The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (9 page)

He knew he should stop and buy more food but the ride seduced him with its rhythm. It was the one he took every day— weekends and holidays included, the same ride he’d taken since he was a boy. A ride that went back and forth. Three inches forward, three inches back. That’s just how it went. Back and forth. He’d gone thousands of miles like that, seated and rocking at the hips. Sometimes the ants would get in front of his face just at the tip of his nose, fluttering their little legs in time to the ride. After a while, the trees and the cars, people on the street and everything and all of it, pretty soon they’d all get on the ride going back and forth with the ants—their legs like his own fingers, just like them with flecks of blood under the nails, waving their little legs and all of it going back and forth. Sound even. He’d let a noise pour from his mouth and listen as the sound waved and pulled like water around his head on the ride going back and forth.

The ants tickled at his face—fingertips brushing lightly against his eyelashes, and he watched them flicker like a fleshy fire burning so close that they might actually
be
his fingers and
not
a fire and
not
ants but just his fingers tittering rhythmically with the ride. Shadows danced with the movements and the whole blessed thing grooved magically with the bump-up and fallback of the entire universe going back and forth and back and forth. He would go until he got hungry or cold or until he got moved along by police. He’d ride until the voices came scratching at his ears and he had to fly or talk on phones or scream into the air to drown them out. But it was a sunny day. There was no one to bother him at the moment and his belly was full of sugar and carbohydrates. A perfect day for the ride, with the sun’s warmth beating down on the sidewalk and up into his glowing face—eyes closed, mouth turned up. Just a perfect day for it. He would cover miles.

Four hours later, he was well on his way. People on the sidewalk sped up as they passed him. Dogs growled as they went by. A young father took his toddler by the shoulders to avoid the disaster of the little one turning headfirst into the lap of a smelly old bum. Earl rode through all of it—through the stares and the pointing, through sneers, through the taunts of teenagers with something to prove, and a whole sea of disgusted looks, because he smelled bad and he looked bad and who knows?—he might even be dangerous.

It didn’t matter that his mind was a catastrophic hall of mirrors. Never mind the fact that his identity changed like a stoplight—that he’d gone from Batman to Dalí over the last forty-eight hours, that in the last couple of days he’d had moments where he was absolutely certain he was Jesus Christ. Never mind the small pieces of Scotch tape in his hair. Never mind the tinfoil necklace tight around his neck to ward off Martians from Venus. (He wore it ever since overhearing a group of teenagers discussing the possibility of water on Venus, because water is the building block of life and if it’s life from outer space then it’s coming to get us for sure so watch your back and pass the tinfoil.) It didn’t matter that he’d lost three toes on his left foot from two cold days during the previous winter. Never mind the limp. People don’t care about all that. Everybody’s had it tough. Everybody’s
got
it tough, while you’re at it. Nobody’s got room for hard-luck stories anymore—the house crammed full of them and the rent’s due and the mortgage is due and don’t forget the bills for power and light, the car needs a new muffler and the kids need stitches and the cats need shots and a man rocking back and forth in a puddle of his own urine is a sad, sad thing, but who the hell needs it.

On some level, Earl Strugg understood that very well. You don’t survive on the streets for twenty-two years without understanding a few things on a very basic level. Go ahead and pee on yourself all you want, but leave your coat on the subway in January or get too loud with the wrong pusher, jog across the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or swallow a whole bottle of Thorazine, and it’s over pal. He’d seen so many come and go. Crazies are a dime a dozen on the golden streets of the city and only the stupid die young. Be a lunatic but don’t be a moron. Talk to yourself, wrap your arms with cellophane and flap like a pretty bird, but don’t leave your shoes in a shelter and never turn down a sandwich or a hot cup of coffee.

THE SUN SAT low at four o’clock. The days getting shorter. The change in light ticked off a part of Earl’s mind that brought the ride to a stop. That, and a sudden pain at his shoulder at the place where the scab used to be. Now the place was mobbed with blood. A stain like a brown fan spread across his shirt and lapel. The fingers of his left hand were dark red and tacky, the nails dirty like from a whole day of working the soil. He wiggled them in front of his eyes.
Ants
, he thought, and cursed them out loud. They’d perpetrated their destruction while he was on the ride. He was vulnerable when he was riding and they knew it. They knew it because they’re
ants
—the most cunning, most blindly vigorous, untiring, vicious, most overachieving damn insects on the planet. He twittered their little legs again, just off the tip of his nose before letting them drop back to his lap where he’d try to keep a better eye on them. Ants were the last thing he needed. Easy to brush away but so damn persistent— resting across his thigh but ready to rise to his shoulder as soon as his mind went elsewhere.

Lifting his gaze out across the street, he saw a small dog straining over a piece of newspaper while the owner held its leash and watched. The dog and the woman wore matching coats. The scene spun to the left as his body adjusted to being off the ride. Things turned a little after a short ride, but when they spun and throbbed it was a sure sign of a long time on the back and forth. The sequins of the little dog’s coat pulsed as he watched them, leaving no doubt in his mind about what had occupied his last hours. He felt it in his hips too—the dull ache of a repetitive strain. A cool breeze caressed his shoulder and he looked down at the stain of damp blood. “
Ants
now,” he groaned out loud, shaking his head. A man passing him stopped and looked back. “Beg pardon?” he asked.

“
Ants,
” Earl croaked, his face twirling. “Ants damn it—
damn
it,
all this and damn
ants
now—
Christ.
. . .” The man turned away and continued walking.

Earl returned his gaze to the little dog who’d just finished up and was watching its owner carefully fold and deposit its steaming turd into the trash. They walked off, their coats shimmering with the orange glow of the setting sun. Earl followed them with his eyes until the glimmer faded into a gray haze of distant buildings and the coming dusk.

His stomach rolled with hunger—a bad feeling with the night pouring in. On good days he’d get fed in the earlier, clearer part of the day, but he’d been lured onto the ride before finding someplace or someone to help him out, before finishing his chores. And the voices were coming. He could hear their raucous filth like an army at the horizon. They were coming like they came every night, to swallow him whole. He’d be lost in a howling onslaught—dodging the rabble between cat-naps and panic-driven sprints until the whole thing spit him out across a heap of trash with the morning sun.

He asked for the time but no one answered because people get meaner as the sun goes down. So he asked again, screamed it really, but no one even slowed down and it didn’t really matter anyway—time of day wouldn’t change the hunger or the voices or the falling sun. The whole mess was coming down on him— caught by the blizzard before getting the tent up, but you get the picture. It didn’t usually go like that, but sometimes, that’s exactly how it went.

IN HIS LAST lucid moment, he reckoned with his biggest enemy. Coming along the horizon, it lurked like a predator, one he’s beat every year but never for good. He could almost see its face in the gloves of teenagers and blankets heaped over strollers, the extra bloom of smoke from exhaust pipes, the sniffle of delivery boys, the brisk walk of lightly dressed women—his greatest threat, a thing that made voices and hunger and darkness seem like a silly game—distant for now, but looming like a stalker: winter. A genuine bastard with a severe lack of imagination, pulling the same old gags it does every year with a brutal lack of variation—takes the ears and fingers and toes, takes the chunks right off of your nose. Junkies roll you over and hunger could take days, but the cold can put you down within an hour. It was coming as sure as galoshes with its worn-out joke bag of slush and windchill. He’d have to fight and defeat it like he did every year—main event in January with final rounds going long into the end of March.
Sure to be a good match-up,
he thought absently, his fingers crawling back to his blood-wet shoulder.
Don’t you miss it, don’t touch the dial
. . . .
budga-freekack
rubber freaker nose bicker-knobfucker .
. .

Then, for reasons no one on the outside could ever imagine much less understand, Earl Strugg staggered to his feet and ran like a madman. Just like one.

Deck

THE OWLS HAVE CEASED THEIR CALLS and the lightning bugs are long gone. It’s just you alone on your deck afraid to admit why you’re alone at night. Most people fear the dark, but you like it. It’s the reason you like it that scares you.

The latest story is going nowhere, so you try to convince yourself that sitting out here will trigger the muse. It’s a story about an older woman who sure does know her way around a mattress. She’s even slept with a woman once, but that doesn’t make her a full-fledged lesberino. She is a dancer and the narrator’s plan is to marry her, but her ideas are different. (She is actually modeled on a girlfriend you had twenty years ago in Boston. She was French and called you
mon cher,
which you thought was totally deck, but she hated oral sex. This was surprising since you thought the French practically invented it or something. She also used sex as a reward for restaurant meals. She had nice skin. Sometimes you wonder what became of her. She was the great heartbreak of youth, and you regretted losing her for many years. You told her she should marry you so there’d always be one man to remind her how magnificent her legs had been.)

The story opens in a restaurant, the kind where just working there makes you so deck that you’re allowed to be rude to customers and you don’t even mind the bad tips. (It’s more of a café and is presently run by your dopester buddy Carlos in Charlottesville.) There’s student art hanging crooked on the walls, and a menu full of culinary puns written in colored chalk on a blackboard. The waiter is gay and you remember working as a waiter, and how you worried that people thought you were gay. You’ve been married twelve years now, and men don’t cruise you anymore, but upon occasion you still wonder if people think you are gay. Then you wonder why you wonder that.

The restaurant is known for having once employed a Weatherman-woman who spent twenty years as a federal fugitive after attaching a bomb to a police car that never blew. She used a false name and formed no lasting relationships. She stayed safe. You envy her. You are reminded of the reclusive Pynchon and recall the time you worked at a Boston Fotomat and a guy named Pynchon came in to pick up photos and you asked if he was Thomas. The guy laughed. He said he was Pynchon’s cousin, and you’d never see Pynchon here. He acted as if you were a mook for even suggesting that Pynchon might come to a Boston Fotomat. The guy didn’t return, and a part of you has always wondered if he really was Pynchon.

Lately you get on the Internet and plug in your ex–French girlfriend’s name and run all manner of searches and come up with nothing. There’s a woman with the same name in Phoenix, but she’s not the one. You call her old friends, but no one has heard from her in years. Her parents left the state. So did her brother. You wonder why you engage in this, and the possible reasons scare you into remaining on the deck in the dark.

Anyhow, the restaurant suits the situation, and like your ex–French girlfriend, it’s small and hip. She was always devastating you with cruelty, then claiming she was being honest about her feelings. She used to say, “Can I ask you a question and you won’t get mad?” You are stunned to realize that you can’t remember if it was the ex–French girlfriend or your buddy Carlos’s girlfriend who said that. Your ex–French girlfriend was a waitress who once got fired for chasing a customer into the street over a lousy tip. You wonder what the Weatherman-woman did if a customer stiffed her on the tip. Maybe she blew their cars up. She lived half her life as someone else, and you momentarily wish you were the Weatherman-woman. The question your ex–French girlfriend wanted to ask was would you mind if she slept with someone else—just once. What could you do? You went along with the idea while seething inside and spent the whole weekend smoking weed and reading comic books, trying to convince yourself that you didn’t really love her. As it turns out, she didn’t sleep with anyone, but was just trying to learn if you were the possessive type. She left you anyhow, and moved to San Diego, which is as far from Boston as you can possibly get and remain in the continental U.S. You drove her to the airport and never saw her again.

Years later and late at night you sit on your back deck, the perfect place to smoke weed, only you quit a long time ago, making this a wasted spot. Sometimes you think about taking up the habit again, just to feel good about eventually quitting again.

Inside the house is your sleeping wife, who you hooked up with on the rebound. Out front is a yard with a little picket fence, which is what your ex–French girlfriend always wanted. She used to leave matches with trade-school ads in conspicuous places around the apartment. The habit drove you nuts then, but now seems endearing. You loved her the way only a nineteen-year-old could—with every cell of your body craving her slightest glance, consumed by memory of her last touch, each song on the radio about her, convinced that no one had ever experienced such bliss before, and that you would wither and die without her in your life. But you didn’t. You married your next girlfriend and twelve years later you fantasize about moving to a faraway town—Vegas maybe—and dealing blackjack under an assumed name. You remember reading that the Weatherman-woman recently got picked up somewhere in the Midwest with a phony driver’s license, credit cards, and everything. She’d married a doctor and her house had a picket fence, too. They let her out on bail because she’s totally deck now, a pillar of the community, a PTA officer who volunteers for all and sundry. She hasn’t tried to blow anything up in a while either. Doctors and their wives get treated special, and you wish you were a doctor in Vegas. Maybe you’d run into your ex–French girlfriend managing a casino bar and she’d look great and you’d win big and move to Paris together.

In twelve years of marriage, you have never taken a vacation with your wife, and in fact the two of you spend a great deal of time apart. You even go to bed and rise at different times. You have no common interests—none. This worries the bejeezus out of you, but you tell nobody and are getting tired of the constant silent fearful dread as if you are a Pynchon character. Suddenly you realize that the reason Pynchon keeps popping up is that you read his Big Book the same summer your ex–French girlfriend broke your heart. They are inextricably linked. You started that book three times that summer. You made more of a commitment to it than your ex–French girlfriend did to you. She left because you refused to get a regular job, and would never be able to provide her with a picket fence, despite the fact that you hung around with her moronic brother, listened to her best friend’s endless prattle, let her mother win at cards, and admired her father’s car. You wish you’d married her and given up on Pynchon’s book.

You remember how angry she was when a girl at work was eating a popsicle in a highly
provocative
manner. This actually happened to your buddy Carlos down in Arizona, except his real name’s not Carlos and it wasn’t even Arizona. (He’s a real good friend and you don’t want to cause him any trouble by using his actual name, which is Dick.) He called recently and wanted to know how often you and your wife have sex. His girlfriend is into it on Sundays only, if she doesn’t get too drunk the night before, and if she does, he has to wait another week. It’s not a religious thing, he said. It’s just a difference in their sex drive, and he wanted to know if she was abnormal. You could tell he thought his girlfriend was screwed up sexually, but didn’t want to admit it. You didn’t know what to do. You hemmed and hawed because you and your wife only have sex twice a month at most.

Instead of writing you are now visualizing your ex–French girlfriend’s face. Her eyes hold back pain and you wonder if that’s why you loved her, or if you put the pain there, and whether she’s still got it. You hope not. She had some bad luck starting out, and you hope it changed. It’s possible that at this very moment, she’s remembering you and thinking the same thing. (Maybe she’ll read this!)

It’s clear that this story has fallen apart. At age forty, sleep has become your drug of choice, and you adjust the lawn chair to a prone position and nap beneath the stars. Upon awakening (and this is true), you remember that your buddy Carlos is presently working in Alaska, and the fishing is bad. If that damn Weatherman-woman had any sense, she’d have gone to Alaska to hang out. There are doctors up there to marry, normal lives to lead, and she’d have never got busted. You wonder if she secretly wanted to get caught, like those serial killers who are always calling the newspapers with hints and clues. It occurs to you that if there were as many actual serial killers as there are books and movies about them, we’d all be dead.

Even though it’s been fifteen years, you still recall that summer very well—your girlfriend dumped you, the protagonist of Pynchon’s book seduced nurses at the sites German bombs would eventually strike, and the guy across the street put the heavy-duty moves on you. Then you remember that many years later Pynchon’s actual wife turned you down when you were looking for an agent. The rejection didn’t hurt so much because after all she was Pynchon’s actual wife!

You think how your buddy Carlos grew up the only boy with five sisters and understood women better than any man you knew. He possessed girlish habits as a result. One was standing with his knees and ankles together, then leaning forward and using his hands to flip his hair out of his face. A burly roughneck in a renegade bar once asked Carlos if he was gay and Carlos grinned and said introduce me to your sister, and the guy got pissed. Carlos just lit some weed, right there in the bar, and the roughneck leaned for a hit and everything got deck. He turned out to be an ex-con. On his chest was a tattoo of two playing cards, the king of spades and the king of hearts overlapping each other, and you wondered what it meant.

The first tattoo you ever saw on a woman was the English alphabet running in a perfect loop around her ankle. This was about ten years before everybody and his brother had one. Nowadays, that woman runs a New York literary magazine, and you think it’s best to change the subject in case she’s sensitive about her tat, and you wonder how come nobody ever says “everybody and her sister.” It’s probably sexist or something and you wonder about the politics of saying Weatherman-woman over and over again, and decide to call the tattooed editor and ask, then change your mind. (You don’t want to be a pest in case you send this story to her magazine.) You wonder if Pynchon has ever published with her. He’s probably got a tattoo of a tattoo of a tattoo on him. A few years ago you thought about getting your wife’s name tattooed on you, but she talked you out of it. At one time you considered getting a vasectomy but she convinced you otherwise, saying she’d had her kids, but you might want more with a different woman one day. It never occurred to you to wonder why she might think that.

The subtext of all this is you had a buddy named Bill, who once gave you a drug called XTC and put the moves on you. At that time XTC was brand-new and had a reputation as a drug you took with an estranged parent on their deathbed and a lifetime’s worth of anger and tension would get cleared up in a few hours. Bill was your across-the-street-neighbor (back when you waited tables at Doyle’s in Jamaica Plain). His girlfriend lived upstairs from you. She was a psychology student having an affair with her teacher, a woman who gave her XTC before sex. So the girlfriend’s big idea was for you and Bill to get down with the drug and talk about it later.

The problem was that no one let you in on all this until way later. By this time, you were feeling full of artificial goodwill and comradeship, and Bill laid this big kiss on you. Between the scrape of his whiskers and the drug itself, you freaked out big time. It was terrible. You left his house in a hurry. You wound up moving to another apartment. You lost weight and couldn’t sleep. You thought maybe you had always been gay but just didn’t know it, although everyone else did, which was why gay guys were always cruising you. You tried to go back to your ex– French girlfriend, who said, if you think you’re gay, sleep with a man to see. That didn’t help. What you wanted was for her to sleep with you to prove you weren’t gay. She thought the whole thing was an elaborate ruse to manipulate her into coming across with sex.

Finally you managed to convince a Portuguese woman to visit your room. While kissing you realized that she shaved her upper lip, which convinced you that you had chosen a woman with a mustache because you were secretly gay. You then lost your erection, which seemed to confirm that you were gay. She asked if she was too fat and you told her not at all, she looked great, it wasn’t her. You told her the problem was you. You told her that you might be gay. She said she was surprised because you didn’t act gay and you said it was a big surprise to you, too. After an awkward half hour, she left confused.

It eventually became so bad that when you went to the movies and the kissing part came, you’d try to figure out who you were watching, the man or the woman, and which person’s pleasure you identified with. You decided the best way to deal with a troubled mind was to get your body healthy. You started eating vegetables and doing fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups twice a day until you heard that gay men were really into fitness and you quit. The only time you were remotely deck was that brief period when you awakened in the morning with the ocean light streaming in the window, until you remembered with a terrible suddenness that you were gay but just didn’t know it yet.

That same summer in Boston, your clothes abruptly didn’t fit because you’d grown an inch and a half at age twenty-four. You wondered if it was due to having been given acid by college students when you were entering puberty. Maybe the drug slowed something down, and the XTC kicked it in. You know you’re not as smart as you once were and sometimes you can feel it, like that guy in
Flowers for Algernon
. After a week, you went to a free clinic in Dorchester and felt guilty in the waiting room because there were people in much worse shape than you— wounds leaking from under bandages, amputees on crutches held together with tape and wire, one man with a glandular condition that made his face turn into a giant potato, and a girl so young you couldn’t believe she was pregnant. You waited, trying not to stare but watching nevertheless, and feeling like a moron with a growth spurt. After a half-hour physical checkup, the doctor pronounced your health excellent, and asked for the form. You said what form, and he said the one for the job and you both frowned until you explained that you’d come in on your own because you had grown an inch and a half and were pretty scared. He nodded his little head and blinked. He began searching a Rolodex, and you figured it was for some pituitary specialist that would run a billion tests and say, sorry pal, you’ll grow until your organs cannot support your body, but you’ll set a record for coffin size. The doctor handed you a slip of paper with a name and number on it. You went home and made the call and the guy was a psychiatrist and you realized that the clinic doctor thought you were delusional. (You stop and reread this and doubt people will believe it. But it’s the truth. You had to buy all new clothes.)