Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  There was no birthday plan. Plans change, are changeable. Fungible. The House of Reformation prefers ritual and unchanging routine. The birthday ritual being: brunch at twelve – bacon avocado tomato butties, no mayo (butty being a word for use inside the home only); a movie of the birthday person’s choice (mine is always Shaun of the Dead), which runs while brunch is being eaten and gifts are being opened; a hike, in the location (Topanga Canyon) of the birthday person’s choice; and dinner, at the most isolated table available – because of the kissy sucky mouth-noise problem I mentioned earlier – in the restaurant (Nelson’s) of the birthday person’s choice. My choices this year were the same as last year, and the year before that. Before that, I was incapable of choosing anything. My choices now are not fungible; they do not funge.

  On a regular birthday, gift-opening is over and done with pronto, with minimal ceremony – materialistic values are not upheld in the House of Reformation – and I’m usually done by the time Shaun’s crossed the street to Nelson’s store the first time. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen Shaun of the Dead – aka SOTD, pronounced SOD; the T is silent – you probably should watch it now, because I’ll be referring to it a lot.)

  The only clue pertaining to this being an irregular birthday was that Thomas’s battered old bright-yellow Amoeba Records shopper was able to stand unsupported on the kitchen table, instead of hanging semi-deflated from the chair, indicating a more substantial load of gifts than on previous years. I estimated that this year’s gift-opening might take at least until Ed tells Shaun there’s a girl stumbling around in their back yard. (By the way, Amoeba is mine and T’s favourite store in the whole of LA. We have a game we play when we go there, you might want to try it next time you’re in the neighbourhood – I guess they have a religious section: 1. select a musical genre; 2. go to the appropriate clearance bins for said genre; 3. select three vinyls with artwork you like – they must cost no more than five bucks each; 4. buy them and take them home; 5. listen to the first, third and fifth track of each one, and 6. toss the vinyls you don’t like, keep the ones you do. This much chance I can handle: organised chance. Mostly the music is lame, but occasionally you’ll find something sweet, even if it’s just the cover art. I have a couple of the coolest covers stuck to my bedroom wall back in RB, The Boys from Brazil – guess why – and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, because that was the first book Thomas gave me after we moved to RB.)

  Besides ownership of the Key to the Universe transferring to my care there was no real reason this birthday should be any different from a regular birthday. Twenty-one is just another number, right? But pretty soon the whole day was thrown off. Let’s just say that Shaun didn’t step out of his house for a Cornetto and soda until well after eight p.m. In fact, the day was thrown so far off I never even got to finish my bacon butty, never mind the hike and dinner at Nelson’s.

  I don’t know what Thomas did all those hours I was in my room. It wasn’t like me disappearing into my room for several hours was such an unusual occurrence. Probably he changed out of his meetings-consultations-and-special-occasions apparel and into his worker apparel to mow the grass or pull imaginary weeds from his vegetable garden. Unlike your regular RB residents, we don’t approve of the hire of cheap immigrant labour. ‘Slavery was abolished in 1833,’ says Thomas. ‘I will be nobody’s Great White Master. We can do our own gardening.’ Or maybe he sat out front reading a book with the Great Dudini at his feet, or went out back to chat over the wall with our neighbours Milly-Anna (it’s pronounced Millionaire, by the way – only in SoCal, right?) and her husband Silent Ike. He definitely would have walked the Great Dudini, at least once, probably twice. As I said, ritual and routine. Whatever, he would have gone on as usual until he figured it was time to try the pizza test. The Thomas Hardiker equivalent of smoking a skunk out of its hole. The smell of baking pizza dough will usually raise me from my gloom. When it doesn’t, he knows something is seriously wrong.

  Thomas is one of those people who knows stuff. He’s been through a LOT. Back then I didn’t know even half of it, probably still don’t even now. It was Thomas who suggested I major in creative writing in college. ‘It’ll give you a place to go that isn’t depression,’ he said. I guess he knew way before I turned twenty-one that I still had it coming.

  So, back to MY BIRTHDAY. (In case you forgot, I TURNED TWENTY-ONE. Okay, enough with the upper case, or majuscules as the French call them, a way cooler name.) What caused the kerfuffle (you can thank Thomas for my interesting vocabulary by the way) that sent me running to my bed? The stuff in the Amoeba Records bag, obviously, so let’s go back to that.

  Thomas was at the arranging tomatoes, grown by him in his garden, atop the bacon and avocado stage in his sandwich construction, so I opened the fridge to grab the ketchup. ‘What’s in there?’ I said, trying to be casual, referring to the Amoeba Records bag, but – wait for it – sarky TH joke alert…

  ‘It’s where we keep the food. It’s called a fridge.’

  Right.

  Even the real clouds had dissolved and it was one of those sparkling SoCal mornings – actually quite rare in June, which is known for its gloomy tendencies and so would by default be our favourite month of the year, birthday or no birthday – so Thomas suggested we break with tradition and go eat our breakfast on the deck out back. It was a risky call, what with SOTD being all lined up and ready to go, but he must have picked up that I was in a pretty good mood, relaxed, chilled, unpuckered, and I can see now that he was testing the water. I’d seen the bag, got the measure of it, was confident I knew what was coming (books, I presumed) so I let him have his variation.

  I’d like to be able to use this occasion as an example of how, if you allow one tiny regime change to slip through the filter, life snowballs out of control, but this variation from our usual routine had no influence at all on what came after; it would have happened anyway.

  The Great Dudini followed us out into the yard, snuffling the ground behind us in hopes of a dropped crumb or two, and when Thomas went back inside for the bag of gifts and the ketchup I snuck him a tiny piece of birthday bacon. Not the regular ketchup, by the way, in case you’re thinking I made a continuity slip: his ketchup, the bottle of brown stuff he drives all the way to Burbank to buy from the Brit store for like ten times the price of regular ketchup. Looks like barbecue sauce but tastes like salad dressing made of nothing but vinegar and black pepper. Thomas ‘enhances the flavour’ of anything he categorises as junk food with this stuff: bacon, fries, pizza. To be clear, fish and chips isn’t junk food, because it’s British. In company he draws the line at splashing it over ice-cream, but I bet when I’m not around even his favourite organic Madagascan vanilla gets a good shake of the brown stuff over it. Everyone needs things they do in secret, right?

  There was a Y in the day of the week so Milly-Anna was in their back yard working out to the Grease movie soundtrack. (I actually used to like this movie when I was a kid – you must’ve seen it – Milly-Anna and I used to watch it together when she came to hang out while Thomas was out at his meetings.) We couldn’t see her from our deck because of the wall separating our yards, but we could hear her singing along, loud and well off-key, her breathing all jerky because of the moves she was busting. One time – before we knew them properly, so it must have been real soon after we moved to Redondo – I climbed up on a garden chair to sneak a look over at what she was doing and wobbled right off again from laughing so hard. (And I’d seen some weird shit by then, right?) It’s not any regular workout she does, it’s the actual routine from the movie, right down to the simulated cigarette-butt stamp-out. Sometimes she yells at Silent Ike to come join her on the part where he has to follow her up the porch steps, crawl across and down the other side behind her, and unless it’s her birthday he mostly pretends he can’t hear her yelling over the loud music. I’m not saying we don’t still snicker into our hands from time to time, but we’re so accustomed to it now that it’s blended into our own routine. />
  So, as I was saying, Thomas went inside to get his special ketchup. When he came back, I put down my sandwich and dipped my hand into the gift bag. (Did you know that, in German, gift means poison?)

  The bag was loaded so that Thomas’s gift came out first. It was obviously a book, which reassured me that my assumption about it all being books was correct. Never assume, right? He passed me a napkin to wipe my hands before I opened it because this wasn’t just any book, it was a 1944 first edition hardcover copy of my favourite book ever, Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck. Signed by the author. Shipped all the way from a bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare & Company, the store all the famous writers who lived in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s used to go to – Hemingway and that gang. Hemingway even writes about it in A Moveable Feast. Maybe he sold his copy of Cannery Row for booze money and now it’s mine.

  ‘Someone in West Hollywood was selling a copy too,’ said Thomas, ‘but I thought you’d like the one from Paris better.’ Damn straight! It had a card inside the front cover with the store’s Shakespeare’s head logo stamped on it and, stapled to that, a cheque for three thousand dollars, signed by Thomas Hardiker.

  ‘What?’ I said, flabbergasted.

  ‘The cheque is just symbolic,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the cash. I thought you might want to take that trip to London you’ve always talked about, to see where SOTD was filmed.’

  Let’s get things straight. I do not wish to appear ungrateful. I was not raised with the same ugly entitlement complex my aforementioned collegiate peers had – the absolute opposite, in fact. There could be no greater surprise, no more treasured gift than a Cannery Row first edition and the possibility of a trip to London, and yes, there should have been hugs and high-fives. In my defence – and to put my response, or non-response to be more accurate, in perspective – the shock of it would normally have been enough to send me rushing to my bed for at least the rest of the day, but when I woke up that morning I turned twenty-one I’d decided it was probably time to man up, grow some cojones. So instead of scuttling off to my room I sat back, took a couple deep breaths and a couple more bites from my butty (do you think about me biting someone’s ass when I say that? I do) to get back in balance, to overthrow old habits, and then I dove my hand right back into the bag and pulled out the next gift. Which was an envelope. A plain old brown envelope. (How harmful, right?)

  The sender’s address was in Zurich, Switzerland. I didn’t know anyone there, and to be completely honest I barely knew where there is. I knew it was in Europe, but exactly where, I couldn’t have said. Despite Thomas’s best efforts, I’ve become an American. I did look it up later, while I was lying on my bed trying to figure out my situation. Switzerland is about a quarter the size of California and has like half the population of the Greater Los Angeles area. In America it would be a ski resort, but over there, it’s a country.

  Inside the envelope were two sheets of paper clipped together. The top sheet was a letter from a lawyer’s office, Binggeli, Birchmeier & Geisert, signed by Herr Philipp Binggeli. It was actually addressed to me using my dad’s family name, Mr Sonny Anderson Agelaste-Bim – which in the light of the above suddenly doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous – even though I’ve never gone by that name even when I lived with my dad.

  Transfer of Estate Agelaste-Bim.

  I stared at the words on the page but nothing was going in. I passed it to Thomas. He read it and turned the page. ‘Shit,’ he said, and looked at me as if he’d never seen me before in his life.

  ‘What?’

  He held the second sheet of paper in front of my face and pointed to the bottom of the page. It was all set out like a bank statement and at the bottom, beside the words Total Estate Value, were two numbers, one prefixed by USD, the other by SF. There were so many numbers with so many points and commas all over the place that my brain froze and my eyesight fuzzed. I could see it was a LOT, in both currencies, but I still didn’t get it. So Thomas spelled it out – it was more than a lot, it was millions of dollars, and they were all mine because I, little old Sonny Anderson Agelaste-Bim, represent the end of the Agelaste-Bim family line.

  ‘Welcome to Trustafaria,’ said Thomas.

  Thomas is also a Trustafarian. I had no clue what that meant until Thomas explained that a Trustafarian is a guy – or a girl, I guess, but usually a guy because the kinds of people who have old money still believe in male supremacy – who lives on the proceeds of an inheritance, trust fund, whatever. Dictionary definition: a rich young person who adopts a bohemian lifestyle and lives in a non-affluent area. I should say Thomas was a Trustafarian because he stopped drawing on his fund years ago. As far as I knew back then, Thomas had worked for every cent he made and spent. And we didn’t live like non-affluent bohemians; we lived like non-affluent ordinary people with issues. Which all makes his gift cheque even more generous, right?

  Looking back, I guess Thomas had known all along there would be money coming my way, but the expression on his face when it arrived – like he’d been waiting for a bus but got a gold-plated limo flown in by pterodactyls – gave a pretty clear indication that he’d been clueless as to just how swanky my lot on Planet Trustafaria was actually going to be. And that’s when I caved and went to my room, leaving my transition to manhood incomplete. Thomas told me later he was in so much shock he didn’t even register the Great Dudini gobbling up what was left of both our butties, proving he’d had no idea how much money was coming to me – because only an idiot gifts three thousand bucks to a multi-millionaire, right? Though even when we’d both recovered he refused to take his gift back. ‘You might want to make the London trip first and then decide what to do about your inheritance,’ he said. He was right, as usual. I might choose to reject it (I still haven’t decided, but that’s none of your business), like I believed he’d rejected his.

  A couple days later, Thomas reminded me there was still stuff in the bag to be opened. This all turned out to be not gifts so much as shit I’d never seen before that now belonged to me. ‘No rush,’ he said, ‘it’s not going anywhere.’

  It took another couple days for me to pick up the bag and take it into my room, where I sat staring into it like it was a mountain pool into which I’d been told to plunge my naked body in midwinter. Common wisdom says it’s always safest to test the water with your extremities first, so I dipped my hand in first and pushed it all the way down. Down in the depths was a box, about the size of a kiddie shoebox. To the side of that was one of those plastic pocket folders that female sophomores use to submit papers to the professors they want to sleep with, only theirs are generally pink and this one was white. Inside was a bunch more envelopes. I picked one that had my real name on the front, Sonny Anderson, which made it less scary, plus it had already been opened, so I knew Thomas had seen what was inside and that also made it feel safer. Seriously, I’ve developed a fear of envelopes, envelophobia; don’t ever ask me to present an Oscar. I took out the sheet of paper. My birth certificate – over there they call it an Extract, ‘over there’ being Scotland. I already knew I was born in Scotland, Thomas had told me that years earlier, and obviously I knew I had a mother and a father even if I didn’t remember them particularly fondly (my dad). Or at all (you).

  Father’s Name: Unknown. (Known Names: Robin Agelaste-Bim, aka, Agelaste Bim, aka, Guru Bim.) Father’s Occupation: Unknown. (Known Occupation: Guru.) Father’s Dwelling Place: Unknown. (Known Dwelling Place: Hell – that’s a guess.) Mother’s Name: Sarah Anderson. Mother’s Occupation: Housewife. Mother’s Dwelling Place: Drongnock.

  It was kind of exciting to see it all written down. Suddenly it was like you really existed, which meant that I really existed too – officially, I mean; I wasn’t that much of a fuck-up – and if we both really existed then it was possible we might meet one day, right?

  I had no idea then where Drongnock is. If it had said Nowheresville that would have been great too, maybe even greater, because it would have made you seem even more ordinary,
even more housewifely and motherly.

  I summoned the courage to open another envelope. A list of names and addresses, all in the UK. I took it through to Thomas, who played it right down, said they were all people who had known either you or my dad or both, and who would be pleased to see me if I made my trip or would help out if I hit any trouble. Marsha Ray I remembered from Brazil and I told Thomas she was the last person I’d call on if I needed help. ‘Okay, fair enough,’ he said, ‘maybe one of the others,’ and told me who they all were: Andrew Harrison, the guy you were living with when I was born; and Ruth Williams, who knew you better than she knew my dad, but she knew you both; and Doris Henry, who looked after my dad when he was a boy. And an address with no name next to it, which Thomas said was the house they stayed in before we went to Brazil. ‘We weren’t there long so it’s not important but I thought you might want to stop off and see it if you’re on your way to Scotland to see Andrew.’

  Okay, backing up.

  Before Thomas and I came to RB, ten, eleven years ago, a bunch of us lived in Brazil: me, Thomas, my dad and Marsha Ray. Back then, I had no memories of my life before Brazil.

  ‘Wait, so you’re saying you think I should go meet all these people?’

  ‘It’s up to you. They’d all love to see you.’

  ‘Even Marsha Ray?’

  Thomas shrugged, then nodded apologetically.

  I knew what he was getting at. Thomas says the past is important. Without the past we have no present and without memory we have no past. I knew why he thought I should go. I’ve been through a lot, have tried to forget it all and am (was) stuck. I was at a crossroads; we didn’t need to discuss it but obviously it’s important to know where you come from, who made you what you are. I was like Shaun in SOTD when Liz dumps him and Pete yells at him, ‘SORT YOUR FUCKING LIFE OUT, MATE.’