He shakes his head. “It’s that twin thing, she’s my rock. She knows I split sometimes. She gets me. You want a bump?”
SelfishmotherfuckingpigdruggieLovewrecker
“I’m good,” I say. I think about those situations, when women are pregnant with twins and the doctors have to go in and remove the fetus that is sucking the life out of the other. It’s the humane thing to do. Sometimes, one must die so that the other can live. Biology isn’t sentimental. None of Love’s other boyfriends had the balls to end Forty. But I do. I look at him, scrolling through his texts from her. He only feels loved when she’s a wreck, worried about him, consumed. Some people are strong enough to share a womb and a birthday. Love is. Forty isn’t.
“Check out the ass on that ass,” he says, pointing to a high school girl looking for the bathroom. “Should we take her with us?”
I want to kill him. Now. In this rental. I start the car. I can’t kill him here. I grip the wheel. He pounds the roof. The schoolgirl found the bathroom. She’s safe. We go. Silence only lasts for two lights and then he’s at it again.
“You and my sister are my fucking rock,” he says. “You take care of her or else, right? You know that, right? Like, you get that you are a dead man if you fuck her over?”
I clench the wheel tighter. “You’re a good brother.”
“I’m the best brother,” he says. “The motherfucking best.”
He pulls a little baggie out of his pocket and sniffs. I pull onto the freeway and he is so high that he doesn’t ask where we’re going. He only rants about how he’s never getting married and how he’s gonna live with me and Love and all the fun we’re gonna have. He’s sealing the deal on his death and the car hums and we are farther and farther from the bright lights, and there are fewer cars all the time. The inside of Forty’s mind is a grave place and it’s right next to me, soaking up the oxygen. He is the anti-Love and he confesses that he shops at Ralph’s.
“It’s fucking groceries,” he sneers. “It’s food. And you know what food is, Old Sport? It’s pre-shit. That’s all. It’s pre-shit and we need it to survive. And it used to be a fucking pain for the cavemen, right, my friend? I mean, you had to get out there with your club and whack at woolly mammoths and drag that shit home before the flies got all up in it and that’s why food was a fucking pain. But come on. It’s modern time. Food is fucking easy.”
He rubs his nose and shakes his head. “All you do is go in, you get your tacos, and you fucking eat. People like my parents, they want to act like it fucking matters so much, like what you eat for dinner is so interesting but it’s not! It’s fucking food! Just eat it and shit it and be done with it and don’t feel special cuz you eat that shit with someone because in the end we all shit alone! Who the fuck cares that you ate the pre-shit with someone if you shit alone, on a toilet, door closed, whammo!”
He snorts more cocaine. I could pull over and roll him out the door but he’s on so much blow right now that he would probably just turn into a roadrunner, catch up to me, and jump back in.
“I could eat a taco,” he says. “Fucking chomp right into that thing.”
He wants to call Love. I panic and my hand slips on the wheel. I sweat. I tell him we had sort of a fight.
“Then maybe we shan’t,” he says. He rolls down the window, all smiles, like a dog searching for fresh air. It’s telling, how his spirits lift the second he thinks I’m on the outs with Love. He doesn’t want me to be happy. He doesn’t want anyone to be happy. Especially Love.
He brags about his time in Vegas, one lie after another, twisting it all, a mile a minute, deranged, and we can’t get there fast enough but I can’t speed—the mug of piss—and he won’t stop talking about table minimums and hookers refusing to take his money. He doesn’t say one true thing for the entire journey through all this brown land, blue sky, and he’s so fucked up, so full of himself, verbally expunging, the loneliest man on earth.
I can’t tell you what a thing it is to see our first stop glimmering, tiny, in the distance, finally, the place where I can begin to kill him: the Clown Motel.
“There it is,” I interrupt him mid-rant about his host at the Monte Carlo.
He drums his backpack, happy dog. And he tells me he has been here before—he has been everywhere, I get it—but this is my first time and it’s the greatest thing I’ve seen in the west so far. It’s the Wild Wild West I wanted. The blue-and-white motel is decked out with clown signs, and the giant Nevada lettering above the building is straight out of a ghost town or a Tarantino movie: welcome to the clown motel. The lobby is supposed to be a tightly packed swarm of clown dolls from different eras, but I won’t get to see it because I’m going to murder Forty today, so I can’t very well go into the fucking lobby.
Forty is finally calm and his backpack is closed and he puts his baggie away. He checks himself in the mirror and he says this was a good call. “I love clowns,” he says, and of course he loves clowns. He’s an imbecile, a clown himself, with his puffy red nose and his wild swath of dirty hair, his belly fat jiggling in his turquoise shorts; a nightmarish thing that frightens Love, haunting her, weighing her down, the thing that she’s supposed to love, the way the world initially instructs children to love clowns even though we all know deep down that they’re creepy, old, puffy men in masks leering at children.
“Hey, Forty,” I say. “You should look online to make sure they have rooms.”
“Old Sport, you and me are for sure shooting something here.” He sighs. “That will be aces. We could even call it Aces. Like Ocean’s Eleven but with Saw and the clowns are the victims and the bad guys are those fucking tourists, the fucking little boyfriend and girlfriend holding hands and shit.”
“Right,” I say. “So the clowns are the good guys.”
“Exactly,” he says. “The couple gets here and the girl is like I hate clowns and the doofus boyfriend is like I do too and they complain and then eventually, they get a machine gun and just spray the clowns.”
“Forty,” I snap. “Did you look to see if they have rooms?”
He ignores me. “You know,” he says. “Last time I was here, it was with Love and Michael Michael.”
I feign surprise, as if I didn’t already know this, as if we aren’t here because I know this. Love posted a #ThrowbackThursday photo a few months ago, harkening back to another era, when she did drugs and had a tongue piercing and eyeliner below her eyes, not above. The three of them came here on the way to Burning Man—God, am I glad I didn’t know her then. The comments told a story: Love and Forty and Michael Michael Motorcycle traveled here, lured in by the gigantic clown boards promising FREE WIFI and WELCOME BIKERS. Forty disappeared with the car. He showed up a month later. He didn’t apologize.
In minutes we are there. I pull into the parking lot and drive around to the back, the part of this tourist trap that I wanted to see most: the early American cemetery.
“Do you know what a travesty it is that we have no shrooms?” Forty asks. “You can’t be in this cemetery without shrooms.”
“Fuck, yes,” I lie. I park in the farthest corner. I don’t see any cameras but the mug of piss I left in Rhode Island is with me at times like this.
“Solid,” he says. “You know, Old Sport, I knew you had it in you, the cool.”
I offer him a hundred-dollar bill, my Vegas winnings. “If you use a credit card in there, your whole fam-damn-ily is gonna show up.”