sweat, the heating beds from our presses adding a good ten degrees to the already sweltering temperature. We took our breaks outside, on the concrete stairs that ran down the side of the building to the parking lot, sipping lazily at cherry Cokes as the sweat evaporated off our bodies. “Have I mentioned,” he said to me during one such break, “that we have a pool?”

  I looked at him severely. “No, you haven't.”

  He grinned. “I meant to.”

  It was starting to look as if my summer might actually not suck after all.

  The Habers had bought an old white Dutch colonial on Leicester Road, a remote, hilly street that worked its way up to the highest point in Bush Falls, but that wasn't the important thing. The large, marbleized pool that glinted like a kidney-shaped jewel in their sizeable yard was all that mattered. Through eight hours of cutting and pressing hot styrene in the scorching heat, it seemed as if the image of its cool blue waters was permanently tattooed on the insides of my eyelids. But Sammy's pool represented far more than a relief from the summer heat. There were other factors. My house, which had the added distinction of not having a pool, was hardly a desirable destination for me in those days. A gloomy silence had settled over the family in the years since my mother's de
ath, and rather than working our way through it, we seemed to have buckled under its weight, like a house with a latent flaw in its construction. Conversation was rare, laughter an anomaly. At least Brad and my dad could talk basketball, once in a while even step into the driveway for some one-on-one, which gave the illusion of familial ease, but that summer my brother was off on a cross-country trip with some of his college buddies. That left just me to watch my father come home, his expression grim, his massive shoulders stooped from a general exhaustion that went much deeper than a hard day's work. I considered offering to play some one-on-one with him, but never actually did, so sure was I of the sardonic, condescending grin that would alight instantly on his face, the ironically pointed arch of his bushy eyebrows as he looked down to me and said, “You?” It was my sorry fortune to know that my father preferred to sit in the dim, air-conditioned privacy of his den, washing down his TV dinner with Bushmills in the nuclear glow of the television until he passed out, over stepping outside to spend some quality time with the runt of his inconsiderable litter.

  Factory hours were seven to three, and with Wayne working at Porter's until after six every evening, my afternoons stretched out before me with a bleakly comprehensive lack of options. A girlfriend would have come in pretty handy in those days, but in three years of high school I'd proven to be remarkably inept in that arena, and sadly not for lack of trying. The closest I'd come to sex up until that point was the night of my eighth-grade graduation, when Morgan Hayes had let me feel her up under the shirt over the bra while she shredded my lips with her braces.

  So it was a lonely, motherless, bored, and sexually frustrated teenager who accepted Sammy's invitation to submerge himself daily in the cool waters of the Haber swimming pool. And it was that same boy who discovered, much to his hormonal glee, that Lucy Haber, Sammy's long-limbed, ridiculously sexy mother, spent her afternoons alternately swimming laps and sunning herself in various two-piece swimsuits whose every fiber strained to contain her glorious assets.

  Sammy wasn't much of a swimmer. He went through the motions briefly, as if to justify his inviting me over to swim, but he would always climb out after five or ten minutes, pull a towel over his skinny torso, and retreat to the air-conditioned house, where he would reconfigure the soaked strands of his pompadour and read music magazines. After the first few days of this, we settled into a comfortable routine wherein Sammy hung out in the house reading and I stayed in the pool, nursing a shameless submarine erection as I chatted with his mother. Lucy, so unlike any mother I'd ever met, seemed to enjoy having someone to spend the afternoon with, and quizzed me incessantly about my own life, occasionally digressing into stories about hers. As far as I was concerned, she could have been discussing quantum physics and I would have been equally transfixed, so caught up was I in the constant inspection of her lush lips, her trim, tanned thighs, and the droplets of water that trickled down her glistening chest and into the crevice of her miraculous cleavage as she sunned herself beside the pool. Her husband's repeated infidelities now seemed not only wrong but baffling and incomprehensibly greedy. What could he possibly have yearned for that he didn't already have? It was all I could do to keep my hand out of my swim trunks as I floated around the pool, basking in Lucy's company. I developed the habit of leaving my towel by the pool's edge so that when I eventually, regretfully climbed out, I could artfully hide the rampant monster in my trunks.

  Showering at Sammy's house after swimming became a daily necessity, my lone opportunity to spank out my excess sexual tension. Afterward, Sammy and I would head into town in Brad's car, which I'd been grudgingly lent for the summer while he was away. We'd meet Wayne for burgers or pizza and then see a movie or hang out.

  Sammy and Wayne had hit it off right away. I could see how Sammy's frenetic nature and constant chatter might rub some people the wrong way, but Wayne's steady, easygoing demeanor was perfectly suited for it. Sammy seamlessly merged into our rhythm like a traveling musician sitting in with the band, and we became a merry little threesome.

  The days of that blistering summer were fused together like something mass-produced, each one identical to the one before and after it. Long, smoldering afternoons spent in masturbatory fascination with every languid movement Lucy made, each luscious curve and mysterious crevice, and nights hanging out with Sammy and Wayne. Even knowing everything that happened afterward, that was already happening, I remember how much I enjoyed that summer: a hazy, wet, shimmering eternity of thoughtless, menial labor, the splash and smell of chlorinated pool water, and Lucy's deliciously pornographic body. As far as summers went, you could do a lot worse.

  six

  I thought that I'd recalled Bush Falls rather well when I wrote the book, but as I drive through the town for the first time in seventeen years, I realize that all I've had are superficial recollections, cardboard stand-ins for real memories that are only now finally emerging. The corporeal experience of returning is the trigger to long-dormant memories, and as I gaze around my hometown, I'm stunned by the renewed clarity of what I'd buried in my subconscious. Memories that should have long since crumbled to dust from seventeen years of attrition turn out to have been hermetically sealed and perfectly preserved, now summoned up as if by posthypnotic suggestion. There is a sense of violation in learning that, unbeknownst to me, my mind has maintained such a strong connection with the town, as if my brain's been sneaking around behind my back.

  Bush Falls is a typical if smaller version of many middle-class Connecticut towns, a planned and determinedly executed suburbia where the lawns are green and the collars predominantly white. Landscaping in particular is taken very seriously in Connecticut. Citizens don't have coats of arms emblazoned above their front doors; they have hedges, fuchsia and pachysandra, flower beds and emerald arborvitae. A neglected lawn stands out like a goiter, the telltale symptom of a dysfunctional domestic gland. In the summer, the hissing of the cicadas, invisible in the treetops, is matched by the muted machine-gun whispers of a thousand rotating sprinklers, some dragged out of the garage after dinner, others installed beneath the lawns and set on timers. Soon, I know, the sprinklers will be put away for the season, replaced by rakes and leaf blowers, but for now they remain heavily in evidence as I drive down Stratfield Road, the main artery connecting the residential section of Bush Falls with its commercial district.

  Even though everything looks pretty much as it did when I left, I know the Falls is suffering. P.J. Porter's went bankrupt five years ago, resulting in over a thousand lost jobs. While the majority of people in the Falls were able to find new jobs in Connecticut's then still-solid market, many of them ended up at Internet start-ups, only to be savaged by the overdue collapse of the whole industry at the end of 2000. Now the town is solidly immersed in recession, and every block has at least one FOR SALE sign planted on the front lawn. Even though the houses generally look well maintained and the lawns immaculate, there's a sense of desperation in this quotidian tidiness, as if now, more than ever, these carefully tended homes are nothing more than facades concealing unknowable and irreparable damages.

  I turn left onto Diamond Hill Road and drive past my father's house, which concealed its own share of damage long before Porter's went belly-up. I slow down to take in the slightly sloping front lawn, at the top of which sits the square two-story colonial in which I grew up. The aluminum siding, a pale shade of blue when I was a kid, is now a dirty eggshell color, and the hedges growing beneath the dark picture window of the living room aren't nearly as tall or dense as I remember, but otherwise the house is exactly the same. I stop the car and take a deep breath, anticipating some sort of emotional reaction to my childhood home, and I come up empty. I haven't always been this dispassionate; I'm fairly certain of that. Is it a function of time and distance, or have I simply shed over the years what general sensitivity I once possessed? I try to recall a time in recent memory that I expressed any heartfelt emotion to another person, and can't come up with a single instance of sentiment or p
assion. Turning right onto Churchill, I'm troubled by the notion that while I wasn't looking, I seem to have become an asshole. This leads to a brief, syllogistic argument. The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefore, I'm not one.

  It is debates like this one, and the sneaking suspicion that I'm losing the overall capacity to give a shit, that led to my brief and ill-fated stint in therapy. One of the drawbacks I've discovered to being a fiction writer is that I seem never to fully inhabit the moment at hand. Part of me is always off to the side, examining, looking for context and subtext, imagining how I'll describe the moment after it's gone. My therapist, Dr. Levine, felt it had nothing to do with being a writer and everything to do with being egocentric and insecure, which I thought, true or not, was a pretty harsh judgment to arrive at twenty-five minutes into our second session.

  “What's more,” he informed me at the time, “your penchant for self-analysis—which is, by the way, another manifestation of your egotism—is further complicated by immense feelings of inferiority. You don't allow yourself to become fully engaged because deep down you feel undeserving of approval, love, success, et cetera. All of the things you crave.”

  “Don't you think you should get to know me better before making such categorical statements?” I said, somewhat put off by his remarks.

  “Don't be defensive,” he chided me. “It just slows down the process. You're not paying me to be gentle.”

  “I'm not being defensive.”

  “You sound defensive.”

  “That's because it's patently impossible to deny being defensive without sounding defensive.”

  “Exactly!” Dr. Levine said enigmatically, sitting back in his chair and scratching the ridiculous little goatee that made his mouth look suspiciously like a vagina. I wondered if he'd grown it for just that reason, being such a resolute Freudian and all. He pulled off his gold-rimmed spectacles and cleaned them absently with his necktie. Then, replacing them on his nose, he asked me the question that all therapists invariably fall back on when creativity fails them before the hour's up. “Tell me about your father.”