by Peter Mattei
I sit at the bar and order a Coke and within minutes a man with a boil on his forehead and an ass so big he needs two barstools is talking to me, asking me where I’m from; I tell him I grew up around here and am just back for a visit. For a couple of hours he doesn’t stop going on, despite the fact I give him absolutely no signals that I am interested in his monologue whatsoever; but the fact that I’m buying his double vodkas is possibly motivating the performance, so I have only myself to blame. He is absolutely convinced of everything he tells me in the way that people who have never been anywhere outside the place where they grew up are convinced they know everything about everything. He is certain, for example, that an airplane never flew into the Pentagon, as certain as he is that the best Vietnamese food to be had anywhere outside of Hanoi, anywhere in the world, can be enjoyed right here in Youngstown, and that’s because there were so many Vietnam vets (of which he is one) who survived the war and came back to town with their young Viet brides, and those girls, most of them quite attractive, they brought their entire families here with them to escape the goddam Communists, and many of the cousins opened up businesses, especially stores and restaurants, and they would open chop suey houses because that’s what people around here thought of when they thought of gook food, chop suey and General Tso’s Chicken and so on, but then this one family opened a bona fide Vietnamese establishment, very authentic, for the other Vietnamese people who were here, for their own community, it didn’t even have a sign, but pretty soon it caught on, and got written up in the paper, and was hugely popular, and that family did well, and pretty soon all the other Vietnamese chop suey houses became real Vietnamese kitchens, too, that’s how it happened, believe it or not. He also tells me, while on the inexhaustible subject of Y-town and its peoples, that the city could have been saved not long ago because there was going to be a blimp factory built just north of here, only the Socialists vetoed it, and that sealed the sad fate of their once-great region. This I also believe to be the truth, I tell him. His name is Frank, Frank Geshko or Leshko, he says finally, shaking my hand, and says it’s the small gifts that we bestow on strangers that determine who we really are in the end, and I agree, saying isn’t that the deep something or other we’ve all been yearning for? and he laughs as if he knows what I’m talking about and slaps me on the back. So I decide to tell him my own story: that in reality I work in advertising but was fired and that I’m driving by myself to Chicago to start my new life, which will most likely be a lot like my old life but who knows. He nods, sensing there’s more to the tale, and so I tell him the whole sad story of a girl named Sabine, Sabi I called her, from the beginning, and how amazing she was, now that I think about it, and when I get to the part about the paranoia and the panic attacks and the shrink in the mental ward in Santa Monica asking me about my family, Frank stops me and asks why it was, when I saw the earlier psychiatrist, the fake one, that I told a crazy lie about my mom dying in a car crash? And then I just tell him, this Frank, this all-American male, I tell him all of it, the story of that summer when I was thirteen and we were living just up the road in a house that’s a hole now, and how she had been diagnosed as manic-depressive, my mother, and how I remember some of the things she would do, and how my father couldn’t understand her or where she was coming from, not that he tried, and they didn’t have the medications in those days that they have today, and how she attempted to do it three times, or I should say two times, because on the third try she succeeded, and how I came upon her slumped in the corner of the upstairs guest bathroom, and how I noticed that she had tried to clean the blood off the (imported) Grigio Luna tile floor with a (monogrammed, imported) powder blue St. Etienne queen-size bath towel, tossing the by-then wine-dark fabric under the sink. Why had she tried to clean the floor of her blood? Did she in her last breath regret what she had done? Or only that she had made such a mess in doing it? Did she surmise that I would find her there and thought that, somehow, the impact would be less if the floor were clean(er)? Frank doesn’t answer, he just stares at me and then breaks out laughing, hacking up gobs of phlegm and cat hair and chicken bones and god knows what else, saying he thinks I’m bullshitting him, and rather than put a damper on the night or confess to him that I’ve never told anyone that story, not quite like that, I just go, yeah Frank, my man, you’re right dude, I’m a bullshitter, no sense trying to pull one off on the likes of you. He laughs and slams me on the back again like we’re brothers in shame and struggle, and gets up and waddles off to take a piss; that’s when I leave.
Before getting on the expressway the next morning I drive from the hotel back down to Federal Street to check it out in the daylight. I dig my digital Leica S2 out of my suitcase and cruise the streets photographing the empty storefronts and abandoned churches and boarded-up houses and small manufacturing plants near the railroad tracks. At one prominent corner I come upon a tremendous old theater, the Warner, which obviously hasn’t been open for business in decades; I park in front and look around. From the sight of the jimmied-back plywood four-by-eights on the front doors I can tell there are people living in here. I had, after all, seen a number of what looked like former mental patients dragging themselves along these streets, shaggy white hair and beards, talking to themselves not unlike people with ear bobs on their Androids, and I assumed that at least some of that population might be living in the Warner. I go in carefully with my camera hidden in my jacket, and as I walk through the place I have to stop and listen for signs of life because the crackling of old linoleum and glass under my own feet gives me away.
In one corner of the lobby there’s a door open to the basement but I’m afraid to go down there for fear of who I might wake up. I head up some wide curving stairs instead. I go through a leather-covered double door, and from the balcony of the theater I look down at the big old stage. Behind it there’s a torn screen, stained from years of cigarette smoke, vomit, who knows what, most likely this was a porn theater in its latter days. Behind the blotchy screen are enormous red-velvet curtains that are ripped and water-stained at the bottom. Before showing adult movies it must have been some kind of legitimate culture palace, and I can imagine the place filled on a Saturday evening in the 1940s with the solid, kindly citizens of an American workingman’s utopia, a place where, for the first and last time in human history, a good heart and a strong back would bring a man a reasonable amount of comfort and self-esteem during his short happy life; today, this man’s grandchildren are thrice divorced and in rehab or jail. I keep going up the marble stairs covered in ripped and stained carpeting and finally get to a door. I don’t know where the door leads but there’s a table leg holding it open an inch or two and daylight is streaming in. I push open the door and I’m on the roof of the theater with views out across the great state of Ohio. I go to the parapet wall and look out. The sun is coming up to the east but I am turned the other way, west, toward the Great Plains and my new life ahead of me; who knows what it will entail. And then I see some kind of mist drifting in from the horizon, blurring the edges of everything, the roofs of the two flats below and the big-box stores farther out, with their empty parking lots, flat gray trapezoidal abstractions getting more and more out of focus, like a dust storm or a cloud of toxic gas covering everything, and then I realize it’s not any of those things, it’s me, it’s my eyes doing it, it’s my tears. I let them come.
I let them flow with me here on this ledge of destiny, naked, peering out across the glacier as Roark would do; it’s so stupidly epic there are bells ringing in the distance. But then I wipe my eyes on my sleeve and realize the sounds are coming from my pocket. I pull out my phone and it’s ringing and the screen says BLOCKED again.
I stare at the display for two-point-five rings in order to not seem too eager and then I answer.
“Hi,” I say.
About the Author
PETER MATTEI is a writer and director who has worked in theatre and film and has written pilots for HBO and other networks. His feature Love in
the Time of Money was developed at the Sundance Directors Lab. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PRAISE FOR THE DEEP WHATSIS
“With zingy, hilarious glee, Peter Mattei takes a sharp stick and pokes it at many deserving underbellies: the puffery of corporate America; hipsters, yoga dudes, and the general pretentiousness of north Brooklyn; and many more. THE DEEP Whatsis is a provocative, darkly subversive, deeply satisfying novel.”
KATE CHRISTENSEN, PEN/Faulkner Award winner and author of The Astral
“[A] morbidly satiric look at corporate culture at the crossroads of art and consumerism… Mattei serves up a rampant critique of haute New York society.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Copyright
The Deep Whatsis
Copyright © 2013 Peter Mattei.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9781443422956
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, companies, brands, organizations, places, and incidents portrayed in this novel either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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