“What about us?” I say.
“I think we need to move on in all aspects of our lives. You’re not happy here.”
“How do you know?”
“If you were happy, you wouldn’t be so busy denouncing my style of bowel evacuation to the staff.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and probably mean it.
“It’s okay,” says Rosalie.
“Fine,” I say. “But I want you to know I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she says. Fraught. Considered. Her delivery makes my declaration sound cheap.
“I’ll clear out my things,” I say.
“No rush,” says Rosalie, and starts to push the dog down the stairs.
“Wait,” I say.
“What?”
“Let me ask you something. In the motel. When we went to see your brother.”
“Yeah?”
“What was my secret?”
“Are you testing me?”
“No.”
“That’s sad. You don’t remember? That’s really sad.”
“I know. I can’t remember my secret. What the hell was my secret? I must have had something I was running from. What the hell is wrong with me?”
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” says Rosalie. “You peaked a little early. It happens sometimes.”
“Rosalie, tell me my goddamn secret,” I say.
“I’ve got to go.”
“The show’s over, bitch,” I call, but too softly, as though my throat knows to close it off.
I clear out quietly. I don’t really have any things.
I go over to the bean-bag bar. The door is locked and I look through the window. There are no bean bags there. There are some stacked boxes and a broom. Maybe it’s a new theme.
Somewhere in this city somebody is probably peaking right now, getting high on a couch and talking about a bootleg he bought from a kid in Bremen. I should locate this fool, tell him what a lout he is, but he’s all I’ve got.
Too bad I sold the Merc. I could sail it off the Verrazano. I’d be a footnote to a footnote, food for carp.
Maybe I’ll fly out to Wisconsin, instead. Or take some slow hearse of a bus. They have movies on the good lines now, so you don’t get so bitter about the landscape, big windows that open with manual levers in case of bad aquatic luck.
Torquemada
The crazy thing is I’m not even Jewish. But when I showed up at Dana’s house with that beanie on my head, her dad didn’t even blink an eye. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t have any. Well, he does, but I think he pops them out at night before he goes to bed. Dunks them in a water glass. Actually, I’m not sure if that’s true. I know he can’t see. At least he can’t see me.
Dana got mad and told me to take the beanie off. She called it the harmonica. “Take it off, you idiot,” she said.
“Take what off,” I said.
“That fucking harmonica,” she said.
“Why,” I said, “Is this Spain?”
Dana didn’t know what I was talking about because she’s not in World Studies. She’s in all these college-track classes. But they don’t teach her shit.
Dana gets mad at me all the time.
Like when I try to squeeze her sno-balls behind the maintenance shed fifth period.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” she says. “We’re in school, you idiot. You’ll get us expelled.”
“Nobody ever gets expelled,” I tell her.
It’s true.
Except for the time Steve Redillia stuck a knife in John Preston’s ear. Other than that, no one gets kicked out. And no one in the history of Nearmont Regional High School East ever got the boot for copping an honest feel — off his own girlfriend no less.
Hey, we live on a chunk of dirt called America.
We have a little piece of paper.
It’s called the fucking Constitution.
But Dana is a terminal Jervis, and she’s always getting pretty pissed. Like if I spark a bone in her car, or make her blow off a stop-sign, or make her pull over so I can tag that sign (because I’m a tagger, and a legend in this town), or all three in whatever order, Dana gets pissed.
“You’re going to get us busted,” she says.
“Nobody ever gets busted,” I tell her.
Which is not truly true. Chief Howie arrests me all the time. He’s some kind of uncle of mine, from the alcoholic semi-retarded branch of the family (like there are others) and he arrests me whenever he feels like it. For whatever. Sometimes just to talk.
Like tonight when I’m tagging the dumpster behind Dave’s Good Spirits Wine and Liquor all bent out because of Dana and the beanie incident, with her thinking I was goofing on her religion when I’d just been thinking about the whole Torquemada thing because of this report I gave for Ms. Fredericks’s class and felt bad for Dana because they would have fucked with her in Spain and just wanting to show my solidarity and finding in my closet this beanie from when my neighbor Todd Feld had that party at the Jewish temple and they gave out free beanies at the door with his name on it so I’m standing in her living room with the Todd Feld Autograph Beanie on my head and Dana’s being a total cunt and then I hear her dad shuffling around at the top of the stairs going “Dana, Dana,” like he’s going to ask her where he put his eyes because they’re not in the glass and since weirdness always increases exponentially I throw the beanie down on the rug and bolt, saying “I’ll be back,” but of course it comes out more squirmdog than superheroic, and now I’m here alone behind Dave’s when Chief Howie pulls up in his cruiser.
“Got a minute?” says Chief Howie.
“Busy,” I say. I roll the almost empty spray can under the dumpster with my foot and lean up against the tag, hoping the paint’s as quick-dry as advertised.
“Wrong answer,” says Chief Howie, and gets out of the car. He comes over like a TV cracker sheriff and administers the beat-down, cuffs me and throws me in the back seat, careful to press my head going in like they do on all the shows. We drive up Spartakill Road, past the Burger King and the Hobby Shop and the Pitch-n-Putt, until we’re going by all the big houses with the huge lawns I used to mow and the big bay windows that you can look through if you want to see people alone or in groups feeling like shit and not knowing why.
“People up here treat me like the garbage man. Which is what I am.” Chief Howie winks in the rearview. “Know what that makes you?” He takes a pull from something in his hand. I can hear bottles clinking together on the rubber floormat.
“Don’t worry about me,” I say.
“Why would I worry about you?” says Chief Howie.
We turn on Venus, cop wheels crunching on the gravel edge of someone’s driveway. I make out the shapes in the darkness, gigantic mounds of earth, big sleeping tractors, rows of brand-new houses wrapped in moonglow plastic. I’ve been up this way already tonight because at the end of the drive is the model house where Dana and her father and her father’s eyeballs live. It’s Dana’s cousin’s company’s development, but so far they’re the only customers.
“That dumb hebe,” says Chief Howie.
I don’t say anything because I don’t know what he knows about me and Dana, if he’s actually trying to fuck with me or we’re just up here because he felt like driving, because if you are just driving around it makes some sense to end up here if you’re curious about what all the dark shapes are and then one with a few lights on in it.
The lights are out in Dana’s living room and you can see the TV screen reflected in the big front window. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s on the screen, but what it looks like it is is pussies. That’s right — in the plural, shaved and flaming, smooching in a close-up grind. What’s a blind man doing with porn? Or is it Dana? Stretched out on the couch, spelunking with one hand and pinching her little sno-balls with the other.