American Spirit: A Novel

by Dan Kennedy

  The body soldiers on in a light shuffle, feeling aglow, thrilled that so much good came of the last day or so. Out of the class as the covey sends a flutter of “See ya-soons.” Down the hall, a peek into the Put ’n’ Take: That issue of Hype Hair! is gone, should’ve grabbed it when it wasn’t, the paperbacks are gone and off to better homes, Shifting Parameters in Nonlinear Models lies at the bottom of the box. The fact that some janitor rescued it from the recycling bin steadies Matthew’s faith in people, but the fact that nobody has inflicted it on themselves or another is what bolsters Matthew’s real faith in the human condition. Hey, look, next to that, in the corner there, an issue of American Craft, and with a spring in his stoop, with some jaunt in his bend, it’s gone in a flash.

  13

  Telecom and Going Down

  THE TELEPHONE HAS BEEN on lately, which is just a way of half-hoping Tatiana is calling any minute for any reason. Matthew knows the phone is on and thinks thoughts in its direction, like Dream about me, or, Hear something ticking inside of you, or, Feel tired of disappearing. But all the telephone is saying at the moment is TIM. MOBILE. Hello isn’t out of Matthew’s mouth and Tim is already talking about how he’s going to make a comeback after losing everyone’s money. This, evidently, starting by mailing out a form letter to everyone whose money he has skimmed and fucked and snorted, and it is apparently a form letter that starts with the line, “I am sorry I failed to make you millions as we had planned. But if you can stop thinking about yourself for a moment, I’d like to tell you about my new plan.” And there’s a line, not long after that gem, that says, “Let’s, just for a minute, quit worrying about how I was supposed to make you millions. Stop and think what it’s like for me at this impasse.” There are other accusatory lines even worse than those that can only serve to strengthen any prosecution’s case, and Tim sees fit to read the whole letter to Matthew, stopping only to occasionally say, in a broken, maybe drunk, certainly speedy voice, “I mean, right? Fuck, give me a fucking break, right?” And then the letter of apology that Tim wants to send along to all of his clients ends with the line, “I’m going to be up front with you: I’m in need of a short-term loan.” That’s it. That is essentially the way he signs off.

  “Are you still doing tons of coke?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That’s a yes.”

  “I’m living in a van…”

  “It’s an RV. And it’s a rental. And seriously, what has gone wrong for you? Not much when you think about it. You have everything you need. You always have. Yes, fine, some woman shaved your legs and fucked you with a bat and tied your balls up with…”

  “My fiancée, thank you very much. And wait, she what? What are you saying happened? Because that’s not what happened.”

  “You were going to marry her?”

  From across the lot, the instructor from class is making her way toward her car.

  “Yes.”

  Matthew waves to her as she gets into her car.

  “You were going to marry the woman who dressed you up like a schoolboy or a maid or whatever, made you wear some kind of dildo helmet and…”

  “What the fuck, where do you get this? It was just a hood; just like a leather hood thing.”

  The instructor smiles in reply to Matthew’s wave; this sort of suburban, perfunctory, and pleasant smile without any eyes to it.

  “Just?”

  “Fucking relatively speaking. Why would I be a schoolboy?”

  She loads the box of class projects into the trunk of her medium-jumbo somewhat-luxury sedan. Matthew brightens. In one week the mug will be finished and back and then fifteen dollars, then thirty, forty-five, sixty, seventy-five, ninety.

  “Your letter thing sounds sad. And vengeful—as if you’re the victim. I think that’s why I figured you were made to wear one of those helmets; because you sounded like a victim. A victim doing tons of blow.”

  “I was.”

  “You were what? Wearing the dildo helmet thing?” Matthew waves politely at her once more. No matter how many times he waves, she doesn’t turn into Tatiana.

  “There was no helmet; who’s saying that? Why would you buy that shit?”

  “That’s the question I should be asking you.”

  “So, yes, I was doing coke. While I wrote it. The client letter.”

  “That’s what I asked to begin with.”

  “I know, and that’s what I just said once you gave me one fifth of a second to talk, okay? Jesus.”

  “Well, you said you’re running some kind of program on yourself out there and that I need to be some hard-ass that you check in with.”

  “I never said to be a hard-ass, I just said I needed someone to check in with.”

  And then Tim talks for minutes on end again. Throwing around all of these tough-guy lines about kicking the savage drugs she kept him embalmed with; about Montana, Wyoming, or Idaho and wishing he had a better idea of which state he was a six-wheeled resident of while anchored in Yellowstone National Park for this federally inspired but supposedly totally self-imposed reevaluation and detoxification program of his. Tim keeps talking and talking and talking to Matthew, which might be part of this program he’s made up to get this life straight again; the whole thing might hinge on sitting in a rented RV talking to Matthew and other friends when he can get a signal to dial them. While Tim keeps talking, Matthew keeps beaming thoughts at the phone, trying to make call-waiting interrupt the moment. Feel something ticking in you, get tired of disappearing, and: “Dream about me.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  After the phone, the book about food and praying and flying comes out again and gets the heart all jumped up about traveling the world. There’s also the new issue of American Craft, and Native American cigarettes, dire dispatches from Steely Dan, and a montage of about nine different driver’s seat positions found by reaching down to the little electric buttons while the eyes take pages in. Finally the sun gets old and fades to deep orange and barely warm. The last of the light looks filtered through high clouds and smoke and all it wants to talk about is the past and it plays sucker ballad chords like that thing where a G major falls a half step to the F sharp root, then down again to E minor with the seventh or ninth added in to make that weird happy-and-sad sound that feels like a thousand Sundays or summer ending or a girlfriend leaving.

  Soon enough the Bavarian sedan is aimed out of the lot and toward the homestead. Once at home there is every excuse in Matthew’s head to leave again and head out for a night alone somewhere: Kristin hovering on stairs and whisking past quickly in the darker periphery of the place, for instance. And the pain that feels like being kicked between the legs comes around with the stream of red urine that Matthew’s trying to forget. He tries to convince himself it’s just vitamins in the urine, that it’s some sign of the body already doing some sort of self-healing; that he will not be required to call Alpha Imaging to pay cash to be slid into some giant tube that photographs sixteen slices of the abdomen to find out what he already knows in his heart and head. There are bills, some sorted through, some falling between cracks again. There are some that won’t be opened until the voice mail about the email about the unopened mail forces his hand. There are a million questions, and maybe the best one to start with is: Who on earth would want to stay inside tonight with all of this bouncing around in here?

  At night it isn’t hard to slip out, for either of them. It’s probably easier for Kristin to slide through a crack in the wall and out of the house. After all, she’s able to vaporize into a room with complete silence, like a deadly government assassin letting you know she could have used lethal precision to remove you from the planet but decided to just observe you and not go through with it. So who knows how many times she comes and goes from the house in the evening. Matthew, on the other hand, bothers to at least devise a decent premise in his head. He will usually go through the trouble of convincing Kristin that he’s meeting Tim for di
nner or to go see some band, but really, he’s trying to convince himself and he’s the last to know. But this premise feels good to hold inside, because Kristin has never met Tim, and so would know nothing about how he’s getting his life together by sucking up the last of his tribal quality drugs alone in national parks.

  14

  Yes, About Last Night…

  WAKING UP, TRYING TO add it up, and there are some significant dots one must connect. The temptation to get out of the house last night proved to be too much, the brain recalls this, but that’s really all that the faculties of Matthew can recollect at the moment, which is where connecting the dots comes in. The first dot, the biggest dot, is a dot called The Gun. Matthew recalls drinking, and this was after walking past on the sidewalk in front of Tatiana’s apartment on Bond Street more than a few times; on the first pass he walked a crisp pace with purpose; then after regrouping around the corner on Lafayette, he walked by again, this time slowly, trying hard to appear poetic and pensive; on other passes Matthew was walking by at any pace that might have looked great on the off chance that Tatiana was in from Los Angeles. And on the off chance that she just happened to be entering or leaving her building. And on the off chance that she would even recognize him. But she wasn’t, and she didn’t, and she probably wouldn’t, so then there was drinking.

  The Bavarian mobile office and den was parked on East Third or Great Jones or somewhere near enough to Bond but not too sadly and desperately close to it. Wherever it was that the land barge was anchored, there were evidently bars all around it, practically closing in on it and slowly surrounding it, actually. Chances are that the car would be slept in, especially with Tatiana being a safe three thousand miles west of it. So the first bar was Jones and the booze there made the migration from the back bar, to the drink mat, to the bar’s top side, and finally down the hatch. Mardi Gras beads, and a menu that never changes because it’s painted on the wall, a bust of Elvis on a shelf, a blue bulb in the bathroom, a bartender splitting his attention between making solid stiff drinks and serving bowls of crayfish and jambalaya to people who wanted to waste their buzz with food. The whiskey did its seductive dance right up to the handshake with the lips, which led straight to a little romp upstairs with the brain. The jukebox was tons of old stuff you never get to hear; it was lit and loud like everyone, it did the tighten up, and there wasn’t a steely cautionary downbeat parable to be had in any of it; there was Cash, there were Raconteurs going into the real nitty-gritty of Southern Culture on the Skids. Each drink took Matthew a hundred miles south of New York City until he was, well, about nine hundred miles south. The jukebox went on until it sounded like every song in the world featured Katy Rose Cox on the fiddle; it went on until Matthew was feeling guided by voices.

  This leads to spirited conversation with anyone who will listen, and surprisingly three young people did. Two guys and a girl, maybe sixty-five collective years between them, they kept listening to him, stayed the long haul of Blenheim’s and Maker’s, and Buckhorn and Maker’s, and Maker’s and Maker’s. And as the long haul went on, all four of them, all one hundred and ten collective years of them, went outside for a smoke together, once or three or five times. And then they even set forth on an expedition to the car when Matthew enlisted them to search for the little bags marked blue and yellow or green and blue or whatever the hell Tatiana had left him with. And that’s where the gun comes in. But one has to understand that the gun wasn’t brought out in any sort of menacing way. There was a certain amount of edge to Matthew’s inspired street sermon, sure, probably only the effect of not finding the drugs and finally being fresh out of cigarettes. Matthew was simply trying to emphasize some of the points he was making while talking to these kids. So as a means of underlining certain points, if you will, the gun, yes, fine, was taken out and waved around a bit. It’s important for the head to make a level argument while waking up this morning that the gun was waved around only as a flourish, really—and only during the underlined words that Matthew felt needed emphasis.

  “I’ve torn my car apart for twenty minutes and I don’t know where that stuff is. I probably sound like some nutcase dipshit, but basically I was this, like, superhot millionaire woman’s dealer. Just for one day. She’s, I don’t know what she is, but she has houses all over the world and she just, you know, she’s rich. She’s beautiful. And we hooked up. And then she basically buys a bunch of shit from me and hands it right back to me and is like, ‘This is for you because you’re connected to something so, like, huge in the universe right now,’ or something like that. I can’t remember everything she said.”

  The three young people were kind of laughing about this, and that might’ve been what started Matthew feeling the need to employ gun flourishes in the conversation. But it wasn’t unkind laughter on their part, though; it was spirited; these kids saw Matthew as another random measure of jazz after years spent living in a world where dinner had always been served at six and every adult who loved them or taught them was hoping they’d end up squares with sensible haircuts and dental insurance. Here were two long, tall young men whose eyes, only four or five years ago, were staring at the ceilings of suburban bedrooms on sleepless nights with parents just down the hall. And her, she was a stick figure of a girl, skinny jeans barely letting her ankles out, thin lips on a narrow, pale slivered moon of a face waiting for a kiss from someone who wasn’t a best friend or a steady bore betting on a future going according to plan.

  “I don’t even know what you guys do now. I mean I think I’ve got a basic grasp of what growing up in America is like for you guys these days. When you’re fifteen you use the Internet to tease kids from school until they commit suicide. Then you live with your parents until you’re thirty because there’s no shame in it now or something. You skip college to invent Internet stuff, you stage weird homoerotic gang fights in basements, and you sell your companies for billions and have bonfires and orgies in the desert. You buy old vinyl records from the seventies, which actually kind of appeals to me, but it’s also kind of condescending. The three of you probably have enough cash liquid at any given moment to have me killed on a dare. You know what? I feel awesome. I feel awesome tonight. Right now. Now. We’re all here now and this is the best night of my life. Tonight is our time. Time is finite. We can’t stand still; we can’t die. We cannot die!”

  And on that last note, that last emphatic wave of the gun, that’s when they started looking a little skittish and concerned about the situation. In retrospect, Matthew gets it: Basically you can’t use a gun as a conversational prop when you’re screaming into the night about how the four of you will never die; the nuanced subtext becomes too easy to misunderstand when you introduce the gun. But all Matthew meant is that time is finite and you have to live each day while you have it if you want to live a full life. It was something that Milton had told him in almost every session. He would say that we have only so many days. He would say that we have to choose action and live the days we have; that staying sedate and not moving a muscle and not choosing action over being static, that was what killed us. But before Matthew could explain it, they all scattered in a blitz, running off and yelling shit over their shoulders back at him.

  At the time, Matthew rationalized their behavior. Stood there by the car quietly watching them disappear, convincing himself he understood yet another thing about their generation. He told himself that it was nothing to do with him, that the mind and body simply do funny things at their age when an entire young adrenal gland is emptied in spasm with too much speed to handle, flooding blood already thin with booze. But then Matthew felt his own chemicals change and administer a surge of disbelief and sadness. And this is probably just the buyer’s remorse that comes with owning a weapon; but still, it wasn’t long ago, in the office, that anyone their age would display a workplace reverence if even thinking about asking his permission to leave before him.

  He stood next to the car, looking around sheepishly in case there were police the
way there always are in movies when things end up like this. He puts the gun back under the seat way too gingerly; he gives drunken gravitas a shot and comes up this flat: “I basically have seniority. Over all of them.”

  And now, here, this morning, waking up in the car, there isn’t much point in doing the math about how he and the Bavarian motor situation navigated this blind path back; no sense trying to figure what the brain had in mind when it parked them here in front of houses clear on the other side of Westport, nowhere near the one Matthew is supposed to sleep in. The gray light outside puts this at about six; maybe seven. Waking up in a car was more fun at seventeen and even twenty-seven.

  Your heart won’t hang on much longer.

  “Shut up,” the brain says.

  Find someone to fall in love with before everything in you stops working forever.

  “Be quiet.”

  Water, water, water.

  “Yes, water!”

  The mouth is all Mojave and cracked dash, and every move it makes feels like razor blades on new skin. Water, water, water, water, there’s no other way to say it emphatically. It can’t be stated plainly enough, this level of thirst. You’d have to wave the gun a dozen times and fire it twice to even underline the word water enough. Matthew opens the door and rolls from the car in slow motion and crawls a few paces, pulling his pants up to cover the crack of his ass, he walks a straight path hunched over a bit so that ideally nobody sees him making his way from the street and up into the lawn. Who knows whose house this is, but it’s a house with a hose on the side of it and hoses are full of cool, clean water and hoses pump it into you faster than you can drink it. A drive to someplace where a bottle of water is sold would be a drop in the bucket; it would be like waiting thirty days and wading through paperwork to buy a gun with the credit card in your name and in your pocket; no, the body requires a flood aimed into the neck and unleashed in almost homoerotic folly; brought on like a flood that rages in, biblical in scale. Up the little walk, and the reflection on the window makes it hard to see in, so Matthew’s crouch gets lower and he attempts precision; tired and hungover but locked into this low-profile recon posture like a man sneaking in to the enemy camp. Up to the hose and turn it on, and here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. If there were a fire hydrant next to this house, he would get his mouth around it somehow.