by Rufi Thorpe
She would say things to him like “Dang, I hope I don’t get sand in my cootch, I’m not wearing any underwear!”
It was madness. It was lunacy. She was a child bull in a china shop of adult social norms. I didn’t think I could handle hearing about it for even a single day more.
After Thanksgiving, there was a long weekend to endure, and I was dreading seeing her, but spending time in my own house was out of the question. Jason had friends over and the living room was a miasma of farts, Axe body spray, and cultural appropriation. “Na, son,” they crowed to one another, bouncing on the balls of their idiot feet, “she a trap queen!”
I was expecting to find Bunny ebullient with her latest frontal-assault flirtation, but instead she was somber and preoccupied. Ann Marie had been comatose for more than a month, and I realized, looking at Bunny as she chewed her thumbnail on her father’s white sofa, that she had lost quite a bit of weight in that time. Her cheekbones were more prominent, giving her face angles that made her look more like her mother. “Will you look at something for me?” she asked. She got out her backpack, which was white canvas and covered in small black hearts. She pulled out a wad of opened mail, handed me the clump, and went back to chewing the skin around her thumbnail. “What do those look like to you? I mean, do you think I’m reading them right?”
I opened the first one. They were letters from the IRS. Some were notices of deficiency, some were notices of examination. They spanned, in the tax years they referenced, almost a decade, and the amounts they listed as owed were staggering. For 2007, they claimed Ray Lampert still owed $107,000 in back taxes. For 2009 he owed $65,489. There was a notice of a tax lien placed against their house. There were notices explaining that his bank account had been frozen. What was most confusing, as I sorted through them, was that there was not a clear escalating time frame. The notice claiming his bank account had been frozen was from five years ago. The lien on their home was new.
“Where did you find these?” I asked. “I’m guessing Cassie doesn’t know about this.”
“I don’t know,” Bunny said, rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. “That bitch would die for him.”
“So how did you get these?”
She sighed. “They were in his office here at the house. I mean, they weren’t even hidden. They were just on his desk. I was never curious about what was on his desk before, but I got the mail today and there was a notice they were putting a lien on the house, and so then I went looking and found the rest.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, “he’s been making money hand over fist, so why not pay his taxes? It just seems so weird!”
“He’s been overextended,” she said. It was such a Ray word, such a typically grandiose euphemism, but for what exactly?
“Upstanding city council member and tax dodger,” I said, in a game show–host voice, but she didn’t laugh.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked me.
“I mean—I guess, eventually, he’ll have to pay?”
“He doesn’t have the money to pay,” she said, “I mean, obviously!”
“Bullshit,” I said, “he has this house. I’m sure he has other investments. He’s just living in some kind of system of cycling delusions where he thinks he can catch up. But he’ll figure out that he can’t, and he’ll settle up with the IRS and maybe you’ll lose the house, but you’ll be fine.”
Bunny began to cry. “Where will we go?” she asked.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “you’ll rent an apartment!”
She nodded, wiping her tears.
And then a young woman whom neither of us recognized opened the front door of their house, and Ray Lampert came in with a bandage wrapped in a thick halo around his head and bruising of Technicolor plum in perfectly symmetrical triangles under his eyes and on the tops of his cheekbones. Something was wrong with his eyes and he seemed to be blind, or his eyes seemed to be stitched shut—in any event, they were swollen and something was deeply wrong with the skin above them. The young woman led him to one of the pretty French armchairs and helped him heave himself down onto it. “Hello,” she said in a singsong voice, “I’m Charity!” She was wearing all black: tight black pants and a black lace shirt over a tank top. She was delicately pretty and had pale, milky skin.
“What happened?” Bunny asked.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Ray said, which led both of us to continue in our assumption that he had been in some sort of fight. “I had to get it done before we went to court and you never know when that’s gonna be.”
“Okay, baby,” Charity said, “I’m putting your meds in the kitchen. He should not drink on these pain pills! Okay, Bunny? Don’t let him drink. I gotta go to work.”
“You’re the best,” Ray said.
“Wait, w-what?” Bunny stammered.
“It’s a simple surgery. In, out, bing, bang,” he said. I noticed there was something wrong with his speech, some thickness to his consonants that I assumed was from the head bandage or the drugs.
“What surgery?”
“Just a little stuff,” he said.
As I examined him more closely, I began to understand that his eyelids were scored with crescents of black stitches in their swollen folds. I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand. “He’s had his eyes done!”
“It was a forehead lift,” Ray said, “but it really only makes sense to do the eyes at the same time.”
Bunny, beside me on the sofa, got up into a half crouch and was shaking with rage. Everything she said came out in a half yell. “You got plastic surgery? We’re about to lose our house and you got plastic surgery? What is wrong with you? And who is that girl? Is she the hostess from La Trattoria? Because she looks like the hostess from La Trattoria!”
La Trattoria was the fanciest Italian restaurant in town.
“Charity is a friend,” Ray said. “Who was kind enough to drive me to the doctor.”
He said this as though Bunny had failed to be kind enough to drive him to the doctor. She sputtered for a moment, then cried, “I mean, how much did this even cost?”
“It’s fine,” Ray said. I was beginning to understand what was wrong with his lips as well. He’d had them pumped full of collagen.
“Really, because I found a bunch of letters from the IRS saying they are going to take the house, and it doesn’t seem like it’s fine!”
“My lawyers are on it. Don’t worry. I’m sorry you were scared, but really everything is fine, Bunny Rabbit!” He looked at her through his squinty swollen eyes. Bunny was frozen on the couch, trying to decide whether or not to believe him. “You know me, Bunny. You know I’m the king of this kind of stuff.”
“Then why haven’t you paid them?”
“Because I don’t owe that money! The only way you can contest disagreements is by refusing to pay—if I pay but then say I didn’t owe that, I’ll never see the money again. They nickel-and-dime you every step of the way, you have to fight to get a fair shake!”
Bunny visibly softened, and I was astonished his pants didn’t burst into flame. I felt sick as I watched, even though, or perhaps because, I understood. She wanted everything he said to be true so badly that she would ignore all evidence to the contrary. “Jesus, Daddy,” she said, “you should tell me about these things!”
“I didn’t want to worry you with a bunch of bullshit.”
“And this surgery? Why would you have plastic surgery?”
“It’s an investment,” he said. “For the business. You have to look young, look good, you know, plus with the forehead lift, it’s interesting, they basically cut away a strip of your forehead at the hairline, so it hides that you’re balding. It’s like a two for one!”
“But couldn’t you have told me you were getting it?” she asked.
“Honestly, I didn’t understand it would be this big a deal. I mean, l
ook at me. I look like shit! I thought I could turn in early and you’d never notice. Wear some makeup, what’s it called, concealer, for a couple days!” He smiled, shook his head to show what an idiot he’d been about it.
“You do look really horrible,” she said.
“I look like they messed up a Raggedy Ann doll!” he said, and they both laughed. “Let’s order a pizza!”
And they ordered a pizza. And I stayed, and I ate it with them. Somehow, the night was weirdly fun. Pizza grease and red wine got on the IRS letters. Ray convinced us that he could have just one glass of red wine with his pills, and Bunny said we should get to have a glass if he did, and for some reason I drank it with them. I held the glass in my hand, and I couldn’t believe I would really drink it, because not crossing this line had been a deep part of my self-identity. I took a sip. It tasted exactly like it smelled. I was ready for a whole new world. I was ready to be a different person. A terrible person.
After the first glass, I understood why every, or almost every, adult I knew did this. I felt amazing. My body was like rippling water, full of energy, nothing hurt, and everything was funny, even me, especially me. I couldn’t stop the things that came out of my mouth, and at one point I made Ray laugh so hard his eyelid suture tore a little and he started bleeding.
“Stop,” he moaned, holding a Domino’s napkin to his bleeding eyelid. “Stop!”
“Mr. Lampert,” I said, holding out an imaginary microphone, “why did you feel the need to do this terrible thing to your face?”
“I don’t know,” he gasped, still dabbing at his eyes.
“Was it a fear of death?”
“Eh, death. I mean—I don’t love the idea of dying, but no, I don’t think it was death.”
“Then was it fear you would no longer be able to attract the pussy?”
“Jesus!”
“Answer the question, sir.”
Bunny was clapping, laughing, delighted with this game.
“Honestly, yes. I mean, it was terrible. I mentioned to Charity about maybe getting work done, and I’m expecting her to say, no, no, you don’t need it, but right away she chimes in with ‘That’s a great idea!’ ”
“Do you love Charity?”
“No, but she’s a freak in bed,” he said.
“Well, you know what they say about a woman who’ll eat ass—don’t marry her, but keep her in your phone.”
Ray laughed at this like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “You are too much, Michael,” he said.
“Next question, marriage equality: Were you for or against?”
“For!” he cried.
“Hallelloo, hunty!” I said.
“Gay people should be able to do whatever they want. Except maybe teach little kids.”
“Wh-what, now?” I said.
“Well, I don’t know, I just—teaching preschool or something. Or even elementary school teachers. That doesn’t seem right to me.”
Bunny’s mouth was literally hanging open and her eyes were bulging out of her head. She couldn’t believe her dad was saying this. But I could.
“Yeah, you think gay teachers can turn little kids gay? How do they do it? Pheromones, or like pixie dust, or do you actually think that we’re all pederasts who want to fuck little boys?” I was still pretending to speak into the imaginary microphone for some reason.
“Well, I don’t know,” Ray said. He was still smiling, like we were going to have some kind of interesting fucking debate.
“This isn’t Fox & Friends,” I interrupted him. “I don’t care about your opinions, Mr. Lampert, because you are a cesspool of a human being with the moral compass of a gnat.” He was squinting at me through his busted, swollen eyes, trying to tell if I was joking, if this was some fun read, hashtag the library is open. Bunny had both hands clapped over her mouth, just watching. “You think this town loves you, but have you noticed you don’t have any friends? You’ve built a child’s idea of a rich man’s house and you live in it like you’re the king, but what are you king of? Money you don’t have? A daughter who doesn’t like you? No wonder your wife drove into traffic, you’re a fucking joke.”
And then I got up, and I left, and no one stopped me.
I do not know where, in a genetic sense, my intellectual bent came from, but I can remember exactly when school began to seem less useless to me. I had always been a reader, and novels provided me much company throughout my boyhood, but school itself held no appeal. The adults there were using the same bad scripts as social workers, like they were telemarketers cold-calling the youth. All the lining up, all the tiny, incremental punishments, pull a green card, then pull a yellow card, but if you pull the red card…Or later in high school the elaborate demerit system: five tardies equal one unexcused absence, and three unexcused absences equal one demerit, and three dicks sucked equal one I couldn’t care less about any of this. Even the schoolwork itself, the worksheets and Scantrons, textbooks instead of real books, it was all so meaningless and bizarre. Why were we all doing this together, and so obsessively?
But there was a day in early April of my junior year of high school when our biology teacher came into class on fire, so excited that he exploded at us, holding up a newspaper and stabbing at the text with his finger. What so excited him was a finger bone that had been found in the Altai Mountains in Siberia in 2008 had now been genetically analyzed and found to be neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens in origin. She, the study called her X-woman, was from a third hominid species, Denisovans, named after the cave in which the bone was found, who had diverged from our lineage about a million years ago, and her finger bone had been found in a cave where both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens remains had also been found, along with stone tools. More startling, while the modern Eurasian populations shared up to one percent genetic material with Denisovans, consistent with the theory that we shared a common ancestor, in Melanesian populations the figure rose to four percent, indicating more recent genetic exchange between Denisovans and Homo sapiens in that part of the world. In another study, bones found in Croatia indicated Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had interbred. The picture, hazy as it was, was that there had been many kinds of humans living, fucking, competing, and killing each other at the same time.
Our teacher, who was a young man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, and who had some kind of rockabilly undercut, much too stylish a haircut for a teacher, was in a kind of rapture about this, and he kept interrupting himself, trying to explain to us why this was exciting. “It’s such a deep assumption in our culture that there was this steady and inevitable march from ape to man, that it was this clear progression, but it was chaotic! I just think it says so much. And it really puts xenophobia in a different light, as some kind of possibly helpful mutation. I mean, we were in direct competition, but also interbreeding, with different species of humanoid animals. Doesn’t that just blow your mind?”
It did blow my mind. And I connected it, rightly or wrongly, with a sensation I had often had with my own father, when he was drunk enough, where I would stop recognizing him. His face, or his eyes, would become too strange, and suddenly he was no longer a man I loved but one I wanted urgently to murder. The idea that this was a human impulse and not a moral failing on my part as his son but some kind of genetic adaptation, a holdover from a time when we decided whom to fuck and whom to kill based on whether they were the same or other, was deeply comforting to me and intellectually freeing.
Questions that had always bothered me, about slavery, about the Holocaust, about the Armenian genocide and the Rwandan one, about the human ability to look at another human being and decide, nope, I think that kind of human is an animal, suddenly coalesced into a powerful shape of interdependent facts and observations. Human beings were murderous because it had been necessary for our survival. Human beings committed genocide because we had evolved to commit genocid
e. Human beings projected themselves onto animals, and then retracted that sympathy, and then projected that sympathy once more, confused about the line between what was like us and what wasn’t, because for thousands of years we had been making exactly those judgment calls. Violence was not something that had infected us, some alien thing that could slip into our bloodstream and cloud our judgment via ideology or mechanization. It was not gray-eyed Athena tricking Ajax into murdering sheep. It was sewn in. We were violent, murderous animals, by design.
So I was not entirely surprised when a group of boys jumped me behind the Rite Aid as I was getting off my shift. I was tired, but I was excited because I was about to go meet Anthony. If we got caught, fuck it. I hadn’t spoken to Bunny since that night in her house, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want her to apologize for her father, to try to explain him to me. And I didn’t want to have to apologize for myself.
While Matthew Shepard had been murdered when I was a child, it was still a story very much in the zeitgeist. In 2007, Ryan Skipper was found dead of multiple stab wounds and a slit throat, and his murderers had driven around in his blood-soaked car, bragging of how they’d killed him. So I understood that other men would want, and possibly would try, to kill me. But it had not occurred to me that it would happen in my hometown. In some sense, I think I viewed North Shore, even then, with the child’s eyes with which I had first seen it when I was eleven. It seemed to me too good a town to harbor such violence, though I kept being proved wrong. Donna Morse’s murder. Bunny beating Ann Marie. Yet I still assumed that if such a thing were to happen to me, it would happen to me in college, or in my adulthood, when I was living in a glamorous metropolis. I just hadn’t imagined I would be getting off work at Rite Aid, still wearing my blue smock, lighting a cigarette.
The one I recognized first was Ann Marie’s boyfriend, Tyler. “Hey, faggot,” he called to me in the parking lot. And so I knew what they were there for, but I did not know how far they meant to take it. I paused, and perhaps because I was very tired, I sighed dramatically and said, “What do you want, honeys?” I had never let myself talk like that except in private, and it felt thrilling and dangerous.
