Lake City
Page 1
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR LAKE CITY
“Kohnstamm delivers a blistering, clear-eyed, and sure-footed debut novel about the perils and pitfalls of misdirected ambition. More than that, Lake City is a hilarious and sneakily incisive examination of the cultural tensions and widening class divides in an increasingly homogenized and gentrified urban America.”
—JONATHAN EVISON, author of Lawn Boy
“Lake City is a darkly funny and extremely relevant debut novel about American inequality and moral authority, featuring a sad-sack antihero who takes way too long to grow up. When he finally does, the results are beautiful, and the book ultimately becomes an elegy for a now-gone Seattle, and a lesson in how the place we’re from never fully lets us go.”
—ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See
“Kohnstamm has written a novel of Pale Male Fail above and below the poverty line, a Dickensian tale of a fledgling philosopher who’s taken flight from trailer parks to Gramercy Park and then . . . had his wings clipped. This is the American Dream cut thin on a grocery store meat slicer, laced with oxy, stolen booze, and an unfinished dissertation. It’s a rotgut to Dom Pérignon rainbow, which is to say: Lake City is a crucial black comedy about the myths of money and happiness, and whether nature, nurture, or AmEx rears a better man.”
—MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY, New York Times–bestselling author of The Mere Wife
“There are so many reasons to admire Thomas Kohnstamm’s astonishing debut novel: his astute and cutting depiction of urban gentrification, his pitch-perfect evocation of a young man’s endless ricochet between self-aggrandizement and self-hatred, his vision of Seattle’s grungy underside that is so richly related one can almost smell the cedar and cannabis wafting off the pages. And yet, it is Kohnstamm’s innate storytelling verve—his taut, noirish knack for plotting and his ability to make the reader laugh, cringe, worry, and feel for his characters all at once—that makes Lake City truly unputdownable.”
—STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK, author of Oliver Loving: A Novel
“Kohnstamm knowingly illuminates the underbelly of Seattle—a place of beater cars, strip clubs, and a subpar hypermarket—far from the hipsters and gentrifiers. Hilarious as it is cutting, Lake City offers an all-too-insightful critique of clashing classes and misguided ideas of success.”
—SHARI GOLDHAGEN, author of In Some Other World, Maybe
Lake City
Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Kohnstamm
First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kohnstamm, Thomas B., author.
Title: Lake City : a novel / Thomas Kohnstamm.
Description: First Counterpoint paperback edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018899 | ISBN 9781640091429
Classification: LCC PS3611.O3695 L35 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018899
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Jordan Koluch
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10987654321
To my parents, Ed and Linda Kohnstamm,
who always encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be
Mine the miners, not the mines.
—DOC MAYNARD, founder of Seattle
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Acknowledgments
ONE
LANE STARTS THE MONTH WITH two bottles of decent pinot noir from the Washington State Liquor Store up on Lake City Way. He determines these wines to be decent, based on their price and minimalist label design. Plus, Mia always drinks pinot noir or pinot something. In the winter, anyway.
“Just enjoying a long Christmas break.” Lane nods to the liquor store clerk as she checks his face against his recently issued New York ID.
She keys Lane’s birthdate into the register and swipes his credit card. He tries her again. “Needed a little time off from my PhD . . . after what happened in September and all.” Lane waits for the clerk to bite on his story. To be inspired by a visitor with such big things afoot.
To be fair, this is not the Seattle of Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon. It’s nowhere, deep Seattle: Lake City. Moss. Lawns matted with decomposing pine needles. Mud-licked streets without sidewalks. The Seattle that fueled the melancholy of what came to be known as grunge; not the one that sells Sub Pop coffee mugs and tote bags at its international airport.
But the clerk knows better than to engage wild-eyed liquor store customers in anything resembling a personal conversation.
Lane makes a final attempt, doing his best impression of a functional human being. “I’m looking forward to trying these Washington varietals.”
“Card’s declined.” She cleans her glasses on her dark orange work vest, clicking the plastic lenses against the edge of her name tag: SHIRLEY.
“Gotta be the magnetic strip,” he says, realizing that Mia’s father must have bucked him off the last of her credit cards. He pulls the other card from his wallet, a relic of his premarriage finances that’s survived in the back of his underwear drawer. “Try this.”
He doesn’t breathe while she runs the card.
“This one’s no good either, Professor.”
Lane stands in silence, unpacking the effects of market and state-run forces on the store’s décor: a 1970s Bulgarian post office pastiche pocked with Jägermeister neons and a Captain Morgan mirror. He fails to reconcile the culture-specific neo-Marxist development theory he’s proposed for his interdisciplinary dissertation in social policy with the fact that the smell, lighting, and vinyl flooring of state-owned buildings make him feel as if he were being strangled. Not a painful strangulation. More of a soft choke by someone with bad taste and sweaty palms.
He goes to return the bottles to the shelf.
The clerk waves hi
m back. “Leave ’em up here.”
“Don’t worry . . . Shirley.” Lane laughs but then second-guesses whether the words even rhyme. He returns one bottle to the display and slides the other neck-first under his armpit and down the sleeve of his jacket. “It’s all a big mix-up. I’m not even supposed to be—Let me run to the ATM real quick.”
Lane pushes through the door, arms flush at his sides, and jogs into the light rain. The sun is on its way over the horizon at 3:08 p.m.
LANE DEDICATES THE NEXT WEEKS to crying, drinking and sleeping as many hours as possible in his mom’s TV room. The same room where she hoards newspaper coupon inserts and the NFL mugs she won playing bingo at the Tulalip. The same room where he lived as a kid. The room where he washed up on and off throughout college. But this time, things aren’t as cool. Which is Lane’s Seattle way of saying completely fucking terrible.
He surprises himself by how fast he can put back twenty-dollar bottles of shoplifted pinot noir from a sixteen-ounce ceramic Seahawks mug. As sobriety is not an option, he soon descends into his mom’s stash of Carlo Rossi jugs she keeps inside the long-broken dishwasher and her boyfriend’s mother lode of Rainier tallboys in a yellowed foam cooler out in the garage. That loser’s boning my mom, Lane justifies to himself. And Lane’s right; the boyfriend never says a word about the beers. Dude even goes out and buys more when the supply runs low.
Some days or weeks into this, Lane gives in and starts trying to call her, the her who matters, back in New York. Mia should have called him first. That’s the least she could do. But she hasn’t. Nobody’s called. Except for Lonnie, the top weed dealer in Lane’s high school from about ’92 to ’93. And everybody knows that call doesn’t count.
The problem with contacting Mia is that the house phone can’t make outgoing calls beyond 206 and the unspeakable 425, 253 and 360 area codes. Lane needs 212s and 917s and 646s. Even a 347 or a 718 might do. He coaxes, complains and breaks down to his mom, but she won’t upgrade her service. She wants to help but keeps repeating some story about one of her various deadbeat ex-boyfriends, his penchant for 976 chat lines and the resulting issues with the phone company.
Lane resolves to do what any self-respecting twenty-seven-year-old man who’s spent weeks using alcoholic blunt force trauma to play Whac-A-Mole with his every emotion while watching an endless stream of Christmas TV specials and post-9/11 coverage would do: he masturbates. A few times. To clear his head. And then he starts calling Mia—collect. Every four hours. That’s the schedule he sets for himself, and he has his eye on the VCR digital clock right up until that last minute clicks over and the receiver is in his hand and he’s asking the operator to put through the call.
He can’t be sure if it’s the second or third day of calling that Mia accepts the charges.
“Don’t you think we need some time?” she asks. Lane recognizes her father’s coaching in this assertive stance.
“Time?” Lane’s voice bends.
“Time without talking. Time to think.”
“I do nothing but think: think about us, think about how to not think about us.”
He wants to scream that time’s easy when she’s the one in their apartment in Gramercy Park leading the life that he was meant to lead. That they were meant to lead together. How would she feel about time if she were sipping off his mom’s eight-dollar jugs of room-temperature Chablis right down the road from Rick’s strip club, Discount Gun Sales and a sixty-block corridor of used car dealerships?
Instead, he kicks over the stack of books he brought home to read during the break. Wallerstein on dependency theory. Sen on human capabilities. Benedict Anderson on the origin and spread of nationalism. He hasn’t opened a single one, but it doesn’t matter because he can feign participation in any lower-level grad seminar by name-dropping the author and the philosophy with which they are most often associated. “Well, because Comte and positivism . . .” can be followed by a quick retreat to a general argument about why social malaise is bad or injustice is unjust. If nothing else, the books provided a serviceable end table for his Seahawks mug.
“We have a lot to figure out.” Mia sounds distant, scripted.
“You’re not figuring out anything,” he fires back as he assumes the fetal position on his side on the floor.
Whether she thinks she needs time or not and whether her father has convinced her that Lane is a parasite or not, Lane knows he is going to find a way to get back to New York, get back on his feet and prove that they are meant to be together.
“You’re holding a pillow over the face of our marriage,” he cries.
“I’m not. I’m—”
“You’re right. You’re not. It’s your dad.” He leaves the dagger in for a moment and then twists. “I believed you . . . that you weren’t like him.”
AFTER THE LAMP (MIA’S) AND cell phone (his on her family plan) smashing incident back at their apartment (technically also hers) on Twenty-First Street, he also made a studied effort to not mention the management-consultant motherfucker she spent the night with. The guy Lane was certain Mia’s father foisted upon her as part of his ploy to sabotage their marriage. The same guy Lane then called at work and tried to shame into feeling as bad as he was feeling. The one who not only didn’t feel bad but countered, “Why don’t you go cry about it like Mia tells me you always do, Bueche . . . douche . . . whatever your name is?”
“It’s Bue-shay. Lane Bue-shay.” Lane crumbled. “Like touché, you piece of sh-sh-sh . . .”
In order to overcome his childhood stutter, Lane spent years practicing his diction by reading his Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual and the Deities & Demigods cyclopedia out loud in front of a mirror, wrestling with psionics, alignment, lycanthropy, dexterity and the like. Those years of repeating the names of the hand-drawn enemies in the books could even be utilized to feign a deeper classical education. For example, he could recall that Isis is the Egyptian goddess of magic and fertility, Ushas is the Hindu goddess of the dawn and Tlazolteotl is the Aztec goddess of vice. But only because they were the ones with exposed nipples in the book.
Yet, even with all of this practice, many types of mocking still took him right back to being called “Slow Lane” and “Douche-Gay” by Matty Ericksen on the tetherball court in third grade. He could envision the single syllable he needed to conjure now to this consultant prick, but it wouldn’t arrive on his tongue.
Lane wondered about creative ways to let the dude know that after all that self-imposed language practice, he earned straight As in high school English. That he scored a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the SAT. It was actually a 720, but he deserved to round up. Maybe he could forge an email to this guy from Mia’s account and slide those details in there, although she’d changed her password a lot in recent weeks.
Lane reloaded. “You piece of sh-sh-sh . . .”
Even the homewrecker on the other end of the line couldn’t bear it any longer and offered, “Listen, man, perhaps I shouldn’ta said—”
Lane disconnected the call, took two deep breaths, said “Shit” as loud as he could and hurled his cell against the wall.
The lamp, which he later learned was a late nineteenth-century family heirloom that was given to Mia by her mother before she passed away, happened to be located between his phone and said wall. And, just like that, everything about her cheating and poisoning their nascent marriage became secondary to his “unpredictable violent outbursts and disregard for other people’s property.” As Mia’s fuckface father would characterize Lane’s behavior thereafter.
LANE KEEPS IT TOGETHER FOR most of his phone call with Mia. He no longer expects her to finish with the once-customary “I love you.” He’s not waiting for her to confirm that he’s still The One. At this point, he’s more realistic than that. But she doesn’t say, “Sorry, I’ve got to go,” or, “We’ll talk soon. Take care of yourself.” That would be too decent.
She says, “I’m late. I’ve got a birthday party in Chelsea.”
A fucking party. In Chelsea. He feels as if half of his personality, half of his emotional being has been cleaved away. While he lies in tatters, bleeding to death on the fetid floor, the other half is coordinating shoes with handbags and heading to a birthday party.
He looks around the room at the stacks of long-expired coupons for discounted margarine at Albertsons and two-for-one Capri Sun value packs at Safeway. He is wrapped in a patchwork quilt with the comforting yet repulsive smells of his long-ago deceased Wally the Collie and the Winston Super Kings his mom smoked until the early ’90s.
“Whose birthday?” he asks.
BEFORE HE LEFT NEW YORK, Lane formulated a plan. A plan with an eye on the long game. A plan that accounted for the asymmetrical warfare in which he was engaged. He figured that if he kept his mouth shut, laid low in Seattle for an extended holiday and played the conciliator, his earlier conduct, in fact, the whole situation, would blow over. He was confident about this due to the fact that it all went down on Friday, September 7. That September 7. 2001. The day that shit really hit the fan, at least in Lane’s estimation.
The conversation changed in the days that followed, which made it easier for him to defer the rest of the semester toward his PhD in social policy at Columbia.
“I know this is a lot to ask in my first year, but all this, what happened downtown, I’m taking it hard,” he groveled to his PhD advisor in her narrow, windowless office. He didn’t think she was convinced. He hadn’t lost any friends or relatives and was nowhere near the Financial District, but the advisor seemed to have bigger issues on her mind.
“I’ll be back and catch up on everything right after the holidays,” he promised.
And he still stands behind that pledge. After all, he isn’t another lost rich kid biding his time in a doctoral program for lack of better things to do. He’s the Bill Clinton of Lake City Way. Sure, Lane knows that not everyone can rise out of Hope, Arkansas, or whatever shithole nowhere to become president of the United States. But if Clinton could do it, Lane can at least expect to head up an NGO of some sort. An international NGO was not unreasonable. Or he’d even settle for one with a national footprint, but not some local charity run like an afterschool activity. He wants one of those jobs advertised in between the articles in the Economist: directors of rarified international institutions with acronym names like WHO, ILO, UNHRC that mesmerize Europeans and are over the heads of most Americans, noble titles that require dark suits and gravitas and meetings in Davos to decide the fate of people like his mom’s boyfriends. The jobs—the callings—that impress Mia and professors and the other well-intentioned, affluent liberals who’ve opened doors for Lane at challenging points in his journey toward realizing his intellectual destiny.