Barrel Fever (13 page)

This man proceeded to question what he called Malison’s “defensiveness” and said he doubted the wisdom of Rotunda Surf’s prologue. It is supremely ironic that this man, this joker with the canes and the wide mouth, would question Malison. Who does he think he is? That prologue is one of my favorite parts of the whole book. In it Malison writes: “If you, reader, can yank your head out of your own asshole long enough to finish the first chapter, don’t make the mistake of congratulating yourself. You possess nothing but fleeting, momentary courage. The shit on your face is still wet. It is your mask.” It is so true, but I could see that this crippled guy couldn’t digest it at all because Malison was directing the prologue at people just like him — people who wear masks. While I respected this widemouthed man for taking the chance to break out of his mindless existence, I could see that he hadn’t taken a hard enough look at Malison’s world. He poured us some more champagne, and I said that I didn’t think it was Malison’s job to create a comfortable world for escapists, some flowery paradise where Mr. and Mrs. America could walk hand-in-hand and think of themselves as wonderful people. Malison’s whole point is that hardly anyone is a wonderful person. There was a reason all the characters in Rotunda Surf had transparent bodies: most people are transparent. Malison can see right through middle-class people, and so can I. Some of us just have that ability. Malison and I are the type of writers who will always be on the outside looking in. Looking in but not banging to be let in. We don’t want in if it means we’ll have to pay the price by becoming as shallow and transparent as everyone else.

The crippled man couldn’t handle this at all. He said, “No one on this earth is transparent. Not even us.” I thought he was talking about himself and the other people in the bar, and I felt sorry for him. Then it hit me he was referring to himself and me. He put us in the same boat when we’re not even in the same fucking ocean. He said that we’re lucky to live in a world populated with unique, complex people. That was when I lost it and threw up on the table. It was perfect timing. All those people who had watched him pop the cork looked our way again but with a different sort of expression on their faces. I just grabbed my shit and ran out, ran into the rest room in the lobby.

Luckily I’ve brought a change of clothes. The fresh outfit was in my duffel bag along with a hairbrush, flat shoes, my tooth-brush, all of Malison’s books, a Walkman, tapes of several of Malison’s readings, the last three term papers I wrote on his last three novels (scarred with the ludicrous comments of my teachers), copies of all the supportive letters I’ve written Malison over the years, some dope, two Valiums, my diaphragm, all the short stories I’ve written since I was fifteen, my novel in progress (which I really need his opinion on), some Scotch tape, and the solution for my contact lenses. I’m not taking any chances tonight!

11:22. I’ve been standing in the hallway outside Malison’s hotel room for the last half-hour rereading my favorite passages of Magnetic Plugs and Smithy Smithy. His lecture must have ended by now, and I fear they are holding him hostage with another mindless question-and-answer session. My God, how much do they expect him to take?!

He’d looked so tired when I saw him this afternoon before my master’s class. I’d left my desk and was on my way to the bathroom when I passed him in the hail. It was incredible. The air was charged. Malison was wearing a pair of camouflage fatigues and a sports coat made of something rough, something like burlap. I thought he had silver hair, but up close I could see it was kind of a flat gray color, a color I like a lot more than silver. His eyelids were dark and puffy because the department heads had tired him out, but the eyes themselves were a rare in-tense shade of brown, like two clean pennies shining. Malison was walking toward the classroom with Brouner, the department head, who was running off at the mouth about his favorite subject — himself. Brouner was saying, “You might have heard of me. I had an essay on art and analysis in last month’s Forefront,” and Malison said, “If you’ve been published in Forefront, then no, I haven’t heard of you.” Malison is so blunt, so matter-of-fact, so uninterested in playing games. He wouldn’t be caught dead reading Forefront.

I tried to catch his eye in the hallway. I wanted to let him know that everyone knows what an asshole Brouner is, but then Professor Nobody came up and started yapping at me about my overdue essay, and Malison was herded into an office. I can’t imagine what’s keeping him now. If I know Malison, he’s fed up with the English Department; he’s not going to jump through any more of their hoops. Where could he be? I’ll wait here for a few more minutes, and if he doesn’t show, then I’ll head over to the Pavilion of Thought. The suspense is killing me.

12:09. I’m standing in a sheltered bus stop on west campus wait-ing for this fucking rain to let up so I can return to the hotel. The Pavilion of Thought was empty when I arrived. The show was over. I was on my way back to the hotel when I ran into Bethany in front of the Rathskeller, where she was taking pot-shots at people with her video camera (as if that hasn’t been done thousands of times before). Bethany started in about the Malison reading. She said, “Where were you? My God, you missed it. I don’t believe you.” Sometimes Bethany takes a very cocky, very inside attitude that infuriates me. She lies a lot, too. Sometimes I don’t even think she realizes she’s lying. She took this superior attitude and told me that just before tonight’s reading Malison approached her, bummed a cigarette, and passed some time with her.

Right, Bethany.

She said that Malison said he’d remembered her from the master’s class and that he’d like to read her work someday.

Right, Bethany.

Then she told me that he read a chapter-like passage from a new work in progress, and I covered my ears because whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it from Bethany. She is an abysmal storyteller and I don’t want Malison’s work chewed by her translation. She said she had the lecture on videotape but that no tape could capture the intensity of the reading. She said I can watch the tape but I probably won’t be able to understand it, not having been there in person.

This attitude of hers really makes me sick. I might not be able to understand Malison? Me? This is very ironic, especially coming from Bethany, who had never even heard of Malison before I loaned her my copy of Smithy Smithy last semester. I might not be able to understand it?

So I said, “Bethany, Malison is my writer, and I think I could understand him if he were speaking Egyptian.” And she said, “I didn’t realize you owned any writers, Anastasia. Are there any others in your stable?” Stable is a familiar word to Bethany. Before I turned her on to Malison, she was wearing fucking jodhpurs to class, arranging her hair into a French braid, and drawing horse profiles in the margins of her notebook. Before I turned her on to Malison, Bethany’s writing consisted of florid little sentences beginning with “’Tis” and “Ofttimes,” as if she’d been writing with a fucking quill that she dipped into an inkwell while sitting on an embroidered chair bathed in soft candlelight. Then, overnight she started writing like Malison and going out of her way to mention his name in class. Then in critique she trashed my story, saying that my writing is obviously based on Malison. I was writing like Malison before I even knew who Malison was. I’ve always written like Malison, so I said, “Maybe Malison is writing like me,” and she said (in front of the whole class), she said, “And where exactly would Malison have read any of your work?” She’s so full of herself since she had that story published in Post-Plane. Who reads Post-Plane?

Bethany is so transparent. I’m sure if Malison did talk to her he only did it in order to get a feel for the stupidity of his audience. She told me she’d invited him out for a post-lecture drink, but he’d said he needed to get right back to New York because his wife was expecting a baby. This was just an excuse to get rid of Bethany. Malison was lying, giving her the shake. I know, because Russell Marks told me that he saw Malison’s wife, Teresa Compton, at a restaurant in New York City two months ago, and Mark told me that it looked like Teresa Compton had lost weight. Lost weight! How pregnant can she be? Mark also told me that Malison and Teresa are filing for a divorce and living in separate apartments, so I highly doubt she’s pregnant. Malison was just throwing up a smoke screen to protect himself from Bethany. I know this for a fact because directly after talking to Bethany I called The Chesterton and asked them if A. Davenport had checked out. I had them connect me to Room 822. When Malison answered, I hung up. I didn’t want to introduce myself over the phone, so I politely hung up, and if this rain doesn’t stop within the next sixty seconds I’m going to say to hell with it and run back to that hotel, rain or no rain.

12:54. I’m back at The Chesterton, in the lounge area of the women’s rest room, waiting for my hose to dry. I’ve got them stuffed into the chute of the hot-air hand dryer, and it’s very annoying because women keep coming in here and giving me a hard time about it. Let them dry their hands on their skirts, it won’t kill them. Who are they? My second outfit is soaking wet, so I’m back in my original choice. I rinsed most of it out earlier in the evening, and you can hardly notice any vomit except on my blouse. If I thought that one of these women had an ounce of compassion I would ask to borrow a shot of perfume that would solve the lingering odor problem, but understanding seems to be in short supply here at The Chesterton. I’ve redone my makeup and used the hot-air hand dryer on my hair before putting the hose in. It’s hard to style your hair when you’re lean-ing over like that. It came out looking very ’70s, a sort of Jerry Hall over-the-shoulder thing, but I guess I’ll have to live with it.

Later. I knock on Malison’s door, room 822. I can hear the tele-vision very ironically tuned to The Hour of Prayer, so I know he’s in there. I knock a little harder and am embarrassed when, after my fifth round — and I’m really pounding away — I hear the toilet flush. I hate it when that happens, I really do. I take a step back and compose myself and look down at the carpet, and someone answers the door but it’s not Malison. It’s that man from the bar, the man with the two canes, and he’s relying on them and grinning like a carved pumpkin. And the worst part, the most revolting part of it all, is that he doesn’t seem the least bit surprised to see me.

SHORTLY after my mother died, my sisters and I found ourselves rummaging through a cabinet of papers marked “POISON,” and it was there, tucked between the pages of a well-worn copy of Mein Kampf, that I discovered fifteen years’ worth of her annual New Year’s resolutions. She took up the practice the winter after my father died, the same year she found a job and bought her first rifle. Every Christmas afternoon, after placing the artificial tree back into its box, she would grow reflective. “Do you think I overuse the word 'nigger'?” she would ask. “Was it wrong of me to spit on that Jehovah’s Witness girl? Tell me the truth here. I need a second opinion.”

On New Year’s Eve she would sit with her notes and a coffee cup of champagne, glancing at her watch and tapping a pencil against the legs of her chair. She would write something on an index card and, moments later, shake her head and erase it. The process was repeated until she wore a hole through the card and was forced to start fresh on another.

The next morning I would ask, “So, what was on your list, Mom?”

“Smother those homely teenagers who call themselves my children is at the top. Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

I always got a great kick out of my mother, but my sisters, for one reason or another, failed to get the joke. They have grown to be humorless and clinically sensitive: the sorts of people who overuse the words “rage” and “empowerment” and constantly ask, “What do you really mean by that?” While I would often call and visit our mother, they kept their distance, limiting their postal or telephone contact to the holidays.

“Did I tell you what your sister Hope sent me for my birthday?” my mother asked during one of our late-night phone calls. "A poncho. Who does she think I am that I might want a poncho? I’ve written her back saying I’m sure it will come in very handy the next time I mount my burro for the three-day journey over the mountains to the neighboring village. Poncho, indeed. I’ve thrown it into the garage-sale box along with the pepper grinder joy sent me. The thing is two feet long, black and shiny what do I need with a thing like that? It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to recognize that pepper grinder for what it truly is. I bet she spent weeks knocking that one around with her therapist. And, oh, it arrived in a fancy box wrapped in tissue paper. You can bet she paid out the ass for it but that’s joy for you, thinking she can impress people with the money she makes 'consulting.' That’s what she calls herself now, a consultant, as if that means anything. Anyone who answers questions can call them-selves a consultant, am I wrong? A telephone operator is a consultant, a palm reader: they’re all consultants. I thought I’d seen it all but then Faith sent me a subscription to that trade paper she’s working for. She calls it a magazine. Have you seen it? Why would anyone subscribe to a magazine devoted to adobe? Is this a big trend? Is there something I’ve missed? I’ve got a house made of bricks but who wants to read about it every month? Adobe? She circled her name on the first page where she’s listed as 'Features Editor.' When people ask what she’s up to I always tell them she’s a secretary — it sounds better. So then, a week after my birthday I got a call from your sister Charity . . .

Faith, Hope, Joy, Charity and me, Adolph.

See, she just couldn’t help herself.

While my mother might threaten a yard sale she was not the type of person to invite people onto her property or make change. Following her death my sisters were horrified to discover, sealed in boxes, every gift they had given her.

“How could she not want a first edition by M. Scott Peck?”

“I made these wind chimes with my own two hands. Didn’t that count for anything?”

“What did she have against pepper grinders?”

Aside from a few stiff wallets fashioned in summer camp, there was nothing of mine in those boxes as, at an early age, I discovered that postage stamps, cartons of cigarettes, light bulbs, and mailorder steaks are the gifts that keep giving.

“How could she possibly be so cruel?” my sisters asked, coming upon the unmailed notes and letters stored in the “POISON” file. “I am not the ’missing link,' I am not, I am not,” Joy chanted, holding a draft of her graduation card. “I am not 'God’s gift to fraternity beer baths,' I am not, I am not, I am not.” Charity and Faith gathered round and the three of them em-braced in a circle of healing. There were letters to me, comparing me unfavorably to both Richard Speck and the late Stepin Fetchit, but in all honesty it really didn’t bother me too much. We all entertain hateful thoughts every now and then, and afterwards they either grow stronger or fade away. From one day to the next, in tiny ways, our opinions change or, rather, my opinions change. Some of them anyway. That’s what makes me either weak or open-minded, depending on what it was I promised the last time we talked. I’m sure that Richard Speck had his share of good qualities and Stepin Fetchit was a terrific dancer, so I try not to take it too hard. My mother hadn’t mailed those letters; she simply left them to be discovered after her death. Hey, at least she was thinking about us.

I have posted some of my mother’s notes on my refrigerator alongside a Chinese takeout menu and a hideously scripted sympathy card sent by my former friend, Gill Pullen. Sympathy and calligraphy are two things I can definitely live without. Gill Pullen I cannot live without or, rather, I am having to learn to live without. At the risk of appearing maudlin or sentimental it was mutually understood that, having enjoyed each other’s company for seven years, we were close. Seeing as he was my only friend, I suppose I could go so far as to call him my best friend. We had our little fights, sure we did. We’d get on each other’s nerves and then lay low for a couple of days until something really good came on television, prompting one of us to call the other and say, “Quick — outstanding IV on channel seven.” IV stands for innocent victim, usually found shivering on the sidewalk near the scene of the tragedy. The impact of the IV is greater when coupled with the WindBlown Reporter, a staple of every news team. Prizewinning IVs have no notion of vanity or guile. Their presence is pathetic in itself but that is never good enough for the WBR, who acts as an emotional strip miner.

“How did it make you feel when that man set fire to your house?” the WBR asks squatting to the level of the dazed and blanketed five-year-old. “I bet it really hurts to watch your house burn to the ground, a nice house like yours. Somebody told me your cat was in that house. That’s sad, isn’t it? Now you’ll never see her again. You’ll never see your cat or your shoes or your mother’s boyfriend ever again. Can you tell me how that makes you feel inside?”

A PCD was another common icebreaker. Nothing pleases me quite so much as the ever-popular Physically Challenged Detective. Nowhere else on television do you find the blind, deaf, and paralyzed holding down such adventurous and high-paying jobs. Gill once had an idea for a show about a detective in an iron lung called “Last Gasp for Justice.” The clients, eager to track down their kidnapped daughter, would gather by the bedside and stroke his forehead, begging him to take the case.

Gill was always full of good ideas. So it shocked me when he changed so suddenly. I never saw it coming. We made plans to meet for dinner at an Indian restaurant that doesn’t have a liquor license. You just buy it down the block and carry it in with you it’s cheaper that way. So Gill and I were in the liquor store, where I asked him if we should buy two six-packs and a pint of J&B or one six-pack and a fifth. Or we could just go ahead and get the two six-packs and the fifth because, why not? I was weighing the odds when, out of nowhere, Gill started twisting the buttons on his coat and said, “Forget about me — you just buy something for yourself, Dolph.” Dolph is the name I go by because really, nobody can walk around with the name Adolph. It’s poison in a name. Dolph is bad too, but it’s just box-office poison.

“You go ahead, Dolph. Don’t worry about me.”

Later in the restaurant, figuring he’d changed his mind, I offered Gill one of my beers. He grew quiet for a few moments, tapping his fork against the table before lowering his head and telling me in fits and starts that he couldn’t have anything to drink. “I am, Jesus, Dolph, I am, you know, I’m . . . Well, the thing is that I’m . . . I am an . . . alcoholic.”

“Great,” I said. “Have eight beers.”

Gill became uncharacteristically dramatic, pushing the hair off his forehead. He leaned toward me and said, “I can’t have a drink, Dolph. Don’t you understand anything at all? I can’t.”

He said it as though he was the recently paralyzed lead dancer in a made-for-TV movie and I had just commanded him to take the lead in tonight’s production of The Nutcracker. I responded, acting along in what I considered an appropriate manner. “You can do it,” I said. “I know you can do it. But, oh, you’d rather sit there on that chair and be a quitter. Take the easy way out. That’s right — you’re a loser, a cripple, but when the lights go up on that stage, when all the other dancers are in place, I want you to know the only thing keeping you in that wheelchair is yourself.”

Gill’s face began to buckle. When he began to sob I realized he wasn’t joking. People at the surrounding tables lowered their forks and looked over in our direction. I pointed to our plates and said in a loud whisper, “Whatever you do, don’t order the tandoori chicken.”

Ever since then things have been different between us. He quit calling me and whenever I called him I got his machine. His old message, the “Broadway doesn’t go for pills and booze” line from Valley of the Dolls, had been replaced. I know he is home, screening his calls but I always hang up at the point where the new Gill’s voice encourages me to take life one day at a time. What has become of him?

I took a train home and talked it over with my mother, who, at the time, was spending a week in the hospital, recovering from surgery to remove cancerous lymph nodes. The cancer was nothing compared to the punishment she endured from her roommate, a lupus patient named Mrs. Galls. The woman never said a word but watched television constantly and at top volume. Possessing no apparent standards she’d watch anything, expressing no more interest in a golf match than a nature program.

“You got any questions about the grazing habits of the adolescent North American bull moose?” my mother asked, fidgeting with the plastic bracelet on her wrist. “I complained to the nurses about the volume but all they do is point to their ears and whisper that she’s got a hearing problem. If she’s got such a hearing problem then why are they whispering about her? She can hear the food cart from down the hail. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. She perks up and rubs her hands together and over what? That foraging moose of hers will sit down to a better meal than anything she’s likely to get in this place. I want that woman dead.”

I talked for a brief while about my problems with Gill until my mother lost interest. “Did I tell you that your sister Charity called me? I hardly recognized her voice because it’s been, what, three years since she’s phoned me. It seems she lost her job at the suicide hot line and is looking to borrow some money. I said, 'Hold on just a few seconds, darling. It’s a bit difficult to reach my purse with this IV in my arm.”

I listened to her stories with the understanding that the moment my back was turned I would likely become the chief character in her next complaint. I fully expected her to turn to her radiologist and say something like, “Isn’t that sweet of my only son to travel all this way so he can whine about his pathetic little friend? Maybe if I weren’t strapped to my deathbed I could muster up the strength to give a damn.”

That’s the sort of thing that destroys my sisters but doesn’t bother me in the least. I expect it in a person and am constantly amazed to hear someone refer to it wrongly as gossip and get all bent out of shape about it.

An example: until fairly recently I had the misfortune of holding down a job in the offices of Vincent & Skully Giftware, distributors of needlepoint beer cozies, coffee mugs in the shape of golf bags, and more insipid novelty items than you would ever want to know about.

I equate the decline of this nation with the number of citizens willing to spend money on T-shirts reading “I’m with Stupid,” “Retired Prostitute,” and “I won’t go down in history but I will go down on your little sister.” The Vincent & Skully employees were, with the exception of me, perfect reflections of the merchandise. The offices were like a national holding center for the trainably banal, occupied by people who decorated their cubicles with quilted, heart-shaped picture frames and those tiny plush bears with the fierce spring grip that cling to lamps and computer terminals, personalized to read “Tern’s bear” or “I wuv you very beary much!”

I don’t know how it is that people grow to be so stupid but there is an entire nation of them right outside my door. I lost my job a few months ago when Alisha Cottingham went off the deep end and cornered me in the mail room. Alisha is in the marketing division and she tends to use what she considers to be concise, formal speech. Listening to her speak I imagine she must type it up the night before and commit it all to memory, pacing back and forth in her godforsaken apartment and working to place the perfect emphasis on this or that word.

“Mr. Heck,” she began, blocking me off at the Xerox machine. “It has come to my attention here at V&S Giftware that you seem to have some problem with my chin. Now, let me tell you a little something, sir. I am not here to live up to your stringent physical qualifications. I am here to work, as are you. If my chin is, for any reason, keeping you from performing your job here at Vincent & Skully then I believe we have a problem.”

I was thinking, chin? What chin? I said something about her neck. Alisha’s chins are another story.

She continued. “I just want you to know that your deliberate cruelty cannot hurt me, Mr. Heck, because I will not allow it to. As a professional I am paid to rise above the thoughtless, petty remarks of an office boy who takes pleasure in remarking upon the physical characteristics of his coworkers, many of whom have fought valiantly against both personal and social hardships to make this a company we can all be proud of.” Eventually she began to sob and I might have felt sorry for her had she not reported me twice for smoking dope during the three o’clock break. So I made some little remark and it got around. So what? Did Alisha Cottingham honestly believe that by sitting beside me and sharing a bag of potato chips our bond would grow so strong I would fail to notice she has a neck like a stack of dimes?