Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

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  For my parents, Katherine and Tony

  I am always going home, always to my father’s house.

  —Novalis

  Wagner in the Desert

  First we did molly, lay on the thick carpet touching the pile, ourselves, one another. We did edibles, bathed dumbly in the sun, took naps on suede couches. Later we did blow off the keys to ecologically responsible cars. We powdered glass tables and bathroom fixtures. We ate mushrooms—ate and waited, ate and waited. Then we just ate, emptied Ziplocs into our mouths like chip bags. We smoked cigarettes and joints, sucked on lozenges lacquered in hash oil. We tried one another’s benzos and antivirals, Restoril, Avodart, Yaz, and Dexedrine, looking for contraindications. We ate well: cassoulets, steak frites, squid-ink risotto with porcini, spices from Andhra Pradesh, Kyoto, Antwerp. Of course we drank: pure agaves, rye whiskeys, St-Germain, old Scotch. We spent our hot December afternoons next to the custom saltwater pool or below the parasols of palm fronds, waiting, I suppose, to feel at peace, to baptize our minds in an enforced nullity, to return to a place from which we could begin again.

  This was a few years ago in Palm Springs, at the end of a very forgettable year.

  * * *

  When I say that I was visiting old friends, friends from whom my life and my sense of life had diverged, I am not trying to set myself apart. Marta and Eli had lived in L.A. for a number of years, long enough, I suppose, that whatever logic married immediate impulse to near-term goal to life plan to identity had slipped below conscious awareness and become simply a part of them. I was by no means innocent, either, of the slow supplanting drift by which the means to our most cherished and noble ends become the ends themselves—so that, for instance, writing something to change the world becomes writing something that matters to you becomes publishing something halfway decent becomes writing something publishable; or, to give another arbitrary example, finding everlasting love becomes finding somewhat lasting love becomes finding a reasonable mix of tolerance and lust becomes finding a sensible social teammate. And of course with each recalibration you think not that you are trading down or betraying your values but that you are becoming more mature. And maybe you are. Maybe you are doing the best you can. But what is true is that one day you wake up dead.

  In any case I was writing a book, one that I hoped would make my contemporaries see how petty and misguided their lives were, how worthwhile my sacrifices, how refreshing my repudiations, how heroic my stubbornness, et cetera. Eli and Marta were trying to have a baby. They would spend the ensuing year attempting to get pregnant, and eventually they would, and later this baby, and their second baby, would grant them some reprieve from the confusion we were all afflicted by in those years. But before they had their baby, during the week when this story takes place, they had decided to do every last thing that a baby precludes, every last irresponsible thing, so as, I guess, to be able to say, Yes, I have lived, I have done the things that mean you have lived, brushed shoulders with the lurid genie Dionysus, who counsels recklessness and abandon, decadence, self-destruction, and waste. The Baby Bucket List, they were calling it.

  And I was game. Although I was not planning to have a child anytime soon, I thought we could all stand to chemically unfasten our fingers from their death grips on our careers and wardrobes and topiarian social lives and ne plus ultra vacations in tropical Asia. The words “we” and “our” are a bit figurative here, as I remain unsure whether I rounded out our group’s eclecticism or stood in contrast to it. But we were, in any case, a particular sort of modern hustler: filmmakers and writers (screen, Web, magazine) who periodically worked as narrative consultants on ad campaigns, sustainability experts, PR lifers, designers or design consultants, Commonwealth transplants living in the borderless monoculture of global corporatism, social entrepreneurs, and that strange species of human being who has invented an app. We rubbed elbows with media moguls and Hollywood actors and the lesser-known but still powerful strata that include producers and directors and COOs and the half-famous relatives of the more famous. We preferred vintage cars to new but drove hybrids (because the environment), took shopping to be an urbane witticism, and were conscious enough of our materialism to mock it. We listened to U2 and Morrissey and Kylie Minogue post-ironically, which is not to say, exactly, sincerely. We donated to charity, served on the boards of not-for-profits, and shepherded socially responsible enterprises for work. We were not bad people, we thought. Not the best, a bit spoiled, maybe, but pleasant, insouciantly decent. We paid a tax on the lives we lived in order to say in public, I have sacrificed, tithed, given back. A system of pre-Lutheran indulgences. Of carbon offsets. A green-washing of our sins. We were affiliated. We had access.

  I was by far the poorest of our group. There was no doubt about it, although I was not poor for principled reasons. I am not sure why I was so poor. Laziness, perhaps. I didn’t have much energy or imagination when it came to monetizing my talents, such as they were. And I think, to be honest, I had a bad conscience about getting paid to do what I loved and what seemed, on the face of it, self-indulgent. So in the Palm Springs house that week, where I stayed on need-blind sufferance, I had the dual consciousness of a Voltaire in the court of Frederick the Great or the Marxists who brood through high-society parties in Wyndham Lewis novels, which is to say I partook, mooched, sponged, and felt myself apart and nonimplicated.

  From the start I had been set up as the counterpart to Lily, a pretty and neurotic executive-in-training who was also not there as half of a couple. Lily had brought a tote bag for her cosmetics, which numbered in the dozens and included machines I was not familiar with. Like all the women in the house, she had exceptional hair. Her hair had the tattered elegance of a Rolling Stone cover model’s and I decided early on that one of my goals for the week would be to sleep with Lily, although this was less a decision, really, than the final figure in some back-of-the-envelope biological math.

  Lily was in the habit of always needing things she didn’t have: water, iced tea, spray-on sunscreen, her phone, Kindle, iPad, a hand, advice, Chablis. I remark on this because, given that my position in the group was as a secular boyfriend of sorts to Lily, it often fell to me to fetch her things or to hold things for her while she did stuff like pee. But I also think that her constant fidgeting neediness captured something we all felt: the ever-present urge to tweak or adjust the experience to make it a touch more perfect. “Can you just hold this?” Lily would say, or “Can you just do my back?” or “Can you just come look at something?” and I slowly understood what it is to be a man for a certain type of high-strung, successful, and thin woman: you are an avatar of capability, like a living Swiss Army knife. And when the child lock on her car door stuck, or the cocktail mixer fused shut, or a toilet ceased to flush properly, or we needed to adjust the propane supply to the grill or glass fire, I was the one called on. And I fixed things, and it felt good. And maybe anyone could have fixed them, maybe Lily only ask
ed to flatter me, to give me a sense of purpose in a modern economy that had creatively destroyed men, but it worked, it allowed me to feel masculine and useful, and I experienced an uneasy gratification that Lily and I could confirm for each other this two-dimensional idea of who we were, who our genders made us, even as we recognized how stupid and outdated this idea was.

  But this was a place to be old-fashioned, I guess. It was, after all, the town of Elvis and Charles Farrell, the Rat Pack, Richard Neutra, of Jack Benny’s radio broadcasts from the desert, New Year’s at Sunnylands with the Reagans, and drives hooking off the fifth tee like the Laffer curve—a place in thrall to an era when the impulse was to leave the lush coastline for a desert town as seedy and plotted as an Elmore Leonard paperback, where pills were prescribed to be abused, drinks took their names from Dean Martin taglines, and the wedge salad never died.

  We found ourselves, one night early on, in a bar dedicated to just this legacy, a place called Sammy’s with a clientele of corpulent besuited men deep into life’s back nine and their girlfriends. The men perched on bar stools watching their girlfriends dance, sipping drinks, and giving off the captured firelight of time spent in the timbered lodges of Jackson Hole. To a man they wore the same unadventurous red tie and spoke of Toby Keith in the hushed tones of boyish veneration. They had the vital febrility of coronaries survived and seemed happy enough to sit there, letting their girlfriends brush up on their laps, untroubled by the jobs they’d shipped to Asia or the liability they’d dumped overboard in the clear, forgiving waters of the Caribbean. The women, their consorts, were all blondes in what I guessed to be their fifties or early sixties. Their ages were hard to judge because they’d had so much work done—high-quality work, I hazarded, although it had frozen their expressions, as though to hedge bets, halfway between smile and pettish complaint. It was a fun night. A tuxedoed ensemble of what I assume were pain-pill addicts played louche numbers like “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” a song in which the narrator has fled to Tennessee, presumably for reasons of alimony or scansion. The women flirted with the sax player, a man rounding fifty with deep gelled furrows in his tow-colored hair and skin the color of wet drywall, and they sort of pawed the good-looking mixed-race lounge singer, not quite inappropriately, but close, while the men looked on equably, having made their peace with death, aureate in the power of knowing excellent tax lawyers. Our Manhattans came in highballs the size of cereal bowls with enough ice to treat a bad sprain, and although I was pretty sure all these people would be dead by the time I turned forty, I thought we had been granted a Jazz Age vision, a benedictory mirage, one that said so long as the bills in your pocket were crisp enough, the lights dim, and the band played on, you could be twenty feet out over the canyon’s edge with no one the wiser.

  * * *

  On the afternoon of day three, walking his dog, Lyle, Eli confessed to me that a good chunk of the financing for his new film had fallen through. One of the backers had pulled out, and now the production company attached to his script and the director and whatever hamlet-size retinue a more or less green-lit film accretes were all scrambling to gin up new money. Eli had it on good intelligence that a financier named Wagner was in Palm Springs that week, and so one of our running intrigues became Eli’s attempt to casually intersect with him. The movie sounded like a hard sell to me, a biopic about the economist Albert O. Hirschman focused on his war years, but Eli assured me that Wagner was their man.

  “This guy—” Eli put his hands together as if in prayer. “You know Richard Branson? Okay, this guy is like the Richard Branson of nature and environment music. His wife’s cousin—or no, no, no. Here’s what it is. His wife’s mother’s sister, his aunt-in-law”—Eli chuckled—“Hirschman helped get her out in forty-one.”

  It was not quite evening. The sun had fallen below San Jacinto as it did every afternoon, leaving us in a long penumbral dusk the color of a pinkish bruise. For the second straight day we’d missed the canyon hike we intended to take, arriving seven minutes after the cutoff, according to the park ranger, who took evident pleasure in disappointing us and had the air less of a park ranger than of an actor playing a park ranger—I doubted he did much “ranging.” And so to salvage the excursion, we’d driven around the tony western edge of the city, taking in the walled-off, single-story period homes, including Elvis’s strange bow window of a house, and we would have explored longer if we hadn’t wandered into a postmortem garage sale and found, laid out like memento mori among old Steve Martin Betamaxes, an assortment of superannuated chemotherapy supplies, which so depressed us that we each immediately took a bump off the key to Lily’s Nissan Leaf.

  Walking now with Eli, feeling just a hair better, that whatever happened I would not die that night, that I could follow some twisting course of multivalent inebriation to the torchlit inner sanctum of the self-subsuming mood, where the need to make decisions would end, and the need to evaluate decisions just made would end, and I would exist in a sort of motiveless, ethereal Dasein, I was feeling a bristling love for my friend, who hadn’t said a word to me in five minutes, showing, in the understated way of competitive men, that our friendship transcended his need to sell other people on a garish idea of his life, that we could be quiet together and find peace in each other for the simple reason that we could offer each other nothing else. I was hoping badly that Lyle would pee on the Ferrari hatchback we were passing, when I looked up to see a slight Hasidic man pacing a jogger down the middle of the street. The Hasid was in full getup, shuffle-walking to keep up with the jogging man and pointing something out to him insistently on a piece of paper. The jogger looked at us with a grin or a grimace that was perhaps self-excusing, but he needn’t have. It became clear to us in the days following: Chabad-Lubavitch was everywhere, Crown Heights had emptied out into our corner of the California desert, bearded men in long black robes haunting our bacchanal, coy and twinkling with a great-avuncular look that seemed to say, You will understand in time, you will see—or maybe not.

  But it’s also possible that I was losing my mind. It was day three, as I said, and the wheels were beginning to come off. Lily and I had made out for a while in bed the night before, humping a bit halfheartedly before she sent me away to sleep by myself—and I had felt grateful, because this way I would actually sleep and wouldn’t have to wake up next to her tired and noisome with a monomaniacal erection. But I’d also felt spurned, or confused, because whereas Eli had the goal of finding and wooing Wagner, and Marta had the goal of treating her body like a chemistry set, and Lily had the goal of having a man around to hold her purse, and the others in the group had various faintly boring goals that involved their partners and spa treatments, my only goal to that point had been to get laid in a state of near-primal cognitive decomposition. And so when I awoke that morning and realized just how seriously in jeopardy this goal was, I promptly ate an entire rainbow Rice Krispies treat of marijuana and lost track of everything but a premonition that the world was going to end.

  I was lying motionless on the couch, under a protective throw that had become important to me, when Lily came over and started talking. She played with my hair while she talked, and I tried to think up one grammatical sentence to indicate that I was still a human being or would some day be one again. The only recognizable thought in my mind, however, was the sudden overpowering desire to have sex, and this wasn’t even a thought as such. If I had been in any state to speak, let alone make an argument, I would have brought a Christian martyr’s passion to the task of getting Lily spread-eagle and receptive, but all I managed to say, interrupting her arbitrarily to say it, was “I’m very stoned.”

  She looked at me curiously. “Really?” she said. I thought it was so obvious that I was briefly furious at her—that she was so wrapped up in telling me whatever shit, none of which I could translate into meaningful ideation anyway, that she had failed to notice I was demonstrating the vital signs of a Pet Rock. Eli walked over to ask if I wanted lunch, or anything, or what
did I want, and I said “no,” “maybe,” “later” in some order, and then I realized that there was something I wanted, although it was not exactly a group activity, which was to lie on the bathroom floor and masturbate until I died.

  “Excuse me,” I said, getting up. I was not terribly steady on my feet and had to brace myself on furniture all the way to the bathroom, but I was excited, let’s say ludicrously excited, at the prospect of masturbating, and more than that even amazed that I had forgotten the possibility of masturbation as a sort of compromise formation in my ongoing sham coupledom with Lily. And although I could barely breathe or stand, the sensitivity I felt to the world just then was a revelation. It was as though every surface of my body, inside and out, had thinned to the basis weight of tracing paper. I seemed to feel the blood in my body coursing along the inner banks of its vessels, a trembling life force lighting up my meridians like neon, and as I pushed off from the free-form couch by the fireplace, the lone thought surfacing within the indiscrete salmagundi of my brain was something like: I know what a chakra is.

  In the bathroom I locked the doors and stripped to nothing, put the cold-water tap on low, and lay down on the bath mat. Something like fevered joy clenched in my abdomen. If there is an end point to the confessional mode it is surely the things we think about while masturbating, but here goes: I thought of the breasts of a woman who had been at dinner the night before, big, heavy breasts. I thought of her telling me to fuck them, or maybe having multiple dicks, or a kind of Matrix-like displacement of dicks, and fucking her and her tits at the same time. I thought of ass-fucking. I thought of someone wanting it, maybe begging for it, maybe Lily. There were mirrors all over the bathroom, and I thought of fucking Lily standing up, of gazing at the mirror and our eyes meeting in a look that said, Wow, we are fucking and it feels awesome. I thought, Mental note: return to question of mirrors, why we like watching ourselves fuck in mirrors—then I forgot this immediately. I thought, This feels so good, and when it is over I will die, but there won’t be any reason to live anyway, so that’s fine. And I thought, What am I doing with my life? And I thought, Am I a good person or a bad person or just a person? And I thought, Am I powerful or weak? And I thought, Now’s maybe not the time … And I thought, Let’s pretend powerful, just for now, let’s pretend I’m powerful and Lily’s powerful and I’m fucking her in the ass, and she’s asking for it, pleading probably, and our eyes meet in the mirror in a look of concern or coital oneness or existential hurt or gratitude that something could feel this good. Yes, that. Let’s pretend that.