American Spirit: A Novel
Page 25
Greetings, Fellow Doomed! Guess what, I’m tired of being lost in a park that’s supposed to be so goddamned simple. If nature is such a perfect system, why can’t it make it clear what the hell state I’m in? One person tells me we’re in Montana, the next person says Idaho, the next swears up and down that it’s Wyoming. I am starting to get the impression one could drink a bottle of fortified strawberry wine, get in the rig, and do a doughnut that would swing her ass end through terra firma belonging to all three states. So I did just that, on sort of a dare from myself, Chief. I’ve generally been getting my act together but I allowed myself one lapse into the powder and booted it up with some strawberry wine thing that Tic liberated from the minimarket a couple days after you left and we went out of the park to refuel. Modoch is pouting about my behavior, big surprise, but Tic Tac tells me, LAUGHING HIS ASS OFF, that I was literally, technically, swinging the ass end of the rig through all three states. It was loud. Things got loud after you left and I allowed myself one last dance with the demons inside me to get a few things straight with them. Anyway, I was drinking and searching for some answers, and had jumped in the rig to do doughnuts and blow off steam. And that’s when the heat rolled up strong with their beef again. The same guy that crawled all over me for defending myself against wildlife up at Canyon Falls when I accidentally smacked the neighboring camper (again, his fault, snuck up on me) but he’s with a new guy none of us have seen. They cooled off real fast when they saw the company I’m keeping these days. Modoch assured the ranger that I’ve been making spiritual progress of sorts. Tic Tac made some crack to the new guy about how he might want to go back to his shed or barrel or wherever they kept him. Then Tic stood right there and told me to get back in the rig and do it again, do another doughnut in the thing, but I felt pretty lousy after they had to strong-arm and scare the park screws, who were just doing their job, so I said I wasn’t up for it and that we would tone things down for the rest of the night. New ground for me, am I right? Modoch saw the progress in my feeling remorse, I think. Tic Tac just got drunker and very silent and sad. He looked, believe it or not, like a little boy whose birthday party had been shut down early on account of bad behavior. Like a little kid who was told he was getting nothing but coal for Christmas. My heart broke, it really did. So I said, “Oh, what the fuck,” screwed up my nerve, gave him a wink, and fired the steel horse up and let ’er rip all over that field again. And, get this: I ROLLED THE GODDAMN THING! Little bit of a bind, to say the least, Chief. The boys kept me out of the worst of it. They told me to get all of my shit out of the RV and stuff it up in whatever rucksack I had, and Tic made an anonymous call to the ranger from the park call box, and then we all hid on the other side of the river there. When three guys from RV Rents USA came into the park along with a big diesel tow truck to winch the beast off her side and drag her back up onto the road, Tic Tac jumped up out of our little foxhole over on the far side of The Madison, his face was all camouflaged with moss and barbecue charcoal and shit, and he power-walked across the river the way only former military assassins can. It was worth the price of admission, even though I haven’t had to pay admission since picking these two up in July. No clue what Tic Tac said to the RV guys, but they decided to kindly drag their goddamned top-heavy, overpowered RV out of the park before it killed somebody, tow it back to their lot in Bozeman, and that would be the end of it; no harm, no foul. Anyway, look, I’ve spent too much time bullshitting here. Here’s the thing: it was great seeing you but now there’s something I haven’t said since the day you got married: don’t do this. Don’t keep hanging on, Chief, move on, she was never the one. I can say that now without getting the hassle I got from your in-laws when they MADE AN EFFORT to overhear me when I was telling you the same thing DISCREETLY at your wedding. It doesn’t matter what went south, doesn’t matter if you were married too fast or looking for a mother, it doesn’t matter if the boy got married but the man stayed longing and looking for trouble, it only matters that you stop living like she’s still at home with you, because she hasn’t been for a long time. You’ve been alone in that house too long, probably still convinced she’s upstairs or in the other room. Take down some of the pictures on the walls, change your screensaver, quit calling her your wife in conversation, it’s been over a year. I bet if I got you up on fire mountain with Modoch doing a ceremony I could get you to admit it’s been two or three years, but I’m done here and by the time you dodge two more of my calls, I’ll be headed back to Manhattan to face the music. And by music I mean the Federal Fucking Trade Commission and a long list of people who would probably like their money back.
Signed, the only family you’ve got, whether you like it or not—
T
There was more mail from Tatiana saying essentially that things are complicated in her life, but that maybe they’re not as complicated as she thinks. A still relatively young man has to count it as a plus when a beautiful woman doesn’t run screaming from the hotel in which blood is urinated onto her by accident. And not only does Tatiana not run, but she lies on the bed to watch television documentaries about geniuses and says she has a hunch that the man has a touch of brilliance, even after this terrible mishap in the shower that would seem evidence of the contrary. This is a solid partner in crime, this is not some Miss Minor League Come and Go. Aside from positing the idea that life was complicated but maybe not, Tatiana’s email spoke of having business to tend to for herself and Matthew. Because when a cute vampire actor uses Twitter FaceLink to post a picture of a fellow cute vampire actor drinking coffee out of a mug that says, It starts out cute and then it gets ugly across it, there are millions of girls in millions of bedrooms in front of millions of computers trying to find that mug in a mall, even though most of them probably don’t drink coffee. There is email from Jim Montgomery, executive director of The Norwalk Developmental Work Training Center. It is a note saying, basically: “It is the future I got wolf blood powers Jim is full of shit.”
This must mean that Chris figured out how to email Matthew on Jim Montgomery’s computer. But there won’t be much time for hijinks, there won’t be time for much more than producing and boxing mugs and mugs and mugs. Chris will be thrilled to learn that there is a rush on for millions more now that there is a distribution contract and the matter of this Internet picture situation. The head reels at the idea of it all. The kind of money that Tatiana is talking about in the contract is crazy money. It is the kind of money one works in the middle-management maze of a place like New Time Media for two decades or more to amass. That’s a lot of money today, but it won’t be in the future, it’s a fortune now, but what if one lives to eighty or ninety? Still, there is no better way to be flying back to America than with one’s mug in every magazine on the newsstand, and someone in Los Angeles making sure it is credited and getting more press, and making sure it is licensed and in line for a big advance.
There’s no better way to be flying back to America than to have left going broke, marginalized, unemployed, low-spirited trying to get high, and now this. But for now there’s the same economy seat and anonymous quiet of life before it was all spun around. Alone now over the Pacific at night again, done with the Denpasar-to-Taipei leg, done with Taipei to Tokyo, halfway done with Tokyo to San Francisco, and then only San Francisco to JFK will remain. Maybe upgrading is in order for the last leg, but for now, economy, sleeping against a sweatshirt against a window, hopefully through with eating pills and pissing red sandstone.
The window rattles and chills the head and it’s a little easier to feel the fight fading from the chest way up here on a night like this; a little easier to see that maybe all of these lives have one thing hidden in the fine print, that they’ve been closing in on the end from the day they began with a slap. All days numbered and ticking away, all clocks doing their sneaking by, all calendars spitting up squares until the grid is done with us—the rush of having it all ahead of us gone, the body aged past the promise of what any stranger might’ve assume
d was within reach, time doing to all of us what we’ve seen it do to everyone.
Then again, a jet! A fucking jet! Up here, seated and fed, up here moping around in air we wouldn’t even be able to breathe in! And that doesn’t even start on the miles of sky above this thing, miles that go way past where gravity has any card to play. Men have stared at the moon and figured a way up. And pilots sit in the nose of these planes, steel and fuel and fire, seven or eight miles above the Pacific all night, and they touch down soft as angels without incident every day! Tatiana is somewhere up ahead, a thousand miles off the nose of this thing tonight, maybe even smiling. Chris is out there dreaming of boxing up mugs like there’s no tomorrow. Tim is coming down from the mountains, surrendering and heading back just in case he sees a chance to try and take Manhattan again.
Maybe it’s not so hard to have a little faith. Maybe it is time to be done with every bad decision that has prolonged the pain of transition—guns, half-assed drugs, drinking, that thing where one is thinking they have everyone fooled, never realizing everyone saw what you were going through, and you were the last to know and everyone knew it. Milton is down there alive and waiting for the next session, right? And wait until he hears just how much progress there has been. Sure there are catches to starting one’s life all over again; this is going to hurt, this is going to be the heavy lifting, this is saying good-bye to the gun before getting the hang of it, and saying good-bye to drugs and drink and to the lonely pornography from under the driver’s seat. Well, maybe not good-bye to the porn, maybe don’t quit everything at the same time and go insane. But yes, let’s get rid of some of the crutches; let’s ask for help when it is needed; learn to have a little faith that there’s still time, no matter how much was wasted. Maybe whatever life one gets is more than we were ever owed to begin with. And all that time wasted on the job thinking one was getting over on the bosses, well, the end is going to come, and in the end, we will all realize the time we thought we were clever for wasting was ours all along.
So, what are we waiting for? Keep this free bird pointed east, Captain! Bring it down gently right at the minute the first half of the big mug money direct deposit from Los Angeles hits! Come on, let’s live, there will be time enough for everyone to find their loves and friends and family as ghosts in the end, and maybe then everyone can meet up again. In the meantime, the sad songs are gone; the cigarettes and anthems of the downtrodden have fallen by the wayside in the shadow of a hospital and hotel; there will be new songs now, and they won’t be songs about things going wrong. There’s nothing to lose but what time’s already planning to take.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Mom, Dad, Trish, for getting to earth and every single kindness. Thank you John Murphy. Thank you Maria. Maria! Thanks James Levine and Daniel Greenberg and everyone at Levine Greenberg. Thank you Larry Kirshbaum, Ed Park, Carmen Johnson, Julia Cheiffetz, Maggie Sivon, Justin Renard, Alexandra Woodworth, and everyone at Amazon Publishing in New York. Thanks to George Dawes Green, Joan Firestone, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Maggie Cino, Catherine McCarthy, Robin Wachsberger, Kate Tellers, Kirsty Bennett, Paul Ruest, Daisy Rosario, David Mutton, Brandon Echter, and every single person from Stories at The Moth in New York City, past and present—Joey Xanders, Lea Thau! Joshua Wolf Shenk, thank you as always. Thanks to Pamela Koslyn, Esq. Thank you Christopher Monks, Jordan Bass, Jory John and everyone at McSweeney’s, 826 Valencia, and The Rumpus. Thanks to Raha Naddaf. And to Jim Nelson and Michael Benoist at GQ. Hello to Michael Patrick King and thanks for making me laugh so damn hard after a crazy beautiful strange gig so far from home. Thank you Amanda, Ben, Janine, Nat, Dave, Eric, Peter, Lotta, Atkins, Doug, Loren, Cam, Sheri, King, Juliet, John, Susan, Jeff, Norm, Scot, Ravi, Courtney, Alex, Karen, J.C., Leroy, Aaron, Dan, Paul, Linda, Kevin, B. Frayn, London, Lyle.
MANIFEST AND WAYBILL: 20 pages in 2003 on Wall Street, stopped, started again in 2006 on 35th street, stopped, started again in 2008, stopped, started again in a cabin in upstate New York, August 2010. Finished 10/21/11 on West 11th St. Daniel Greenberg emailed that it had a home and contract on 03/12/12. I mention this because I have said that writing is easy work one too many times and it finally bit me in the ass.
File under: Pressure.
DAN KENNEDY is a writer living in New York. He is author of the memoirs Loser Goes First and Rock On, host of The Moth storytelling podcast and live events, and a contributor to GQ and McSweeney’s. His stories have been featured on the Peabody Award–winning Moth Radio Hour.