Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality

by Bill Peters

  His house is like a worn-out college rental—walls thin enough to vibrate the whole place if you punched them, stairs to the second floor right there when you get in. There are nicer, parentish things: gold picture frames, a wall unit, carpets and furniture colored like different degrees of creamed coffee. I sidestep my way past the red party cups on the glass end table. Around Kim Stanton, Kim Piscarelli, Kim Opec, all still here; around Mike Falconi; around the other Mike Falconi who did track and jazz band. I set the cube of Labatt’s I brought on the sticky kitchen floor, and, in a Clinic of Hellstachery, Mindy Fale has not arrived yet, and there is nobody to talk to.

  Nobody, except for Conor Ricketts, who, I decide: Why not go stand around while he talks to Eric Ashner and some kid who is maybe Jeremy Near.

  And if you’ve ever just had a standaround with someone who has ripped on you your whole life, the conversation always feels four jokes ahead of you. But since Conor Ricketts is one of these people I always think I’ll never see again (until I always see him again), I get this post-headlock, really-terrific chipper hate in me:

  “So, Conor! Are you in school?” I go, slapping him on the arm.

  And the only good part of the night is right here, when his face unsquints, for a second, like I’m maybe finally seeing the face that got nervous on the bus to school, or the face that told his mom he felt like he had no friends. But he collapses halfway and goes: “Can’t do it, man. Can’t do it!” He looks to Ashner and the other kid who, actually, might be Kevin Keaveny if Kevin Keaveny burned his neck really bad. “He’s just Sausage Academy. Slim Jims as pencils, books with pages made of sliced turkey.”

  And because she is already a Life Mistake, Mindy Fale chooses to arrive right now, with her work shirt and stretch pants and perfume of raspberry-scented paint thinner. She kisses Conor Ricketts on the cheek. Which why tell me I should come here if she’s going to be that way.

  “Academy what?” she says.

  I flex my head muscles with anger at her. “Oh it was just this time,” I say, “when Conor stuck a sausage—”

  He gets me in another headlock before I can finish, and it feels like I’m underwater, and people start to laugh, and he wrestles me to the floor, pressing my cheek into his parents’ carpet. And suddenly, I relax. And I begin to think: Of the Top Five Uncomebackables You Don’t Need to Know About Me, if Taped-On Dildo is the final boss, then Sausage Academy is the bonus quest after you beat the game. Not even Necro, Toby, or Lip Cheese know what Sausage Academy means. But rather than simply reseal Sausage Academy into the Nate Expanding Zoo of Lies, something happens that can only be described as the entire history of vitamins typhooning upward into every nerve-hole that Sausage Academy has dug me into since I was fifteen. And what I decide is, if Necro is going to Joke-Hostage me with Taped-On Dildo, and Conor Ricketts is going to Joke-Hostage me with Sausage Academy, maybe I can Un-Joke-Hostage myself by making a habit of telling the truth.

  So I put my hand on Conor Ricketts’s waist, gently, in a way that I guess he understands means Enough, No Really, and he un-headlocks me. People have gathered around us in the living room, like they’re not sure whether to expect a fight. I stand straight, let some headlock-fizz drain into my cheeks, and hold my breath, like I’m about to make an Olympic dive.

  “Basically, Mindy, what Sausage Academy was—is—” and I can feel my mind, like a digestive tract, trying to pull back down everything I’m about to say. “What it was, was, basically—I was in a study group with Conor here, and Jessica Stanfeld. We were in Jessica’s bedroom, and we all ate several tablespoons of nutmeg. We sat around licking our lips, and then, I forget what we were talking about, but Jessica asks, out of nowhere, ‘Nate: Are you circumcised?’”

  And the biggest Bowl of Skittles about this is that I start to get Crazy Stories Wheels, and I’m leaning forward, making big spidery gestures, like I’m doing stand-up, like maybe I can make Sausage Academy sound like something Holy Grail Point worthy.

  “Now, obviously I know what circumcised means now—I mean who doesn’t? It’s so obvious—but back then, I was like: ‘Circumcised? Like circumscribed?’” I smack my right temple. “So I said, ‘Circumcised? No.’ And Conor and Jess start cracking up. And Jessica asks, ‘So do you just have, like, a hood?’ And I tell her, totally on autopilot, ‘No, no way. It’s pretty standard-issue down there: See?’ And next thing, Conor here”—I put my arm around him—“lets out this BWOAAAGH and dives for the corner. Jessica begins to cry, because my hands, without mentally documenting it, have undone my fly and just completely taken it out. Like I could just do this, no editing box.”

  Mindy Fale is the only one laughing. Conor Ricketts has this frown that looks like, I would say, the Vice President of the Diarrhea Fan Club. Which makes me feel like I’ve steered the crowd away from him. Soon, someone will begin to clap, slowly, and they will love His Natorade for his honesty, because we’re all just walking bags of pain who have one or two chances ever to speak truthfully. Because the next part of Sausage Academy—the Sausage Academy Tapes—Conor has been nice enough this entire time not to tell anybody.

  “And the craziest part,” I go on, “is that I look down, standing over Conor and Jessica, and not only have I taken it out, but there’s some actual crotchular movement, like maybe the horror of this sort of turns me on. And when I realize this, I’m double horrified, and I start going ‘AHHH! AHHH!’ and I stumble into the bathroom. And I can’t calm down, and the only thing I can think to do to relax is pleasure myself, pleasure the horror out of me. And Conor here doesn’t know this, but the fear—the total creepiness of it right then in Jessica Stanfeld’s bathroom—feels awesome, awesome like hollowed-out-my-pelvis. So that turns me on! So back home that night, I think, Well the rest of the school year’s already ruined, so why not just see where the demons take you. So I work out another round in my bedroom. But now I’m horrified that I have let this horror be enjoyable, and now I have a headache, and my brain is so fogged up from demon boner gas that I don’t sleep, and so I pleasure the horror out of me again to tire myself out. I tell my mom to make a sick call to the nurse’s office. And when she goes to work, I wait forty-five minutes to download this porn clip—just some man-on-woman to normal a bro out. But in the clip, the woman yells ‘Oh Jesus!’ and the guy yells, ‘Jesus never fucked you like this!’ Which is awful! So I throw my hands over my eyes, and I run into the bathroom and yell into the mirror: ‘Cultaneous! Cultaneous! Cultaneous!’ yelling this made-up word, slapping my face. ‘Cultaneous! Cultaneous!’ So that’s Sausage Academy.”

  Even Conor Ricketts has a loosened look on his face. This respectful look, like he’s at the funeral of someone he hates.

  “I was high on nutmeg you squares!” I say. “It was instinct. Curiosity. You think Christopher Columbus would have gone very far without curiosity? You could all learn something from this, all of you, still living at home. And Conor: His last name is Ricketts!”

  People walk into other rooms, start other conversations. Conor Ricketts puts his hand on my shoulder. “I am glad I am not you,” he says.

  Minutes or hours later, I’m sitting on the living room couch. It feels too much like I’ve lit my face on fire to know if I’m relieved or if I’ve done irreversible harm to myself. Since I’ll take any reason to get out of here, I hear Mindy Fale ask her friends if they want to go to the Millcreek Pool Club to light up a spliff. So, I do the thing where, if you want to invite yourself someplace, you quietly follow the people headed to that place for a while, and then I become the Cloaked Man and slip into the backseat of Mindy Fale’s car when they go: the Classic Nate Slip-In.

  We follow her friends’ car to Millcreek, and then her friends wander into the trees out behind the diving board. And here’s me and Mindy Fale, sitting on top of the monkey bars, legs hanging down over the weeds, me trying to taste her saliva on the joint. The pool is drained, but at night its bright blue paint job looks like moonlight.

  After eight or nine long, angr
y inhales, the area behind my eyes knots up. I look at Mindy Fale’s chest, and somewhere, deep in the nerve vortex of my cock, a telephone rings. But I can feel a Sad High fighting its way up to my head.

  “I’m finally at that point where I can kill myself,” I say, but accidentally like it’s an accomplishment.

  “Right. Right,” she says. Then, after an extra second: “Sometimes I get so tired when I smoke. It made my old jobs a disaster. My dad was co-owner of Salty’s when I was a junior, and I’d hang banners and place ads when he’d do boxing events there. One time when he was talking to the promoter, I fell asleep in the change room on Cisco Arriaga’s lap, the boxer. He was so sweet about it. He didn’t try to get up or anything.”

  “I can’t believe I spilled the beans on Sausage Academy,” I say, slowly. But I’m way too conscious how serious my face looks to give what I say sufficient Sad-backing.

  “I can’t believe they believed it,” she says.

  And the closest I get to a realization of what this means is hearing a voice from my brain’s echo-filled sewers—a black saxophone player’s baritone voice that says: WHOA. Some puppet strings attached to the corners of my mouth pull upward, which must mean I’m smiling.

  “You talk a mean game of bullshit, Nathan Gray,” she says. “After you told that whole story, Josh DuGoff asked me: Is Nate dying?”

  I start to nod and to laugh, seemingly uncontrollably, like my head’s trying to pull my body upward. “I’d run into the woods and, you know, pleasure it through again,” my voice gets squealy, “But I’d be so scared!”

  Mindy Fale sprays spit. Each bubble of cracking-up hardens into a laughter kidney stone in my cranium.

  “But I’m totally meeting you where you’re at!” she says.

  I take another hefty inhale, a coast-inhale.

  “Like, Eddie Izzard,” she says. “At work I just go out and talk with these old ladies at lunch, and I’ll make references to Eddie Izzard jokes when they’re talking about their husband’s government health insurance. And when nobody gets them I drive home like: Yes.”

  I start to say something, but I can apparently tell Mindy Fale has wanted to talk about what she’s about to tell me, and has been waiting for a way to segue into it, which I feel very respectful of.

  “But I love driving around high, or after mushroom tea,” she says. “Driving past the malls at night, past Marketplace or out to Eastview. I had ‘Second Toughest in the Infants’ in the tape player—Underworld?—which Chadvertisement said helps him concentrate. And one night, I’m driving around, past the farms, past the schools. Everything is closed, like this deep mind-techno rattling the speakers; that ‘Pearl’s Girl’ song: I remember thinking it sounded like when they show cities in fast motion. I drive past this stretch of field past Victor, where there are no street lamps. And I swear, I’m driving, and right then, my headlights catch this white baby’s shoe on the side of the road—absolutely glowing.”

  “That is amazing!” I say. “That is, like, a child—”

  “I got teary,” she says. “It was the funnest fear I’d ever had.”

  And even though Real Dad’s line about Eddie Izzard—he’s this transvestite and he just stands there!—pulls my head softly to the right like a news ticker, hearing Mindy talk about baby shoes tastes like Snapple in my heart.

  “We should do that,” she says. “Hey, hey, hey.”

  “Yeah, hey.”

  “Do you want to drive to Niagara Falls?” she asks.

  “We pretty much have to now!”

  To even be in someone’s car that isn’t mine or Toby’s, to have to move my feet around a different pile of junk; coffee cups with a Hess logo as opposed to McDonald’s; this tote bag with an old Videk logo—letters fat, square, and digital-looking; to even have to adjust the seat because it hasn’t been adjusted, yet, by me—all of that is pretty neat.

  On I-90, the after-sweat of almost-August whips through the windows. Into the America side of Niagara Falls, we pass a factory, which looks like an expansive white six-pack. A yellow banner across its top says: NABISCO: HOME OF TRISCUIT. Which we both laugh at. The roads are empty, street lamps like huge lowercase r’s. A lone booth is open at the Rainbow Bridge.

  “We’re just here to see the falls,” Mindy Fale says to the booth guy, who waves us through with his index finger.

  I remember Mom, sitting in the passenger seat, looking back at me when we went over the Peace Bridge, saying, “This bridge represents friendship between our country and Canada,” when Real Dad wanted to drag Mom to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. The lights are off in the clown-colored storefronts and the tower that says CASINO on it. We pass the Burger King, over which rises a giant sculpture of Frankenstein’s head, his hand holding a hamburger.

  But instead of going straight to the falls, Mindy Fale, totally out of nowhere, turns hard into the parking lot of Plaza, a liquidy executive-class tower hotel with a lightbulb-studded gold ceiling over the pull-up loop.

  “I feel really sick,” she says. “What time is it?”

  Mindy Fale hurries into the hotel’s airport-terminal-sized lobby, check-in desks on opposing sides, polished granite I’m still high enough to want to lick. Palm trees surround the glass elevator shafts, inner balconies of each floor shrinking upward like we’re inside a gold accordion. The attendant charges $200 to Mindy Fale’s credit card. She yanks her tote bag off the desk counter and walks, heels like hammers, toward the elevators.

  “Shut up, shut up, do not talk, do not ask me a thing,” she says.

  “Did I do something?” I say to the back of her head.

  She jabs the elevator button a bunch of times. “I have to get to a bed. I can’t drive.”

  Our room is on the eighteenth floor, light the color of cowhide, microwave on top of a mini bar; a circular table with a spread of information pamphlets. Mindy Fale sits next to me on the bed. I lean my right shoulder into her. My right armpit is soaked with sweat. I take her hand, and I am sure now this time, as before all other future interruptions, that we finally love each other. Her knuckles are chapped. She stands up: “I have to take my—” she says, and yanks her tote bag across her arm and strides into the bathroom.

  I hear a fan go on and what sounds like Tic Tacs rattling. When she comes out, she takes off her shoes, lays down, still in her work clothes, and falls immediately asleep.

  Her hands are folded on her stomach, in that way where I never fold my hands when I sleep on my back, because when I was younger I worried someone might think I was dead and bury me in my sleep. Every three or four seconds, her throat cracks open and releases a pencil-thick tube of air. Which is annoying, so to be annoying back at her, I look through her tote bag. There’s a ball of tinfoil, a pair of sunglasses, a rolled-up copy of the Rochester Real Estate Journal, and an earwax-colored pill jar with a yellow sticker wrapped around it showing an icon of a half-opened eye.

  Rolled into the corner of her pack of cigarettes are a one-hitter that looks like a cigarette and a plastic bag, the size that spare coat buttons come in. The one chunk of pot left in the bag looks like a tiny, freeze-dried Christmas tree. So out of revenge against her—and the way she hugged Conor Ricketts, or how she said Don’t Ask Me Anything and fell asleep so now I’m stuck here and bitch-bored—I tap the one-hitter against the bathroom sink and crumble in a few pinches of weed. Then—just to have at least some Crazy Stories—I spark it, exhaling into the ceiling fan, coughing grains of solidified electricity until the plastic bag is empty, and my heart rate speeds up and floats, moth-like, out of my body.

  When I leave the bathroom, my face glows with a calm, very discerning expression, like Harrison Ford. I assess the room. Curtains cover one wall. No sound anywhere, except my socks on the carpet. A cozy, echoless sound, like dialogue on late-night anime.

  I lie down next to her and slip my hand under hers, which feels dry and slender, a Victorian hand. I place my palm on her right breast. I make a few rotations, scientifically. Her
chest expands and contracts, like we’ve always been falling asleep in a bed that’s too small for us.

  When I sit up, I notice on the Rochester Real Estate Journal cover the phrase SAVE TOUCH AND DIE written in large, hip-looking type that’s apparently supposed to resemble handwriting. Since that phrase seems like some life comment I don’t understand, I open the magazine. Some listings are pre-circled, like an edgier way to highlight notable properties. Some of the articles display photos of homes, with messages in the margins like “use this” next to a picture of a granite fireplace; and “!!!!” Which I realize, then, is all just Mindy Fale’s handwriting, balloony in a murdery kind of way. But then I see this article about code enforcement, with pictures of rusted pipes.

  I eye-stroke the article’s first four words over and over, but a paragraph near the center of the page reads: “After a gas leak explosion at the Rochester Public Access Building that injured a St. Bonaventure student, the city condemned 21 properties in the two w—.”

  I make a Bible-sized gulp. A picture, light harsh from the flash, shows a buffalo-sized gas tank—a cylinder on four legs, covered with rust and white and green infections. The caption says: “The gasoline tank had corroded due to excessive water at the …” I blink over a few sentences. “Tests had not been conducted since 1987.”

  But then, Bible-Sized Gulp No. 2: “—a department research coordinator, said that outliers had created misleading statistics. This month, a juvenile, 14, pled guilty to arson charges in connection with fire incidents at two homeless shelters, the Monroe County Democ …”

  I set the magazine down because my lips feel heavy. My head feels like it’s about to fall off. Did I seriously not see this in the news? Did I miss all of this only because 11 p.m. runs directly into Rochester Drivearound hour? Was the Fires Gone Wild Runaway Cockdrama, this whole time, just some kid, a juvenile, who the magazine doesn’t identify, along with a bunch of oven burners left on? For an answer, all I can hear is a low-pitched, synthesizery noise, tunneling in on me, low like monks’ blow horns. Then, in a wallpapery pattern, 8-bit images of Necro flash, in time with my heart rate, on the inner side of my cornea. My lungs close when I swallow. My mind free falls. My thoughts very quickly reason their way to hell.