“Well, I’m retired now. But during my career I prided myself on providing the negative example.”
“Get him some coffee.”
“Goddamn phony,” said Fontana, after my father had left.
“Watch it,” I said, “that’s my progenitor.”
“He’s still a phony. Ask him how he’s doing he’ll tell you he’s swell.”
“Think for a moment,” I said. “Where are? When are we?”
“I’ll need more than a moment.”
CATAMOUNTS, as the hall began to fill it was hard not to notice how gladly you all groped for name tags at the reception table. Maybe some feared mistaken identity, so many slack bellies and hairless heads in the room, faces filigreed with worry, shame, capillary burst. Time had done an odd thing aside from the individual rot. Some alums seemed morphed into startling amalgams, especially the men. Don’t be insulted, Catamounts, and I don’t exclude yours truly, but only the pistol bulge in Special Agent Brett Meachum’s suit, for example, set him apart from his old football line mate Stan Damon. Their identical pug-nosed swaggers were intact from the old days, their hairlines in a match race to oblivion.
Once upon a time, the age of constant measurement, I’d known the ear jut, the nasal flare, of each and every Catamount. I could have sketched the pimple distribution on the chins of boys whose names I barely knew. Now features seemed smeared, indistinct. The joggers looked like other joggers. The boozers looked like other boozers. The rich loosed the same guffaws in coded bursts. The Moonbeam seemed full of types, hugging, kissing, pointing to each other’s tagged lapels in disbelief.
All save Mikey Saladin, that is, who stood apart and imperious, odd coif notwithstanding. He served himself spinach-stuffed chicken from the heated trays, retreated to a candlelit corner. Dozens hovered while he ate, poured his Pinot Grigio, whispered in his diamond-stabbed ear. Mikey nodded, grinned, great bright stones for teeth. It was a shame his critics could not see him here tonight, so regal in the Moonbeam. Maybe there were sugarball phenoms with buggy whip arms about to surmount him in dazzle, but for now Saladin’s throne seemed safe.
I threaded my way to his table, nodded toward his empty plate.
“May I take that for you, sir?”
“Sure thing,” he said.
Proximate Catamounts may recall how long his look lingered on yours truly. “Hey,” he said. “I know you.”
“Damn right you know him! said Philly Douglas.”That’s fucking Teabag! He’s a homo and a loser freak!”
Saladin winced, laid his huge hand on Philly’s shoulder, shoved him, tenderly, away.
“It’s Lewis,” he said, “right? Lewis Miner?”
“That’s me,” I said.
“I remember you. You wrote that editorial in the school paper about how we shouldn’t make racist assumptions about people.”
“I still believe that,” I said.
“It meant a lot to me,” said Saladin. “Because I’m all different races.”
“I always thought it was a tan.”
“No, I’m like my own race. And I’ve struggled at times.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“I make it look easy.”
“You’re the fucking shit, Mikey!” said Philly.
“Yo, pindick, shut up,” said Saladin. “I’m talking to Lewis here. Lewis, it’s nice to see you. I know what this fool did to you in the locker room. I want you to know that if I’d been there I would have stood up for you, the way you stood up for different races.”
“Mikey,” said Philly. “You’re the one who told me to do it!”
“Shut up, yo,” said Mikey.
“I know you would have,” I said. “And I also know you’re the best shortstop of our era, forget that kid in Detroit.”
“He’s good,” said Mikey.
“But you’re better. Now, may I take your plate?”
“Let me help,” said Mikey.
We bussed together for a while, as most of you noted with acrid bemusement. A Teabag-Mikey tandem is high comedy, I’m sure. What you may already have suppressed, however, is how much stuff Mikey dropped—platters, decanters, forks—surprising given his five gold gloves, his recent near-error-free season. I chalked it up to the wine, and, really, it wouldn’t have mattered much if he hadn’t also stopped so often to chat with everyone, pose for photographs, especially after I fetched him my Moonbeam apron to wear over his silk suit. How many pictures of Mikey pushing my bus cart with a dish towel on his arm did the Catamount community require? A multimillionaire feigning menial labor! How classic!
Fucking showboat.
That kid in Detroit had a much higher slugging percentage, too.
I stepped out for some air, found Gary in the parking lot kicking an empty champagne bottle against the curb.
“Feeling Togethered?” he said.
Downlit in the sodium lights Gary bore the aspect of a corpse newly prized from the earth, slid into a crisp white shirt.
“Nice shirt,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“So, exactly how high are you?”
“One to ten?”
“Sure.”
“Wait, one to what?”
“You should call Hollis.”
“I thought you hated him.”
“I do. But he’s your sponsor.”
“I fired him. Conflict of interest. He’s just my dealer now. And anyway, I don’t really think he’s in the mood to talk to anyone. He’s in rant mode. He’s been oiling his mace.”
“Is he coming here? You know Brett Meachum’s inside.”
“I doubt Hollis will make it up off the sofa.”
“Good. Why don’t you come inside? I’ll get you some coffee.”
“Coffee’s a drug,” said Gary.
“That’s why you’ll like it.”
“Okay.”
While you Catamounts finished your entreés (and on behalf of Rick, and Martin Miner Enterprises in general, I apologize for the parched fibrosity of the chicken), Fontana took the stage. I’d been keeping tabs on him since his meeting with Daddy Miner, watched him sip club sodas by the kitchen. Sobriety had visited him briefly, departed, like one of his resentful daughters. He was back on the blended malts.
Fontana leapt up there now with the look of the damned, hell’s house comic, doomed to tank for eternity. He bolo’d his microphone in some bizarre approximation of baroque rock stagecraft, paid out inches of the cord with each swing. The mike gunned into the hi-hat behind him, clattered to the boards in a gale of feedback. Fontana shot a sick-sweet smile, duckwalked toward the shriek like he’d planned it, and somehow it did seem in that moment as though everything—the flopsweat, the flown microphone, the miserable grin, the stunted love, the lost savings, the wasted years, the unfinished manuscript, the hundreds of thousands of Titleists driven deep into the futile, overlit night—was some grim design, the world’s most hideous and ingeniously protracted comedy routine.
And this before he’d even spoken.
“Welcome,” said Fontana now.
As I’ve mentioned, I realize a good many of you were on hand to witness all this, but I re-create the moment for those who weren’t—absent Catamounts barred from the Moonbeam by those dimensional thugs Time and Space, as well as for the youth of
Eastern Valley, potential lifers of these suburban crags and lairs, who, men like Glen Menninger would have us believe, are our future, though I’ve never fallen prey to that theory myself. The youth are their future, not ours. Still, perhaps this narrative will serve as some kind of measuring stick for tomorrow’s disasters. The dead, though, I do not write for the dead. That’s Bob Price’s deal.
“Welcome,” said Fontana again. “Welcome all and sundry to our first official Eastern Valley Togethering, celebrating the ongoing celebration of our lives!”
A cheer went up and I looked about the room, saw Catamounts everywhere bathed in warm Moonbeam gels. There were Curtis Breen and Rhada Gupta, the prom dates who lasted, nuzzling each other’s necks. There was Ryan Barwood, gay tech mogul with a private jet, and Devon Leventhal, who’d lived alone our sophomore year, abandoned by his swinger father. There was Jerome Albrecht, science whiz and rare black Catamount, rumored to be perfecting nerve gas for the Pentagon. There was Vinnie Lazlo, hooks agleam, triumphally clenched, and Ms. Tabor, slim-chested once more, wrapped tight in turquoise and gold. There was Gary, listing in cross-chemical tweak. There were Stacy Ryson and Philly Douglas, Glen Menninger, Randy Pittman, Jazzes Jasmine and Brie, and, yes, there in blood-pink shadow, sipping chardonnay, was Jazz Loretta, here to partake with us, to Together with us, Aphrodite alighting from her sea-foam chariot to join a beachside wiener roast.
Here we stood, Catamounts, or here most of us stood in glorioles of shifting hue, our scored skin smoothed, our dry throats slaked by Daddy Miner’s watery martinis, our bodies asway in the glow of the hall, us quivering and tender again, looking up at Sal Fontana, our ruined leader, who, for all his faults, had only wanted what was best for us, or, if not what was best, at least something with a minimum of degradation that reflected well on the district as a whole.
“Can you hear me, Catamounts?” said Fontana, grunted, wheezed into the microphone.
“For Godsakes,” said Stacy Ryson. “We hear you. Please don’t make that sound again.”
“Shut up, Stacy!” a voice shouted.
“Stuck-up bitch!”
“Fucking Doctor Feelbad!”
“Still-in-the-closet-in-this-day-and-age lesbian!”
Cruel titters ricocheted through the crowd.
“That’s enough, folks,” said Fontana. “Doctor Ryson has a point. I never could get that cougar sound right.”
“Neither could we!”
“Anyway,” said Fontana, “what a delight it is to find you all here. A delight and an honor both. I’ll be your host tonight, and, as one of my estranged daughters pointed out during a recent, strained telephone conversation, this evening really is a fitting capstone to my career here at Eastern Valley. No, I never did make superintendent, but bureaucracy was never my bag. I’m a hands-on people person. That’s what I always loved about being your principal. Back in those days you could touch kids with impunity! Just a joke, folks!”
“We know about you!” someone called.
“Oh, yeah? What do you know?”
“You’re the man!”
“That’s right, son, I am the man, at least for the next few hours, and this man hereby guarantees you a spectacular Togethering, a night you will never forget! I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the evening wears on and the liquor kicks in, but for now, before the music and dancing commence, I’d like to introduce a Catamount who’s made us all proud, whose personal warmth and political vision have helped catapult this region out of the cesspit and into the environs of respectable mediocrity. Ladies and gentleman, the next governor of his own living room, Glen ‘Double Dip’ Menninger!”
The legislator climbed the stage, took the mike from Fontana’s hand.
“Thanks, Sal. And I’d just like to say that during my time
researching the health-care sector for a proposed bill I came across several fine rehab clinics which might suit your needs.”
Menninger snickered. Fontana, asquat near the drum riser, swiveled a mammoth, imaginary phallus in the state senator’s direction.
“To begin, I just want to convey how much my Eastern Valley days have meant to me as husband, father, public servant, and, perhaps, future congressman from this district who promises to …
“Gracias,
El Jefe,
” said Fontana, snatched the microphone from Menninger’s hand. “We’ve got to keep this moving along. And boy do we have a special treat for you now. I remember this kid when he was a whiny little maggot with immaculate hair. He’d come running to my office every time somebody looked at him funny. I’d let him sit there and read his teenybopper magazines, but eventually I got fed up, told him to shut his trap and carry a buck knife. I’m not sure if he ever took my advice, but he returns to us tonight with a calculatingly filthy hairdo and a rather inexplicable run of success with a collection of tired chord progressions and overwrought lyrics he purports to be rock ‘n’ roll. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Glave Wilkerson and the Spacklers!”
Gary joined me near the kitchen door, a joint reaching roach-hood pinched between his lips.
“Fontana’s bringing it tonight,” he said. “Bless him.”
He sparked his lighter and the flame overshot, torched the tip of his nose.
“Shit!”
SPACKLEFINGER TOOK THE STAGE with the stoic, heavy-booted gait of astronauts, men in quiet awe of their imminent triumph. They spent precisely forever strapping on their axes, adjusting their electronics. Space launches, in fact, required fewer systems checks.
Finally Glave pushed some loose strands of feral hair away, leaned into the microphone.
“Thanks, Principal Fontana, for that, I guess, introduction. Nonetheless,” Glave paused, “nonetheless, we intend to rock you full throttle tonight. I can’t say you all believed in me when it counted, or that I couldn’t have done it without you, because even the really die-hard Spacklefinger fans drifted off a few years ago, but what the fuck, I forgive you. How were you supposed to know how ginormous we’d be? Forgive and let live, that’s my motto. He who moves the most units wins, right? But seriously, for all the insults, all the betrayals, all the beatings, all the humiliations in the corridors and around the kegs, all those times you pretended to like me just to get some money off me or fool around with my sister, who, by the way, couldn’t be here tonight because her MP company has mobilized, God bless her, I forgive you, every last one of you. And now, in the hardest way that is humanly possible, I, or, rather, we, that is, Spacklefinger, rock you! One-Two-Three-Four!”