Glave, your rendition of “People Get Ready” was a travesty, but we were all touched by your presence, and I won’t soon forget the lone tear coursing down your meth-carved cheek as you, Gary, Chip, and I lowered our troubled but beloved mentor into the earth.
That day I drove back to the Nearmont Cemetery in Fontana’s car I made a funny discovery. Walking up to the plot I noticed the lawn all around it dotted with bright white orbs, hailstones from heaven. Just beyond the treeline, I realized, was the Nearmont Driving Range. I picked up one of the golf balls, made to balance it on
the flat edge of the gravestone. I’d seen grievers do it with pebbles in movies about my people, the Jews, but the ball just kept rolling off, plopping into the grass.
I laid down in it myself, boots up on Fontana’s tomb. I guess I was waiting for something, some kind of inner montage, but aside a few stray images, Fontana on parade in the corridors of Eastern Valley High, or brooding on life’s purpose behind his cluttered desk, or harnessed to his Hoover in the buff, no suitable reel unspooled. I did recall that book on his office windowsill:
What the Aztecs Knew.
What did the Aztecs know? How to carve a beating heart from some poor bastard’s chest? Actually, according to Craig Sperlman, who’d been on a pre-Columbian kick before Colette, the Aztecs knew a good deal. They knew the earth, the stars, the vagaries of lake travel, the secret to spicy cuisine. They knew crowd control and how to exact tribute from client tribes. Obviously they knew show business. But most of all, I think, they knew, as Will Paulsen may or may not have known, that they were fucked.
It had been foretold.
The longer I stayed there at Fontana’s grave, the less I could remember him, the more I dwelled on other things: how I’d better get some car insurance and what a hassle that would be, how Penny Bettis was lowballing me on the Malaysian biographies and there was nothing I could do except pick up more work at the Moonbeam, or, God forbid, Don Berlin, Jr.’s Orchard of Bliss.
Roni was on my mind, too. We’d hit the apex of our passions a few months after Fontana’s funeral. Winter had been a steep, achesome slide to uncertainty: jittery phone calls, canceled dates. Roni started picking fights for sport, wore a Spacklefinger hat to goad me. She’d disagree with everything I said, even, “Good burger,” talk incessantly about anal sex in the manner of her favorite radio jocks, which I took to be the symptom of some greater cultural malaise, but when I finally said, “I’m sticking it in your ass” and stuck it in her ass, she screamed, swiveled, punched me in the nuts.
“Pigfuck!” she said.
I told her that was Stacy Ryson’s word, and besides, a pigfuck wouldn’t have warned her first.
“I’m trying to be a good guy,” I said. “You can stick something in my ass, too, if you want. I hear that’s the happening thing now, anyway.”
“Fuckpig,” said Roni.
“That’s more like it,” I said.
Roni calmed down and we made some popcorn, watched an old movie on the Boring Old Movie Channel, the kind with men in suits and women in veiled hats and nobody trusting each other much.
It was no submarine flick, but it was one of Roni’s favorites and I pretended to be engrossed.
“This so great,” I said.
“Lying sack of shit.”
I let it go because I loved her, Catamounts, but most of me knew it was over. She’d refused to wear the leg warmers I’d bought for her birthday. She was going to California and I guess she wanted to be certain she’d ruined everything so she wouldn’t come back. Or maybe she was just sort of done with me, looking past my shoulder into the blur of better days.
Another Hazel in the making.
Driving out from the Nearmont Cemetery I thought about the Erasing Angel, that memory cleanser I’d once pictured myself becoming, roving from town to town, burying all the badness, leaching out the poison history. The Kid could have ridden shotgun, his spent, dribbly member flapping in his lap as we rattled over the roads of this great nation, highways and byways cut by men and women through our shiny, ingenious land. We’d be weary fellows, far from our dreamer, the sun burning through the windshield, the trees and cities and deserts and fields unfurling before our tremulous advance. We’d drive on with the truth in our hearts: The mission was pure folly.
There’s nothing for the pain, as Doc Felix knew.
“Love it or leave it,” he’d said.
This Catamount wasn’t going anywhere, Catamounts.
I took a shortcut down Mavis to Gary’s house. We sat out on his patio, passed the bong between us. The view here isn’t much, no mayonnaise factory, just bushes, birds. I knew the names of them now.
“What are you, a fucking ornithologist?” said Gary.
“A bird guy?” I said.
“Yes,” said Gary, “that would be a bird guy, moron.”
It was good to be here with Guano again. It’s not so bad at the Palace of Satan, either. Gary’s father, maybe out of guilt, lets us do as we please, serves us trays of hoagies and beer. The patio thick with our smoke, he’ll sniff it up, say, “Good harvest this year.”
Sometimes he’ll take a hit, too, tell us how everything going down in the world these days is a joke, that Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, and Leon Trotsky, his Big Three from history, are sitting around busting their guts at how bad we’ve botched it. Then he’ll go back inside, bid for antique candy on the Internet. It’s his hobby. He has lollipops from the Wilson administration.
“Son-fondler,” Gary will hiss when he leaves.
This time Ben and Clara were gone to visit Todd in the city and we had the house to ourselves. We stayed out on the patio anyway. Gary had that week’s
Gazette
and he pointed to a picture of Judy Tabor, the same windswept beach shot I’d seen at Auggie’s house, the rich husband cropped out. “Popular Teacher Returns to Heal Catamount Community,” read the headline. She’d been appointed the new principal of Eastern Valley High.
“Maybe she’ll publish your updates,” said Gary. “You still writing those?”
“Not really,” I said. “Time to move on.”
“You’ve said your piece?”
“I’m up-to-date.”
“Maybe you should send them to Bob Price.”
“Fuck Bob Price.”
“Amen, brother.”
“
‘Good Hands’
is good, though,” I said.
“It’s okay. If you like sentimental bullshit. I’m happy he screwed over Mira, though. The whore deserved it.”
“Gary, you’re pathetic.”
“Yeah, right, me, I’m pathetic.”
“She didn’t like you as much as she liked Bob. Can’t you just accept that? Why does that make her a whore?”
“Are you hanging out with that Sperlman guy, going all feminist on me? You know he goes to sex addict meetings? Crackhead Jesus freak Tiffany, who’s also a nympho, she sees him there.”
“It’s none of my business, Gary. People do what they have to do to get well.”
“Oh, do they? You should be on a fucking talk show with wisdom like that. The fucking Teabag show. The nation is going nuts for Teabag. He just wants us all to get well. We’ll do what we have to do.”
I stood.
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Sit down,” said Gary. “I was just kidding. It’s this weed. Must be the pesticides or something. They make you all bitter about life. I bought this stuff from Loretta.”
“Loretta’s dealing?”
“Just to me. It’s Hollis’ leftover stash. Loretta wanted to unload it. You know, pay for their kid. It’s going to be a bitch moving it, though. Guess I’ll have to smoke it myself.”
“Her kid,” I said. “The kid is Will Paulsen’s kid.”
“Will Paulsen? Really?”
“Yeah.”
“That guy was a head case. But a good bike rider.”
“He stood up for me in the locker room,” I said.
“Good for him.”
“You weren’t there, Gary. He was.”
“I was in study hall.”
“Still, it was Will Paulsen. Don’t pop shit about him.”
“Copy that,” said Gary.
We sat there, listened to the birds for a while. Maybe Gary was a bit pissed about my Will Paulsen worship, but I didn’t care. Will was on my mind and I could see him now, thirteen, fourteen, cruising around on his puny bike, flipping curbs, popping wheelies, riding the wide circuit of the neighborhoods, nodding kindly and pedaling onward, maybe back to the fields behind the power plant. He’d sit there and dream of his escape, maybe never quite able to picture it, not the philosophy, not the squash, not the ocean life, not knowing he’d be home again, either, with a son who called another man, a bad man, “Dad.”
Maybe he’d be dreaming of nothing at all, just sitting in the high grass with a breeze on his face. I guess it didn’t matter because he was somebody else’s dream now, mine, in fact, had been since that hit-and-run on the County Road. Will was dead like Hazel and Fontana were dead, like all of us would be dead.
It was a dumb thought, Catamounts, I know, a pretty fucking obvious thought, but it was that kind of weed, maybe, the kind that if you smoked enough of it even the dog turds on the curb would glisten with meaning. The pesticides, if there were pesticides on the weed, they definitely gave the world a bitter taste, too, or at least made the world fall away from you somehow, like you could be strapped to some satellite spinning off through space, a satellite beaming sea stars and factory fights and unjust wars and second-rate sitcoms all across the earth, a satellite in deep orbit shooting out rays of entertainment, its hazard lights winking red in the void. Yes, there must have been some seriously bad spray on Gary’s weed that could make you think you were truly harnessed to this device, able to breathe in cold airless space, plus blessed with supersonic vision like one of those floating telescopes, so you could look down on the earth and see all the ant-people running around like crazy as though it all meant something, and you not wanting to mock them like Jesus or Trotsky but wanting to comfort them, to fly down on your satellite ship and land softly before the ant-people like some kind of
entertainment-beaming space priest, caress their antennae, their carapaces, their pincered mouths, only to discover that as you do, the ant shells fall away, all the ant-people you touch, the antness of them falls away and there beneath the carapaces are fluffy little cougar cubs, that’s right, alums, tiny baby catamounts, scared but playful mountain kitties lost down here in Eastern Valley. You must take them up in your arms, my brothers, my sisters, if you are such a satellite flyer, an ant-person toucher, you must take these soft and weepy needballs up in your arms, tug at the fur on their necks (they like that), hush them, kiss them, cuddle them, tell them it’s going to be okay, everything will be okay, even though, of course, it won’t, it can’t, but still, there they are in your arms, so sad, so fuzzy, so confused, what else should you say? What else should anyone ever say, ever?
“What the fuck are you mumbling about?” said Gary.
“Me? Nothing.”
Gary hacked some lung chunks into his hand, started to smear them into his army pants. He picked up the
Gazette
instead, laid the biggest loogie under the photo of Judy Tabor.
“I’m glad they hired her,” I said. “It’s what Fontana would have wanted.”
“Would have wanted?” said Gary. “Why do people say shit like that? You can say that about anything. Maybe Fontana would have wanted me to dig up your dead mother and bang my dick on her brittle, powdery skull until it crumbled.”
I’ve never punched someone smack in the jaw before, Catamounts. It was a strange combination of sickening satisfaction and searing pain that shot through my wrist like something electrical. Dirtfuck teetered on his wrought-iron chair, pitched over to the patio stones. He looked up from where he lay, rubbed his teeth, shook off the daze.
“What the fuck was that?” said Dirtfuck.
“That would be love,” I said.
“I have no idea whether this is the way people talk, but I suspect it is, and that I’ve learned something. In any case, I was impressed, amused, and—since blurb writers like to list things in threes—moved by the events in
Home Land
. This Catamount really listened up.”
—Ann Beattie
“Comic genius on every page. Lewis Miner speaks truth to power, part Lenny Bruce, part Leon Trotsky, with tiny hints of John Belushi and Camus in there, too. Holden Caulfield, fading poster boy for pissed-off alienated youth, comes to mind, not by way of comparison, but rather because
Home Land
would be his bible.”
—Thomas Beller
“A biting satire on the confused aspirations and ideals of American youth. Sam Lipsyte eulogizes the quiet disappointments of yesteryear’s high school graduates through the voice of his anti-hero, Lewis Miner, a kind of Holden Caulfield for Generation X.”
—Marco Notarianni,
Times Literary Supplement
“Playful, serious as a death mask, inventive, filthy, and gifted as can be, [Lipsyte] takes on contemporary reality and gives it one hell of a fight … . A despairing riot of laughs. Read it now.”
—Chris Roberts,
Uncut
“A profoundly funny comic novel … . No pocket can possibly be complete without a copy.”
—David Belcher,
The Glasgow Herald
Praise for
The Subject Steve
“Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny. In a time when the language of most novels is dead on arrival, this book, about a dying man, is startlingly alive.”
—Jeffrey Eugenides
“I laughed out loud, and I never laugh out loud. You’ll want to rest up before reading this one. Thank you, Sam.”
—Chuck Palahniuk
“First-rate satire and writing that dares to be bold and edgy and a little ragged … . [A] spot-on DeLillo-like excavation of our consuming consumer culture, and the ultimate fear—the fear of death—that lurks beneath it.”
—Andrew Roe,
San Francisco Chronicle
“Stings as it makes you laugh … . Lipsyte’s poignant acidity is nearly flawless.”
—Alexandra Ringe,
BookForum
“Smart, savvy, and admirably ambitious … . Lipsyte excels in a kind of edgy hilarity, a breathless mirth the function of which is to mask feelings of dread and discomfort.”
—William Skidelsky,
Times Literary Supplement
“Sam Lipsyte’s gifts as a stylist are mighty indeed: sentence after sentence is so cannily cast as to merit blowing up and sticking in a frame … . A book so sharp you can hardly stand to pick it up.”
—Dominic Maxwell,
Time Out London
“Strange, disturbing, and hilarious.”
—Maurice Newman,
Irish Independent
Praise for
Venus Drive
“Sam Lipsyte is a wickedly gifted writer.
Venus Drive
is filled with grimly satisfying fractured insights and hardcore humor. But it also displays some inspired sympathy for the daze and confusion of its characters. Above all, it’s wonderfully written and compulsively readable with brilliant and funny dialogue, a collection that represents the emergence of a very strong talent.”
—Robert Stone
“Sam Lipsyte can get blood out of a stone—rich red, human blood from the stony sterility of contemporary life. His writing is gripping—at least I gripped this book so hard my knuckles turned white.”
—Edmund White
“I like it when short stories—metaphorically speaking, of course—smack me in the face, kind of like what Kafka said about art being like an axe. And that’s what Sam Lipsyte’s stories do—they come at you like a fist, they knock you around, they make you wince, they make you look away, and then they make you look back.”
—Jonathan Ames
“The new world as viewed by the newest.”
—James Purdy
“Pitch perfect.
Venus Drive
explores the complexity of despair with poignancy and sly wit.”
—Christine Muhlke,
The New York Times Book Review
“It’s fascinating to read a writer who can bring you so efficiently to such an uncomfortable place.”
—James Hanrahan,
Voice Literary Supplement