Flatscreen

by Adam Wilson

  Not that I hated them so much as hated myself for not being one of them. I was a glorified townie without the glory. No rugged good looks or blue-collar gas-station-employee pride. No fading memory of a football career. No greaser girlfriend, legs thick and strong like the twin pistons on my (nonexistent) restored Camaro.

  The girls here—slender, over-eyelined, snuggly shawled in black cashmere—went to BU, Northeastern, prepped for careers in PR, HR, other initials. Mean-sexy with salon-styled hair, slipping shoulder straps. Eyes peeled, panning for potential husbands. Gave me a look that said, “Yes, we cum-guzzle weekends and some Wednesday nights, post–Sex and the City, bewitched by Samantha’s skanky spirit. But never for fat boys in ill-fitting suits still living with Mom, hardly shaken by un-stoned ‘I’m a fuckup’ revelations, no job, no portfolio, no property, no chance for a seven-figure bonus come Christmastime.” Daughters looked just like their mothers.

  Knew I didn’t look like Dad, but wondered if people thought I looked like Mom. Mascara had already smudged. Women whispered as she moved past. Felt the urge to stand in front of her like Secret Service, block the eye-bullets with my blubbery bod. Maybe if I held her arm and corrected my posture she would see that we were in this together: this town, these stale, life-lorn lives. But she would have shoved me off. I was her shame in my too-short pants. Fair enough. This was her world, not mine. She tried to follow its rules, she failed; my existence underscored her failure.

  Picked up my prayer book, thumbed the pages, braided the fringes of my tallis. No one paid attention. Maybe some oldies whose faith had come and gone, but now, with the end drawing near, it was God or zilch. The cantor’s voice trickled with vibrato, rose up to the high ceiling where it was contained in the building (no musical bird soaring to heaven), accepted reverb from the stained glass, bounced down into our ears and his. A hundred syncopated pacemakers kicked garage backbeat while Cantor Branson hymned.

  There was beauty in the music itself, ethereal organ in perfect counterpoint to Branson’s earthy tenor. You could get lost in it, space out, stare at the stained glass, or retreat into your own head, where the sounds drowned out the other sounds, annoying and imagined, like my brother gleefully whispering, “Tough shit. I go to college where coeds swill keg beer, while you stay with Mom in this purgatory of postadolescent angst.”

  Left for the bathroom before the start of the sermon, because you’re not allowed to move once the sermon starts. If I timed things right, I’d be locked out, wouldn’t have to sit through Rabbi Zarkoff’s talk. Zarkoff stood on his tiptoes when the pitch of his voice rose, camp-lisping like an alum of the Richard Simmons Rabbinical School: “Joseph was a special boy with a special coat.”

  Strangely, the “yes-on-eight, yes on the word feygele” contingent had no complaints about Zarkoff, who was a private bachelor, Harvard-educated, acceptably conservative in regards to Israel. I liked him too: his unself-conscious style; his interest in the Old Testament’s moral ambiguities; his way of smuggling queer theory into Talmudic analysis, same way Mom mixed ground turkey in the burger meat—our best interests at heart. But I was restless, wanted to get high.

  On my way out, I found Seymour Kahn sitting by the exit, staring at a high-school-aged blonde a few aisles over. Erin sat next to Kahn. Next to her was a pretty black girl of about thirteen. I tapped Kahn on the shoulder, flashed the universal “Smoke a joint?” hand gesture.

  Pushed Kahn past the back lot into the edge of the woods. Small clearing I’d been going to for years. When I was in high school, I thought getting high at temple made it more spiritual. Then realized it didn’t.

  Lit the joint, passed it.

  “Take a few.”

  Kahn closed his eyes, inhaled. I leaned on his wheelchair, delicately, to see if it would support my weight. Chair began to roll. Grabbed the handles, reeled him in. Took all my strength. Thought I might have pulled a muscle.

  “Trying to kill me?”

  “Sorry.”

  Kahn coughed, spit in the dirt, grinned. Smile showed yellow-tipped teeth, a menacing overbite.

  “You need to get laid. Your pores leak sexual frustration. I can smell it on you.”

  “What does it smell like?”

  “I’ll tell you what it doesn’t smell like.”

  “Roses?”

  “You laugh. But when I was your age, I fucked everything that moved. It wasn’t a good weekend if I didn’t wake up with puss dripping out of my dick. It’s the whole problem these days: AIDS, Christians, Islam, condoms, well-made vibrators. No one fucks anymore. Maybe the French, but fuck the French.”

  “What’s wrong with the French?”

  “The French are good for two things: filming and fucking. Godard knew how to rouse a cock. So did Brigitte Bardot. But they eat too much duck. It makes them soft. The duck is a weak animal.”

  Kahn was the only person I’d met other than Uncle Ned who’d even heard of Godard or Bardot. QHS wasn’t known for cultivating high culture. More emphasis was placed on standardized test prep and Web 2.0 acumen. The post-lib-arts era: all tech training and multiple choice. They fed us game-show-style shots of noncontextual knowledge, taught us to tick the right boxes with our number-two pencils. No passionate and unhinged English teacher with a soft spot for slacker budding intellectuals (Dead Poets Society, Touchstone, 1989). It’s true there were theater kids who called their hats chapeaux, duck-walked the halls reading aloud from the Romance poets, but they had nothing to do with me. We called them Shakespeares. Pure AP, with big egos and their own set of thrift-store-clad wood-nymph-wannabe women. Just another clique among the envied cliques. My own friends—John Sammel, Matt Lappin, Sammel’s older bro—were unaffiliated free agents, not a true clique. We were bound by pot-smoking prowess and the delusion that listening to loud music could replace regular sex as an outlet for hormonal energy. No shared sensibility among the group, no deep sense of outcast brotherhood. Our lack of female friends created an undercurrent of unspoken animosity; we each blamed the others for this glaring, unforgivable oversight.

  I’d personally come across the cinema classics at the side of Uncle Ned’s sick bed, watching rom-coms from the forties filled with witty repartee, and coiffed and healthy heroes like Cary Grant, whose sturdy screen presence nearly negated the foreboding sense of death in Ned’s apartment. Later found the A/V room at the Quinosset Library, where I mourned my uncle’s death by suffering through the rapturous cinema of postwar Eastern Europe. There was comfort in the corners, under A/V room dark. Each lone cinephile partitioned off by cubicle walls. Take off headphones and you could hear halogen buzz, A/C hum, nothing more. Always slightly too chilly for tee shirts, slightly hair-raising. Something electric in the quasi-silence, and the way we all stared. This was pre-Netflix, pre-Hulu, pre-pirated-downloading, pre-Mom-bought-premium-cable. Back then my isolated screen viewing involved the silent companionship of other library loners, mostly Asian twentysomethings consumed by the eros of anime. Now I watched alone on laptop, desktop, flatscreen. I communed with the world from the comfort of my couch, denying real time, like an anthropologist attempting to study a distant, extinct species, wondering what went wrong.

  Kahn knew what went wrong.

  “No one fucks, no one fucks, no one fucks. Can it be that no one fucks? What, then, pray tell, were the sixties even for?”

  “Some people must fuck,” I said. By some people, I didn’t mean me.

  “Your mother looks like she hasn’t had a decent dick in her since they killed Kennedy.”

  Was it true? No boyfriends. Had she tried JDate? Speed dating? Struck out? Sadness too embedded to be hidden behind mascara? Hoped I was wrong, that there were Craigslist encounters or married tennis doubles partners entering via the porch for late-night hookups. She deserved a man with silver hair-wings, silver pockets, a summer house. Someone she could go jogging with, hold beneath the covers, be reassured by when she asks, “Am I the mother I…”

  “You can get more of this?” Kahn aske
d.

  “Usually it’s even better.”

  He nodded. “Good boy.”

  “I can probably hook you up tomorrow.”

  “And we’ll see about finding you a slot for your man part.”

  “Man part?”

  “Your schwartz, Schwartz.”

  “You have a vested interest?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  But I was flattered.

  People were already coming out. Dad fondled his tie, yukked it up with his poker buds, ran a thumb through his comb-over. They saw me pushing Kahn.

  “He even helps the handicapped in his spare time,” Dad said.

  Kahn gave them the finger.

  “I was worried sick,” Erin said.

  Kahn ignored her, addressed the black girl.

  “And how’s my Nubian princess this morning?”

  The black girl gave Kahn the finger.

  “Like father, like daughter,” Kahn said.

  “This is my sister Natasha,” Erin said.

  Natasha waved. Benjy was giving Erin that puppy-dog bullshit I’m-in-love face.

  “Let’s trade,” I said to Erin. “I’ll give you Benjy for these two.”

  Erin laughed. She liked my brother’s candied whisper and ironed collars, I could tell.

  Walking to the car, thought I might come back later, burn the building to ashes, blaze of fall glory, flame and amber leaves in high relief against the Quinosset dark. Burnt down to the hallowed ground like the First Temple.

  But no murder in my heart, or political outrage. My imagined arson was purely aesthetic, ecstatic. More like that movie with the freeze-frame ending, actor entombed in midair, in fist-pump approval of his own bravura before the credits roll, movie ends, crowd goes home, real-life copycat gets seven to ten upstate, so much for romance.

  four

  Facts About My Father:

  • From November 1975 until March 1976, Dad disappeared. Not literally—he claims no alien abduction or celestial sabbatical—but not figuratively, either, in the took-too-much-acid-spent-a-year-licking-childhood-toys-in-a-closet sense. Nor did he go to Vietnam, disappear emotionally upon his return. According to my uncle Sal, he went somewhere—another state, country, or maybe just down the street—no one knew where. Not so weird in and of itself. The seventies, etc. What’s strange is it wasn’t one of those “When he came back he was a totally different person” things. My research (uncle, grandma) shows he was exactly the same as he was before. He never mentioned it.

  • Played baseball in college. He was good. Not good enough for TV, but good enough to regret his decision not to sweat out a few seasons in Single A (Peoria, Beloit, South Bend, some beautifully named mid-American dust-burg), exalt in the occasional starlit base-trot, bleacher-drunks screaming, “Hail! Savior! Sultan of mosquito nights, bring back my boyhood!”

  five

  On the drive home Mom asked if we were fasting. We said no. She said she was fasting to make us feel guilty for not saying we were fasting. When we got back to the house we ate leftover Chinese food.

  After lunch, Benjy wanted to go for a walk, to give me brotherly advice and have me reassure him I wasn’t fucking up. He’d been doing this a few times a year since Dad left. He was the adult now: condescendingly arrogant, clean-shaven. Moved through the world like a marathon runner, deliberate and mid-speed. He paced himself. Kept one eye on those who fell behind. And perhaps deep down I wanted him over my shoulder, observing my blunders with fraternal felicity, figuring himself the safety net I so desperately needed. But less deep down I thought he was an asshole.

  Street was quiet. No fighting neighbors, crying babies. Suburbs in autumn: eerily serene. Houses tried in all their pallid glory to convey immortality with high windows, four-car garages, but the overall effect was sterility. No yards on these new houses. All the green was gone. Square footage valued over outdoor acreage.

  Walked through the Orchard, a gated community/golf course at the end of our block. Last time I’d been was for Quinosset High’s Annual (Unofficial) Senior Scavenger Hunt, where (among other things) underage girls gave BJs to the underage judges while the rest of the twelfth grade watched and videotaped for posterity. I was no Ron Jeremy, but I was there, by the sixteenth hole, as Nina Janovy licked her own nipple in the late May predawn.

  Didn’t mention the scavenger hunt as we walked through the empty course. Too obvious a memory, an implied discussion that was, therefore, moot. At the twelfth hole, Benjy faked a golf swing, which was actually an imitation of the way our father faked golf swings, which we thought made him look like an asshole.

  Past the course, through rows of condos where we’d been to parties when parents were in Bermuda and girls with open houses behaved decadently—learned from summer teen blockbusters—allowing semi-strangers to trash their homes, jump in their pools fully clothed, lick the flesh of pierced, pulpy earlobes in upstairs maid’s quarters, or toggle at belt buckles atop white felt pool tables.

  Benjy said, “So.”

  “So?”

  “I talked to Dad today. He’s…”

  “An asshole?”

  “He’s your father.”

  Benjy hesitated. Knew we sounded like an after-school special, still couldn’t deviate from the script.

  “He’s worried about you.”

  I wanted us to laugh. Two brothers on a crisp fall day, walking through a golf course, one confronting the other about bad choices, the dead-end course his life has taken. But it wasn’t funny because it was true, it was about me, and Benjy was serious.

  “You’re worried about me.”

  “I am,” he said and tried to put a hand on my shoulder.

  I was walking too fast. His hand grazed my upper back like he was brushing lint from my coat.

  “I’m fine.”

  “What are you…”

  “I’m fine.”

  Before, we’d been allies. He was the good son; I was the bad son. Recent confrontations broke an unwritten code that said: “Never speak of the fact that one is the good son and one the bad son.”

  “You know you have to get a job?”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? Don’t you want to get out of the house, get some money, get your own place?”

  “I have money. Dad subsidizes my lifestyle.”

  At least he had been. Last two checks had mysteriously never arrived. Was trying not to think about it.

  “Isn’t that embarrassing, Eli?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I don’t mean to be a dick.”

  “Whatever,” I said again. The cry of my generation, or maybe the one previous to mine. Meant what you wanted it to mean but also the opposite.

  Almost home.

  “What’s with you and Erin Kahn?”

  “I don’t know,” Benjy said, and I knew he liked her because he didn’t mention her tits.

  six

  Re: Dad’s Baseball Regret:

  • Seen him watch the game on TV in August, one of those never-ending West Coast slugfests that lasts until the a.m. hours. Color commentators—jet-lagged, feeling the freedom provided by waning late-night viewership—make half-veiled innuendos to the scantily skirted, naturally flirty anchorwoman checking in for the late-night traffic report.

  • He’s still awake. Watches even though the game’s boring, because for him each at-bat is a unique, intricate equation. Remembers his own equations, physical equations solved by the fit/faithful body that’s no longer his.

  • When he watched these games, I sat tuned to his sad-Dad frequency.

  • Wanted to say, “It’s okay, those dumb jocks don’t understand the universe.”

  • Wanted to say, “Why is life bullshit?”

  • Wanted to say, “Father, have you ever licked butt cheeks in moonlight or sucked fat clit while Otis Redding comes crinkled with static over the radio in your 1968 Ford sedan?”

  • Wanted to say, “Tell me how to feel the way you once fe
lt.”

  seven

  Googled Kahn. Benjy in his room. Mom on the treadmill, working off guilt, Chinese food. Dad outside city limits staring at a 58-inch plasma, loving wife nestled to his chest while the twins played pinball in the east wing. Where was Kahn? He was, for me at that moment, suspended in the immortal ether of cyberspace, twenty years younger, winking at the world through a series of black-and-white headshots.

  Kahn’s IMDB was like the back of a baseball card of a player at the end of a long, middling career. Stats indecipherable and unremarkable in all manners other than quantity. He’d been a regular cast member on seven different shows, none of which I’d heard of. Made one- to five-episode guest appearances on forty-seven other programs. Sixteen made-for-TV movies, four after-school specials, and a Skinemax flick from the early eighties. One legit film, Wood and Nail, critically acclaimed at Cannes for its portrayal of an artiste carpenter’s descent into madness.

  Bio appeared to have been written by Kahn himself. Section marked trivia read:

  • Seymour Kahn has made a career doing crappy shows viewed by idiots.

  • The self-proclaimed “King of the Crossover,” Kahn holds the record for appearances on the most shows while playing the same character: the brash yet lovable Albert Stamn, who first appeared as a police captain on the short-lived NBC series Guns and Tarts.

  • In the seventies, Kahn slept with many of Hollywood’s leading ladies, and a few of its leading men.

  • His first wife, actress Sheila Glent-Kahn, left him shortly after adopting their second child, Natasha, in a desperate attempt to save their marriage.

  • Unfortunately, the marriage was unsalvageable, because it turned out Glent-Kahn was a lesbian.

  • Kahn did not believe this was an irreconcilable difference. After all, he was part gay himself.

  • These days Kahn relies on Viagra to maintain erections.

  One reader comment, headed “Is this real?!?” No responses, possibly because no one knew, more likely because no one ever looked up Kahn.