The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (25 page)

The soles of her feet were black, and a trickle of blood ran over one pale thigh. I couldn’t decide whether she had fallen down the stairs or given up on the climb and taken a seat, only to die in the process. Her face may have been in moonlight, as it was impossibly white. One thing was clear—she was not supposed to be looked at like this. I unbuttoned my shirt and draped it over her.

“Thanks,” she said.

I jumped back and tumbled down the stairs to the landing, hitting the back of my head. When I came to, she was gone and Clete was kneeling beside me. Other people were stepping over my torso to go upstairs or come down.

“These creatures have strangely human qualities,” Clete said, “like recuperating ghosts.”

He lifted his eyes to follow their movement. Even in this situation, he and I thought of these house squatters with a combination of condescension and ironic pride, owing to the van and our independent living skills.

“How many people are at this shindig?” I asked.

Clete didn’t answer. He waited for the landing to clear. Then he leaned close and whispered, “Wilt thou be made whole?”

It was time to go home.

Coming down from the mushrooms, I realized how high we had been and how long it would be before we were fully grounded. Along with that came the tedious desire to have never taken the stuff. With psychedelics, there was always a lingering descent, during which time you were not high but could not sleep or relax, like a hangover that begins while you’re still drinking and spoils the whole evening. It comes with a bottoming-out feeling. The designs you’d imagined and the new light that you’d shed on your life grow dim and dull and disappear as you nose-dive. Your mind strains to retain some sense of what it was that had you smiling and optimistic, but you can’t touch it. The dream of the high, as well as the high itself, vanishes, and the asphalt’s cracks remind you that you’re no kid and less young with every plodding step. Hallucinating has taken you no closer to understanding what it is you mean to do with your life.

Clete and I marched down the wide street to the heart of the little town, the bare streets and dark houses clucking disparagingly at us. In one window, beyond gauze curtains, an orange light licked at the dark world and dim figures crossed and recrossed the floor. A cold wind taunted the domestic bushes along the street and made my skin prickle and bump. I had lost my shirt to the approximately dead girl and longed for shelter, my nipples turning to squat little stones.

“I should have brought my coat,” I said maybe a hundred times.

“We’re at ten thousand feet,” Clete said, removing his shirt and handing it to me. “The nights are always cold.” He was wearing a wife-beater underneath.

I buttoned up the shirt, which was several sizes too large for me. When we turned on Main to head out of town, the sleeves rippled like a swath of skin separating from my body.

Morning arrived. The sun should have heated me up, but my body held tenaciously to the cold. We stopped at a diner on the highway and ate eggs. Clete told me about the party, as if I hadn’t been there. Stu had come around enough to have several drinks and pass out.

“His essential movement is to seek unconsciousness,” Clete said.

Our booth had bad springs, which put our heads close to our eggs, a handy convenience this morning. A scrambled bit of egg escaped my mouth and hit the plate. Its brief contact with my palate had turned it an unnatural red, the color of maraschino cherries.

“Do I look funny?” I asked Clete.

Clete shrugged. “I’ve known you too long to say.”

The food sated something in me deeper than hunger. Three walls of the diner were made of plate glass that needed cleaning, and we spent a long time watching a smeary light shift over the pines and aspen and wide stretches of high grass. The waitress had big eyes and narrow shoulders. Her name tag read “Kale.” She knew Clete and would only talk in his ear, which made me a little paranoid.

“I’d introduce you,” he said, “but she doesn’t like talking to strangers.”

“Is this really the right line of work for her?”

She went from table to table, listening and nodding, pointing to the menu. She’d whisper to one person, who’d speak to the others.

“Her legs are nice,” I said.

“Every man in here is half or more in love with her,” Clete said. He got her to scrape leftover eggs onto our plates.

“This guy’s omelet has a weird spice,” I said.

Clete forked a bite and savored it a moment.

“Cigarette ash,” he said.

We stayed in the diner until the eggs and coffee had worn down my chill. Clete paid the shy waitress, and we hit the pavement again, happy for the heat of the sun. He carried a white paper bag bearing the diner’s logo—a possibly cross-eyed elk. Inside were packets of salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, and nondairy creamer.

Twenty minutes down the road, the peak of a tall black construction crane appeared. We watched it a long time before we got close enough to see the van. At the end of the crane’s long metal wire was a big round magnet, which snapped onto the van’s roof. Tireless and thoroughly defeated, the van rose up into the air. We joined the others—a crowd had gathered—in applause when it was set down on a flatbed truck. This was a terrible loss for us, but it was a great spectacle.

“We can kiss that one good-bye,” Clete said.

“My worldly possession is in there,” I said.

There was nothing to do but get the bag of mushrooms and hike back to Val’s.

This series of events—losing my coat and the drugs and other secrets and luxuries of my life, along with being given a new name by someone mumbling out of a coma, and encountering the not-quite-naked-or-dead girl to whom I gave the shirt off my back—combined in an almost scientific way to make me swear off drugs. I was twenty-nine years old and wanted to change before I hit thirty. Clete and I developed a plan for me as we ambled back, a plan that would work all that summer and beyond. Even after I left the mountain, it stuck. The plan had four parts.

One: I would not get a job. There’s always some guy with a goatee and great weed to turn you on during a break, or some friendly braless girl tired of washing dishes or mowing the graveyard or sweeping up the pencil shavings in Rosa Parks Elementary School who lights a joint or drops a line and offers to share. Work was a haven for drug users and I couldn’t risk it.

Two: I’d use willpower and the help of friends who, even if high themselves, would discourage me from joining them.

Three: The mushrooms, being organic and free, didn’t count.

Four: In order to be realistic and give the plan half a chance of working, I would stay drunk as much as possible.

A few people—including you and the therapist they assigned me when you had the flu—have since pointed out that as many people are done in by booze as by any drug or family of drugs. But Clete and I saw it differently. Being drunk was a momentary lapse into happiness, like drifting off while listening to a song about sex, whereas the drugs I craved were symphonies. They played at that low level just below the timbre of thought, a mattress of sound you could sleep on for days or a lifetime. Liquor relaxes the brain and lets the fool in you rise up, while the drugs I loved kept me still inside myself, permitting me to reside there in something like peace.

That’s a hard thing to give up, and it’s easier if you’re drunk.

We moved in with Val and lived in the dog-sitting house three months. Without rehab or an arrest to keep me in line, I became Keen and did no drugs.

You asked for a happier time. That was it.

A lot of people lived in the house that summer. It was hard to say who did and who didn’t on any particular day. I had the boy’s room, and almost nightly I had to kick strangers from my bed, which was made to look like a sports car.

Our regular lineup, however, included only a few of us.

Stu: Except for Val, Stu had lived in the house the longest. He had the teenage daughter’s room and a job at the library, which lent out videos as well as books. He stole tapes he thought we might like. (The big-screen television was gone, but we had a portable hooked to the extension cord.) He had a nervous habit of chewing his toenails with his teeth, the indecent fragments littering the carpet like exactly what they were—little scraps of us we no longer needed. When I complained, he claimed I was jealous.

“Of what?” I was genuinely stumped.

“I can put both my feet all the way behind my head,” he said.

I shrugged. “I can wiggle my ears.”

This comment earned his contempt. “You can’t pick up girls wiggling your ears.”

The obvious question occurred to me, but I was shy about asking.

Stu went on, his voice dipping confidentially. “Your ears are not your best feature, Keen. You shouldn’t draw attention to them.”

Lila: She was the girl all the boys wanted to fuck. In any community of a certain size, there is always such a girl. I once worked in a landscaping crew, and we all wanted the foreman’s wife. She wasn’t beautiful or even particularly acceptable, but she was present and we liked the way she carried her tools.

Lila was pretty, but something about her life kept her discouraged and a little sour. She moped from room to room as if looking for her keys or purse, too preoccupied to respond to the typical direct address. Her body was bottle-shaped, but not Coke bottle. More like a flask. Yet every guy there wanted to get her square butt in bed. It might have been her slutty eyelids and the dark eyes they hid—eyes the color of bark but with a luster her attitude seemed to deny. I had a powerful sex drive in those days. My brain, bored without drugs, let my body have full rein, and it demanded Lila.

One day she told me that her first language was German, but she quit speaking it when she started kindergarten. Now she couldn’t remember any of it—a whole language lost inside her. I thought maybe that was what she was looking for when she meandered about the house, the language she’d been born into.

After I’d lived there a month, and only then because she showed up in the green tube top, I realized Lila was the dead girl.

The dogs: Ruff, the golden retriever, was always happy to see you and generally optimistic about life, the way a dog ought to be. Ready, the terrier, reminded me of my third-grade teacher, who had her nose in our desks during recess, looking for something she could use to dim the day. Ready barked at the mailman. He barked at the neighbors. He barked at every single one of us who lived in the house. He barked at the sound of the toilet. A red hummingbird feeder in the backyard sent him into mad barking convulsions. Let in the house, he did laps around the kitchen, sniffing out disorder.

Ruff would wait by the tub when I got out of the shower and gently lick my legs, but Ready would sniff my toes, bark, and occasionally gnaw my Achilles tendon. Many evenings he would latch on to a pant leg and growl while whatever chump who got nabbed—often me—swung his leg back and forth, the little dog careening.

Val: A familiar kind of sweet-hearted addict who couldn’t say no to anybody. She loved heroin because it let her remain kind. Her junk-sweet heart opened the house to any loser who came along.

Clete summed her up best: “Her dilemma is that she’s alive.”

One day she and I were in her room (the master bedroom, which seemed only fair), running a chisel around a window that wouldn’t open. Without electricity, we relied heavily on breezes. After we got it loose and propped up a ski pole to keep it open, she told me she had learned the secret of masculine behavior.

It sounded like something I ought to know.

Her ex-boyfriend, a Mexican guy from Oklahoma, had told her that some nights he’d say anything to get a woman in bed and other nights he wouldn’t fudge the truth at all. It could be the same woman, and he could be feeling the same desire.

“You’re all bastards
and
saints,” Val explained. “It’s just a matter of luck which day matters—the one when you’re being good or the one when you’re bad.”

I found out the Okie Mex confessed to this after breaking Val’s nose in an argument over something stupid like who did the laundry last or what kind of vegetables are okay to feed a dog. The confession was his way of apologizing and letting himself off the hook.

When she finished her story, she went to the drawer in the nightstand where she kept her junk. She cooked the stuff in a glass tube over a Bunsen burner. (The boy had a chemistry set.)

“I’d offer you some,” she said, “but Clete says I can’t give you drugs.”

“I don’t shoot up anyway.”

I’d only ever snorted heroin because I had a stubborn and wholly genuine fear of needles. Val listened while tying off with a paisley necktie from the closet, smirking only slightly and trying to hide it. I was touchy about this subject. As a teenager, I’d driven a hundred miles an hour in residential neighborhoods to prove I wasn’t afraid of dying, just of needles.

I helped her slap her arm and hunt down a vein, but I couldn’t watch the needle go in. She still wasn’t convinced. Even when the rush hit her and she fell back on the floral bedspread, the look she gave me had near equal parts of ecstasy and doubt.

I told her about waiting in line at a county clinic to get a vaccination. I was maybe six and watched each kid ahead of me burst out crying. They give shots better now, but back then it was just swab and stab. When it was my turn, I lost it, kicking the doctor in the head and eyeglasses.

“I blacked out. My mother had to tell me what I’d done.”

It had taken awhile to tell the story. Val had sunk into the lowest parts of her reclining body. She had to turn her head to make her lips work.

“It’s not fear,” she said. “Just weakness.”

She meant it in a nice way, trying to defend me and doing such a lousy job of it that she pulled me on top of her and let me screw her.

While we were fucking I thought about how this junkie friend of mine from high school had died shooting pool. He fell onto the table after making the three ball. I think he was dead a couple of shots earlier, but his body kept on eyeing the cue ball and following through. He hit face-first, breaking a tooth, which I found and stuck in my pocket. We took his body to his parents’ house and left it in the yard. I memorized the address, put the tooth in an envelope, and mailed it to them.