by Marc Parent
IN HIS LAST lucid moment, he reckoned with his biggest enemy. Coming along the horizon, it lurked like a predator, one he’s beat every year but never for good. He could almost see its face in the gloves of teenagers and blankets heaped over strollers, the extra bloom of smoke from exhaust pipes, the sniffle of delivery boys, the brisk walk of lightly dressed women—his greatest threat, a thing that made voices and hunger and darkness seem like a silly game—distant for now, but looming like a stalker: winter. A genuine bastard with a severe lack of imagination, pulling the same old gags it does every year with a brutal lack of variation—takes the ears and fingers and toes, takes the chunks right off of your nose. Junkies roll you over and hunger could take days, but the cold can put you down within an hour. It was coming as sure as galoshes with its worn-out joke bag of slush and windchill. He’d have to fight and defeat it like he did every year—main event in January with final rounds going long into the end of March. Sure to be a good match-up, he thought absently, his fingers crawling back to his blood-wet shoulder. Don’t you miss it, don’t touch the dial . . . . budga-freekack rubber freaker nose bicker-knobfucker . . .
Then, for reasons no one on the outside could ever imagine much less understand, Earl Strugg staggered to his feet and ran like a madman. Just like one.
Deck
THE OWLS HAVE CEASED THEIR CALLS and the lightning bugs are long gone. It’s just you alone on your deck afraid to admit why you’re alone at night. Most people fear the dark, but you like it. It’s the reason you like it that scares you.
The latest story is going nowhere, so you try to convince yourself that sitting out here will trigger the muse. It’s a story about an older woman who sure does know her way around a mattress. She’s even slept with a woman once, but that doesn’t make her a full-fledged lesberino. She is a dancer and the narrator’s plan is to marry her, but her ideas are different. (She is actually modeled on a girlfriend you had twenty years ago in Boston. She was French and called you mon cher, which you thought was totally deck, but she hated oral sex. This was surprising since you thought the French practically invented it or something. She also used sex as a reward for restaurant meals. She had nice skin. Sometimes you wonder what became of her. She was the great heartbreak of youth, and you regretted losing her for many years. You told her she should marry you so there’d always be one man to remind her how magnificent her legs had been.)
The story opens in a restaurant, the kind where just working there makes you so deck that you’re allowed to be rude to customers and you don’t even mind the bad tips. (It’s more of a café and is presently run by your dopester buddy Carlos in Charlottesville.) There’s student art hanging crooked on the walls, and a menu full of culinary puns written in colored chalk on a blackboard. The waiter is gay and you remember working as a waiter, and how you worried that people thought you were gay. You’ve been married twelve years now, and men don’t cruise you anymore, but upon occasion you still wonder if people think you are gay. Then you wonder why you wonder that.
The restaurant is known for having once employed a Weatherman-woman who spent twenty years as a federal fugitive after attaching a bomb to a police car that never blew. She used a false name and formed no lasting relationships. She stayed safe. You envy her. You are reminded of the reclusive Pynchon and recall the time you worked at a Boston Fotomat and a guy named Pynchon came in to pick up photos and you asked if he was Thomas. The guy laughed. He said he was Pynchon’s cousin, and you’d never see Pynchon here. He acted as if you were a mook for even suggesting that Pynchon might come to a Boston Fotomat. The guy didn’t return, and a part of you has always wondered if he really was Pynchon.
Lately you get on the Internet and plug in your ex–French girlfriend’s name and run all manner of searches and come up with nothing. There’s a woman with the same name in Phoenix, but she’s not the one. You call her old friends, but no one has heard from her in years. Her parents left the state. So did her brother. You wonder why you engage in this, and the possible reasons scare you into remaining on the deck in the dark.
Anyhow, the restaurant suits the situation, and like your ex–French girlfriend, it’s small and hip. She was always devastating you with cruelty, then claiming she was being honest about her feelings. She used to say, “Can I ask you a question and you won’t get mad?” You are stunned to realize that you can’t remember if it was the ex–French girlfriend or your buddy Carlos’s girlfriend who said that. Your ex–French girlfriend was a waitress who once got fired for chasing a customer into the street over a lousy tip. You wonder what the Weatherman-woman did if a customer stiffed her on the tip. Maybe she blew their cars up. She lived half her life as someone else, and you momentarily wish you were the Weatherman-woman. The question your ex–French girlfriend wanted to ask was would you mind if she slept with someone else—just once. What could you do? You went along with the idea while seething inside and spent the whole weekend smoking weed and reading comic books, trying to convince yourself that you didn’t really love her. As it turns out, she didn’t sleep with anyone, but was just trying to learn if you were the possessive type. She left you anyhow, and moved to San Diego, which is as far from Boston as you can possibly get and remain in the continental U.S. You drove her to the airport and never saw her again.
Years later and late at night you sit on your back deck, the perfect place to smoke weed, only you quit a long time ago, making this a wasted spot. Sometimes you think about taking up the habit again, just to feel good about eventually quitting again.
Inside the house is your sleeping wife, who you hooked up with on the rebound. Out front is a yard with a little picket fence, which is what your ex–French girlfriend always wanted. She used to leave matches with trade-school ads in conspicuous places around the apartment. The habit drove you nuts then, but now seems endearing. You loved her the way only a nineteen-year-old could—with every cell of your body craving her slightest glance, consumed by memory of her last touch, each song on the radio about her, convinced that no one had ever experienced such bliss before, and that you would wither and die without her in your life. But you didn’t. You married your next girlfriend and twelve years later you fantasize about moving to a faraway town—Vegas maybe—and dealing blackjack under an assumed name. You remember reading that the Weatherman-woman recently got picked up somewhere in the Midwest with a phony driver’s license, credit cards, and everything. She’d married a doctor and her house had a picket fence, too. They let her out on bail because she’s totally deck now, a pillar of the community, a PTA officer who volunteers for all and sundry. She hasn’t tried to blow anything up in a while either. Doctors and their wives get treated special, and you wish you were a doctor in Vegas. Maybe you’d run into your ex–French girlfriend managing a casino bar and she’d look great and you’d win big and move to Paris together.
In twelve years of marriage, you have never taken a vacation with your wife, and in fact the two of you spend a great deal of time apart. You even go to bed and rise at different times. You have no common interests—none. This worries the bejeezus out of you, but you tell nobody and are getting tired of the constant silent fearful dread as if you are a Pynchon character. Suddenly you realize that the reason Pynchon keeps popping up is that you read his Big Book the same summer your ex–French girlfriend broke your heart. They are inextricably linked. You started that book three times that summer. You made more of a commitment to it than your ex–French girlfriend did to you. She left because you refused to get a regular job, and would never be able to provide her with a picket fence, despite the fact that you hung around with her moronic brother, listened to her best friend’s endless prattle, let her mother win at cards, and admired her father’s car. You wish you’d married her and given up on Pynchon’s book.
You remember how angry she was when a girl at work was eating a popsicle in a highly provocative manner. This actually happened to your buddy Carlos down in Arizona, except his real name’s not Carlos and it wasn�
��t even Arizona. (He’s a real good friend and you don’t want to cause him any trouble by using his actual name, which is Dick.) He called recently and wanted to know how often you and your wife have sex. His girlfriend is into it on Sundays only, if she doesn’t get too drunk the night before, and if she does, he has to wait another week. It’s not a religious thing, he said. It’s just a difference in their sex drive, and he wanted to know if she was abnormal. You could tell he thought his girlfriend was screwed up sexually, but didn’t want to admit it. You didn’t know what to do. You hemmed and hawed because you and your wife only have sex twice a month at most.
Instead of writing you are now visualizing your ex–French girlfriend’s face. Her eyes hold back pain and you wonder if that’s why you loved her, or if you put the pain there, and whether she’s still got it. You hope not. She had some bad luck starting out, and you hope it changed. It’s possible that at this very moment, she’s remembering you and thinking the same thing. (Maybe she’ll read this!)
It’s clear that this story has fallen apart. At age forty, sleep has become your drug of choice, and you adjust the lawn chair to a prone position and nap beneath the stars. Upon awakening (and this is true), you remember that your buddy Carlos is presently working in Alaska, and the fishing is bad. If that damn Weatherman-woman had any sense, she’d have gone to Alaska to hang out. There are doctors up there to marry, normal lives to lead, and she’d have never got busted. You wonder if she secretly wanted to get caught, like those serial killers who are always calling the newspapers with hints and clues. It occurs to you that if there were as many actual serial killers as there are books and movies about them, we’d all be dead.
Even though it’s been fifteen years, you still recall that summer very well—your girlfriend dumped you, the protagonist of Pynchon’s book seduced nurses at the sites German bombs would eventually strike, and the guy across the street put the heavy-duty moves on you. Then you remember that many years later Pynchon’s actual wife turned you down when you were looking for an agent. The rejection didn’t hurt so much because after all she was Pynchon’s actual wife!
You think how your buddy Carlos grew up the only boy with five sisters and understood women better than any man you knew. He possessed girlish habits as a result. One was standing with his knees and ankles together, then leaning forward and using his hands to flip his hair out of his face. A burly roughneck in a renegade bar once asked Carlos if he was gay and Carlos grinned and said introduce me to your sister, and the guy got pissed. Carlos just lit some weed, right there in the bar, and the roughneck leaned for a hit and everything got deck. He turned out to be an ex-con. On his chest was a tattoo of two playing cards, the king of spades and the king of hearts overlapping each other, and you wondered what it meant.
The first tattoo you ever saw on a woman was the English alphabet running in a perfect loop around her ankle. This was about ten years before everybody and his brother had one. Nowadays, that woman runs a New York literary magazine, and you think it’s best to change the subject in case she’s sensitive about her tat, and you wonder how come nobody ever says “everybody and her sister.” It’s probably sexist or something and you wonder about the politics of saying Weatherman-woman over and over again, and decide to call the tattooed editor and ask, then change your mind. (You don’t want to be a pest in case you send this story to her magazine.) You wonder if Pynchon has ever published with her. He’s probably got a tattoo of a tattoo of a tattoo on him. A few years ago you thought about getting your wife’s name tattooed on you, but she talked you out of it. At one time you considered getting a vasectomy but she convinced you otherwise, saying she’d had her kids, but you might want more with a different woman one day. It never occurred to you to wonder why she might think that.
The subtext of all this is you had a buddy named Bill, who once gave you a drug called XTC and put the moves on you. At that time XTC was brand-new and had a reputation as a drug you took with an estranged parent on their deathbed and a lifetime’s worth of anger and tension would get cleared up in a few hours. Bill was your across-the-street-neighbor (back when you waited tables at Doyle’s in Jamaica Plain). His girlfriend lived upstairs from you. She was a psychology student having an affair with her teacher, a woman who gave her XTC before sex. So the girlfriend’s big idea was for you and Bill to get down with the drug and talk about it later.
The problem was that no one let you in on all this until way later. By this time, you were feeling full of artificial goodwill and comradeship, and Bill laid this big kiss on you. Between the scrape of his whiskers and the drug itself, you freaked out big time. It was terrible. You left his house in a hurry. You wound up moving to another apartment. You lost weight and couldn’t sleep. You thought maybe you had always been gay but just didn’t know it, although everyone else did, which was why gay guys were always cruising you. You tried to go back to your ex– French girlfriend, who said, if you think you’re gay, sleep with a man to see. That didn’t help. What you wanted was for her to sleep with you to prove you weren’t gay. She thought the whole thing was an elaborate ruse to manipulate her into coming across with sex.
Finally you managed to convince a Portuguese woman to visit your room. While kissing you realized that she shaved her upper lip, which convinced you that you had chosen a woman with a mustache because you were secretly gay. You then lost your erection, which seemed to confirm that you were gay. She asked if she was too fat and you told her not at all, she looked great, it wasn’t her. You told her the problem was you. You told her that you might be gay. She said she was surprised because you didn’t act gay and you said it was a big surprise to you, too. After an awkward half hour, she left confused.
It eventually became so bad that when you went to the movies and the kissing part came, you’d try to figure out who you were watching, the man or the woman, and which person’s pleasure you identified with. You decided the best way to deal with a troubled mind was to get your body healthy. You started eating vegetables and doing fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups twice a day until you heard that gay men were really into fitness and you quit. The only time you were remotely deck was that brief period when you awakened in the morning with the ocean light streaming in the window, until you remembered with a terrible suddenness that you were gay but just didn’t know it yet.
That same summer in Boston, your clothes abruptly didn’t fit because you’d grown an inch and a half at age twenty-four. You wondered if it was due to having been given acid by college students when you were entering puberty. Maybe the drug slowed something down, and the XTC kicked it in. You know you’re not as smart as you once were and sometimes you can feel it, like that guy in Flowers for Algernon. After a week, you went to a free clinic in Dorchester and felt guilty in the waiting room because there were people in much worse shape than you— wounds leaking from under bandages, amputees on crutches held together with tape and wire, one man with a glandular condition that made his face turn into a giant potato, and a girl so young you couldn’t believe she was pregnant. You waited, trying not to stare but watching nevertheless, and feeling like a moron with a growth spurt. After a half-hour physical checkup, the doctor pronounced your health excellent, and asked for the form. You said what form, and he said the one for the job and you both frowned until you explained that you’d come in on your own because you had grown an inch and a half and were pretty scared. He nodded his little head and blinked. He began searching a Rolodex, and you figured it was for some pituitary specialist that would run a billion tests and say, sorry pal, you’ll grow until your organs cannot support your body, but you’ll set a record for coffin size. The doctor handed you a slip of paper with a name and number on it. You went home and made the call and the guy was a psychiatrist and you realized that the clinic doctor thought you were delusional. (You stop and reread this and doubt people will believe it. But it’s the truth. You had to buy all new clothes.)
Afterwards, you gauged every woman you saw as a possible gir
lfriend, but felt unable to ask for a date in case you were gay. Around this time, information about AIDS was scanty and full of rumor, and you heard it was some sort of super-clap from Mexico. After learning it attacked gay men, you began worrying that you had it, and read as much as you could about AIDS. One of the symptoms was listed as “loose stool.” You knelt before the toilet and tried to measure the relative looseness of your stool by prodding it with a pencil. This actually loosened the stool even more, which immediately made you scared that you had AIDS. The bathroom door swung open and in walked one of the guys who lived down the hall of your rooming house. He saw you bent over the toilet and said, what are you doing? You stared at him, then stared at the toilet full of brown water which you were stirring with a pencil, and realized with a tremendous sense of relief that for the past several months you had been playing with your own psychological shit, and now you were doing it for real. Very slowly you said, I like women. He backed from the bathroom and never spoke to you again.
Years pass and you marry someone and own major appliances. There is a mortgage and car insurance, and you attend grade school functions so your kids can see you there. Outright flight looks good a lot. You and Carlos up in Alaska would be ideal. The best would be if Pynchon was there, and the three of you had a little weed field that was guarded by the Weatherman-woman, who turned out to be really smart. She’d even learned some minor first-aid skills from her doctor husband, and could provide medical assistance to the Alaska natives, who would become your buddies and teach you how to make igloos. Now, that would be deck with a capital D.
