Home Land: A Novel (10 page)

Authors: Sam Lipsyte

Tags: #Fiction, #Humorous, #Literary

BOOK: Home Land: A Novel

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Anyway, Catamounts, it’s late now and your faithful updater is getting sleepy. I’ll send my FakeFacts off to Penny in the morning. Sometimes I wonder if she knows I make them up. Sometimes I wonder if she cares. It makes me sick in a way, because I do believe
in the truth, in historical accuracy, the light it can shine on our shadowy puppet play of an existence and all that. Our nation wallows in the dark too much, eating cheese puffs, touching ourselves. We think we’re not fat and that we’re a nation. It’s sad, and I know fools like me are partly to blame. But I console myself with the thought that
Fizz
is an in-house newsletter. It’s not as though kids see it. What kids do see is that copy of
Catamount Notes
you’ve left beside the toilet in that wicker magazine rack, the one you maybe bought on sale at the River Mall. These young malleables make their little number twos and pore over all your Catamount lies about what enchantments await a faceless node on the global motherboard, what comforts are guaranteed to those who gleam with this belief: that we are all of us blessed with talents, skill sets, and if we just stay the course, apply a little elbow grease, ride out the bumps and grinds of decreasing economic indicators, life will shine like our new “professional” kitchens.

Dream on, worm bait.

No Closer to Resolving the Mays Debate, or, Why I Even Bother

A MAN SO OLD he’s got his baby teeth again stood behind me in the supermarket today. He clutched a sack of potatoes, wore a baseball cap that read: “Ask About Our BJs.”

Catamounts, I note this merely as precaution.

Objects too close may be a mirror.

“Nice hat,” I told the man.

“Is it a ball team?” he said. “Found the thing lying around the house. One of my grandkids must have left it on the last visit. Odd name for a ball team, though. The BJs.”

“They’re good this year.”

“Expansion team? I never heard of them. I only follow the National League. They have what’s his name, Saladin, with the steroids.”

“Silly rumor,” I said.

“Don’t care either way,” said the man. “It’s the heroin what worries
me. What are the kids going to think when a junkie jacks a hundred dingers?”

“Good point.”

“I watch a lot of sports. I’m a veteran, too. I was at Normandy.”

“The greatest generation.”

“The what? Oh, that’s a load of crap. We weren’t so great. Most of us were morons like you or me. We got lucky. Hitler beat himself. Bet you don’t even know who Hitler was.”

“Which Hitler do you mean?”

“You’re a funny young man. What’s your name?”

“Lewis.”

“I’m Auggie. Auggie Tabor.”

“Any relation to Judy Tabor? The teacher?”

“That’s my daughter.”

“I had her in high school. How is she?”

“She’s fine. She’s living down in Jacksonville, Florida. Right there on the beach. Married a rich fellow, a developer. Looks nineteen with her tan and her new tomatoes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Augmentation of the ta-tas.”

“Jeez, I can’t imagine that. She was always so serious. She’s the one who taught me about the absurdity of existence.”

“Little Judy’s much happier now. I never liked her reading all those depressing books, those Frenchies and such. She’s frolicsome by nature.”

“Well, say hello for me.”

“Going down there in a few months. Her stepson is teaching me to surf.”

“Okay, then, guess I’ll see you around, Auggie.”

“A pleasure. And by the way, I lied.”

“What’s that?”

“I know what a goddamn BJ is. I was at Normandy, for Christ’s sake.”

BAD NEWS on the deadbeat front: My landlord’s clan held a council, voted Pete meek. Shamed, undone, he’s fashioned a new persona: bagman, baby tough.

He banged on my door this morning in a dark silk shirt.

“Pete,” I said.

“Pay up,” said Pete.

“You know I will,” I said. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing’s gotten into me. You owe, you pay. I forgive you for taking advantage of me when I was a rookie, but I’m stepping up now. I’m owning my ownership. I’m a landlord. From a long line of landlords. I have ways of settling this situation. I’m hooked up. Hooked up with interesting people. Hollis Wofford, for example.

“I know Hollis Wofford,” I said.

“So he tells me. Hollis is a partner of my family now. We’ve joined economic forces. That makes him, by extension, your landlord, too.”

“You should steer clear of that guy,” I said. “There are some who consider him an evolutionary cul-de-sac.”

“Thanks,” said Pete. “But I don’t take advice from renters.”

“I can’t believe this new attitude, Pete. I’m a little shocked.”

“I advise you to get over your shock.”

“Look,” I said. “I want to pay you. I always do pay you, eventually. But you can’t threaten me. Ever hear of tenants’ rights?”

“You need a lease for that.”

“I have a lease.”

“Ran out last month.”

“I thought we had an agreement. An understanding.”

“A nod and a handshake won’t cut it these days. Do I refer to my SUV as a horseless carriage?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“The earth turns. Terms evolve. What passed for civilization
before is an abomination to us now. Nostalgia is fear smeared with Vaseline. Think about it.”

Pete turned, stalked off down the street, a new languorous gangster strut. He stooped to tie his shoe and I saw the bulging sheen of it tucked in an ankle holster: his cell phone.

I HEATED UP some split-pea soup in the kitchen, thought about it. Maybe I could call Gary, borrow from his retractor trust. It’s a bitch to owe your best friend money, Catamounts. The awkwardness is bad enough, and then you have to pay the jerk back. What about Penny Bettis? I could beg her for an advance, throw in some extra FakeFacts, gratis. Clark Gable gargled with the stuff to stifle his halitosis. Skip James cut a rival pimp with a broken bottle of it. Or how about a TrueFact: It rots your fucking teeth.

I called the Retractor.

“Hey, man,” I said. “Just calling to see how you’re doing. I was thinking of you today. How are things with Mira?”

“We’ve been making the beast with two separate parts that don’t touch at all.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“She’s playing hard to find. She shows up late at night. What’s wrong with me, Lewis? Guys my age have careers, children. I’m being toyed with by a twenty-three-year-old. I’m a joke. It’s the young skin. That’s all it is. Too bad she’s not fourteen. That would have been something. Something wrong, but still. What was that?”

“What?”

“The sound you just made.

“A laugh. I laughed.”

“Is that a new laugh?”

“That’s my laugh.”

“You’ve been working on a new laugh.”

“The hell I have.”

“Fucking poseur,” said Gary, hung up.

The phone rang a few seconds later.

“It’s definitely a new laugh,” said Gary.

“Listen,” I said. “I need to ask you a favor.”

“How much?”

TONIGHT the evening news ran some footage of Mikey Saladin. The man stood shirtless, bandaged, before the press corps. These vipers hissed about a trade, their dry invisible tongues slithering over Mikey’s great veiny arms, his granite abs, though I can’t prove it, of course, their tongues being invisible.

“I’ll always be a Jersey boy,” said Mikey, “no matter what uniform I wear.”

A viper from the network of record inquired about retirement rumors.

“Retire from what?” said Mikey. “From baseball or from banging your wife?”

“And what about banned substances?” said another. “Have they enhanced your performance?”

“About as much as that twelver of Schlitz you drink every night has enhanced yours, you fat fuck.”

His insolence was warranted, Catamounts. These media fiends think their microphones are electric shock sticks. Sick of their softness, they hope to jolt their betters. Bat Masterson would be appalled. He’d strap his irons back on, catch the next coach to Abilene.

As for Mikey Saladin, he might be old for an Estonian ice dancer, but not for a power-hitting shortstop. His slugging percentage is up because of anabolics, growth hormones? How about wisdom, maturity, the resolution of a grueling custody battle? Go ahead, drive Mikey from the game. Banish what shines, revel in the antics of dullards. Not only Mikey will suffer. Think about the kids from his Sacrifice Fly Foundation. I suppose you’d prefer they were back on
the streets so you could buy your party favors from them, rent their hot little mouths on the West Side Highway. You’d best pray Mikey Saladin doesn’t catch you. The man has no mercy for your kind.

Some of you are maybe wondering why I persist with these updates. A few of you, perhaps, pass the whipped potatoes at table, remark: “Is Teabag a fucking twit, or what?”

Worry not, Catamounts. I might be a twit—I’m uncertain of the parameters—but I do not labor under any illusion my updates will grace the pages, or, scratch that, the screens, of our beloved alumni bulletin. Fontana was correct in his prediction that
Catamount
Notes
, under the Ryson regime, would be an electronic affair. I received an e-mail today announcing the site was officially live. The same old lies. Now they are linked to other lies. You can leap between them.

Instead, consider these ramblings an antidote, the antiupdate, continuous and true. Someday, perhaps, my missives will serve some edifying purpose. Archeologists will look to the Teabag Letters as a source text in their quest for Catamount meaning. Our lives and dreams may feel insignificant now, but the future could dispute our puniness. Menninger may become a universal synonym for glad-handing sleazeball. A Jazz Loretta might denote a sort of woolen legging. Our descendants could very well reside in a domed city-state called New Fontana, with statues of Mikey Saladin in every public square.

Or, of course, not.

Many are the ages of man that have meant nothing at all, as Ms. Tabor once put it in Introduction to World Literature. Maybe she was crashing hard on diet pills, but she had a point.

It matters little in the end, Catamounts.

Even the semiforgotten times have had their Teabags, their town criers, totem carvers, scribes, skalds.

Here ye, here ye, the Jaguar King died in the sickle moon, the year Reed-Seven. The honey jars numbered ten and two. Leif Leifson jumped from the dragon ship, slew many shitloads of Jutes.

These are the Catamount dead: Dean Longo (OD, disillusionment), Enrique Herrera (drunk driving, loneliness), Will Paulsen (drunk driver, bad luck), Tina Chung (cancer, radon), Shandra Baum (cancer, anger), Chip Gallagher (cirrhosis, pending).

TONIGHT I took a walk down Venus Drive, cut through the woods to the Pitch-n-Putt parking lot. The stars were out, what stars we get in our dirty sky. Some old golf carts stood near the field house, more for after-hours ball retrieval than for play. Nearmont has an eighteen-hole course and a state-of-the-art driving range. The Eastern Valley Pitch-n-Putt, with its culverts of broken glass and unmowed greens, must have been designed expressly for trespassing, teen sex, vandalism.

Gary and I used to come here to drink beer and smoke bones and talk about the future, when we’d drink beer and smoke bones with girls. Gary was going to be a rock star, or a rock journalist, maybe both.

“I don’t want to be a superstar,” he said. “Just a star. I want to have influence. I want to be the visionary all the hacks steal from.”

“Why would you want to be that?” I said.

“It’s cooler,” said Gary. “Maybe I won’t even start a band until I’m twenty. You shouldn’t even attempt to rock until you’ve run the gamut of human experience. All of my records will include essays I’ve written about why the record rocks.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“Wilkerson liked it.”

Glave was a joke to us even then, but he did have a nice Les Paul sunburst, and Gary had jammed with him once in Glave’s basement.

“He’s got chops,” said Gary. “But no heart.”

“No heart,” I said.

“But chops,” said Gary.

Sometimes others came to park and smoke with us. Randy Pittman would drive up in his Pittman Liquors family liquor van,
offer us in-state vodka, bitch about his vicious father. He had a plan to run off with his sousaphone, join the navy marching band.

“I need the discipline,” he said.

One night he came by with a bottle of apricot schnapps and we got sick on the stuff while he told us how his father really wasn’t all that mean, just a little tweaked from his tour on a patrol boat in Vietnam. Old Man Pittman was only a cherry when another piece of new meat caught a bad case of nerves. Everybody got scared Charlie would hear the sobs, the whimpers. A corporal named Van Wort slit the kid’s throat, dumped him into the Mekong. Randy’s father made Randy swear to keep the whole thing secret, but Randy figured he could trust us. We didn’t know anybody in the navy, and who’d believe us, anyway, a couple of ass clowns from Eastern Valley?

“What a load,” said Gary.

“True fucking story,” said Randy.

“Well, the patrol boat’s a nice touch, but really, I doubt your dad told you all of that. For one thing, guys who were actually in the shit talk squat about it. That’s just how it is.”

“I’m his son.”

“He still wouldn’t tell you.”

“You can’t speak for everybody.”

“No, I can’t, dude, and neither can you.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

We never really got to hear what that meant because suddenly there was a loud crack from out past the woodline.

“Shit,” said Randy Pittman.

The kid was bleeding from all these tiny shallow holes in his chest.