American Spirit: A Novel

by Dan Kennedy

  After the ballet of hello, and kisses that land four inches shy of skin, Matthew starts his version of hello, which is basically staring at Tatiana for seemingly one solid minute, unable to say anything during it. This welcoming homeostasis ends with Matthew jerking into action and presenting Tatiana with a coffee mug that has a blurry picture of an androgynous, long, thin person sitting on the floor and beneath it, text that says: I’m going to meditate so well that I make all of you disappear. Tatiana reads this and squeals with delight.

  “Is this for me?”

  “Yeah, yes. This is this thing I’m doing now; I’m making these coffee mug things now. Well, I come up with them. I have people making them, some friends, this place in Westport makes them for me after I give them one as an example.”

  “You’re selling them?”

  “I have been, yeah, but it’s hard.”

  “No, I’m sure, you have to glaze stuff and put it in kilns and all that. My mom used to make tons of pottery stuff.”

  “Guys do it, too.”

  “Oh, I know, no, I’m just saying I know it’s hard to do.”

  “Making them is pretty easy, really. Since I basically don’t do it. I just meant selling them is hard. It’s hard trying to figure out how to make it a real business. And there’s the cops and all of that.”

  This last part about police brings silence and more staring. And so Matthew and Tatiana quickly move into the business of menus, ordering, eating, and the luxury of using eyes and millions of muscles in the face to telegraph late-night sentiment instead of having to text or dream it.

  One can drink rum with an order of French toast, but it isn’t recommended. It takes three or five of them to do the proper work of corrosives and soak through a gut of doughy night breakfast and find some blood to thin. And the road to the brain and heart seems laced with speed bumps of eggy bread soaked in syrup; the buzz comes, but the whole commute for the booze is roughshod and gimped; gummed up and sullen. After the bloodstream’s traffic jams, Matthew pays the tab by stretching and breaking a rubber band, hacking, and unfurling a roll of wad. Tatiana stares at this form of financial management, so Matthew offers up a breezy explanation.

  “I’m kind of not using the bank and ATMs.”

  They get up and head out of the hotel restaurant into the lobby, Matthew rummed up like a mail-order bride who just landed. Once through the sea of American youth plankton still balled up under the lights and beats, one assumes there will appear a bank of elevators waiting to whisk them up to the roof for drinks or something. Instead, after a series of gentle pushes through the clouds of youthful brine shrimp, in which Matthew follows Tatiana the way a shark is followed by pilot fish, they are at the side door leading outside to a gas fire pit surrounded by chairs and chaise lounges.

  Tatiana doesn’t break no stride; walks past the fire, pulling a piece of cash and ticket from a tiny pocket up near the top of her twenty-one-foot-long leg. She hands it to a handsome young man with hair styled to the day’s fashion and a red jacket with narrow lapels that feels like it was stolen from a Las Vegas bellhop in 1967. The kid smiles and says hello to her, disappears in a flash, comes back around in a car best described as a long, dark blue piece of sculpture stolen from a museum; a form of transportation boasting hood- and trunk-logo medallions from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Tatiana jumps in smiling, Matthew approaches the passenger side; pulls the door handles about an inch, at which time the door handle starts pulling itself open with a tiny hydraulic hiss. His ass hits the passenger seat, he yanks the door shut, but the door won’t slam, it rushes pretty quickly closed over 95 percent of the space and then just whispers a hush and very slowly completes those last few inches of closing. Real money will not let you slam doors behind you, it bears considering as French toast sponges continue to time-release half of Jamaica into the blood and brain at the moment.

  Tatiana takes them on a drive up Wilshire then a right or a left, or an upside-down clover or corkscrew to Hollywood via La Cienega to Sunset. Her car’s speakers ooze truth from young people playing bluegrass, lyrics asking musical questions like whether or not a gigantic crush can tend to a young man’s dog for one week because he’s about to be gone for three. And another song that says we don’t know what lies in the days before we die, since we never know when we’re going to die. Somehow none of it is sad; somehow banjos and fiddles and half-assed washboards and drums played with heart make the sights of Los Angeles whizzing past the passenger window feel beautiful and quaint. Melrose turns to Mayberry, a sign for Rodeo Drive reads like it’s alerting motorists to a rodeo that’s in town tonight, and Sunset Boulevard, one is reminded, was named for the fact that you can see a beautiful day’s end by driving westbound on it.

  “I need to get to a store at some point. I have a friend I’m visiting while I’m out here. I’m driving up to his, um, house. So, long drive, need some water and snacks, and stuff like that.”

  The head likes the idea of having a backup plan, and taking the pressure off the visit. Tatiana is smiling for some reason, as if she’s never heard of putting good snacks in a rented Ford Taurus so that there’s stuff to munch on for a road trip. She whips left with the long, slender, and slightly oval foreign art piece she’s driving and starts up Laurel Canyon and pulls in at the tiny parking lot next to the Country Store. They get out, the two of them, walk across the little lot and up onto the wooden deck in front of the place, the smell of jasmine making strong synaptic connection between the landscape and the sight of Tatiana, triggering some spastic switch of dopamine and cueing the pursuit of her heart and sex. She moves with arch and sway, looking back over her shoulder to compensate for Matthew’s lag, saying things about Jim Morrison, pointing to the building that borders the tiny parking lot, talking about how he used to live right there.

  Inside the store, mug money is stripped from a roll maintained only by the tender’s muscle memory, then pulled through the fingers and flattened for spending on granola, trail mix, three big bottles of spring water, hippy muffins and bars, some organic mints, some Native American cigarettes, and a disposable lighter since the land of the free has stripped Matthew of his during airport security clearance. A good bag of fuel, to be sure, enough get-some-go-again in case the idea is to make it to Yellowstone tomorrow or the next day to catch up with Tim. Once back in the car, at the end of the little parking lot, pause and decision seem required. Making a right will take them up into Laurel Canyon, and certainly to some gigantic house in these Hollywood Hills where the Tatiana creature lives. But she points the car left instead and coaxes a silent growl from it as gravity does its thing and pushes one back into the seat.

  “Let’s go to your place,” she says, as if this is a good idea.

  “I just have… the one in Connecticut, really.”

  “I mean, your room.”

  “It’s a basic queen. With sitting area.”

  “Oh, fun! Don’t you think it’ll be fun?”

  “It’s, you know, yeah… it was pretty fun when I was in there earlier, I guess.”

  The drive back downtown brings scenery of the aged haunts of Hollywood’s ghosts of everyone who tried it here. Motels like The Lamplighter and the hard-boiled noir voices of also-rans still echoing off the neon sign: Why, I’ve hung around gin mills long enough to sign up the next hothouse flower and now I’m in town, ready to make a picture—dial me at The Lamplighter! Los Angeles whisks by like opening credits and Tatiana sits there in the driver’s seat, a perfect portrait of temptation. Say something, say something, say anything. And so Matthew tries; just says what’s on his mind.

  “In Swedish folklore, right, there’s this girl; more of a wood nymph, really, if that’s the term I’m looking for. You know, this sort of sexy… forest ghost. She roams around in the woods, and she’s beautiful, here’s the thing though: She has seven faces. No, wait, two faces. Two faces? Wait, you know what, she has one face, actually; so, she’s normal in that regard. But the point is, she wanders around
in the woods, she is unbelievably sexy, and any man, like, lost in the forest and unable to find his way out is defenseless against her, basically. And these are men who—not that the legend stipulates this, I’m taking the liberty of assuming this next part—these are men who are terrified because they’re lost in the woods, so they’re not even remotely aroused; sex, courtship, flirting, all of that stuff is the furthest thing from the mind of a man lost in the trees with nightfall coming on. And that’s precisely when this chick appears. At the most hopeless point, basically. And so, a lost man in the woods sees her just before he basically gives up on ever finding his way out. And he’s thinking: Fucking, no way, this might be my only hope of living. And she basically whispers something like, ‘Don’t sweat this, I got it. Follow me, I’ve been in here tons of times.’ And so a lost man will follow her to get out of the woods, and when she gets you out of the woods, all of a sudden, she turns around, and she’s a withered old hag; she’s the devil, basically.”

  “Who cares if she’s the devil? She gets you out of the forest so you don’t stay lost in there and die, that’s all that matters.”

  “Oh, I know, I agree. But some people will say, Oh, you shouldn’t follow the devil in that situation.”

  “But you don’t know she’s the devil, you only see her from behind, is what you were saying.”

  “Oh, wait, no: She gets you lost. That’s the thing. You weren’t lost to start with, you were fine, but she lures you into the woods because she’s so beautiful and you think you kind of have a chance with her or whatever, and then you’re lost. And you die. So…” Matthew holds what he hopes is an intense and worldly look on his face, ideally making the fable still scary, even the way he messed it up.

  A left into the parking lot. Back at the hotel. Up the elevator. Key the door. And then, upon stepping into the room, Matthew is shut down. Cock-blocked by coffee mugs, if one can be so forward. Prior to departure, back at JFK, there was the last-minute thought when leaving the car to put a few mugs into the carry-on bag. This thinking was along the lines of: One can’t pack the gun, one can’t pack the leftover beers from the cabin, one can’t pack the mix of crushed-up antihistamines and Valium—so almost for lazy spite, one may as well pack a few of the coffee mugs. And now Tatiana is gushing over them instead of gushing over the idea of hotel sex.

  “Wait, there are more of them?”

  “That’s one of each. Well, of the most popular ones. There’s a few others.”

  She picks up and unboxes each one. The one about God helping you buy a gun. The one that has a blurry, disheveled, androgynous person and a long, stacked, unruly caption wrapping around it that says, Fuck it, I’m not old. Unless you’re nineteen, sober, and looking right at me, from a few inches away in natural light. The one with a terrible drawing of Matthew with giant teeth, in a smudged black car, and text that delivers the good news: When the angry jerking about and spitting stops, the serenity starts.

  “I love these! I love the little random stuff you put inside some of them!” And with this, she pulls out a dime and a piece of gum that was in one of the boxed mugs.

  “Shit, that’s… see, they’re kind of made and boxed up by people with Down syndrome and stuff. Chris or somebody must’ve put that in there.”

  “That’s sweet that you reach out to people like that. It’s kind of cool in a weird way, having something random in them; it’s kind of collectible. It totally suits the tone of the product.”

  “Well, the thing is, they’ll start putting nachos and shit in there if I don’t talk to them. I’m going to have to go through the batches I pick up from them when I get back. Goddamnit.”

  “I love these so much.”

  “You can take those so you have one of each. You’ll have the whole set.”

  And with that, thank the sky and dead Indians, the mood turns silent. Matthew sees to it that the alarm clock thing next to the bed finds a way to play something slow and not too sad, something rhythmic and blue that isn’t wasting lyrics on bad news. The two of them lie on the bed, staring up at the ceiling of the room, the floor of the room above them. Matthew’s rum hasn’t let him down, but it’s hard to tell if anything is working inside of Tatiana in the way of substance. But she did, after all, have to talk to Hernan in order to get a phone number for Matthew so she could text him, so she could’ve lined herself up with something. But she seems all business. She called Matthew’s crafts products. She used words like collectible and tone. Frankly, the room feels a bit like two pleasant conventioneers on a bed after a vigorous bout of networking a Novelty Card and Gift Show. But then, progress! Tatiana starts a westward expansion from the bed, standing at the side of it and slipping out of her pants.

  “I’m going to take a shower.”

  “Oh, okay. There’s clean towels in there.”

  Jesus, the heart lurches; there’s clean towels in there? It feels like going from a drugged-up fling to a quarter century of marriage in one six-hour flight. But then, halfway to a whisper Tatiana says, “Wanna watch?” Even with boozy bread in his stomach, Matthew feels himself practically blush at the idea. This prospect of watching, inviting to be sure, is also sort of embarrassingly pragmatic with that wall of the shower being glass and bordering the bed; the glass shower wall is really kind of the centerpiece of the basic queen.

  “I think, you know, I’d have to watch. Unless I sit over at the…”

  “No, watch.”

  Her eyes snap to half-mast and dreamy in an instant, her mouth suddenly languid, gorgeous, candy, sin, and she makes a joke of begging Matthew to stick four of his fingers in it. Tatiana can do this. She can be just another person rocketed here to earth, halfway through her thirties or forties, then instantly an otherworldly sweet and potent mash of adolescent funny, depraved and high-spirited. It feels equal parts deadly and harmless, and one is instantly lost in it without life’s usual chart or compass. The only two times that Matthew has looked up at her to witness the shift, it has felt like being brave enough to stare at the sun for a minute; or like boyhood has finally come around to make him a rare and lucky witness of lycanthropy or aliens, chosen for this moment by something bigger than him.

  The room goes dark a little; fades in his peripheral vision, like standing up too fast, or a fighter staying down listening to the count of ten tick past; giving in to it. Tatiana is all legs and inward belly button, and a brain that’s doing who knows what at any moment; ankles, California feet; tits and ass, and gravity be damned. She moves, shower bound, westward in heather gray favorite underwear, around the corner, and in through the bathroom door, gone for a flash, and then reappearing behind water and glass, barely lit, but brighter than a silhouette. She moves around under the deluge falling from the ceiling, and there’s nothing canned or soft-core stupid about what she’s doing. She stands bored for a second, then she presses her tits, face, eyes, nose, and lips against the wall of glass; hair smashed and smeared against all the wet skin, a cross between a half-assed, gross-out prank and some kind of hot, deranged thing drowned or crashed. She pulls back and grins, she gets all business and actually showers, actually washes, really goes about the pedestrian rigors of soaping up and rinsing armpits, neck, ass. She turns sideways and gets lost in thinking for a minute, she snaps out of it, reaches out to the sink for the tiny bottles of expensive shampoo and conditioner, pulls her body back into the shower, turns to the glass, and gestures for Matthew to come in.

  Matthew silently bemoans being coaxed; isn’t he still married, technically? Isn’t he even uncertain of Tatiana’s last name? The head has a million little questions like this. But the body is up, appendage hanging half hard, thick and primate; the body is ready to round the same corner into the bathroom, through the steam, and the gray’s sugar-and-rum fog is making this okay just one more time, one more time, one more time and that’s it. Matthew recalls songs and movies that made this sort of thing okay; he recalls a character in a Southern poet’s novel saying, “Grace of God!” three times fast whe
n tried and tempted; he recalls how quickly all of our lives will end and leave us in the palsy of inventories that ask what risks one really took while down here; what limits one pushed to be certain they were living in this physical plane. Banged up by a gray noodle’s kettle of chemicals, fueled by good old-fashioned dopamine’s desire, sold out by synaptic ruse and pull, lulled by adrenaline’s peak and fade, it’s easy to take one’s clothes off in moments like this; it makes more sense to be as naked as the day you got to the planet.

  And so good-bye pants, hello shower with Tatiana. Warm water washes over Matthew’s head without having the heart to make him awake and sober, and both of their brains must be thinking this, upon the mashing of lips: There’s that mouth again, the one not quite familiar yet. And something warm jets against Matthew’s leg with decent force, it hits just above his knee, warms it down to the shin, and almost cools by the time it’s at his feet then on its way down the drain.

  “Woops, peeing,” she says, the side of her wiseass smile cracking.

  After the announcement of this strange and delightful breach of shower etiquette, the mouths are pressed together again, teeth clipping hard up against each other when Tatiana and Matthew start laughing in the middle of it. The warm still hasn’t stopped and Matthew moves his arm, straight and skinny-stiff, down between the two of them, turns up his palm to intercept it. The laughing stops and there are those eyes again, eyes that could stare for the rest of their mortal years and then some. Tatiana breaks from the stare they’re lost in, looks down, at first curious and serene, then instantly slack-jawed, aghast, terrified, and Matthew’s head races with its refrain: No Damn it. No damn it. No damn it. No. Fuck. No.

  Matthew is a fountain of blood; a nightmare stream of red gushes from about midway on the biological container, his body having succumbed to the warm shower and following Tatiana’s lead of peeing, but with a big, jagged stone somewhere inside of him, moving ever so slowly a fraction of an inch across the kidney, tearing whatever red-gouged path it needs, and taking months to move two or three inches to the renal pelvis, in what the doctor said would eventually be an impossible migration without surgical intervention. Nothing will put a damper on a highly charged shower with someone the way becoming a human blood sprinkler will; a scarlet fountain of twenty-first-century potential biohazard; plasma spattering everything red, like red-soaked pay-per-view horror flicks.