Repeat

by Neal Pollack

  That was only half-true, but he was sorry he’d said it. He also wanted to say, “Well, you haven’t been much help, you know,” but he didn’t like confrontation.

  “Pathetic,” she said. “You’ve been a great disappointment to me in many ways.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Drop your cocks and grab your socks.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means get back to work.”

  “But I have nothing to say.”

  Alison regarded him scornfully. “Someone once told me that Brad Cohen will be the best thing that ever happens to your career,” she said. “But it hasn’t really worked out that way.”

  “For either of us,” Brad said.

  She drove him back to his car in disapproving silence.

  By the time Brad began his journey home, the rain had stopped, and by the time he got halfway, there were rainbows over Griffith Park. Two years hence they would have been the most Instagrammed rainbows of all time, but for now, in the common era before infinitely shared online photography, they just existed as reminders that there was something beyond all this.

  You put in the days, Brad thought. You put in the hours. You try. But he had even disappointed Alison. Talk about not clearing a low bar.

  He parked the Prius on lower Sunset, two doors down from the Green Athena. The city kept shutting down his favorite dispensaries, but this one was pretty good so far. There was a courtyard with a fountain and a smoking table, and they always banged a gong when a customer entered. It was a lot better than the one behind Burrito King on Hyperion, which had anarchist pamphlets scattered around and scary dogs that barked at you while you examined the wares. Of course, the fountain at Green Athena wasn’t working, and the bottom had grown thick with algae, but Brad’s expectations where pretty low for a quasi-legal marijuana shop in Echo Park.

  At the entrance sat a thick-necked cholo wearing a gun holster.

  “ID,” he said with understandable resentment. If he’d ever got caught with as much weed as he saw white dudes walk out of here with, he’d be doing five to ten in San Quentin, no questions. One man’s medicine was another man’s doom. But Brad couldn’t worry about that right now. He’d printed out an Internet coupon for thirty-five dollars an eighth.

  Green Athena had a good selection. Brad stuck his nose in a jar of Tangerine Dream and also one of Orange You Glad. In general, he only consumed strains that were named after citrus fruits. Anything indica brought him down. One time he’d smoked a bowl of Chronic Grape Kush and wanted to saw off his arm. The only worse strain he’d ever experienced had been called Walter Mondale. He didn’t have much wisdom to pass down to his daughters, but “Don’t buy ironically named pot” was definitely on the list.

  Finally, Brad settled on an eighth of Lemon Lift.

  “That’s a good one,” said the cute girl behind the counter, though she said that to every customer.

  “Well, it’s my birthday tomorrow, so I thought I’d treat myself.”

  The girl cocked her head so cutely, in a manner clearly learned by watching the early performances of Zooey Deschanel.

  “Awwwww,” she said. “Happy birthday!”

  “Thanks,” Brad said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Forty.”

  “God,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It happens to everybody,” said Brad.

  “I hope it never happens to me,” said the girl.

  She weighed out Brad’s order and then gave him a little extra with a wink. He paid. She slid a fat joint into a paper bag.

  “It’s a present from us,” she said.

  “Is it sativa?” he said.

  “It’s a blend,” she said. “Mostly shake.”

  Brad appreciated her generosity but knew that if he smoked the wrong stuff, it could really mess up his brain. He was forty now, basically, and he had to be careful. But when he walked outside, the sun had come out and the air was crisp and cleanly breathable, as it always is the first hour after an LA rain. Suddenly the day seemed possible again.

  The patio table was still soaked, so he sparked up standing, his face instantly enveloped in a cloud of smoke. The weed tasted fragrant and good. He smoked it down to the nub, putting the roach in the key pocket of his jeans for later. It didn’t occur to him until he got into the car that he’d have to drive home stoned.

  By the time Brad reached the highway 2 on-ramp, his legs felt leaden, and his brain felt like a mash. The road seemed to come up at him in 3-D. Whoa. NPR sounded distant, as though it were being broadcasted in from a faraway star, a soothing, disconnected buzz.

  Don’t drive stoned, Cohen, he said to himself. The phrase echoed around in his head like a squash ball going back and forth in an empty court. But somehow he made it up the hills and pulled into his cracked driveway still breathing.

  Brad went inside. His girls were there, watching TV and eating chocolate ice cream. Juliet stood in the kitchen, stewing herbs. Cori and Claire shouted his name and ran up to hug him. He hugged them back.

  “You guys are Ewoks,” he said spacily.

  “Daddy’s home!” Juliet said.

  She came over, gave him a kiss, and wrinkled her nose.

  “Ooooh,” Juliet said to the girls passive-aggressively. “Daddy smells like Daddy’s medicine. Daddy knows he shouldn’t drive after taking his medicine.”

  “Give Daddy a break,” Brad said.

  “How was your meeting?” Juliet asked.

  Brad went over to the sofa and sat down.

  “Daddy wants to watch Jeopardy!,” he said.

  Watching Jeopardy!, which he’d been doing more or less regularly since 1984, always made Brad feel pretty smart. He knew most of the answers. Juliet had often told him he should go on the show. Brad replied, “I’m going to get on TV the legitimate way.”

  But now, he realized, he wasn’t going to get on TV any way, ever.

  He put his head in his hands. “I’m such a failure,” he said. And he began to sob. “AUUUUUUUGH!” he moaned.

  “Oh boy,” Juliet said.

  She put a hand on Brad’s shoulder. “Girls,” she said. “Go play in your room for a while.”

  Brad wept on the couch for fifteen minutes before Juliet told him firmly, “Don’t let the girls see you like this.” Juliet wasn’t Jewish and therefore hadn’t grown up in an environment where it was considered fairly normal for men to weep at home. But she had a point. So he went into his “office,” which was really just a windowed closet off the carport, fired up his vaporizer, and checked his e-mail, which consisted of three pieces of spam, a message from Amazon telling him he might like the new Elmore Leonard novel, a reminder that his website registration was about to expire, and a forwarded message from Alison about a script contest for “short features with a sci-fi/horror theme about Coke Zero.” In other words, it was the in-box of a man without much to do. Yet still his birthday approached, as sure as the morning sun. It was time to celebrate.

  Now even more stoned, Brad went inside and put on his suit, which was seven years old, but he’d worn it so infrequently that it still looked sort of new. Juliet had donned a blue velvet jacket and a flower-print skirt, as well as various earrings, bracelets, and rings that she’d bought on Etsy. She always adorned herself so beautifully, and with so few resources. She was a walking charm bracelet.

  A neighbor lady named Linda appeared at the door, because there’d always been a neighbor lady named Linda no matter where he’d lived. Brad had met her a couple of months before when he was walking Kedzie around the block. She’d burst out of her townhome, screaming, “I admire your extremely interesting canine!” He’d started walking fast, but Linda had followed, soon telling him her entire life story, much of which seemed to involve taking mushrooms with Lawrence Ferl
inghetti in the basement of City Lights Books. In recent months, she’d moved to the neighborhood because her brother had died in a motorcycle accident and now she was “seeing after his estate,” otherwise known as “living in his place for free.” She let Brad know that she was receiving permanent disability for an illness she refused to name. Also, she provided babysitting services for a reasonable fee.

  This turned out to be fifteen dollars an hour, or, as Brad liked to call it, “the alternative minimum tax.” Even thinking about going out the door without the kids cost them sixty bucks. And then Linda had just started hanging around for free. Several times Brad had come into the house to find Linda helping Juliet with her herb recipes. He’d gone out for a dog walk and had come home with an apprentice witch.

  “You all have fun,” Linda said as they headed out the door.

  “You too,” said Juliet.

  “We’ll just make cookies and watch YouTube,” said Linda.

  The older girl rolled her eyes. Brad wasn’t sure why, as those were pretty much her two favorite activities.

  Juliet drove them forever to a part of Los Angeles that was as unfamiliar to Brad as the nicer districts of Santiago, Chile, would have been. There were uncracked sidewalks and cheese shops and little blond children eating gelato. Cars with tinted windows and bespoke chrome bumpers glided silently down the streets as though on private tracks. The air carried just a hint of chill and just a touch of neon, one of those nights where the city seemed to promise a unique destiny to whoever dared brave its causeways. When it was all over, you were out of money.

  The restaurant was called The Sideshow, not just “Sideshow,” but “The,” located on the ground floor of a hotel that was all white concrete on the outside and dark wood on the inside, like some kind of crazy bank that only let millionaires make deposits. The chef, who’d grown up near Coney Island but to Japanese American parents, said he’d drawn the inspiration for his place from his childhood, coining the term “raw fish Americana,” which had since been repeated in every airline magazine from Dallas to Singapore. Brad knew what he was in for when he turned to his left and saw a wall-length poster, sepia-brushed to look old-timey, featuring a weight-lifting strongman with a crustacean head and the words “See the Lobster Boy.”

  There was no hostess stand, just an animatronic head topped with a turban. The head sat inside a glass box captioned “The Amazing Seating Machine.” Earlier, Juliet had printed out a code off the Internet. She entered it into a keypad at the box’s bottom. The head turned around and uttered an incantation that sounded more or less like Sanskrit to Brad. A slip of paper appeared in the slot. This contained the table number and the time of their dinner.

  They went into a spare antechamber and waited in front of a red velvet curtain. Faint, tinny old-time circus music played from a speaker above their heads. Brad missed the old days in Chicago, when going out to dinner had meant a slab of meat and a martini. There were a thousand little storefronts in Thai Town where they could have eaten well for about an eighth of this money. They had nothing, but here they were acting like something. Brad was turning forty, and that was special. Dinner had to be a show. Or, in this case, The Sideshow.

  At the appointed minute the curtains parted, revealing a culinary wonderland with a sawdust floor. Great bolts of pretentious red silk hung from the ceiling, swaying about in rhythmic time to accordion music that was coming from the corners of the room. All the walls were glass, showing scenes from different kitchens. Blenders whirred and cleavers thwacked. In one window, an ancient Japanese master lovingly rolled rice balls. Another showed men and women in lab coats and goggles making food with eyedroppers and test tubes. It was abattoir and laboratory all rolled into one. Aboratory. The recession had brought America to its knees, but clearly this room had been spared its ravages. Brad needed a drink.

  Soon he had one too, from a bottle of wine he couldn’t afford. Juliet had preordered it, and it was waiting at their table. They were deep in now. You buy the ticket, so you take the ride. A lithe woman wearing an adorable kimono and a fake beard approached.

  “Welcome to The Sideshow,” she said. “Have you dined with us before?”

  “Not hardly,” Brad said.

  “Well, we don’t have menus, unless you request one. Otherwise, it’s the chef’s favor.”

  First came a “mouth amusement” (as the server described it), an eight-ounce glass containing a semiviscous, deep yellow liquid topped by what looked to be a dollop of shad roe.

  “What is this?” Brad asked.

  “This is our fish-egg popcorn,” the bearded waitress replied.

  Juliet gave Brad a little smirk across the table. The server left. She raised her glass.

  “Here’s to fish-egg popcorn,” she said, “just like Mom used to make.”

  Brad took a sip and then another. Suddenly, his mouth was alive with texture. The fish eggs tasted like the essence of salt. He thought he felt a taste bud actually pop.

  “Oh man,” he said. “This is fucking delicious.”

  “How did they get it to be so crunchy?” Juliet said. “It’s liquid!”

  “I don’t know,” Brad said, “but I want another.”

  That didn’t happen, though, because next they brought him a whole white anchovy slit open at the belly. Inside was a specimen slide, topped with a light green smear.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Brad asked.

  “Lick it,” said the server. “The slide itself is made of a flavorless edible substance. Then you need to bite the anchovy.”

  Juliet looked at him with a raised eyebrow. Brad did as he was commanded. Suddenly, his mouth was awash with the taste of the finest Caesar salad ever constructed by humans.

  The rest of the meal unfolded in his mouth like a lunatic puzzle box. What appeared to be a house made of Lincoln Logs turned out to be richly spiced chicken mole topped with guacamole. A tiny little ball of potato hash exploded on his tongue on contact, filling every sense with meat, as though he’d just freebased a filet mignon with béarnaise sauce. A strand of Twizzlers contained homemade spaghetti with wild boar ragù. There were sliced meats that tasted like cheeses and cheeses that tasted like meats. Two pieces of sushi appeared, and it was definitely just sushi, but the finest sushi and strangest sushi Brad had ever tasted, as though the chef had gone fishing in some secret lake on Mars and brought his bounty home.

  Brad and Juliet drank and laughed and talked, mostly about the food, as they once had done, before adulthood had caught them in its relentless treads. For once, mercifully, the girls didn’t come up, and work didn’t come up, and their shitty annoying house didn’t come up. He didn’t think about Battlecats once.

  Two and a half hours passed this way. They brought Brad a piece of upside-down cake, literally a chocolate cake with the frosting on the bottom, which Brad thought was the one joke of the night that kind of fell flat. But this wasn’t a script edit, it was dinner, and it had been completely, insanely awesome.

  The check came. Brad grabbed for it.

  “Uh-uh, birthday boy,” Juliet said. “This is on me.”

  “But it’s the same money regardless,” Brad said.

  “Still, I know how much you hate to spend money.”

  It was true. He had many neuroses, but most prominent among them was the idea that he simply wasn’t getting his money’s worth out of life. The act of buying a new pair of shoes, not that it happened that often, could send him into a spiral of self-doubt and depression. If he didn’t like a restaurant meal, no matter how inexpensive, he’d save the receipt and keep it on his desk and stare at it for days, trying to figure out how to claim it as a business deduction. Now, this meal had been special, possibly the strangest and best ever, but his pernicious spendthriftery hung over him like a gassy cloud.

  Juliet examined the tab. “Oh boy,” she said.

  “How bad is it?
”

  “It’s bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll just sell some extra herbs this month.”

  The delight had ended. Brad’s stomach sloshed full of red wine and reconstituted molecules. His guts were set on full broil. He let out a low moan. “Goddammit,” he said.

  His thirties had begun on a note of more than promise; he actually reached something close to success, at least as close to success as he’d ever hoped to come. But then it was like he’d hit one of those chutes at the top of the board that knocks you down seventy places, and it had been impossible to climb again. In actuality he hadn’t risen that far and had probably only gone down about fifteen spaces, and really it was more like he was losing at Monopoly than Chutes and Ladders. Or maybe his life didn’t resemble a board game at all. Regardless, as far as he could tell, forty was less than thirty.

  Also, he was really drunk, more so than he’d been in months. It felt like someone had stuffed wet cotton balls up his nose. The sulfates in red wine could really do a number on your sinuses, Juliet said. His overpriced miracle-of-science dinner sloshed around in his stomach, making the final molecular transformation into shit, a perfect metaphor for what his life had become.

  “We should have just eaten at In-N-Out and gone to the ArcLight,” he said. “That’s what we can afford.”

  “It’s over,” Juliet said. “We did it. You have to let it go.”

  “We need to stop pretending.”

  “OK. We’ll stop pretending tomorrow. I promise. But tonight’s your birthday dinner, so don’t be such a grump.”

  Brad rose from the table and stumbled across the velvet baroque that was The Sideshow, parting the curtains into the antechamber and then into the hotel lobby, which was all gray and blue, minimalist art and instrumental Brazilian music playing around. The air was cool, modern, refined. By comparison, he felt hairy, bloated, and old, like a shambling rhino.

  He leaned into his wife and murmured in her ear. “I’m useless, used up, and discarded.”