American Spirit: A Novel

by Dan Kennedy

  There are a few beers to be fetched from the floorboard of the car. And there are a few shots of stiffer stuff in the kitchen to erase the pictures from the head. The drinks flow like drinks and then the arms flail in terrible tantrum. Smash this all now, fuck it all, the brain knows there’s something wrong with the biological container that houses it. Everything’s cracking inside, everything’s packing up and ready to hit the road to leave this earthly stint behind, the head knows it, the films show it. There is more beer in the car even after these, there is more of the stiff and strong in the cabinet above the stove, the one with the door torn off and thrown into the dining room like kindling for this place’s final disappearing act. A plastic bottle shaped like a bear and filled with honey smashed into the counter in a fit of tics and sobs, all the sticky golden insides of the bear now going wrong just like Matthew’s guts. Bags of shit that was bought on larks, things that they were supposed to eat in front of fires in the fireplace or in front of love stories on the television screen, stupid bags of sweet, hard comfort that never came, all torn and smashed and thrown.

  The head wonders for a minute why it is that every big, dramatic, violent fit or fight in this body’s life has been so silent; gummy candy thrown, honey punched and smashed, yoga mats in giant stacks tumbling silently while soft hands pummel the soft pillow of fat on a man’s kind, warm back. The head fires up harder trying to think of better things to destroy, things that would make loud manly sounds, but no luck. And the gray stumbles into remembering that there is a gun around here now. One that presumably has bullets in it, one would assume based on the price and connection. So the tantrum of medium-grade destruction of honey bear and cabinet door could end in a loud smack, flash, and powder burn. A tight metal click-and-bang economy ticket to heaven, a quick end to this situation inside of him.

  But the heart is having none of this, the chest is reminding the entire system that the gals in craft class are expecting Matthew; there is the matter of the mug for Jan, the matter of her middle-aged son, who likes Pulp Fiction, getting it and loving it regardless of Jan’s prediction that his wife will not. There is also the matter of a slip left on the door that says United Parcel Service is dropping by in the morning with two large parcels. And there is a lyric, rocketing in, in the quiet calm that comes after the, well, equally quiet destruction, a Steely Dan song that has not come up in the cerebral satellite shuffle before. It bears double-checking, but tonight—in the middle of this sticky mess of smashed bears and snacks that have been ripped from cupboards after the cupboards’ doors were quietly bent down and back and forth on hinges that eventually broke—the little stanza sounds all about carrying on; about how minor worlds break apart but also fall together again; about how the demons won’t be at the door once morning comes repeated over and over in the head, from every angle, it seems there is not a downbeat loss to be found in it.

  17

  In the Morning, at the Door

  MATTHEW’S DAYS ARE ADVANCING without certain things happening, the scheduling of a follow-up appointment with the doctor who touches him and has terrible taste in political biographies, for instance. The denial has been thick enough to keep the delusion of reprieve alive and kicking, and then there was last night, which has landed squarely at this morning. Rocket from the bed and into the kitchen, and he keeps walking without looking behind him to see that he hasn’t made the bed and that the room is wrecked just like the kitchen. He has hidden the CT scan films, mostly from himself, between the wall and the stove in the kitchen. On the counter next to the stove, the white stone horizon is littered with tiny bear bodies; the contents of the honey bear’s head have thickened right where they spilled out after his head exploded from the pounding. A crowd of gummy bears looks on, rubbernecking and milling about, staring down at their feet and feeling the weight of just how wrong things went for the honey bear, and if it happened to someone so much bigger, couldn’t it happen to them at any second?

  Matthew steps over cabinet and cupboard doors, walks to the living room, and peeks from behind the curtain to make sure the UPS guy has jumped back into the truck and driven off before he creeps out on the porch quickly and recedes back into shadowy safety carrying the parcels left by UPS. Parcels that rested directly beneath a door slip signed and hanging there trying too hard to say something; to say that during the weekday hours between nine and seven, of course nobody would be here to sign for a package; why would they; why would someone be here when normal people are at work during that time; of course the recipient of the parcel of product ordered from a tiny classified ad in American Crafting wouldn’t be home—what, do you think he was fired or something? Well, he wasn’t.

  Inside the house, Matthew opens the boxes and double-checks the order against the invoice with some scrutiny. After all, a business owner unaware of his inventory is not a business owner for very long. Two dozen (24 count) unfinished plaster mugs without graphics (Mug, LG16, nonfin/nonGFX) with no chips or damage, shipped UPS 2nd Day Air, paid in full by credit card. The mugs are each inspected, each repacked with their respective ball of corrugated-cardboard packing wad, and the box is humped out to the Bavarian Motor Warehouse. The sleek, black, long, overpowered, aimless cockpit of denial and optimism is pointed toward the community center again. The brain keeps sending word down through the blood that something is wrong; that this is the wrong time of day to be leaving the house; that the dot on the film is winning whatever war it has waged; that a grown man is not supposed to be looking forward to an afternoon craft class with the craft ladies. But Matthew turns into the lot at the community center, suspending disbelief, at least for the moment—a rare gift for the semi-afflicted.

  To the trunk to fetch the inventory; across the lot and in through the glass doors and down the hall; past the Take me! Take me! Take me! box where the book about data measuring continues to lie alone, filled with creased heartbreak and hopes of being taken home by some maligned and crushed soul in the kind of dire spiritual debt that drug and drink haven’t learned to solve yet; and finally, through the classroom door. Matthew cuts a direct line straight up to the box on the instructor’s desk, barely affecting the periphery of the chirpy, cooing craft covey. There it is. There’s the finished product. The words are as clear and as clean as Matthew recalls them having been: God will help you find a gun if you’re grateful. The illustration never really looked like a hand, and time and fire have not remedied this, but the gun is very plain to see in the illustration. It’s a gun held by a hand moving so quickly it appears to have seven blurry fingers; a gun held in the hand of a burn victim—you can make fun of the hand portion of the illustration on the mug all day long, but one thing’s for sure: For fifteen bucks Jan’s son gets a sweet-ass mug with a gun on it, and a saying to buttress his faith.

  18

  The Business of This

  FIFTEEN DOLLARS FROM Jan wadded and rolled and stuck into the pocket and the second it happened, adrenal corticoids raced fifteen thousand ideas right through the head. That was the moment all this sprung into consideration, this little production line that preps and glazes and fires under state supervision, then packs the mugs into the little white boxes. After the fifteen dollars created the explosion—the idea of making more mugs, and more little wads of dollars—there was a search online. It’s called The Norwalk Developmental Work Training Center, it turns out. There’s a video to click on. Matthew had heard about this place from Tim, of all people, years ago. Tim had said there was a place where people with physical limitations and so-called disorders enroll in a work-training program and are supervised and authorized and certified; they do piecework assembly for your business. You drop stuff off, you pick it up assembled or gift-wrapped, or whatever. Tim didn’t explain as objectively as the Web site does, of course. Over drinks one time, Tim said something like, “There’s a huge factory full of retards up by where you live. People hire the place out for contract work. Just simple shit, though. When I worked at Solomon, we used them to stuff prospectus
envelopes, but they eventually fucked a bunch up so we had to stop. They’d put keys and gum wrappers and shit like that in the envelopes—one had a nacho in it; just whatever the fuck catches their eye. They don’t know; you can’t get mad. But can you imagine that? You’re a client, we mail you a prospectus on a new fund and there’s a fucking nacho jammed in there?”

  Anyway, Matthew went online, Matthew found the site, he clicked on the video, he got a stupid lump in his throat watching it, then he made a phone call and spoke with a guy named Jim, the executive director of the place, and the conversation went like this:

  “So they’re coffee mugs basically?”

  “Basically, yeah,” Matthew says.

  “And you need some spot art, firing, then some packing. Okay, are we doing any fulfillment; any drop shipping to fulfill retail orders or anything?”

  “I’m… Okay, there’s one thing. I’m not sure if the stuff I need put on them—the art I’ve come up with that I need replicated on the mugs—is too controversial for your… special, you know… for the people that…”

  “For the twenty-eight- to fifty-year-old grown adults who work in our program?”

  “Never mind, I know, I don’t think they’re… you know, I just…”

  “So, we’ve reviewed your project and I’ve assigned Chris as your team leader.” Which is Jim’s way of saying, Let’s move this along, shall we, you condescending idiot.

  Chris has Down syndrome or a mild palsy or maybe both. He can turn around a case of mugs in a few days, in time for Matthew to try and sell them over a weekend. Since he’s a team leader, he decides how many staffers will help and everything. Today is maybe the third or fourth or seventh Friday that Matthew has made a pickup. It’s hard to tell what time is doing these days; days grind by in near halt like winter sap, and weeks fly by fast. But there are moments like this, Chris shaking, twisting, smiling, and trying hard to stay straight in his chair and not show a thing; to play it cool when Matthew comes around, to keep it all in, but it doesn’t work. Another batch of mugs, another Friday, another visit from Matthew—these are all things to twist and smile and make sounds about. And when his happiness peaks, you see it cross his mind to settle down, you see him admonish himself.

  It’s hard on any heart watching; seeing him get mad at his body in a flash; seeing him trying to hide excitement the way the whole stupid, average world has mastered hiding excitement when life is trying to make them glad to be living.

  And when Matthew sees him try to reel it all in and tear the heart off the sleeve, Matthew waits until the executive director of The Norwalk Developmental Work Training Center isn’t looking, at which point Matthew catches Chris’s eye and acts like he’s humping a case of mugs as he puts them into the car’s trunk. And the twisting and laughing and smiling are all back! Full bore! Full tilt! Who can hide it! Who would want to! Matthew is cracking up, too! For some completely predictable and wholly unseemly reason called the human condition, nobody really jokes with people like Chris, so acting like you’re fornicating with a boxful of coffee cups—a chestnut to begin with—gets an even bigger laugh than one might expect while standing behind the car and loading another case in. Another case into the trunk—mugs, once blank, now fired and glazed and burned and brave. Maxims clear, beautiful illustrations blurry. Crude paintings of heads and phones, and hands holding guns, and tall girls that are Tatiana, all drawn by way of shaking hands, and heads that bob like those of jazz musicians feeling phantom time signatures and meter that we can’t keep no matter how hard we listen, a curse on days, a ballet of this earthbound urgency.

  There’s a little picnic table on a concrete slab next to the place and Matthew sits with Chris while Chris has lunch. Matthew smokes, which is probably another in a series of the bad hunches like guns and jogging. Chris points at the cigarette, shakes his head, makes a tsk-tsk-tsk sound, and starts smiling. Matthew smiles bashfully back, shrugs his shoulders like he’s busted, rolls his eyes like he knows Chris is right, and Chris starts laughing and claps his hands.

  “Oh, no, I’m busted now, right?”

  “No! Hey, don’t!”

  “No, I was just kidding. I’m not leaving, I was just saying you busted me for smoking, get it?”

  “Yeah. But if, you know when people go? I miss them. It doesn’t, but it doesn’t, make me sad. Some people get a baby inside of them and then they’re gone; it’s boring. Boring baby, boring baby. I don’t have a baby inside. I can’t have a baby inside, since I’m a man.”

  Chris starts cracking up and he won’t stop. It is pretty funny, actually, and Matthew is laughing, too, mostly because Chris points to his crotch a superlong time when he says it, which, again, is kind of one of those classic hits no matter how you play it. When he’s had enough of it for a laugh, he gets back on track and talking.

  “I keep working. I get haircuts with it. I get pizza with it. One day you can stop, one day you are dead again. But not now because we’re lucky and sad, like wizards. There’s other ones that didn’t come with you; they couldn’t find a belly to come out from. So you forget you knew them. Until you meet them alive. That’s why people fall in love. Because from when they were dead together. But then they came to life and got lost unless they meet again.”

  “You’re a smart guy, you know that? I’m not fucking being cute, you’re smart and I mean it.”

  “I’m joking! We are not sad wizards!”

  Fucker. How’d he do that?

  “Mmmusic is. Good!” Chris says like he’s glad to finally get it out in the open.

  “Not all of it, Chris, I’m afraid I have to draw the line here. I’m tired of some of it. Like the sad kind. It gets boring.”

  “Music is litter. I have so much money, so I keep working.”

  “Why?” asks Matthew.

  “To help you. Then you’re gone. To help me, then I’m gone, too.”

  “I hope you and I don’t go away for a long time. I get sad when people go away, too.”

  “If you get sad, just have fun. First have fun, THEN close your eyes, THEN die.”

  “Yeah, no duh, I already know that.”

  “You need a belly to get here, but you don’t need a belly to die. So the mom goes away. She has fun, then she closes her eyes, too.”

  And then there’s a little bit of silence while Matthew and Chris just sit in the afternoon sun, just two men thinking for a minute.

  Matthew is thinking: I love you.

  Then Chris quietly says, “Work, pizza, haircuts.”

  This conversation with Chris, it’s the only talk lately that makes this much sense. And the heart and head are together for once, working in concert, agreeing with each other. It’s one of those times when a man thinks to himself: It’s that same old thing all guys deal with, where you’re in love with the thirty-six-year-old man with Down syndrome who makes coffee mugs, but for some reason it’s always a woman you want.

  The lull stays there between them the way lulls will when any two men on earth sit at a table sizing up their own lots during lunch. Chris gets up, starts to walk back inside to work, thinking about something, almost not noticing Matthew, but then he stops and turns and waves good-bye, making a hilarious stupid-guy face and saying bye-bye-bye instead of bye-bye. The head says to make something sad and beautiful of times like this one, but it’s too late for following the head, and maybe it’s always been. Two hearts know it’s a good laugh, this super hilarious, weird face Chris makes, this bye-bye-bye riff.

  The woman at the craft class, the teacher or whatever, she couldn’t handle the volume and pace, not even with a cut of the eventual profits that Matthew promised. One case of mugs to fire (not even to do the art on!) was too much apparently, unthinkable, evidently. So never mind talking to her once the UPS man was showing up at the doorstep with two cases. Fuck anyone who doesn’t feel how fast life is ending; fuck anyone who hasn’t got the heart of Chris and his helpers and friends. These people are excited and determined—they soldier right into co
ffee-mug production; and news flash: They know, they know, they know. They know they forget to tell someone about the burr in their sock that’s wearing a bloody spot into their ankle. And they know they’ll be lucky if you ever figure this out from the way they stop walking for a minute and start to cry at the sting of frustration that comes with knowing something simple is probably causing their pain. They know that you won’t know why they suddenly decided to try and punch the sky instead of continuing to cry. Punch it. Punch the Goddamned heaven that spat down the genes and bad codes that brought these physical limitations; these cruel and permanent grifts and gyps that play out in the wombs of people never expecting them. Fuck average people; fuck everybody who can’t be bothered to race death and beat its perverse pace to win any argument for sticking around another year or decade; fuck everyone who can’t handle any number of mugs waiting to be turned into ones, fives, and tens rubber-banded.

  So when the normal people look at you like you’re crazy, there’s one place to go, go to where the definition of normal means nothing—to the place where you can infer that one who is normal is sadly average. Go to The Norwalk Developmental Work Training Center where people with so-called behavioral and physical challenges will prepare 144 mugs; where they will shake and twist and smile when they’re excited. It starts to feel like common decency when they do it, it starts to be a relief compared to so-called normal people; with normal people, you have to stand there second-guessing how they’re feeling. After a month or two of coming around picking up mugs for selling, one starts to believe that everyone should shake and twist when they’re excited—when so-called normal people are excited about something all they do is drink, or say something like, New Time Media couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to be a part of Fashion Week.