Monkeytown

by Chris Vola

  I swallow a Xanax-Vicodin double-dip, head back to the highway.

  LAUREN’S SITTING AT THE TABLE next to a bottle of Plymouth gin, a bottle of seltzer water, a glass of bobbing ice. Wearing an old gray Barnard College orientation tee shirt that says A Woman Who Never Made A Mistake Never Tried Anything New. She looks up from her iPhone.

  “You reek of pot and B.O.,” she says, waving her stubby, burgundy-colored nails in front of her nose. “I can smell you from here.”

  She’s straightened her normally curly, chocolate-colored hair. It frames the outline of her round, childish face, her thin neck, and the slight pouch under her chin she developed from four years of college drinking, even though she’s the opposite of overweight. Smooth, milk-colored skin that looks olive in the lamplight. Big hazel eyes, two opaque buttons caught in a fire’s reflection. She doesn’t have any makeup on, doesn’t need any.

  “How did you get in?” I ask. I move cat-like to the table. Her eyes steam, but her face is limp, stone-frozen.

  “You left the back door open again,” she says. “It’s partly my fault. I should have checked sooner, but I forgot whose house I was trying to break into.”

  “Mind if I have a drink?” I ask.

  “Think you know where the glasses are,” she says, stabbing at the screen of her phone.

  I come back from the kitchen with an empty mug, sit next to her, reach for the bottle. Lauren takes a long swig. The fingers of her other hand twist strands of her hair into weak knots and untie them, a nervous habit.

  “Where were you guys today?” she asks, takes a longer drink.

  “Jackson’s.”

  “Oh,” she says. “I heard he was having people over. How was it?” Calmer, calmer…

  “I talked to Susannah,” I say. “It’s so funny, but I can’t even look her straight in the eyes anymore. I keep thinking about her sleepwalking.”

  Lauren laughs hard and a few drops of liquor shoot out of her nostrils. Jackpot. She covers her face, embarrassed but giggling. “I completely forgot about that.” When Lauren and Susannah shared a room their junior year, Susannah used to not only sleepwalk, but sleep-piss every week or so. Hop out of bed, walk across the room stop in front of her basket of dirty laundry, pop a squat. Then she’d unleash a powerful stream. She’d pull up her pants, mumble goodnight to Lauren, get back into bed. A major secret between us. A guaranteed tension-smasher.

  “I think the next time I see her,” I say, “I’m going to tell her. Then I’m going to tell Billy. He’d probably be into something like that.”

  “Nooo!” Lauren screams, horrified but laughing. “I would torture then murder you.” Her nose is still watering. “You’re getting worse,” she says, smiling. “I used to only have to call you five times before you picked up the phone.” She laughs, touches my hand.

  We finish our drinks. I slip my hand around her chair, massage her shoulders gently over the fabric of her tee shirt.

  LAUREN’S FACE, SHIFTING on the pillow. Sweating, soaking everywhere. She’s so wet that when I really start thrusting it sounds like the sloppy suction a plunger makes in a toilet. She closes her eyes, grunts, sighs, comes for the second time. Muscles tense up, choke my cock, release. I can’t come. Thrust a little harder. She whispers something like Are you close baby? in a hoarse chain-smoker whisper. She licks the ear she’s just whispered in, pulls me out, jerks me off until it’s painful. Is that cute? Spontaneous? What she read at work on one of her frumpy PR friends’ personal blogs? Here’s a How-to on Handling His Hottest Urges! Hot Sex Trends Worth Trying! I’m farther away from coming. The gin doesn’t help. She gets on her stomach, arches her ass up. I push inside. Not as wet as before. She bucks, swallows me with her hips. The hourglass back, the three birthmarks that form a triangle below her right shoulder, a small patch of scar tissue snaking around her waist, the results of a still-traumatic bicycle crash when she was six. She bites my forearm. I thrust harder. She moans, buries her face in the pillow, kneads the bedpost. After a while she goes completely silent. Barely moist. She turns, sore, impatient for the finale.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, “I can’t.” I pull out, roll over onto my back. My erection fades, flops against my leg.

  Lauren coils, a balled-up fetus. For a moment I think she’s going to snap the inverse magnetic field between us, but she doesn’t. I pull on a pair of boxers, rest my arm below her breasts. She stiffens.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeat.

  “Look, Josh, this is retarded.”

  “I love you,” I say as I try to slip my fingers between hers.

  “Stop,” she says, pushing me away. “You have nothing to be sorry for, you never have. It’s always just, what you didn’t do, what you never do.” Crying softly. A familiar conversation. Still more than one way out. She traces the outline of my face gently with her fingers, cradling my skull like there’s something inside she’s worried might break. “I don’t know…” she says. The twist of hair. I try to put my arm around her again. She twists away.

  “This hasn’t been much of anything for a long time,” she says, “and, duh, I moved on.” This is not familiar. “It was so easy at first, so much fun, we were in college. But after your parents, and then our…accident.” She presses on the syllables, sharpens them.

  “Great,” I moan. “Still blaming everything on the abortion. What a crutch. Grow up.”

  She laughs. “You want me to grow up? I’m not even going to respond to that. And yes, it is partly about the fucking abortion. I’m not saying I really wanted it, I never did, you know that. I knew it was right after the crash, that you would be different, and I tried, I really tried for so long, but I needed something back, anything, and it never happened. I was sick of waiting, so I found –”

  “John?”

  “How do you know about him?” she asks.

  “Susannah,” I say.

  Lauren shifts, stares at the ceiling. “He’s really nice,” she sighs. “I met him at his luncheon thing a couple months ago when you and Billy took the boat to Block Island. He’s taken the train up to see me and I spent a couple nights in the East Village at his place.” How did I not know? When was this? “He makes me laugh, and he’s so positive. It hasn’t been like that with us, with you, for so long. I miss it so much.”

  “I can change,” I say. The dead-end road… “What does he do?”

  “He’s an accountant. Private equity firm in Manhattan, Midtown East.”

  “Sounds like a par-tay!”

  Sarcasm duly noted. “And what do you do that’s so interesting?” she hisses. “Drive around in your sweet ride? Have dildo swordfights with Billy in that stupid store? Forget to pick up your phone when someone calls you who doesn’t want to just sell you pills?” She’s twisting her hair so hard that some of the strands crack.

  “How long have you been fucking him?”

  She shifts farther away, almost off the bed. Silent, but the fire is deafening. “Why I’m here,” she says, “is to let you know I got offered the job I was telling you about, at the New York office.”

  I don’t say anything. What job was that again?

  “And I’m going to take it,” she says. “We can’t do this anymore. I’ll be staying at John’s while I look for apartments.”

  My BlackBerry vibrates on the dresser. She reaches across me, picks it up. Wet puffy eyelids in the neon glow.

  “Billy,” she says. “Do you want it?” She stretches out her hand.

  “I think my loser stoner friend can wait until tomorrow,” I say. I close my eyes. She pulls the covers around her, wedges a pillow into the space between us.

  SWEATING IN THE darkness, I listen to Lauren’s snores. Her face on the pillow, mouth open, a thin strand of drool escaping the corner, running slowly down her chin. I wipe it off. She groans, turns on her side, stops snoring. The patter of drizzle and the smell of salt fill the colorless pre-dawn world.

  17

  Vola

  AN AWAY MESSAGE. A text message.
A Facebook wall post. A voicemail. A rushed Skype call with questionable European voices in the background. This was Lauren, the basic properties of what she’d become, what we’d become, after I’d graduated and she’d decided to spend her senior year abroad in Barcelona. A virtual relationship, an illusion of intimacy. Faced with moments alone in my car, at a party, I scanned the screen, the call history, desperate for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere needed or wanted me. Switch on the mobile, switch off the real. When nothing happened, I switched off both.

  I still don’t know why she took the job in Fairport. The desire for security, the need for a complete identity – college graduate, businesswoman, girlfriend-slash-caretaker of damaged, neurotic, substance-loving moron. Maybe a genuine sense of pity or a genuine need for touch. Deep-seeded masochism? If she expected fulfillment from us being together, then she should have kept her distance. Keep all doors open, all the time. I couldn’t see past myself.

  Now it’s over, and introspection is useless. She was the last strand, the severed tie. For me, there’s no longer a contradiction between feeling and not feeling. There are no contradictions.

  THE BLACK RANGE Rover chugs to a stop in the driveway. Davis. He opens the drivers’ side door, wearing the same suit from last night, cigarette in mouth, fumbling with the safety mechanism of a green Bic. Billy gets out, too. He’s already smoking a small joint, rubbing a spot on his head above his temple. Baggy no-sleep eyes, patches of dead leaves plastered, sandals caked in organic sludge.

  “What happened?” I ask as I open the porch door. “You look like shit.”

  “You motherfucker,” Billy hisses, “if you still didn’t have my crate, I’d –”

  Davis cuts in. “After you left Kenyon’s,” he says, “Billy tried to walk home. I drove around until I found him passed out in a bus shelter next to the highway bridge on Asylum Street.”

  “So let me get this straight,” I say, “you fell into a compost pile? Or did you get jumped by a bum in Bushnell Park and have to wrestle him for the dimebag in your pocket? Come on, mess, tell me what happened?”

  Billy stares at his feet. “I fell,” he mumbles. “And it was a quarter-ounce, dick. Whatever, go fuck yourself.” He tosses the joint, stomps it out.

  “All right,” I admit, “I’m the asshole for sketching out and not answering my phone, but Lauren was here, locked out, and I –”

  “And she didn’t try the back door?” Billy sneers. “Does she even know you?”

  “That’s a good question,” I say. “Maybe you should ask her, because I don’t think we’re –”

  “Just open the trunk,” he snaps. Why the trunk? The metal crate from the parking lot yesterday. Why… “Is that too hard a request, numbfuck?” He rubs at the spot above his left temple.

  “OK, fine!” I throw up my hands. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you home, I’m sorry you can’t take a joke, and I’m sorry that my life is an unkempt place filled with cruel and indifferent psychopaths. OK?”

  “My life?” he repeats. I point my keychain, the hatch swings open. Billy limps toward the Audi.

  Davis finishes his cigarette, steps out of his silence. “Let’s go inside,” he says, “there’s something I want to talk to you about.” I ignore the creepy invitation, watch Billy until Davis grabs my shoulder.

  “All he needs is another joint and a nap and he’ll be fine,” he says as he opens the porch door. “You have anything to drink?”

  I GRAB TWO bottled waters from the refrigerator, swallow a Xanax before heading back into the living room. Davis doesn’t booze, never has.

  On the TV is a rerun of a History Channel program about a psychologist named Henry Harlow who, for several mid-century decades, conducted experiments on baby rhesus monkeys that involved rearing the animals in social isolation. Deprived them of social contact with other monkeys and humans for months, sometimes years. Quivering, shriveled brains behind the box. A black-and-white photograph of a monkey being removed from a light-restricting metal crate Harlow nicknamed the “pit of despair,” its unused eyes squinting, huddled against the wall in dread at the gloved hands descending into the chamber, its sharp teeth bared in the ghoulish grimace of incurable psychosis. Lonely brains boiling in the dark.

  I sit next to Davis, scan my open laptop. A series of AIM messages:

  MFKRASHTEST24 (10:35:07 AM): to be passing is to live – to remain and continue is to die

  MFKRASHTEST24 (10:36:45): love is not consolation

  MFKRASHTEST24 (10:40:28 AM): is it light?

  MFKRASHTEST24 signed off at 10:42:06 AM. 47

  “Who is MFKRASHTEST24?” I ask.

  “Huh?”

  “Somebody’s screen name. MFKRASHTEST24. Do you know who that is?”

  “I don’t think I’ve instant messaged anyone in like half a decade,” Davis says. “Maybe it’s one of those IM bots, remember those? You friend a program and it automatically sends you uplifting quotes, relationship advice, whatever your pathetic, lonely nerd ass desires.”

  “Maybe,” I mumble. “I would remember doing something like that.”

  “You’re coming to Virginia, right?” he asks. “No pussying out now.”

  “Against my better judgment, yes.” I nod in the direction of a loaded North Face backpack resting against the couch.

  “Bullshit!” he laughs. “Billy would never let you get away with missing out on a good time.”

  “Nothing to do with him,” I say. I keep forgetting that Davis invited Billy. Maybe it’s because it was out of character for him to agree so quickly to leave his old man alone for a week. “I couldn’t think of anything better to do around here,” I say, “so…”

  “Forget here,” Davis says, “forget her.”

  “So what’s up?” I change the subject, lower my voice in case Billy is by the window. “Why the secret pow-wow minus Sob Story out there?”

  “This is going to sound so Cruel Intentions, but there have been some, er, issues with the trust fund,” he mumbles, looking out the bay window toward the strip-of-sand excuse for a private beach at the end of the street. “It appears that my family and their legal team have finally decided that my collegiate performance, or lack-thereof, in addition to a lingering, ah, extra-legal issues, have sort of voided any chances of me receiving future payments, according to the limitations set by my great-great-grandfather and blah blah…” he sighs. “Unless we do something big, I may be fucked, Josh.” He knocks a cigarette out onto the tablecloth.

  “We?” He doesn’t say anything. “You’ve been getting payments for what, three years now?” No response. “You’ve made investments, mutual funds. And you’ve been shit-talking to me for six months about how big Kenyon’s getting. You can’t be that bad.”

  “Forget Keyon!” Davis hisses. “Fifty thousand YouTube hits and ten thousand sheeple following you on Twitter is great, it’s won-der-ful, Josh, but it doesn’t make you shit. Neither does making piece-of-garbage home videos in some hoodrat's basement, or booking shows at fifty-person clubs in Bridgeport and New Haven. Don’t even bring up the iTunes sales, I can see you want to. They’re also shit. Curb your curiosity.”

  “According to your latest sales pitch,” I say, “the hip-hop industry seemed a little more lucrative.”

  “It is,” he says, “it is. It comes down to doing the right kind of promoting, viral marketing, touring, constant recording, et cetera, et cetera. But all of that requires a significant short-term investment without any payoff. And that would have worked for months, but my fucking family…” He slurps his water, a little too dramatically.

  “So a six-hundred-mile road trip is going to, what, line your pockets, make your wildest schemes come true?”

  “At the very worst,” he says, “getting a little fresh highway air for a few days wouldn’t be the worst thing for any of us.”

  “Amen.”

  Outside, muckstained Billy hugs himself, scratches at some scar tissue on his elbow. He mutters something that evaporates in
to a cool noon drizzle.

  *****

  From: Lauren

  Can we talk pls??

  Mon, Jun. 16 1:46pm

  To: Lauren

  Sorry on vacation

  Mon, Jun. 16 1:48pm

  I’M RIDING SHOTGUN, breeze-happy in the Automatic Climate Control. Billy’s chiefing on a joint in the back, bobbing along to Big L’s “The Heist”.

  The plan is to spend the night in southwest Harlem – four avenue blocks from Columbia – at the apartment of one of Davis’ friends. A pit stop on the nostalgia train for me, and, more importantly for Billy, a sweet squirt of debauchery in the Lecherous Apple. It just feels good to get out, to be moving again, like running downhill. No more vibrations in my pocket.

  I-95 South is an asphalt hell-hole, suffocating, fume-laden at the tail-end of rush hour. A twenty-foot black-and-white Derek Jeter eye-bangs his new Movado timepiece. McDonald’s crucifixes coax their congregations with promises of the holy trinity– High Trans-fat! High Sodium! Free Happy Meal Toys! Billy tosses the roach out amidst a blue-gray cloud. An elderly couple in a Lincoln glare. “At least we’re not going to die soon!” he screams at them, clown-smiling. They pull off the highway. Davis’s iPod cycles endlessly through his brand of nineties minutiae – Mobb Deep, Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Nas, variations of alternative, jangle-pop, post-hardcore punk, trip-hop. The Ghosts of Genres Past. I drift in the familiar guitar chords, the middle-school-dance mystique. A breath of old-fresh air.

  Traffic crawls.

  Davis keeps checking his iPhone – Google Maps or something. Just after we pass Exit 18 in Southport we see the cause of the congestion, across the median in the oncoming lanes. A truck has skidded perpendicular to the road, four huge tracks of burnt rubber streak the asphalt.