But Gwendolyn already had a child: Lenny. When he wasn’t seducing teenage production assistants or having mild cocaine seizures or picking fights with the least connected person at any given gathering, Lenny sobbed on the phone to his big sister. Hours slid by as I watched my ball team lose on mute and listened to Gwendolyn purr her encouragements: “Lenny, you just need to relax and take care of yourself. Lenny, your job is to be Lenny. Please, Lenny, you are so talented, you’ll be betraying us all if you don’t honor your dream.”
Lenny was a schmuck but he did honor his dream, which was to
be a famous schmuck. Once he’d copped some statues for his fey portrayal of Tchaikovsky his ascent was quick. His public persona depended on his near-incestuous love for his sister, so Gwendolyn and I became members of his entourage. One tabloid item even had me getting juiced and trying to shoot Lenny in the nuts out of jealousy. The juiced part was true. So was the jealousy.
Lenny had a burning need to keep me busy, far away from his sister. He found me a script-doctoring gig for the son of a legendary producer. The old man was renowned for his deeply American toupee. His kid had written a movie about all the times he’d blown his father’s friends in the pool house for Valium, cocaine.
My job was to punch it up.
“Our hero needs a buddy,” I told the kid.
“I’m the hero and I don’t need any buddies. I need a fucking three-picture deal.”
My doctoring was surgical, heroic.
“You destroyed my script,” said the kid.
“Let’s just pray I got all of it.”
That pretty much ended my stint as a healer.
LENNY, Gwendolyn, and I, we’d fly to Paris or Madrid or Mexico City for the weekend. We saw many parts of the world, but just for a few hours, a few days, drunk, still drunk, jet-drunk. It all ended in Lisbon, which was a shame, because I loved that city of fish stink and stone fountains, ornamental balustrades. While Gwendolyn coached Lenny for his role as Young Salazar I’d walk the
bario alto,
stop in cafés for a
pingo,
or, if Lenny had a night shoot, hit a club called Captain Kirk. I’d befriend the Azorean bartenders, who’d sell me fake hash, point me to the real Fado.
Those rare days Gwendolyn wasn’t required on set to provide psychic suckling for her brother, I’d take her to this restaurant I’d discovered near the bus station. You could get fried sardines with their tails stuffed in their mouths and if the waiter had a good mood
going he’d tell you all the evil he did in Angola. This aproned fiend appeared intent on making us shudder, especially Gwendolyn, who’d wriggle in her chair as though worried he’d rape her right there on the table, those old junk buses chuffing by. She wants to be raped, I remember thinking, then hating myself for thinking that, cringing from myself in my head, then cringing from the man, hating him. Then not hating him, but noting him, as I’d noted the swastikas. Lisbon was plastered with them—on colonnades, church doors, toilet stalls.
I know, Catamounts, it’s an ancient Indian symbol, but it still says “Heads Up!” to me. I preferred the sunnier sentiment painted in English on a slum wall:
Portugal is Cursed by God.
“Took them four hundred years to figure that out?” I said to Gwendolyn.
“I do love you, L.,” she said.
She sounded so odd just then, that studied wistfulness borrowed from the pool house fellator’s mother, the one who thought skin-popping liquefied gorilla fetus would keep her forty-eight forever.
“Hey,” I said. “There’s a statue of Hank the Nav I want to see.”
I was feeling jaunty, Catamounts. The things of the world had been named, but not nicknamed.
“You’re not listening,” said Gwendolyn.
“I’m listening, baby,” I said. “You
do
love me. I
do
love you. Was there something else? Your feet still hurt? We can skip the Prado.”
“The Prado is in Madrid.”
“Precisely. Sintra, though. That’s a must for us. Lord Byron called it the most beautiful place on earth. He had a clubbed foot. His famous poem is pronounced Don Jew-On, for those in the know. That’s what Ms. Tabor told us and—”
“Lenny and I are flying to New York tonight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I had someone take my stuff from your apartment. Thanks for letting me stay there.”
“Stay there? We live together.”
“Since when?”
“Since you moved all your stuff in. Is this Lenny’s idea?”
“He needs me.”
“Are you guys getting married?”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“You’re the one who fucks your brother.”
“You know that’s not true,” said Gwendolyn. “You’re being so goddamn disgusting, Lewis.”
“Why is it disgusting? Who are we to judge? Maybe if I had a brother like Lenny I’d fuck him, too. But I’m an only child. I had to learn to pleasure myself. Jerk myself up by my own jockstraps.”
I guess I figured I could win her back with bad comedy.
“Good-bye” said Gwendolyn, peeled off into the crowd.
It wasn’t a very heroic note to end things on, Catamounts. Here I was, ditched on the cobbles of a dead empire. Those squat rovers had ruled half the Pope-split world. I’d had the love of a goddess and relatively low upkeep. Now look at us.
Does all of this answer your query, Stacy?
Do I qualify as human, yet?
It was just a goddamn Halloween Dance.
CATAMOUNTS FAMILIAR with the Miner family agon (I guess this means you, Gary, and you alone) will be happy to know my father has finally called me back. We’ve fought our wars in the past, Marty and I, mostly over my failure to follow in his footsteps, to “make something of myself,” an expression I’ve never understood, as it implies I am both the raw material and the artisan manipulating it, which is kind of silly, not to mention physically awkward, but I don’t blame my old man. He didn’t invent the English language. (Trust me, you’d know if he had. It probably wouldn’t be a spoken language, either. A medium-hard slap on the head, for example, would suffice for “Hello,” “I love you,” and “You’re fired.”)
My father, as most of you probably know, is founder and chief executive officer of Martin Miner Enterprises. His diversified holdings include In Your Cups on Hoyt Avenue (“offering patrons an intimate saloon experience since 1983”) and the Moonbeam Catering Hall, where, I recall, Catamount Chip Gallagher married that
woman from Dubuque, the one who fed his winning Powerball ticket to their rottweiler for religious reasons. Apparently she believed the money would distance Chip from his spiritual potential. Chip soon distanced himself from his wife, and, eventually, most of the basic forms of consciousness. That’s how I heard it, anyway.
Buy Chip a Cutty Sark down at In Your Cups, ask him yourself.
I admire the hell out of my father, who started with nothing and has lost everything more than once. The Moonbeam is his pride and joy, though it’s never done the business of its rival, Don Berlin’s Party Garden. This is fitting in its way. Whatever my father has, Don Berlin has more of the same: more house, more hair, more car. They even dated identical twins in high school.
“Prick had the prettier one,” my father said.
These last few years he’s been listing toward another catastrophe, buying useless property at inflated prices, but he’s never been a man to sit still for moderate and sustained success.
“So many guys,” he told me once, “they’re doing okay. Not too up, not too down. What’s that? Kill me you see me doing okay.”
“Okay,” I said.
We agreed to meet at the Moonbeam to work out the details of our detente. I took the bus over there because I don’t drive these days. It’s a boring story, but the version whose sole asset is brevity is this: I can’t deal with cars anymore.
I even went down to the DMV to surrender my license.
“I don’t understand,” said the clerk.
“I can’t deal,” I said. “Please, just take the damn thing. You don’t want me on the road. You don’t know what erratic is until you’ve seen me.”
“Your record looks clean here,” said the clerk, clicking, mousing.
“They can’t believe it, the cops. They’re too stunned to stop me. They think it’s a dream.”
When I got to the Moonbeam the tables were set for a wedding reception and Daddy Miner was yelling at some Mexican kids in tuxes about how the Moonbeam uniform is a short-waisted jacket
and bolo tie, not a fucking monkey suit. I’ve heard the speech a few times myself, filling in for sick busboys and valets. The Mexicans eyeballed my father long enough to ensure he understood they’d considered violence, rejected it.
“I’m the groom,” one of them said.
My father snorted, wheeled, spotted me at the DJ booth. He stomped across the dance floor, scuffed loafers thumping, his double-breasted bulk iterated by the mirrored walls until it seemed an entire squadron of Daddy Miners was in formation and on the move.
“Don’t fuck with the gear. That’s sensitive gear.”
“Good to see you, too,” I said.
“Take the bus?”
“Bet on it.”
“How did you get to be such a whack job, Lewis? Am I a whack job and don’t even know it? Your mother had her moments but she was a product of her era. I’m not buying you a car.”
“Don’t want one. Can’t deal with them. Speak not of my mother.”
“America is a car country, Lewis. New Jersey is a car state. The Amish are one state over.”
“I’m bucking the system.”
“You can’t buck the system unless you’re in the system.”
“Reformer’s fallacy.”
“Don’t talk fancy to me. I sent you to college to talk fancy and you couldn’t hack it. What about money?”
“It’s the root of something.”
“Don’t be a wiseass, Lewis. People just pretend to like them.”
“I’m fine for money.”
“We both know that’s bullshit.”
“Had enough for the bus, didn’t I?”
“I’m not giving you any money. It’s not a principle thing. I just don’t have it. The economy’s in the crapper. The entire homeland’s in the crapper, far as I can tell. Or maybe it’s just me in the crapper. Anyway, no benjamins for you, my boy.”
“I don’t want your blood money.”
“Blood money? I’m a restaurateur.”
“Watered-down-vodka money.”
“Watch your mouth, boy. That watered-down-vodka money could have put you through college.”
“Anyway, I don’t want it.”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell me what you
do
want or I won’t know what to deny you. Oh, shit, look at those flower arrangements! Roni! Roni!”
Roni is the assistant manager at the Moonbeam, a big pretty girl with a wrecked nose from a grade school newcomb incident. She’s an unnatural blonde, sprinkles glitter on her clavicles. Her father was a jockey who walked out when his daughter started to dwarf him, or when he, as Roni once put it, “gianted me.” Her mother works the bread slicer at the River Mall bakery. Roni’s saving up for law school and the Moonbeam will suffer dearly when she leaves. She’s a managerial genius, though that doesn’t stop my father from doing everything in his power to drive her away. It’s his version of gratitude.
“Dang, Marty,” she said now, stilting up on space boots that made her even more enormous, her perpetual parricide. “Why do you have to yell like that? The flowers are fine.”
She wore a phone jack in her ear. A wire dangled near her chin.
“The flowers look plastic,” said my father.
“They are plastic.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What’s the point then?”
“Perception.”
“Perception?”
“You heard me.”
“I perceive a lovely arrangement of flowers,” said Roni.
“Injection-molded.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You think
I’m
crazy? Look at my kid.”
“’Sup, kid.”
“Hi, Roni. Nice to see you.”
“Don’t get any ideas about Roni,” said my father. “Nobody fools with Roni. That includes me.”
“You are a sick man, Marty. I am not amused. I’ll be back in the office running your business if you need me.”
“Thanks, Roni. You know I’m just joking, right?”
“Yes,” she said. “In the refrigerator. It’s thawed! I thawed it!”
Roni shook, pinched the wire nearer to her chin.
“Her mom makes her nuts,” said my father.
Together we watched Roni cross the dance floor. It was nearly like a moment, Catamounts, the two of us together there, a dirty old man and his horny not-young son.
“I’ll miss her when she deserts me.”
“She just wants to have a life,” I said.
“This is life!” said Daddy Miner with a dominion-gathering sweep of his arm: heat trays, coat check, mop closet.
“So,” I said, “should we go somewhere, get a coffee?”
“I’ve got coffee here. I’ve got big fucking cans of it. Canned coffee is no good?”
“I thought we were going to talk.”
“Canned coffee hinders talk? What are we supposed to talk about, anyway?”
“I don’t know. The bad feeling between us. How I’ve been a disappointment to you. How I haven’t—”
“Whoa, hold up,” said my father. “I don’t care about all that crap.”
“You said I had to make something of myself.”
“It was a fucking suggestion, Lewis. Sue me. What is it with you kids today? Do you think my world turns on your happiness? Your success? Do what you please. Just make sure you’re alive to wipe my ass when I’m an invalid.”
“I’m alive,” I said.
“Not now. Later.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Fine,” said my father. “Then we’re done here.”
The way I told it to Gary later, it was a kind of liberation. Go forth, Daddy Miner was saying, be your own disappointment. There’s a whole wide world to fail in.
It makes me wonder how many of you Catamounts still buckle under expectation’s yoke. Your mothers, your fathers, they just want you to be one of the breathers. They’ve got better things to worry about than your fulfillment. Here are a few of them: What time is the six o’clock news? Will I ever piss with force again? Chicken or chicken salad?
ME, I was hankering for some eggs by the time I left the Moonbeam. There was a new luncheonette on the corner called The Corner Luncheonette. The cutesy name was worrisome. Maybe they served those tasteless tiny roasted potatoes instead of curly fries. Besides, I have my favorite diners laid out like winking cities in my mind. I’m wary of parvenus. But this one must have been some Flying Dutchman luncheonette, a phantom spoon newly arrived, already a pit, the Formica cracked, the leatherette booths in shreds. The place must have floated in from out of state, Cleveland, say, under heavy cloud cover.
I took a counter stool, ordered eggs, sunnyside-up, coffee, toast. When the food came all I could do was stare at it.
“What’s wrong, buddy?” said the counterman. He looked fatigued, somewhat filthy. Maybe he was a ghost counterman.
“Nothing,” I said.
How could I explain to him the food didn’t look quite like food, that it seemed more a model of the meal they might eventually serve you?
Or what about the absurdity of these sunnyside-up eggs, which did, in fact, resemble suns? There were so many books I’d read—mediocre fare, admittedly—where the home star was likened to a
blob of yolk. Which was the original image, I wondered, egg as sun, or sun as egg? Furthermore, what about those sci-fi worlds lit by two or more suns, or two or more moons, even? I licked some butter from my toast.
“Don’t like my eggs?” said the counterman.
“I’ll get to them.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a strategy.”
“Is this a real diner?” I said.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. I’m having one of those moments.”
“Moments?”
“Everything seems a little off. A shade wrong. I thought it was this place but it must be me. I’m misfiring.”
“Are you on drugs?” said the counterman.
“No, are you on drugs?”
“Not real drugs.”
Some summer-school girls trooped in with their backpacks and headphones, jubilant nipples puffing through their tank tops. Hilarious, I thought, in homage to Gary, if one can think in homage, and then I suddenly remembered my first literature-induced boner, if literature can include
The Girls of Galamere 5
by Lincoln A.H. Duvalier, a novel about a planet in another solar system where nubiles cavorted in the dying light of a dwarf star. I’d read the book a half-dozen times without locating its fundamental flaw: How could a dwarf star sustain nubile life?
Now I dug into my eggs, wondered at the myriad connections the mind could make. Meanwhile, in another sector of my mind not prone to wonderment, I felt some lurid urge to blow the whole mess out onto the smeared steel awning above the Fry-O-Later. I’ve never paid these noises much heed. Sometimes, alums, I’ll be walking down the street, catch myself chanting softly, “Blow my friggin’ head off, blow my goddamn friggin’ head off.”
Doesn’t everybody, Catamounts?
The voices, I figure they’re just a kind of roll call, a homeroom
attendance of the soul. Delusional Confidence? Here. Underlying Sense of Worthlessness? Here. Cycle of Emotional Abuse? Step off, motherfucker!
Stacy? Stacy Ryson?
Most of my voices are too vain for harm. There are exceptions, of course, inner tyrants who chuckle at naive notions of pluralism and fair play, or attitudinal zealots, like those life coaches on TV. One of these latter bellowed from some high moist pulpit of a lobe.
“Gravy boat!” It said. “Stay in the now!”
I looked up at the counterman, then remembered my father barking those words one Thanksgiving years ago, my mind wandering as it was wandering now, making its maybe-not-so-beautiful-nor-extraordinary connections while a row of aunts and uncles waited for me to pass what wasn’t technically a gravy boat but more on the order of a mason jar filled with pan-spooned turkey juice.