Alice Fantastic
P
RAISE FOR
M
AGGIE
E
STEP'S
N
OVELS
for
Flamethrower
“There's lunatic fun to be had in the offbeat adventures Maggie Estep dreams up for her endearing slacker heroine, Ruby Murphyâif you happen to enjoy the kinds of places where this free spirit hangs out. In her home base of Coney Island, she lives in the shadow of the Cyclone and has a âdownwardly mobile job' at a museum sideshow. But Ruby's often to be found, as she is in
Flamethrower
, at her shrink's, where her discovery of a human leg in a fish tank leads to a quest that takes her, as all her bizarre quests do, to the racetracks and stables where she truly comes alive.”
âNew York Times Book Review
“Maggie Estep writes like no one else. She is one of my favorite writers, and
Flamethrower
might be her best book. Do yourself a favor and read all her books now.”
âSara Gran, author of
Saturn's Return to New York
for
Gargantuan
“Maggie Estep is a writer of a thousand voicesâwell, a half-dozen anyway, since that's the number of characters who share the narrative chores in
Gargantuan
and offer multiple perspectives on the strange, sad tale of Attila Johnson, an apprentice jockey with a shady past but a sweet touch with racehorses ⦠Although Estep can get into just about anyone's head, including the horses who are such strong, individualized characters in this series, it's Ruby's singular voice and oddly detached sensibility that lend an air of danger to the storytelling.”
âNew York Times Book Review
for
Hex
“Maggie Estep's debut mystery,
Hex
, is so blazingly idiosyncratic that it's a real shock when a character actually plays by the genre rules and gets murdered ⦠Ruby Murphy hasn't a clue how to conduct an investigation, [b]ut she's such an enthusiast for life's little oddities that the whole world looks new in her eyes, and everything that comes out of her mouth sounds fresh ⦠Although she shares the narrative with several of her bizarre friends and neighbors, Ruby is such a ravishing original that it's love at first sight.”
âNew York Times Book Review
“Ruby Murphy, the Coney Island drifter whose free spirit accounts for the ravishing originality of this idiosyncratic first mystery, falls for a perfect stranger's sob story and goes undercover as a stablehand at Belmont Park to keep tabs on a stable groom with sexy eyes and a mysterious past.”
âNew York Times
“Notable Book” Selection
for
Diary of an Emotional Idiot
“Diary of an Emotional Idiot
is a coming-of-age novel, as it might be trod by steel-toed shoes and stippled by hypodermics; it's a roman à clef featuring sex and chains, same-sex sex, sex in rehabs, and ridiculously compulsive abuse of multiple partners; it's a primitive, joyous mess of a cartoon book about the way some people live now, and it should infuriate nine out of ten lovers of heartfelt, carefully wrought novels about rural life. Be in on the controversy.”
âRick Moody, author of
Right Livelihoods
for
Soft Maniacs
“Soft Maniacs
is a beautifully written book, simple and direct.”
âHubert Selby, Jr., author of
Last Exit to Brooklyn
“There is about Maggie Estep's work a directness, a clear determinationâa drive to cut through, to break through, to claw throughâthat is impressive.”
âA.M. Homes, author of
The Mistress's Daughter
“The stories in
Soft Maniacs
and the characters who inhabit them are alternately dark, funny, sad, sweet, and twistedâright up my alley.”
âSteve Buscemi, actor
for
Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals
“Maggie Estep is the bastard daughter of Raymond Chandler and Anaïs Nin. Her prose is hard-boiled and sexy; she turns a good phrase and shows some leg.
Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals
is one hell of a great book!”
âJonathan Ames, author of
The Alcoholic
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters (with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures), are the products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of this work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2009 Maggie Estep
eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75005-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-81-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008937348
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Much appreciation to the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo, where portions of this book were written.
Thanks to many others, including: Dr. Andrew Stewart for rescuing my shoulder, Jim Gaarder, DVM, for saving Mickey, Avrom Robin for vetting legal matters, and Ira Jaffe for many kindnesses.
My brother, Chris Murray, for merciless questioning of everything.
My family, Jon, Maman, Neil, Ellen, Lion, and Myrna.
Jenny Meyer for glorious enthusiasm about everything.
Alex Glass, a girl couldn't ask for a more valiant agent.
Steven Crist, reader, editor, ogre.
And ⦠Matt Hegarty, Tess Kelly, Paul Pagnozzi, Amy Lonas, Stuart Matthewman, John Rauchenberger, Andy Sterling, Annie Yohe, and Gerard Hurley.
I
'd been trying to get rid of the big oaf for seventeen weeks but he just kept coming around. He'd ring the bell and I'd look out the window and see him standing down there on the stoop looking like a kicked puppy. What I needed with another kicked puppy I couldn't tell you since I'd taken in a little white mutt with tan spots that my cousin Jeremy had found knocked-up and wandering a trailer park in Kentucky. Cousin Jeremy couldn't keep the dog so he called me up and somehow got me to agree to give the animal a home. After making the vet give her an abortion and a rabies shot, Jeremy found the dog a ride up from Kentucky with some freak friend of his who routinely drives between Kentucky and Queens transporting cheap cigarettes. The freak friend pulled his van up outside my building one night just before midnight and the dog came out of it reeking of cigarettes and blinking up at me, completely confused and kicked-looking. Not that I think the freak actually kicked her. But my point is, I already had a kicked puppy. What did I need with a guy looking like one?
I didn't need him. But he'd ring the bell and I'd let him in and, even if I was wearing my dead father's filthy bathrobe and hadn't showered in five days, he'd tell me, “You look fantastic, Alice.” I knew he actually meant it, that he saw something fantastic in my limp brown hair and puffy face and the zits I'd started getting suddenly at age thirty-six. It was embarrassing. The zits, the fact that I was letting a big oaf come over to nuzzle at my unbathed flesh, the little dog who'd sit at the edge of the bed watching as me and Clayton, the big oaf, went at it.
My life was a shambles.
So I vowed to end it with Clayton. I vowed it on a Tuesday at 7 a.m. after waking up with an unusual sense of clarity. I opened my eyes to find thin winter sunlight sifting in the windows of the house my dead father left me. Candy, the trailer trash dog, was sitting at the edge of the bed, politely waiting for me to wake up because that's the thing with strays, they're so grateful to have been taken in that they defer to your schedule and needs. So Candy was at the edge of the bed and sun was coming in the windows of my dead father's house on 47th Road in the borough of Queens in New York City. And I felt clear-headed. Who knows why. I just did. And I felt I needed to get my act together. Shower more frequently. Stop smoking so much. Get back to yoga and kickboxing. Stop burning through my modest profits as a modest gambler. Revitalize myself. And the first order of business was to get rid of the big oaf, Clayton. Who ever heard of a guy named Clayton who isn't ninety-seven years old anyway?
I got into the shower and scrubbed myself then shampooed my thick curtain of oily hair. I got clean clothes out of the closet instead of foraging through the huge pile in the hamper the way I'd been doing for weeks. I put on black jeans and a fuzzy green sweater. I glanced at myself in the mirror. My semi-dry hair looked okay and my facial puffiness had gone done. Even my zits weren't so visible. I looked vaguely alive.
I took my coat off the hook, put Candy's leash on, and headed out to walk her by the East River, near the condo high-rises that look over into Manhattan. My dead father loved Long Island City. He moved here the 1970s, when it was almost entirely industrial, to shack up with some drunken harlot right after my mother broke up with him so she could take up with the rock musician who fathered my half-sister. Long after the harlot had dumped my fatherâall women dumped my father all the timeâhe'd stayed on in the neighborhood, eventually buying a tiny two-story wood frame house that he left to me, his lone child, when the cancer got him last year at age fifty-five. I like Long Island City just fine. It's quiet and there are places to buy tacos.
“Looking good,
mamÃ,”
said some guy as Candy and I walked past the gas station.
I glowered at the guy.
As Candy sniffed and pissed and tried to eat garbage off the pavement, I smoked a few Marlboros and stared across at midtown Manhattan. It looked graceful from this distance.
The air was so cold it almost seemed clean and I started thinking on how I would rid myself of Clayton. I'd tried so many times. Had gotten him to agree not to call me anymore. But then, not two days would go by before he'd ring the bell. And I'd let him in. He'd look at me with those enormous brown eyes and tell me how great I looked. “Alice, you're fantastic,” he told me so many times I started thinking of myself as Alice Fantastic, only there really wouldn't be anything fantastic about me until I got rid of Clayton.
I'd start in on the
This isn't going to work for me anymore, Clayton
refrain I had been trotting out for seventeen weeks. At which, he would look wounded and his arms would hang so long at his sides that I'd have to touch him, and once I touched him, we'd make a beeline for the bed; the sex was pretty good the way it can be with someone you are physically attracted to in spite of, or because of, a lack of anything at all in common, and the sex being good would make me entertain the idea of instating Clayton on some sort of permanent basis, and I guess that was my mistake. He'd see that little idea in my eye and latch onto it and have
feelings
and his
feelings
would make him a prodigious lover and I'd become so strung out on sex chemicals I would dopily say
Sure
when he'd ask to spend the night and then again dopily say
Sure
the next morning when he'd ask if he could call me later.
But enough is enough. I don't want Clayton convincing himself we're going to be an everlasting item growing old together in a trailer park in Florida.
Right now Clayton lives in a parking lot. In his van. This I discovered when, that first night, after I picked him up in the taco place and strolled with him near the water, enjoying his simplicity and his long, loping gait, I brought him home and went down on him in the entrance hall and asked him to fuck me from behind in the kitchen and then led him to the bedroom where we lay quiet for a little while until he was hard again at which point I put on a pair of tights and asked him to rip out the crotchâafter all that, just when I was thinking of a polite way of asking him to leave, he propped himself up on one elbow and told me how much he liked me. “I really like you, I mean, I
really
like you,” looking at me with those eyes big as moons and, even though I just wanted to read a book and go to sleep, I didn't have the heart to kick him out.
All that night he babbled at me, telling me his woes. His mother has Alzheimer's and his father is in prison for forgery. His wife left him for a plumber and he's been fired from his job at a cabinet-making shop and is living in his van in a parking lot and showering at the Y.
“I've got to get out of Queens soon,” he said.
“And go where?”
“Florida. I don't like the cold much. Gets in my bones.”
“Yeah. Florida,” I said. I'd been there. To Gulfstream Park, Calder Race Course, and Tampa Bay Downs. I didn't tell him that though. I just said,
Yeah, Florida
, like I wasn't opposed to Florida, though why I would let him think I have any fondness for Florida, this leading him to possibly speculate that I'd want to go live there with him, I don't know. I suppose I wanted to be kind to him.
“Just a trailer is fine. I like trailers,” Clayton said.
“Right,” I said. And then I feigned sleep.
That was seventeen weeks ago. And I still haven't gotten rid of him.
Candy and I walked for the better part of an hour before heading home, passing back by the gas station where the moron felt the need to repeat, “Looking good,
mamÃ.”
I actually stopped walking, stared at him, and tried to think of words to explain exactly how repulsive it is to be called
mamÃ
because I just hear it as
mommy,
which makes me picture the guy having sex with his own mother who is doubtless a matronly woman with endless folds of ancient flesh and cobwebs between her legs, but I couldn't find the words, and the guy was starting to grin, possibly thinking I was actually turned on by him, so I kept walking.
Once back inside my place, I gave Candy the leftovers from my previous night's dinner and sat down at the kitchen table with my computer, my Daily Racing Form, and my notebooks. I got to work on the next day's races at Aqueduct. No matter how much I planned to change my life in the coming weeks, I still had to work. It wasn't much of a card, even for a Wednesday in February, so I figured I wouldn't be pushing much money through the windows. But I would watch. I would take notes. I would listen. I would enjoy my work. I always do. No matter how bad a losing streak I might endure, no matter how many times common sense tried to dictate that I find stable employment and a life devoid of risk-generated heart arrhythmias. I am a gambler.
Several hours passed and I felt stirrings of hunger and glanced inside my fridge. Some lifeless lettuce, a few ounces of orange juice, and one egg. I considered boiling the egg, as there are days when there's nothing I love more than a hardboiled egg, but I decided this wasn't one of those days. I would have to go to the taco place for takeout. I attached Candy's leash to her collar and threw my coat on and was heading to the door when the phone rang. I picked it up.
“Hi, Alice,” came Clayton's low voice.
I groaned.
“What's the matter? You in pain?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean? What hurts? I'll be right there.”
“No, no, Clayton, don't. My pain is that you won't take no for an answer.”
“No about what?”
“No about our continuing on like this.”
There was silence.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In the parking lot.”
“Ah,” I said. “Clayton, I know you think you're a nice guy but there's nothing nice about coming around when I've repeatedly asked you not to. It's borderline stalking.”
More silence.
“I need my peace and quiet.”
More silence. Then, after several minutes: “You don't like the way I touch you anymore?”
“There's more to life than touching.”
“Uh,” said Clayton. “I wouldn't know since you won't ever let me do anything with you other than come over and fuck you.”
Clayton had never said
fuck
before. Clayton had been raised in some sort of religious household.
“My life is nothing, Clayton, I go to the racetrack. I make my bets and take my notes and chain-smoke to keep from vomiting out of fear. I talk to some of the other horse-players. I go home and cook dinner or I go to the taco place. I walk my dog. That's it. There's nothing to my life, Clayton, nothing to see.”
“So let me come with you.”
“Come with me where?”
“To the racetrack.”
“I'm asking you to never call me again and get out of my life. Why would I want to take you to the racetrack?”
“Just let me see a little piece of your life. I deserve it. Think of it as alimony.”
I couldn't see why I should do anything for him. But I agreed anyway. At least it got him off the phone.
I took Candy with me to the taco place. Came home and ate my dinner, giving half to the dog.
I'd told Clayton to meet me the next morning at 11:00 and we'd take the subway. He offered to drive but I didn't trust that monstrous van of his not to break down en route. He rang the bell and I came downstairs to find him looking full of hope. Like seeing each other in daylight hours meant marriage and babies were imminent. Not that he'd asked for anything like that but he was that kind of guy, the kind of guy I seem to attract all too often, the want-to-snuggle- up-and-breed kind of guy. There are allegedly millions of women out there looking for these guys so I'm not sure why they all come knocking on my door. I guess they like a challenge. That's why they're men.
“Hi, Alice,” he beamed, “you look fantastic.”
“Thanks,” I said. I
had
pulled myself together, was wearing a tight black knee-length skirt and a soft black sweater that showed some shoulderâif I ever took my coat off, which I wasn't planning to do as I figured any glimpse of my flesh might give Clayton ideas.
“I'm just doing this cause you asked,” I said as we started walking to the G train, “but you have to realize this is my job and you can't interfere or ask a lot of questions.” I was staring straight forward so I didn't have to see any indications of hurt in his eyes because this was one of his ruses, the hurt look, the kicked-puppy look, and I was damn well sick of it.
“Right,” said Clayton.
We went down into the station and waited forever as one invariably does for the G train and all the while Clayton stared at me so hard I was pretty sure he would turn me to stone.
Eventually, the train came and got us to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop in Brooklyn where we switched to the far more efficient A train. I felt relief at being on my way to Aqueduct. Not many people truly love Aqueduct, but I do. Belmont is gorgeous and spacious and Saratoga is grand if you can stand the crowds, but I love Aqueduct. Aqueduct is where you see down-on-their-luck trainers slumping on benches, degenerates, droolcases, and drunks swapping tips, and a few seasoned pro gamblers stoically going about their business. My kind of place.
Thirty minutes later, the train sighed into the stop at Aqueduct and we got off. It was me and Clayton, a bunch of hunched middle-aged white men, a few slightly younger Rasta guys, and one well-dressed man who was an owner or wanted to pretend to be one.
“Oh, it's nice,” Clayton lied as we emerged from the little tunnel under the train tracks.
The structure looks like the set for a 1970s zombie movie, with its faded pastels tinged with that ubiquitous New York City gray and airplanes headed for JFK flying so low you're sure they're going to land on a horse.
“We'll go up to the restaurant, have some omelets,” I told Clayton once we were inside the clubhouse. “The coffee sucks but the omelets are fine.”