American Spirit: A Novel

by Dan Kennedy

  The other thing is this: the brain has probably confused the words loss and loser for as long as it can remember. Matthew has never told anyone but Milton this, but here it is: He lost his biological parents early on. All he has said about this is that they saved a considerable amount of money on airfare; two deeply discounted round-trip tickets to Florida. Evidently the deal was that by having the pilot slam the plane violently into a swamp at the end of the journey—as opposed to using a costly, fancy airport runway—the airline was able to offer significant savings on fares compared to other full-price airlines. So, at the age of nine years, the brain heard the word loss about seven thousand times in one year, from people wearing the kind of sad faces that bad television actors wear, and that might have been when and why the brain latched on to Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen’s songs about losers and tales of suburban failure. The little head swam in the lyrics on the radio copped from a box of foster home donations and stuck under the pillow that never felt like his own, the lyrics of these steely siren songs of the modern and downtrodden swooned their way in as the heart pondered and feared fate beyond its nine years.

  This many years later, thirty-one of them, it is now around 10:20 AM, and Matthew clings to routine, piloting the BMW, the Bavarian Mother Womb, speaking softly but aloud. This might suggest to anyone motoring along next to him that he’s talking into the car’s speakerphone, or maybe calmly repeating a daily affirmation of the successful and spiritually fit.

  “No, damn it. No, damn it. No, damn it. No, fuck, no.”

  And apparently the way to punctuate a mantra like this on one’s fake morning commute is to spit casually—with poor, lackluster aim—out the driver’s-side window.

  The majority of the spit lands inside and runs down the leather interior that can’t really be afforded right now, then onto the forearm and elbow resting on the leased armrest. At first, Matthew looks upset, then deflated, and then, fuck it, he’ll spit again, and again, spitting, spitting, spitting, and making so Goddamned sure it all lands on the inside of the stupid door. And even spitting and spitting and spitting at the passenger-side window and onto the inside of the windshield. The mouth becomes as dry as it does on the days he got bad news. The breath starts to taste like fear and regret. The mouth’s spat saliva is the color of the convenience store coffee, and all of it is inching slowly downward across the car’s black interior so that the gray interior of the head will start to curse. At first, the gray deals up a sensible assortment of three- and five-syllable profanities, and then both the profanity and the car accelerate. The same one-syllable profane word is repeated over and over in a short and fast staccato. Maybe six or eight times and then it seems that Matthew is about to either cry or punch something. He hasn’t cried since he was nine. He has never hit anyone or anything. And that’s when the fit stops and the lull of recent memories begins.

  Last night was beautiful; the kind of beauty that doesn’t seem to get much mention. This was the last (probably, most likely, ideally) situation involving entertaining a young lady in the car instead of the home. These girls in these bars around here, they’ve all had twenty-five or thirty years of fine living in good houses and they are eager to make one wrong decision. But Matthew wants to believe that last night was more than just good skin dying to do something bad, but he was probably simply the body double for a professor this girl spent New Haven days dreaming of fucking in a summer house. But for now, try to forget that part of it, and just think about the dark suburban horizon and the calm of it; the subdivided patterns of rooftops that any number of betrayals, or struggles, or joys, or highly experimental sexual encounters, could be happening under. Think about the symmetrically white-lined and well-lit calm of the night’s ample parking—everything clean, vast, and finally, after all of those daylight hours, so sparsely populated. But in the middle of the calming, very recent memories comes a cautionary lyric, worming into the ear, continuing to map everything finally going according to Steely Dan’s terrible and seductive F Major 7th plan. The one about crawling like a viper through suburban streets to basically have sex with folks who live on those streets, and then it rhymes words that are all too close to home right now; words like “languid” and “bittersweet” and then the guy starts waxing poetic about dying behind the wheel. Jesus, it’s all happening.

  Matthew drives along, parsing the lyrics on the car stereo that killed the daydream, and by the time they play the solo, he is reduced to a man catching his reflection in a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-month rearview mirror; paranoid eyes framed by an expensive haircut with another week or two of mileage left in it, sitting atop a head that has been jerked about by swearing and spitting. But if the head has told the heart one kind thing this morning, it is this: Nobody has the right to act like they’ll never have to face days like these; there are probably only two paychecks and a very modest savings account between almost anybody in America and days like these.

  2

  Brand-New Man

  THE GOOD NEWS IS, when the spitting and angry jerking about finally stops, the serenity starts. Matthew tries to type this one down as soon as he thinks it, tries to split his attention between driving and getting the thumb of one hand to type and send it to himself. But he can’t, there’s swerving, and it’s the kind of swerving that evidently frightens oncoming motorists who honk horns that form passing Doppler fades as Matthew misses them by feet and inches then swerves back into his lane. Okay, on second thought, can’t type it right now. So the idea is to repeat it instead, to try and remember it, and it works, this mantra. Serenity washes over the Bavarian cockpit like the calm of generic Valium, mostly because Matthew has eaten some generic Valium. But one can’t just drive around eating pills and waiting for things to change. Wait, or can they? No, one can’t, probably, one must make things change. One must decide what’s next! Jogging! Jogging is next. Period.

  “This, I don’t just talk about. This, I do. Starting now.”

  And then a pause while Matthew already recants by thinking: Well, maybe not today. Starting soon, anyway.

  “No! Jesus! See how that almost slipped away in that same Goddamned hot minute that it came? Starting now, I am the jogging type. Just do it, like the ads say.”

  And just like that, the arms steer the car over to a place where the equipment associated with jogging can be purchased. The brain takes minor issue here. Jogging sounds strange—a dated word? Jog. Jogger. The joggers went jogging. What are you going to do today? Oh, I’m going to go jogging. Oh, are you a jogger? Yes, I jogged here. And the decision made inside the head is that the word is probably not dated, it’s probably just Scandinavian. So with confidence, Matthew decides that if it’s Scandinavian, it’s evergreen, as they say, and okay to keep in one’s vocabulary forever, really. Jogging is already making Matthew feel good, and he’s not even doing it yet, so how could it lead to anything bad? More of this sudden confidence allows Matthew to holler above the din of the car stereo, seemingly without provocation, “Boom! It’s like that, everybody!” It’s a phrase he thinks kids say, but in the moment right after exclaiming it, he wilts again, certain he’s gotten the phrase just a bit wrong.

  A right turn, a 1.1-mile straightaway, a left turn into this shopping plaza’s driveway, proceed along the right, along past the Cineplex (fatties who never jog), along past the place that takes family portraits (terrible families that refuse to jog), farther still past the computer store (you people, you customers in there, you sit inside in front of computer screens all day, never jogging), and now turn down the row of parking that lines up quite nicely with the store called Fuel Feet. Bing! Destination on the right; you have arrived. Matthew is on target, in action, goal oriented, calm, focused. He parks the Germanic sedan situation, locks it, and strolls away. The car’s windows are all marked from the inside with gobs of spit, the early part of the day lighting it like a safety-glass cage where some endangered creature wakes at dawn to violently spit and craft its brown saliva into webs. The gait becomes a bit more la
nguid and loose as the trio of Valiums kicks in, and Matthew thinks: This kind of buzz is probably the total fucking sweet spot; right where you want to be for getting into something like jogging.

  The door is pushed, as the sticker on it advises, a small electronic bell sounds, and this dispatches a great spindly geek from the stockroom, a praying mantis with a handsome head, a man creature who has spent the majority of his estimated thirty years running, indeed. Running to anything that might be out there for him, one would imagine; running away from a job like this that forces him to be so suburban and pleasant. Or maybe running away from a marriage or relationship that isn’t what he expected. Matthew stares a long, slow pharmaceutical-and-silent hello, realizes he was projecting all of that stuff about running away from things, and is startled when the tanned and sinewy geek mantis speaks through a giant smile.

  “Hi, there. How can I help you?”

  “Jogging shoes. Jog. Jog. Jogger.” Oh, no. Inside the head, words sound odd. Speaking sounds like the dentist’s office after the hygienist has been away from the chair for fifteen minutes and something has kicked in, the head hearing itself a split second after speaking, so there’s the delay effect, and a stereo hollow to whatever is said.

  “O… kay. Well, what do you usually look for in a shoe?”

  Matthew looks around him slowly and then, pointing, says, “Those ones?”

  The blood has talked the brain into the terrible decision to fall back on some improvisational acting classes that New Time Media made Matthew and the rest of the middle and upper management take at a corporate retreat last year. Improvisational acting skills were supposed to make the New Time executives more successful in business, the idea being that they would be able to think quicker on their feet in meetings and dealings and things. That was the big idea. But the big idea didn’t make Matthew any quicker on his feet in business dealings. He is, in fact, convinced that maybe these classes are what led to his problems at work to start with, and ultimately to what is still only being referred to by Matthew’s brain and Matthew’s former employer as the Incident. None of these creative retreats are good situations, one knows this, but one attends and participates, regardless. Fact: There was an exercise that paired people up to feel each other’s faces. Fact: Matthew used his left hand, sober as a nun in the light of day, to feel the president of marketing’s face for three minutes straight. And from that point forward, even long after the so-called retreat, Matthew would be trying to go about his office dealings at just the normal speed, Steve Timmel would walk by in the hall, and suddenly the brain would torture Matthew. It would essentially say to him, There is Steve Timmel, president of marketing. You have touched every inch of his face. And Matthew would immediately stumble and slowly stammer over whatever he was trying to say to the person he was talking to and doing business with. So falling back on the so-called improvisational skills he was taught, while falling into the warm confidence that three little friends, all named Val, have brought on, is not going to end well today. But it starts smoothly enough.

  “Firmness. Firm soles, I guess.”

  “But, like, do you know if your feet have a tendency to roll in, to pronate?”

  “They were pronating when I was outside, but they’re level now.”

  “O. Kay. Well, the easiest way to tell is to just look at your current pair of running shoes, and just see how the heels are worn down. Like, if it’s to the left or to the right.”

  Matthew does a degenerate ballet, a sort of slow-motion roadside sobriety test, one leg planted, one leg lifted with a terribly hesitant grace and uncertainty, and offers a look at the soles of the black leather Alexander McQueen cap toes he’s left the house in this morning.

  After this odd balancing act, there’s a fast flurry of words offered up about shoes, socks, blisters, hot spots, ankle roll, impact, posture, and form. Matthew absorbs it all like a sponge. The entire moment is shadowed with a warm haze; one that carries the overwhelming discovery that folks in the retail sector are fundamentally good people with a strong spiritual foundation.

  3

  W Is for Whale

  THE CAR IS ONCE again parked in the Stan Leland Food Emporium lot, almost at the very edge of this tarmac horizon. The heater is on, like in an athletic warm-up kind of way. Pants are off, shoes have been bought and changed into, minimarket Heinekens have been procured, everything is ready for warming up and stretching. It’s about a quarter to noon now, Matthew’s coffee is empty in the beverage holder; a dead soldier tossed to the back and replaced with a couple of green Dutch private reservists stocked into the center console. Rest in peace, coffee, you’ve advanced the battle but now we’re going to need some real firepower to win the war. There’s no reason to beat oneself up about switching to beer a little early, as the prospect of getting back into jogging is daunting, and something is required to take the edge off. Drinking before noon seems like an okay thing when it’s clearly fueling a man in an athletic way or in a way that lets him realize his dreams.

  You might be thinking that being of a certain age and drinking alone in one’s car while “warming up” for one’s first physical exercise in fifteen years is not the portrait of a man realizing his dreams, but maybe you’ve got pretty lofty ideals. Matthew has pushed the seat back as far as it will go to accommodate the athletic warm-up stretching/drinking. And it almost seems like when the leg is stretched in a certain way up onto the dashboard, beer and coffee flow down into the muscles. Same when the arms are pushed up against the glass of the sunroof. One can feel the body coming to life. This is what athletes probably feel like right before they do Olympic jogging or a World Series or something. Matthew seems to be radiating this message: Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life, fuckers. He kicks over the open beer but doesn’t beat himself up about it, because these are tight quarters for stretching, even with the seat all the way back. The personal listening device is powered up. The headphones are not really running headphones, since they’re the older, very large noise-canceling headphones that were used for business travel. But people used to roller skate with headphones this big, and one assumes roller-skating and business travel are harder on headphones than jogging, so let’s hit it. All systems go, let’s do this mother. Jesus.

  When was the last time any jogging like this happened? By the looks of how this is already going, the answer must be that jogging hasn’t happened for Matthew in a very long time. It’s supposed to help fight depression, but all one can picture while jogging are the guts—red and shiny, heaving and contracting. It looks near impossible to breathe in this case. The ground is pounding the feet, which are connected to the legs, which lead directly to the knees. Matthew tries to focus on something, and can come up with only a question to focus on: Fuck, am I old enough to have a heart attack? Answer: Yes. A difficult answer to face, but it’s the truth. Time races by all of us, time creeps along slowly like something playing dead, and then it turns and jumps our ass like we were walking down a block we shouldn’t have gotten so far down to begin with.

  The stupid music thing is shuffling songs randomly into the ears and head, and Matthew keeps pressing the button hoping that some good jogging song will come up next. One cannot jog to these anthems of downtrodden men and desperado women. And one cannot jog to the stupid slow song by Taylor Swift that New Time Media preloaded every employee’s computer with; a slow song that, at some point during the halcyon days of employment, has automatically updated and migrated onto the personal listening device, and now right up the weird coiled cord into the abnormally large headphones on Matthew’s head—a head that is bright red, sweaty, huffing. The head of a grown man running to a slow, breathy song for girls about two people becoming one when they kiss. Fuck it, whatever; leave it on, because, well, it is kind of maternal and calming. After all, it is about hearts doing well, so maybe it will keep a heart from seizing and a field of vision from narrowing.

  Matthew shifts to a mantra to calm himself: Fuck jogging. This simple Zen koa
n is repeated in his head a few times but then there are good college tries at attitude adjustment shoehorned in: That’s not the attitude, is it? And also: That’s not how we improve ourselves, is it? Focus on the positive. Focus on the stupid free song that the former employer shoved onto your computer. Two become one. He tries to start reverse engineering some kind of jogging mantra or message from the benign lyrics. Two really do become one, he tells himself… yes, imagine a vision of a healthier, not depressed, brand new you who is finally living a real and authentic life. And now imagine the old you. And now imagine that the versions of you are kissing and becoming one. Excellent. Now just focus on getting around the perimeter of this parking lot at least once and then back to where the car is parked. Throat feels like steel wool. Why are the daytime McMansion housewife jerk-off grocery shoppers staring? Ah, right, still holding the second beer bottle. Bad form, they’re right. But still, fucking back off with the judging, you apes. This is the beauty part of never knowing your neighbors. Do you think Matthew cares what any of these people think? He does, sadly, but still, it’s not like they know him or know Kristin. Matthew stares ahead, stares back at them, stares at the asphalt below him and thinks: What are you dirty bats going to do? Tell my wife that instead of being at work I was jogging around the parking lot at Stan’s with a beer in my hand with my face all twisted up and red, here atop my weird, sweaty steel wool constricting neck? Go ahead and tell her. I’ll just say that I called in sick. I look sick right now, so it fits.