Authors: Jonathan Miles
A
N HOUR AFTER EATING THANKSGIVING DINNER,
Dave Masoli was staring into the toilet with wide-eyed awe and admiration. He couldn’t recall ever making anything so beautiful as this in his life. Not even the Cashomatic PayDay eLoans deal, in which he and his partner had scored a $1.3 million debt portfolio for $12,750 in a bankruptcy auction and started clearing a profit on it within
two
hours. But no, that was business, while this—this might be art. Suspended in the toilet was what could only be called the
perfect
turd, the turd a man might aspire to produce his entire life but despite daily attempts never achieve: an unbroken coil of three (Dave counted) equidistant loops so smooth and unblemished that it looked machine-made, like the compression springs on a shock absorber. Even the ends were flawless, not pinched or severed but rounded and polished-looking, as if milled on a lathe. And the color! A deep and unstreaked chocolaty brown: not Hershey’s bar brown, but that other one, the more bitter candy bar he’d always traded to his brother on Halloween—Special Dark, that was it.
Dave was stunned. How could he, the humble son of a Turnpike toll collector, a man with no discernible artistic talents save finding money where others thought none existed, have possibly squeezed something so precious and perfect out of his ass? Standing over the toilet, he wondered if this was what childbirth might feel like: the sensation of being on the sweet end of a miracle, the bodily pride, the instinctive urge to nurture and protect. But then . . . how could he preserve this glory? Flushing struck him as criminal. Leaving it, dishonorable—and anyway, no one else in the house (certainly not now, with the house overrun with Sara’s relations) was sensitive enough to appreciate a thing of beauty like this. Whoever came next would just say
ewwww,
look away as the toilet scarfed it down, then creep back downstairs whispering about the unflushed potty like it was some lowgrade family scandal, eager to finger the dirty culprit, the poo vandal.
Then a solution occurred to him: From his pants pocket, down at his ankles, he fished out his cellphone camera and aimed it at the toilet. Three digital clicks later, he verified the turd’s glory with the camera—it looked as majestic, in five-megapixel resolution on a 2.5-inch LCD screen, as it did in the bowl—before flushing it all away, wincing then sighing as it collapsed and splintered in the cruel vortex of water. Walking back downstairs, to where his in-laws were gathered around the big-screen, he felt a sense of accomplishment that he hadn’t felt in weeks, a proud, delighted buoyancy that was evident to everyone, even his dense mother-in-law, who remarked, as he settled back into his chair in the living room, that he looked like the cat who’d eaten the canary.
“Canaries? I thought we ate turkey!” exclaimed her husband, persisting in the geezer-slash-bumpkin routine he enacted whenever he and Sara’s mother came east from Ohio, which they pronounced “Oh-
HI
-ah.” Dave knew he was supposed to laugh at this, if only to be polite; just two years (re)married, he remained within the statute-of-limitations period in which he was obligated to care, or pretend to care, about what came dribbling from his in-laws’ mouths. This time, however, he let everyone else do the laughing for him: Sara’s older sister Liz, who’d recently cut her blonde hair short and shaggy like a schoolboy’s, confirming—aesthetically, anyway—Dave’s longstanding suspicion of ulterior lesbianism; Liz’s husband Jeremy, a skinny nailbiter who worked for a nonprofit something-or-other (nonprofits also striking Dave as vaguely lesbo); their twelve-year-old son Aidan, who Sara claimed was autistic but who Dave suspected was just weird; and Bev, his mother-in-law, who chuckled loudest of all, punctuating it by grabbing her husband’s knee and giving it a good hard lovey-dovey wiggle. “Ohhh, Raymond,” she said.
“Well, they do things differently back east,” said Raymond. “Didya eat a canary, Dave?”
The temptation, properly resisted, was to flip out the phone and display the snapshot he’d just taken:
Yes, Raymond. As a matter of fact I did. Then, courtesy of my astounding, amazing, even miraculous bowels, I turned it into . . . this.
Truth was, however, Dave actually
liked
his father-in-law, who struck him as the most hypoallergenic human being he’d ever met: Mortimer Snerd reincarnated as a (retired) suburban schools administrator. Sure, you’d never want to share a battle trench with him, and you’d definitely want him on the
other
side of a business deal . . . but sharing a couch with him on the holidays, once or twice a year: eh, not so bad. Dave’s former father-in-law, on the other hand—there was a ball-buster, a Brooklyn vice cop who knew every angle, was always glaring narrow-eyed at Dave as if just about to place his face from an old Wanted poster. Always pissed off and sourheaded, as if begrudging the fact that he’d been born a few hundred years too late to earn dowries on his trampy daughters, the trampiest of whom Dave had squandered six years of his life on. So Raymond Tetwick was an upgrade—corny jokes and all. Dave let the canary inquiry slide.
“What’d I miss,” he asked Raymond instead, nodding his chin at the television while reclaiming the glass of beer he’d left on the side table.
“On the game?” said Raymond. “To be honest, now, my mind wandered . . .” As if Dave couldn’t make out the digits on his own eighty-two-inch LCD screen, Raymond leaned forward, squinting, and reported, “Looks like the Cowboys are up by, looks like fourteen.”
“Felix Jones just ran it in for forty-six,” muttered Aidan, who was sprawled on the carpet, his head propped against his father’s shins.
“That’s
right,
Aidy,” said Jeremy, a long shock of gray-brown hair flapping forward as he patted his son on the shoulder with a degree of pride more suited to Felix Jones’s father, high-fiving Jones on the sidelines. “That’s great. You knew his name and everything.”
Dave rolled his eyes. No wonder the kid was a freak. And why, he wondered, did liberals all sound the freakin same? One part Mister Rogers, one part Jeff Spicoli, condescending and vacuous at the same time. Like the way homos all sounded the same, Dave thought, exhuming an old barroom disquisition: why sticking dicks in your mouth resulted in a lifelong lisp. Did cocksucking tear some hidden, hymen-like membrane in the male mouth, thereby altering the air-to-saliva ratio (as in the gas-to-air mixture in a fuel injector) so that the words came out all wet and slushy-swishy? Were scientists studying this? Probably not, Dave guessed. Too
incorrect
to address. Global warming, on the other hand: That was an open-and-shut case, as clear and tidy as a prime-time whodunit. But this—this was just,
ooooh,
a wiggly
mystery.
Dave made a mental note to bring that up with Jeremy sometime, as a verbal noogie, when he was feeling less charitable (and accomplished) than at present. He enjoyed watching Jeremy stammer; it made the holidays bearable.
Dave’s eye-roll hadn’t gone unnoticed. Aidan smirked at him, commiseratively, as if in agreement about his goo-gooey father, thereby confirming Dave’s suspicion that whatever was wrong with the kid—up to and including the various food allergies that had forced Sara to more or less cook two separate Thanksgiving dinners, one of which went more or less uneaten—wasn’t clinical.
The Raiders fumbled on the Dallas twenty-four. Though he’d claimed to be rooting for Dallas, Raymond went, “Ohhhh,” and shook his head, as if heartbroken by the brute injustice of it all; Dave got the feeling that in Raymond’s vision of the perfect world—call it Raymondville—all games ended with a hunky-dory tie, and the only legal sexual position (here Dave’s mind was wandering) was the even-steven sixty-nine, although, as he assessed Raymond and Bev from that unsavory mental angle, Dave highly doubted that they’d ever graduated from the mild injustice of missionary position. Because he’d neglected to call his bookie in time, Dave didn’t care about the game’s outcome. He suspected no one else in the room cared, either—certainly not Jeremy, who seemed frustrated that his offers to help Sara with the dishes kept being rebuffed, and who was presently molesting a thumbnail in a way that didn’t suggest he was anxious about the Raiders’ chances. Maybe Aidan, but then, with that kid, who the hell knew? “I’m saying this sucker is over,” Dave announced.
“You never know, Dave,” said Raymond, which is what passed, in Raymondville, for a heated rebuttal.
“
I
do,” Dave said, with an incontrovertible snort, then slid his almost-empty beer glass off the side table, swirled its skimpy contents to signal his purpose, and stood up. The self-satisfied groan he released, upon rising, was loud and carnal enough to cause his sister-in-law Liz to glance up in jumpy alarm. Her semistricken expression, which she quickly hid by turning toward the television screen, brought a pleased simper to Dave’s face, as if he’d whispered
boo
and she’d promptly drenched her panties. He knew she despised him, probably had from the start. He didn’t know why—he considered himself a solid guy, a more-than-decent provider with a business that was ka-chinging in this weakening economy, who took primo care of Sara and her daughter, bought ’em whatever they wanted, rubbed Sara’s feet when they were achy from jogging, drove to the Rite Aid at midnight when the girls ran out of tampons;
solid,
right?—but figured it might have something to do with him being Republican and her being a liberal feminazi-slash-closeted-lesbo who talked, openly, about her two youthful abortions—
two!
—the way Sara talked about her old TV commercial jobs: disparagingly, but with what Dave sensed was secret pride. As if she’d
endured
something, come through fire or someshit, and was stronger and wiser for having done so, unlike (thought Dave) the two babies she’d flushed without even as much fanfare or feeling as he’d accorded his recent super-turd, two babies denied the chance to be strong and wise or at least, like Aidan, autistic and allergic. Fair enough: She didn’t like his kind, and he didn’t like hers, but at least he could be civil about it. Civilly, he asked, “Anyone need a refill while I’m up?”
A bland chorus of
nope
s answered him. Jeremy felt compelled, naturally, to apologize for his
nope,
citing the long drive back to Port Washington, to “the Island,” which Dave ignored, saying “Suit yourself” to no one in particular.
“Where’s Alexis?” Raymond asked.
“Still in the
bath
room,” muttered Aidan, his tone strangely vituperative, as if he’d been waiting forty minutes for the potty to clear.
“Be kind,” Jeremy hissed at him, and this time, instead of patting Aidan’s back, gave the boy’s neck a two-fingered massage. The tactile line between approval and disapproval, Dave noted, was awfully slight. “Alexis,” Jeremy informed him, “has Irritable Bowel Syndrome.”
“What’s that?” Aidan said.
“Means Lexi’s no good at pooping,” Dave explained.
Aidan said, “That’s funny.”
“It’s actually very serious,” Jeremy corrected.
“It’s a little funny,” said Dave, striking off toward the kitchen. Along the way he noticed a tiny curl of mud on the carpet—must’ve fallen out from between someone’s boot treads—and scooped it up, then dunked it into the foamy dregs of his beer glass. He was trying to remain unbothered by all the disarray that houseguests engender: the multitude of drippy boots in the mudroom, the coats heaped upon one another in wayward piles, the sink overrun with coffee mugs and egg-encrusted plates, the trail of abandoned newspaper sections charting his father-in-law’s creaky passage from room to room. Dave was big on a clean house, a clean car, believing you could tell much if not everything about people by the state of their furnace filter, the organization of their freezer, and the level of rinse aid in their dishwasher. He considered these things—the house, the Cadillac Escalade in the garage, the furnace filter, the subzero freezer, all of it—testaments to his success, showcases for what he’d achieved, at the age of forty-six, via a mixture of sixteen-hour workdays, savvy timing, the investment capital spending spree of the mid-’90s, a rare and precious grasp of human frailty, and (even he would admit) deliciously loose federal regulations.
Dave was in the collections business, though the term he preferred—insisted upon, actually—was “debt acquisition,” which had a much more gilded, Wall Street-y ring to it than “collection agency,” or, worse (though more accurate), salvage or junk debt collection. The word
collection
had a dirty taint—trashpickers, ragpickers, stamp and baseball-card nerds, that sort of thing—which was why, publicly anyway, he banned its use at ARC (Acquisitions and Asset Recovery Corp.), the company he had founded in 1996, except in the required legalese (“This is an attempt to collect a debt and any information obtained . . .”).
Privately, however, the ban was intended to position Dave farther upfield from his father, who
was
a collector, and nothing but—a toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike who’d blown his twenty-eight-year career by offering a boozy-looking carful of coed-looking girls (Catholic high schoolers, as it turned out) a free pass through Lane 8 of the Bayonne tolls if one of them (the daughter of a state senator from Neptune, as it turned out) would flash him some fresh white tit. Ordinary night-shift hijinks on the Turnpike, but this marked Sal Masoli’s tenth such complaint, plus the senator wouldn’t stop huffing and puffing, so the Turnpike Authority eased Dave’s father out with an early-retirement package and a listless farewell party conspicuously unattended by management. Now he spent his nine-to-five hours dialing and redialing sports call-in shows to complain about the various “bums” spoiling athletics in the tri-state area. Once or twice, in the car, Dave had heard his father on the radio. It was a miserable experience, like happening upon a photo of your mom on the internet with a schlong up her tush. “Sparta Sal,” the hosts called him, and usually tried to hurry him off the air. “Breathe, Sal, just breathe,” they sometimes advised. After pulling the plug on one of his rants, a host pondered aloud: “What’s the opposite of a fan? Is there a word for that? Anti-fan, maybe?” His cohost added, “I think Sparta Sal actually
hates
sports,” to which the first host said, “I think Sparta Sal might hate
life.
Bennie in the Bronx, what’s shakin . . .”