Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

by Bill Peters

  “Also—because I do walk the walk,” Fake Dad No. 3 says, reaching for the Frito bag, “I remember when I was monetarily and spiritually low. My first wife left me, so I blew five credit cards backpacking through South America. When I got back, I couldn’t find work. I was thirty-two. I moved into the basement of a house of grad students. All the dishes ended up in my room, because I was too depressed to carry them to the dishwasher when I finished eating. I tried to read self-help books, but self-help books are all written by people who are already successful, right? They would never need their own advice. And I couldn’t reconcile that. Finally, I went to King of Prussia, in 1989, for this retreat. Could you imagine if you knew that several times a year you didn’t have to talk to anybody? I almost moved there for it.”

  “But, so, why Mom?” I say.

  He looks toward the ceiling and sighs. “That’s an astute question,” he says, because he says every question is a good question. “Debra commits herself. Gary: Did you take your Donnatal? Are you transferring your medical records? You have meditation on Tuesday, not Monday.”

  “I feel like I can never complain about anything with her,” I tell him.

  “I can’t speak for that,” he says. “But I can say, us guys, you and me,”—he nudges his elbow at me—“the other night, alone, at my apartment, I called GE to walk me through how to use the washing machine in my own complex’s basement. Men won’t spend their money; men will count the pasta noodles she bought before she left us.”

  Which, okay, is about a 4.1 on the Scale of Funny.

  “The retreat would be free. It’d be in the summer. It would be an intense challenge. But a chance, for the mind.”

  “I would have to think about it.”

  Because I begin to feel something as this conversation ends. And the last time I felt it was when Real Dad drove all the way to Fairport so we could go sledding at Brooks Hill, which had the best sledding hill in Rochester. It was Super Bowl Sunday, with the Bears playing later. The other sledders packed snow together to build a jump, and poured water on it for added momentum. Skidding a glove across the snow, saliva freezing on your coat zipper, it was like the ground was punching up at us when me and Real Dad’s sled plunged toward the jump, and then everything went quiet and airborne, and that, I guess, was family for three seconds.

  But Mom’s shower gulps to a stop. Fake Dad No. 3 sets his vitamin jars on the kitchen table, and I dive under my bed covers and pretend I’ve been asleep. And the next day, I totally Walk Down Faggot Lane when I meet Toby at the Airplane Booth.

  “Something about a retreat sounded kind of interesting,” I tell him. “Wouldn’t you be almost relieved? To walk away completely?”

  A French fry falls out of Toby’s mouth. I blush for even bringing up the subject. Blush enough to come back home and tell Fake Dad No. 3: “I don’t think so.”

  “But you’re considering it,” Fake Dad No. 3 says. “I can see it in your face; view of the lake? Simple breakfast in the morning? I’ll bring pamphlets! I’m eager to help.”

  Eager to help. Like he, Necro, and Garrett Alfieri can walk into a room, offer help, and expect everyone to start licking themselves in strange tongues.

  “Nothing against you, but a retreat sounds stupid to me,” I say, a little harder.

  Tell me I need some retreat, when, later, I go to bed, and I’m staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and I get this tickly feeling. Like how after any party, I’d walk home, wishing the world was a quiet, empty lit town where the sun never came up and high school kids walked around outside. Cutting through store lots and peoples’ backyards, I’d start to talk to myself, whispering one-liners—“Nine out of every ten sportscasters prefer Just For Men Beard Coloring!”—whispering louder and louder and louder.

  THE HAPPY ROLODEX

  For spring, though, to combat the Springtime Breezes of Fear, I decide that I am Going to Be Happy. So I don’t call Necro (who never calls anymore anyway), or Lip Cheese, or Toby. There’s literally no Fires Gone Wild Cancun Fuckfest through all of March. So I stop checking NecronicA, and spend more time outside sitting on benches around town, where it’s flu-warm, enough for the shops to prop their doors open on rubber-bottomed kickstands.

  The cashier at the 7-Eleven asks me How you doing, and I tell him, “Everything’s chugging along!” and I pause and look closely to see if there’s any change in his face, to see if I’ve caused him to look deep into the sad trash that is his life.

  A few times, I even visit Wicked College John, who is now at the rehabilitation section of the hospital. He can stand now; he shuffles around the bed in his room, and I nod approvingly. He turns his head and looks at me for a few seconds. “TV?” he says, and then, in another visit, he says, “This show? Hellstache?” and then, in another, “Let’s listen to that Rusted Root bootleg now.”

  Back home, Mom is microwaving a cookie for dessert. “Jobs? Anything?”

  “Had some really exciting conversations!” I say, after I interview with the managers at Zabb’s and Java Joe’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods. And on the back of a grocery receipt, Mom writes down numbers of some temp agencies I haven’t called.

  The next morning, in the kitchen, when I handful Product 19 from the box for breakfast, Fake Dad No. 3 stirs up a fiber drink and asks how I am.

  “Doing great, spiritually!” I say. And on my bed, he leaves pamphlets for the retreat. There’s a green background and a picture of a mountain on the front and the address of the retreat center. The text on the inner flap has a heading, in a cursive font, that says: THE BUFFALO THAT ROAM THE MIND. On a Post-it stuck to the pamphlet, Fake Dad No. 3 has written, in the teacher-like scribble I’d get on homework papers: “Great for exploring excess & what we discussed!”

  And it’s like I’m creating a Happiness Rolodex. The Nate that Necro and Garrett Alfieri and Fake Dad No. 3 think I am, who needs help? Gone like ads in last year’s newspaper.

  And, by the time we get to Easter-ish, it’s T-shirt weather. And at some point, there comes a time when there comes a time. So insert Rambo gearing up, cartridge into gun, knife into bootleg, as I test the Happy Rolodex on Toby and Lip Cheese at the Airplane Booth at Applebee’s. I tell them, off the top turnbuckle:

  “Life’s working out! Putting the ‘joy’ in ‘enjoyment.’”

  And I’m saying to myself please, please let Toby remember that time I thought I saw him sniffle when the Miami Dolphins dumped Flutie Flakes on the locker room floor and danced on them (“It’s the moisture in my nose!”), or the time Lip Cheese tried to tell everyone that a laser was a solid object.

  Instead, Toby heaves his mutton-pink forearms onto the tabletop. He looks at me, face heavy, like he’s about to tell me he’s pregnant. “Look, I don’t know what you just said there,” he says. “But we have some bad news.”

  Lip Cheese jumps in. “My friend Lewellyn? At the County Clerk? She told me there was a fire at Bambert’s Weapons.”

  Toby closes his eyes and nods. “Retaliation burn-down.”

  “She said the sprinkler system was disabled,” Lip Cheese says. “I drove by there. The fire was in the back room, so I couldn’t see anything, but there was somebody from the fire department walking around the building with a pair of tongs and placing these little bits of burnt cloth into a paint can.”

  “You guys seem to have a lot of hostility,” I say. “This is a bit touched, man.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this, especially after that laser pointer,” Toby says. “Look at NecronicA: Necro draws a picture, building burns down. Necro draws a picture, building burns down. That pattern, over and over. And the buildings that have had fires set to them? Those homeless shelters? These kind of liberal places? And you remember how at Weapons of Mankind, they were complaining about their treatment within the community, and they were all, you know, bruahrahrahrahrahrahrah”—he makes these motions with his hands, like he’s a bear clawing at a tree— “bruahrahrahrahrah state laws; bruahrahrahrahrah, li
ke totally anti? So maybe the first fire—the explosion—let’s just say Weapons of Mankind did that one, acting out against the public access building and the neighborhood. Then, maybe, suppose the next few fires somebody set maybe out of protest against the Weapons of Mankind explosion—Race-War Amalgamation, etc. Then, Weapons of Mankind in turn sets the fires at the shelters in retaliation for those fires. Then”—and the seriousness in Toby’s face breaks for a second, and he actually giggles—“someone breaks in to Bambert’s Weapons, disables the sprinkler, and sets it aflame. I mean …”

  The thing I should say here is that Toby’s not mentally disabled. I saw him once tutoring kids at lacrosse camp. He talked about split dodges, keeping the stick head behind the shoulder for an overhand shot, building power from your hips and legs when you shoot on the run. I’ve seen him make sense.

  “What about every other fire this year, Toby?” I say.

  Toby slaps Lip Cheese on the arm, gestures toward me, and smirks. “Well I would imagine there would be some regular fires in there too, Nate.”

  All I can even think to do is shrug at Toby as hard as I can. Lip Cheese, though, flips through more of his documents, an inch-high stack this time, stopping at a page with a lot of white space and two bold headings near the middle and bottom.

  “This is a bunch of stuff from some court folder—court papers, news articles—from 1986, that says Bambert L. Tolby quote ‘defrauded thirty-one investors of $571,000 which Mr. Tolby claimed would be used to fund the development of a film, purportedly titled Letters to God and the Third Reich and said to be based on Mr. Tolby’s historical research on World War II,’” Lip Cheese says. He slides his index finger down another page, “Mr. Tolby fabricated twenty-one messages from the IMG World agency to mislead investors about production, marketing, and expenditures for the movie.” He moves his finger down the page over the paragraphs, each of them numbered. “The film budget Mr. Tolby produced was later discovered to be identical to a budget plan for an independent horror film produced in Prentiss, Mississippi.” He reads again, “After six years, Tolby had produced a promotional poster for the film and a two-minute film trailer …” He flips to what looks like a stapled-together portion of a transcript: “Somebody here says the movie had themes of white supremacy,” Lip Cheese says. “It doesn’t say what kind.”

  Toby nods whenever Lip Cheese pauses, the fake listener’s nod.

  “It also says that ‘from 1981 through 1985, Mr. Tolby regularly attended community functions in Brockport, as well as meetings held by the Rochester Professionals Society, to solicit investments. On April 18, 1981, he began renting an office at 92 Main Street in Brockport for a production company, Interesting Films, LLC. In or about 1982, he hired two staff to run telemarketing operations, which were carried out to seek investments.’”

  I have no idea what most of more-or-less any of that means. Our waitress says, “Hi guys!” and I tell her coffee and French fries.

  “And, then, the document says that he spent $26,240 of investments toward renovations on his home living room, $3,137 toward rare movie posters, $8,421 on a vacation, and $16,000 toward a German military sword said to be used during World War II.” Lip Cheese looks up. “There’s some other page in here that says he got some number of years in prison. He had to pay back I even forget how much.”

  “And, Nate,” Toby takes two pieces of paper out of his Bills vest. Suddenly our booth smells tender like garbage. The papers look crumpled, and some kind of mustard appears to have crusted up on them. “I did a little dumpster diving. These are receipts from Necro’s trash.” He flicks one of the receipts, an 8½-by-11 sheet of paper, violently with his middle finger. “I also found a receipt from some place called Tazmanian Cash in South Carolina …”

  “They didn’t have a website that I could find,” Lip Cheese says.

  “Twenty-seven hundred dollars, total. Purchases of something called Quickmatch; purchases of potassium chlorate, dextrin, lactose, because he’s, I don’t know, lactose intolerant?” He uncrumples a receipt from Chase-Pitken. “Three hundred in fertilizer? With ammonium nitrate? All of this, on Andrea Fanto’s credit card.”

  “Goddammit, Toby!” I say.

  Whatever Happy Rolodex I had shrinks into my chest like drying palm sweat on a steering wheel, and not just because Necro apparently has a credit card. It’s more that, Cockdrama In Motion or Actual Seriousness—I can’t tell—maybe Toby has a point: Maybe Necro is trying to kill someone.

  Toby passes the receipts across the table to me. “Talk to Necro about these, Nate. Show them to his face. It’s moral to confront people.”

  “Should we all go together?” I say.

  “You know him,” Toby says. “I never hang out with Necro when you’re not there—me and him have never branched off into being our own friends. But you, Nate: You have the Winston Churchill Golden Olive Branch. Let him know we can go to the police, take him down to the Zone for real this time.”

  Toby hands me the receipts, which I fold into the pocket of my running pants. “And think about who your friends are,” he says. “Provided you’re not still Friend to All Animals.” Toby cracks up, mouth opening half-moon-shaped with his baby gremlin teeth.

  Lip Cheese goes, “Hooo!”

  “Those stuffed animals were Lip Cheese’s,” I try to say over them. “Lip Cheese’s!”

  But the next afternoon, at home, I’m blushing about Friend to All Animals even in private. I’m so embarrassed that I actually call Necro. I leave a message on the Robot Voice Machine saying: “We have some real Winston-Churchill-ing to do, Necro. You haven’t been around recently, and I’m really worried what you’re up to.”

  Then I think: Maybe Necro actually left town. Then I go back to Applebee’s. And, as if he’d known via Doppler Natecast, Necro is sitting there, at the Airplane Booth.

  I haven’t seen him in a while. His face looks a little less swollen. His forearms are hairier, and there’s more white in his eyes where they’re usually bloodshot. He shakes my hand. “Long time, no talking points.”

  He hands me a bottle of Glenfiddich, aged twelve years. Because today—April 20th—I also forgot to tell you, actually is my twenty-first birthday.

  Any muscle I had is chewing gum now. Any idea that Necro was the Unabomber on a Unabombing Gone Wild Cancun Fuckfest Spree falls totally out of my brain. My point all along being this: Necro’s a nice guy and I just want him to be around.

  “I know it probably seems like I’ve been, you know, self-sequestering a lot recently,” Necro says. “But you’ve hit the big two-one.”

  The bottle is rich-pervert, gray-chest-hair caliber, and comes in a cardboard tube, with rounded edges and a cap you need a long thumbnail to pick off.

  “Built in the Glen of Fiddich, Gaelic for ‘Valley of the Deer,’” I read from the fold-out card inside the tube, “with notes of peat and spices.”

  “I drink it for the peat,” Necro says, flipping through the cards on our table’s ring-bound dessert menu. “Spices.” He puffs some laughing through his cheeks. “Babies love the amped-up taste of Paul Prudhomme’s habanero-banana puree,” he says, in his pro-wrestler Extreme Voice.

  I sputter, like laughing out car exhaust. Then I look up. “Wait. What?”

  He waves one hand, batting the comment away. “I don’t know.”

  “Gerber Cajun Selections?” I say. “Put the fire back in your baby’s dietary whatever.”

  “Take and transcend the tongues of the earth with our Stage 3 Sweet Potatoes and Atomic Jalapeno: Buuurn your baby’s face.”

  Necro pays for my fries, and we get in the Vomit Cruiser, and the car’s smell, a caramel-and-newspaper perfume, is like a little arcade token dropping into my brain’s coin slot. I brace my foot against the seat well like I always do to substitute for a seat belt. We drive past Irondequoit Bay, the way we would every night we were off to a party, and we knew Toby would’ve bought tobacco or a cube of Labatt’s and a six of Shea’s to class it up. And I’d
be wondering what girl would be there that I could stare at all night.

  We turn onto a dirt road where twigs flick the windshield. But near my shoe, underneath an unfinished bottle of Surge, I see a chapstick-sized metal tube, and my temples turn into absolute knuckles. Because, I wonder: There is no way that is a laser pointer. And if it is, how would Necro possibly know me and Toby were looking for the Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm, got lost, and ended up in a field? I suppose, though, Necro is sort of good at finding us—he did find us at Mighty Taco in Buffalo that time when nobody told him we were going to see WWF. Because, am I going to have to realize about Necro what everybody apparently realized, like when Missy Giordano went out with Matty De Luca, and then she found the single sentence “THIS IS NOT FAIR” written on a piece of paper somehow slipped under her bedroom pillow, and how everybody knew that Necro did it? Or how that one time when we were driving back through the woods from Tavis Porcelli’s party out in Macedon, and we spent the whole ride back saying nothing, and Necro’s driver’s-side window was open the way it is right now, except then, he turned to me and said: “Hey Nate?” And I went, “What?” and he went, “What if I killed you?” And the receipts Toby gave me feel like they’re glowing in my pocket, but then I look closer, and the metal object is only a keychain with a pewter skeleton bone, so everything is fine again.

  Necro drives us to a clearing, and, look at this: this pond-slash-swamp with all of these boats in it: oil tankers, yachts; ships with rust holes big enough to fit a phone booth through, ships with chairs and trash bags piled up in their windows; ships shouldering into the water.

  “How’d you find this place?”

  “Bored. It’s a ship retirement yard. The navy and the ports send old ships here to let them sort of eat themselves in—cannibalizing. I thought you’d have fun staring at them. Happy Birthday, Part II: The Proto-Stachening.”

  The dirt at the edge of the water is cold and dry. Under a shirt in the Vomit Cruiser’s backseat, Necro finds a Red Wings plastic game cup with a yellowing logo. He pours the scotch halfway up.