A Changed Man (40 page)

Danny’s chest feels painfully tight as he pulls the dictionary out from the wall. He opens the coffee can.

“Yes!” he says, and with that word feels his heart start beating again.

He plays a few rounds of Minesweeper before he checks his e-mail. There’s a message from Chloe, which he decides not to open. She’s probably asking what the
Chandler
taping was like. She can see it for herself if she waits until…Danny checks his watch.

He races down to Dad’s room, where he finds Mom and Max on the couch listening to the first notes of the
Chandler
theme song.

“Thanks for calling me,” says Danny. “I could have missed the whole thing.”

“You hate
Chandler,
” Max says. “As you’ve told me a million times, bro.” Max is trying to sound tough so he can hang on to the remote.

“Fucking loser,” Danny mumbles.

“Language,” says Mom, staring at the screen. For someone so opposed to TV, she’s gotten into it big-time. “I was going to call you during the first commercial. Sit.” She pats the couch.

“That’s okay, the floor’s good,” Danny says.

“Please,” says Mom, in such a way that Danny sinks down beside her.

Under the
Chandler
theme are the words “Faces of Love and Hate.” The show starts with a close-up of Chandler. It’s what Danny watched them filming as he waited in the Green Room. Staring into the camera, Chandler tells the folks at home how, this evening, they are going to see the faces of love and hate.

Most of the rum has worn off, but something about Chandler’s voice starts Danny feeling woozy again, and he grabs Mom’s arm. Right away, Mom’s got her hand over his. Trying not to be obvious, Danny slips his hand out from under hers.

“Tonight,” Chandler’s saying, “we will meet two men who will show us what it means to reprogram our hearts from hate to love. To change from one kind of person to another. And another man will show us how risky and dangerous a change like that can be.”

“I can’t breathe,” Mom says.

“Hang in there,” says Max.

Mom puts her arms around their shoulders. Max snuggles up against her, and even Danny lets her arm stay there.

“This is so weird,” says Mom. “I mean, we were just there at the studio—”

Obviously, it’s weird. But the fact that Mom has said so means that Danny can’t agree. Anyway, what’s weird about it? Every day, people appear on TV and then come home and watch themselves.

And now it’s as if they’ve all stopped breathing, or as if the three of them are breathing in unison, through the commercials. Finally Chandler comes back on, introducing Meyer and Vincent.

From there it goes pretty much as Danny remembers, except for one moment when the camera picks Raymond out of the audience, and stays on his face a beat too long, the way you do when you think you recognize somebody on the street. Then it’s back to Meyer, then Chandler, yakkety-yak about change, then Meyer plugging his book, which appears on the screen, then Chandler trying to con them into flashing their tattoos, which, thank God, they resist.

At a certain point, Vincent, who is talking about how he used to blame the wrong people for his problems, suddenly looks more nervous than he did before.

“I think he just saw Raymond,” Danny says.

“That’s what I was thinking,” says Mom.

The camera cuts away from Vincent and follows the girl with the microphone, who’s handing it to Raymond.

Raymond stands up and tears right into the stuff about how bad Vincent is, all the evil things he’s done to him and his family, and his dunking the old lady in the pool. Danny believes Vincent when he says the old lady wasn’t hurt. Vincent probably had his reasons, it probably taught her a lesson. Taking all that into account, you could almost think it was funny.

Raymond doesn’t think anything’s funny. Raymond’s smile is disgusting. Danny’s glad Vincent trashed him.

And then that retard Chandler invites Raymond to come down on the stage. So what’s about to happen will be Chandler’s fault.

“Max,” says Danny, “you can open your eyes, man.”

“He doesn’t have to watch,” says Mom. “He’s seen it once already.”

But Max might as well watch, and in fact he probably should watch, because what happens on the screen is not what he saw.

Chandler and Raymond talk for a while until Meyer cuts in; Vincent’s pretty much out of it. This time, they can see what sets Raymond off. It’s when Meyer tries to get the show back on the subject of him and Vincent, and Chandler announces they’re going to break.

Except they don’t go to break. There’s a shot of Raymond moving in on Meyer. Raymond’s spitting, red in the face.

Cut to Vincent grabbing him from behind, pulling him back by the shoulders.

Then there’s a shot of Danny, running toward the stage.

“Hey, that’s you!” Max must have been looking through his fingers.

“Shit,” says Danny. Now everybody will know.

“Shit is right,” says Mom. “What were you
thinking,
running down there?”

But wait. What’s happening now? According to the
Chandler
show, what Danny is thinking is about protecting Meyer Maslow.

In the middle of the scuffle, Meyer backs up against Danny. And Danny stands tall behind him. Danny has his back.

And now it really
is
weird. Because at that point, as Danny recalls it, he had no idea where Meyer was. He wasn’t thinking about Meyer, but about himself and the fight.

On TV, it doesn’t look like he ran toward the fight and stopped. It looks like he ran to save Meyer.

The cameras get jittery, like they do whenever there’s violence, and with the whole scene bobbing around like that, it’s hard to figure out what’s happening. But Danny can tell that Vincent is doing the major part of the punching. He gets in a couple of good ones. Yet when the camera moves in on him, he doesn’t look angry or crazed. He looks like he’s going to cry.

And that’s it. No spurting blood. No flying teeth. No Raymond’s face turning to jam.

The fight ends there. Fade to black. Cut to Chandler, talking. This must be the part they filmed when Danny and Max were getting wasted in the Green Room.

“This afternoon, brothers and sisters, you have seen the face of hate. And the faces of those brave men who would try to save us from hate.”

“He means you, man,” says Max.

“Shut up, creep,” says Danny.

“Love and hate are the basic subjects we are always talking about here on the show. Underneath every word we say, behind every guest we meet. Changing from hate to love is the greatest change there is. So let’s look back through some recent shows—”

And suddenly they’re watching a clip from that program about the skinhead who went to work with the foundation in L.A. Danny feels Mom tense.

“This is a repeat,” Max says. “We saw this.”

“I never got to see it.” There’s a spaciness in his mother’s voice that Danny finds scary.

After that they show five minutes from another program, which Danny and Max also saw, about a woman who forgave her sister’s murderer on death row.

“This is boring,” Max says.

“You’re the one who likes
Chandler,
” Danny says.

“Don’t you
dare
change it,” Mom says. “There’s supposed to be a part where Meyer reads from his book. Oh, dear God, I hope they left that in.”

Danny hopes they didn’t. But no one’s changing it, anyhow. They’re all too limp with relief. Max, probably, because he didn’t have to see the blood again. Mom, probably, because the edited version looks a lot better than it really was, which is fortunate for Vincent, for Meyer, and for the foundation. And Danny, definitely, because no one could tell that he ran toward the trouble and stopped. But even though it’s a huge relief, it puts them in an odd position, bound by the knowledge that what they saw on TV isn’t exactly what happened. Only a few people know that. The three of them, Meyer, Chandler, his staff, the studio audience. And Vincent, if he sees it. Danny hopes he does. The way they distorted the truth proves what Vincent always used to say about how the media lies.

And now Meyer’s reading, sitting in the Chandler chair, a circle of light pooled around him. He’s got his new book open on his lap, and he’s singing the same old song. One this at a time, one that at a time. One heart, one brain, one—

“I’m glad about this, at least,” says Mom.

Eventually, Chandler comes back on and thanks Meyer, thanks Vincent—who is noticeably not around—thanks his producers, his audience, the folks at home. “And God bless every one of you who truly believes that we can change.”

Commercial break. Game over.

Fifteen seconds into the
Chandler
theme and the closing credits, the phone rings.

“Maybe it’s Vincent,” says Max.

Maybe it’s Raymond’s friends, thinks Danny. Or some lone-wolf ARM psycho.

Mom isn’t gone very long before she returns, looking older than she did when she left.

“That was Roberta,” she says. “She thought the show was fabulous. No one’s heard from Vincent.”

“Wouldn’t he call here first?” Danny says.

“I hope he’s okay,” says Max.

“I’m sure he would. And I’m sure he is,” says Mom. She takes the remote from Max and turns off the television.

“I’ll call out for pizza,” she says, then heads back upstairs.

“Excellent,” says Max. Danny’s silence is an assent, though neither of them are hungry. Danny takes advantage of the momentary distraction to reclaim the remote and switch to MTV.

Later that night, as Danny lies awake, knowing he’ll never sleep, he remembers how, when he was in eighth grade, they had a dog. For two weeks. They’d bought it from a mall pet shop on a Saturday afternoon when his dad was in one of those rare good moods that meant, as Danny and Max figured out, they could mostly get what they wanted.

Much later Danny realized that those good moods were about Dad and Lorraine. But so what? They milked it for what they could get. They got a copper Siberian husky they called Tramp until they could think of a better name. And they brought it home to carry out Dad’s real purpose, which was to piss off Mom. Poor Mom got to clean up dog shit everywhere, on the rugs, the floors. There was puppy shit on the ceiling until Tramp (they never had time to rename him) slipped out the front door one day while Mom signed for a package.

Everybody blamed Mom, but it wasn’t her fault. A few weeks later, Danny and Max and Dad saw a TV program about puppies raised under brutal conditions by greedy, sadistic breeders. The puppies were so mentally ill they could never bond with their owners. The segment included a warning not to buy dogs from mall pet shops. Dad looked daggers at Danny and Max, as if they had known all along.

Now Danny remembers how hard it was to sleep as he listened for some rustle or yelp that might mean Tramp had come home. He remembers how long those nights lasted as he watched the numbers snap on his Chewy Chewbacca clock. It was like a preview, a trailer for the long nights he would have to get through when his parents were getting divorced.

And that’s how long the night seems again, as Danny waits for the noises that might mean Vincent is home, the same noises that, he can hardly believe, used to scare him, not long ago. He misses Vincent, who, somewhere along the line, seems to have become part of their little household. Meanwhile, the friends of the guy Vincent creamed on
Chandler
are probably coming after him, and—when they find out that he’s not here—they’ll take it out on Danny. Which gives Danny a whole new set of noises to listen for in the dark.

Well, it’s fortunate that the night is so long. Danny needs every minute to replay Vincent and Raymond’s fight in slow motion, to try and see more than he saw at the time, certainly more than they showed on TV, more than the flailing arms and legs, the two men tangled in a nest of wires and cables, everyone yelling but not stopping them until Vincent had messed up Raymond.

Danny knows he should hate and fear physical violence, that his mother had raised him to hate and fear it, that everything Meyer stands for is about hating and fearing the fight. But Raymond parked in Danny’s driveway. Raymond hates black people and Jews. Raymond came after Meyer. Somebody had to do something. What would Mom and Meyer have done? Try and talk to Raymond? Change him one heart at a time? Talk was not going to work. By the time they called the security guards, Meyer could have been toast.

Danny can understand why Vincent might have split. The guy gets accused on network TV of stealing from his own family, and he loses it and busts up his cousin’s face. And this is after Mom and Meyer have been marketing him as Mr. Changed Man. Mr. Brotherly Love might need some time to go off by himself and think. Meanwhile Danny refuses to believe that Vincent is gone for good. Though if it turns out that way, Danny will deal with that, too. During the divorce, he’d been afraid that Dad would disappear. When actually, Dad stayed close enough so that, every so often, he invites his kids to spend the night with him and Lorraine and now the Bulgarian baby. Maybe Dad should have disappeared, moved to another city. Maybe it would be better if that’s what Vincent does now.

Mom probably misses Vincent, too. She’s probably worried about him. She worries about every little thing. Why should this be an exception? Danny can’t handle Mom’s problems right now. Because he has his own.

In the morning he’s got another meeting with Graber and Armstrong. Mom has sworn that her agreeing to talk at graduation will take the heat off him. And Danny wants to believe her. But part of him suspects that they’ll squirm out of the deal, or find some clever way to make him suffer more.

Danny sees the sun come up, by which point there’s nothing to do but play dead and wait for Mom to call him. He gets dressed and grabs a handful of Cheerios and—without the usual drama—tells Mom good-bye. Vincent has had a good effect on their morning routine.

By the time Danny leaves home, he’s feeling sick to his stomach. Perfect! Start the day by heaving in the boys’ bathroom, and you might as well do it on the auditorium stage.