I see Chief Howie has taken a sudden interest in the cinema. I see he’s staring at the window, too.
“My, my,” he says. “There ought to be a law about that.”
“There is, Sheriff,” I say. “It’s called the fourth amendment. Privacy and shit.”
“You little fuck!” says Chief Howie, whips a bottle back over the seat at my head. The ability to duck is a perfect example of why the nature-versus-nurture argument Dana’s always yapping about is a pile of crap. It’s both. Still, what does it get you? There you are, cuffed in the back seat while your pissed-off retard cop-uncle pulls off the curb and drives you far, far away from the big soft couch where your girlfriend is all alone with her juicer on frappé, just hoping you’ll come back like you half-assed threatened to, and now you are driving cruel distances from anything that could be reasonably called joy. So the bottle doesn’t open a big red smile on your forehead. So fucking what?
There’s no question left in my mind that this Saturday night is shot, is history, is a tiny meaningless point on the time lines Ms. Fredericks makes us copy down in World Studies. Chief Howie dumps me down at the bottom of the hill, takes off the cuffs, “impounds” my shake, my papers, a few bucks from my wallet.
“Go home,” says Chief Howie, and peels off like somewhere there’s a crime being perpetrated besides his own sorry-assed life.
A brisk nipplebreeze jaunt across the moonlit links of the Nearmont Country Club and I find myself once more in a familiar spot, leaning on the big white birch in front of Steve Redillia’s house, wondering whether I really want to go in there again.
As part of my project to ascertain whether I really want to go in there again, I crouch down in the bushes next to Steve Redillia’s house and peek through the basement window. Bilious smoke of the kind hangs nimbus-like in the half-lit room, and there’s Steve Redillia flopped out on his ratty couch, headphones on, Zildjian sticks flying in tight four/four air-drum formation. Steve Redillia is the third best speed metal drummer in New Jersey, or so he was told by Archbishop Chickenhawk of the Non-Dead, when he tried out for them and didn’t get the gig, and so he has repeatedly informed us.
I hate listening to music with him, not only because so-called speed metal is slow as shit as far as I’m concerned, but because he’s the type who when you listen to a song with him will in the middle of it nod his head and say, “Nice,” like in the middle of all that double-kick-drumming and guitar he heard some subtle shit your dolt ass could never comprehend. Then, if you don’t immediately smile and agree with him, Steve Redillia gives you this look, goes off on how nobody actually listens to music, and then maybe starts throwing shit, with you, as closest representative of a species he detests, the target.
“You fucking twats don’t get it at all!” he’ll say. “Goddamn puppets on a string!” And then objects, sharp and heavy, will receive the gift of flight.
Fuck it.
I book.
I’m coming home to a beat-down either way, so why procrastinate? I’m standing outside the kitchen door looking in, and now it’s like the third time tonight I’m sneaking around windows like a perv. Dad’s on the phone, probably with the Big Chief himself. Dad’s leaning up on the refrigerator — and I swear to God I catch him pulling one of those stringy boogers out of his nose, the kind with the dry handle and the gooey tail. He pulls it all the way out, holds it up for inspection, and then, I swear on Dana’s dad’s missing eyes, my fucking progenitor reaches under the edge of the Formica and deposits the snot jewel.
When I was a crawling babyboy, I used to hang out under that Formica, tagging the cabinets with my orange crayon, and whenever I looked up, I always saw these dried snots like tiny cave spikes dangling down. Once Mom found them there and chewed my ass but I denied it, which just got her madder, and Dad was sitting there the whole time shaking his head even though we both knew they were his boogers. I remember a look on his face like it’s a shame the world is like this before he got up with his belt.
Not to say this event was some big revelation, like before this he was taking me to the hobby shop on Saturdays and teaching me how to fly kites and shit, and then suddenly everything changed. It’s just another point on the time line.
So I go around to the garage door, hoping to get in that way — but Dad must have cloned himself, or built replicants, because by the time I get there I see another one of him through the garage window standing under the lightbulb with the only sound the hum of the meat freezer. He’s surrounded by all his tools, his hands on his hips like he’s the royal torturer taking a moment to reflect on the hot debate of the day, the rack versus the thumbscrews.
I guess this occurs to me because for Ms. Fredericks’s class I made that report on the Spain Inquisition situation. “A bit over the top, but informative,” was how Ms. Fredericks described my report, because I went into detail about the various devices any good torturer was familiar with, like the special skillets to fry up your testicles and the two-handed saws they wedged up your ass to saw you in half with.
Some of the Jervises in my class were all offended or something, like I approved of the whole thing (though no doubt Steve Redillia, if he hadn’t been expelled, would have), like I wasn’t fucking going out with a Jewish girl anyway, wasn’t sensitive to what her feelings might be in regards to Torquemada, if anybody were to tell her what the man thought of her, instead of seeing that I was just trying to do what any decent historian would try to do, too, namely to describe all the sick shit that went down, which Ms. Fredericks says must be done so we learn from our mistakes and so history doesn’t keep happening again and again. But I have my doubts about that theory. Because like remembering or not remembering your last beat-down has shit to do with the next one coming at your ass. And what help is a skinny black line with dots on it besides just to say this sucked, and that sucked, and do not doubt it all will suck again?
Less Tar
Out on the street I’m thinking, “Who needs life, people?” I stop off at Gupta’s to buy cigarettes. I’ve quit quitting them again.
“Two?” says Gupta, goes to the carton on the shelf, my carton, the soft-packs, lays them on the countertop. Forty sticks of friendship there.
“How’s your brother?” I say.
“Doing the same as you,” he says, pinches thumb and finger to his lips. Gupta was a journalist somewhere where it’s okay to torture one for prying. Lucky he had a brother set up in America. Now he sells Salems and bongs and screw-top one-hitters to the kids cutting trig at the prep school down the block.
“Your brother and I,” I say, “we must have a death wish.”
“Don’t be a fool,” says Gupta, “no one really wishes it.”
First smoke in a week. My lungs are good and rested, strong and wet. One drag, another, and the great dense mist of things — the company, Katrine — drifts up, away. When the butt burns down to my fingers I’ll flick it into the street, light another for the short walk home. I’ll put on some records, reread my junk mail, scour the clause minutia in the sweepstakes offers, call Katrine’s machine. I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke.
Smoking at work, that’s another story. We are outlaws of the state. We have a hideout, a floor forsaken partway through remodeling. Ghost cubes, glass-walled tombs. We all found our way here somehow. Martha runs the newsstand in the lobby. Mikhail is the Russian super’s lackey, possibly his son. Rich teaches real estate a few floors up. I do ad sales for an on-line magazine. I let them think I’m some kind of player, a silicon prince on the make, but Rich knows enough to see the fear in my eyes. I’ve been tracking numbers of doom these days.