American Spirit: A Novel (18 page)

And another thing, it’s not lost on Matthew that not one of his classmates from the community center craft class has staked claim here. Look around and not one Jan, Ruthie, Suzanne, Lori, or Lynn. There’s the only moral and social compass one need follow in navigating this pottery fair; the real deals on the scene aren’t even showing up here. The thing is fueled, instead, by a coed knot of Nathans, Melissas, Skylers, and Rebeccas. For every ten resigned gray ponytails, there’s one fuckable, loveable thing just barely having talked herself into spending her nights with ovens and glaze-clogged sinks to save her heart from another dead-end man doing the kind of math that tells his heart to run if prospective kids would be ten when she’s passing forty fast. Matthew tries with a
couple of them, but no stare gives chase. Matthew, chipped and cracked goods to them, really—long legs, eyes at half-mast, thin and too hungry for something, hair approaching longish, disheveled, a speedy tense jaw on a long face braced with the cologne of failure and optimism—just another mouth and moan, daring and alone.

Evidently, the cardinal sin of the pottery fair culture here in Westport is pulling your car/office up to the edge of the curb bordering the official green, grassy, ordained, and sanctioned park and treating this parking arrangement as your pottery fair space. Yep, selling the shit right out of the car trunk, with a nicely tightened 11:00
AM
buzz, to anyone with a twenty looking for five bucks change and a mug that says,
God will help you procure secondhand firearms
when you’re in a fucking bind, folks. And over the course of the day, guess how many people will come up to get serious about finally drinking from a coffee mug that actually means something? Well, not that many of them, really, but at least enough to start adding some cash to the situation under the car seat.

That’s where the last third of the severance package is, taken from the bank where it felt like it could be taken at any moment by any number of phantom agencies seeking to force Matthew to make financial amends for any number of missteps over the years. So there may not be a lot of cash coming in from the mugs, but there’s enough to be adding to the tight and filthy little rolls of severance cash rubber-banded and jammed under the seat like a gun or porno; these days, that’s where the money goes. The days race by in between
the usual indiscretions and derelictions, and as these days are wont to do, and the brain races right along, killing the downtime with spasms of basic math: fifteen, thirty, sometimes even forty-five or sixty, godly and full of possibilities these little torpedoes of lucre, stuffed into a dirty little heaven, under the driver’s seat, next to spent and bent Sudafed foils, Heineken empties, and the gun; just imagine it; it’s probably possible to make more; it might even be possible to somehow make forty-five times forty-five. Maybe get some press somehow, maybe rush at the president if he’s in New York, push past the security detail of secret service and CIA and thrust a gift mug at his chest, the papers all pick it up, everyone wants a mug. Finally, life feels a little bit like options, and a little bit like it’s actually happening.

But there are other matters. The spot on the film—are you ready for this shit?—is an eleven-millimeter kidney stone. No small stone, a giant by kidney stone standards, has to come out; the body won’t do the job on something that big. Still… hardly a life sentence; hardly worth pissing all over your office because you think your life is certainly ending sooner than you had anticipated, hardly death. However, having a Republican jam an eighth-inch-wide scope into your urethra while he tells you a story about his dead grandmother, rest her soul—this may as well be one’s death. It is, maybe, what the French call “the small death.” And there’s the matter of Tatiana and where is she now? How can the heart do these things and then just stop working, and why are people so custom-made to disappear one way or the
other, time and distance, or faulty jet engines, sticking them in the ground too soon?

Matthew kills his days trying to sell a few mugs while sitting in the car, reading the book about eating and praying and loving. At first selling was easy. It was a matter of parking on the border of the pottery fair, crafting a perfect over-the-counter jazzed blaze on the brain that made the speakers in the door sound like canyons of truth; that made customers feel like beautiful discoveries, each and every individual. But then the pottery cops crack down. This is success in America; start making a couple of bucks, and everybody comes sniffing around for a little look-the-other-way dough. So then it becomes a matter of principle, and Matthew will do anything but pay for a space. He parks at a lot just down the street and trolls the weekend fairgoers, shows them the mug he’s carrying, looking around nervously, explaining he can sell them some if they’d like to follow him back to his car, or he can bring some back if they know how many they’d like. But one would be surprised by the wariness of pottery fans; it takes a sturdy pottery fan to follow a man like Matthew just a few short blocks away to a car where a deal can be done; all very on the up and up, these people, so it’s pretty tough going.

It takes only a week or two to find other corners and lots to clock; he should’ve thought of it ages ago. The community center parking lot where people take the free classes, that’s a go, especially on weekends. And then one starts considering the effectiveness of hopping around on the scene—one does
a rush over on the far border of the pottery fair until hemmed and hawed, bitched and barked, and shooed off. One moves it to a parking lot across town and gets slammed there for a bit, trading these things for small bills in fits and starts; long on downtime and then inexplicable speed and urgency of moving a mug or two, usually pity sales where folks need to feel like they’re supporting someone doing their thing. It bears mentioning that the one about God helping you get a gun has found an unlikely but potentially broad and lucrative audience; conservative people who seem to embrace the sentiment as some sort of right-leaning maxim to bear arms in America. There were a few of them over the last couple of weekends. They don’t seem to understand that it’s a mug about the moment fortune smiles and allows you to procure a gun because you have a hunch that petty crime or suicide may be the next logical step in how things are going to progress.

They smile kindly and buy the mug like Americans standing up for something, but this is a mug that is all about God finally throwing you a bone by letting you sell Ecstasy to pay for a weapon from a cool Mexican guy or South American or whatever, and then God lets you get an unbelievable piece of ass in the process. Being embraced by a mainstream audience is at once disheartening and stirring, finding this polite conservative following bodes well for eating, but it feels fraudulent to let them drink so proudly from a coffee cup painted with memories of a drunk, unemployed Democrat being grateful for having sex on psychotropic vegetables.
And they always act like the art is a mistake—a mistake! Like, Oh it’s blurry, I think something happened to the drawing on this one, oh do you have another one maybe since something is wrong with this one? That’s the fucking art part of it, you guys! And they’re like children; once you explain that’s the way it is because it’s kind of cool, they pause a minute, look at the art again, and suddenly it is art—and they’re fine with it. Anyway, move the hustle often, then on to yet another location, and so forth. One actually ends up doing more business than just catering to the pottery fair spillover. You can double your take some days if you move enough. It’s not a lot but it will keep you in cigarettes and those little foil packs of Sudafed.

So far the numbers are small, but the big hits are, yes, the one about God helping you buy a gun, but also a new one with a man urinating in his own office. This mug says nothing, just has a drawing of a stick figure peeing next to a desk while some other stick figures at desks point, proving that art still sells. There’s another one that has sold three copies, so not a hit, but certainly doing decent sales; the one with a leggy blotch of a woman confidently sprawling on a smear of a couch that says,
Selling hallucinogens to a rich girl feels as innocent as fairy tales.
The trick now is probably to combine the mainstream attraction to God with the excitement of sex and drugs. It might be as simple as
God loves sex and drugs.
This is true. So Matthew starts typing it out.

There are matters to deal with, the matter of crafty cops to outfox, but mostly, at the moment, there is the matter that
Westport is like four walls closing in; even the parking lots of Westport are places to feel tracked and watched. And whatever brief comforts were once found in this house, it has become a tomb of good intentions quickly staled; a hallowed haunt that feels like breaking and entering. This town is just parks and parking lots dogged by phantom pottery cops; this house, a field of decent carpet and expensive tile, roamed by a ghostly housemate with a fouled heart. But there is cash under the driver’s seat! There are cups turned into cigarettes and gasoline, and under the driver’s seat, those little wads plus the rolls of severance cash scream that it’s time to start living like the woman in the book about eating and praying; that it’s time to get out and start traveling this world never seen.

Two Counties, Separated by a Common Gene

W
HEN MATTHEW TURNS OFF
the steep, narrow dirt road, the cabin owner is standing on the porch, saying good-bye to the cleaning lady. Matthew pulls into the gravel driveway, gives the car a bit too much push, and the tires make a stony racket tearing up the grade and scratching a wake of gravel and dust to the flat landing patch at the top. Seeing that the cleaning lady’s good-bye is under way, seeing no need to rush a hello and handshake, he is now in the driveway, on his knees. The midsection twisted, the head askew, the shoulder anchored down and trying to get the most reach out of the arm, now crammed up under the driver’s seat. The way this sort of thing usually takes place is that there are checks exchanged weeks in advance—that’s
what the vacation rental Web site prefers, but plans were made in haste, the mission was launched last night, late. And so it was agreed that payment could happen on arrival, there was probably the presumption that this would also mean a check changing hands, but that isn’t the way things are rolling these days, is it?

There’s not much in the way of a balance in the checking account and there’s simply no way for a man to appear employed when toting all the tight bundles and bindles of jacked and stowed cash. And if the coffee-mug business ever blows up enough to pay real and delinquent bills, there will be the matter of figuring how to choke the tight steel, prudish slit of an ATM with a mouthful of mug cash, and then hoping that the green makes it past human hands and posts to the account is plain unnerving. But for now it’s not a problem; for now the bills don’t get paid and the bank is in the car; the whole system is very self-contained. If the crafty hobby ever turns into bestselling wares, the obvious solution will be to head into Manhattan for deposits every so often; into the city where tellers probably see this kind of binge cash banking routinely from serial blood hawkers, low-stakes deviant pornographers, and misdemeanor tramps. It will be a hassle, putting the grift on the books, but it will be better than these little rolls and wads jackknifing the adjustment mechanisms under the seat like this, caught up in everything.

If the arm can just fish this wayward roll from behind a jam of empties and a dirty magazine, some deli napkins and a wrapper from a Reese’s, an empty water bottle with a tiny
nicotine-stained swamp of butts settled into it, then, well, won’t the cabin owner be happy to have solid payment in cash in these times of recession and instability? The mountains up here are so quiet they scream, the only sound at the moment is Matthew grunting, determined to reach up under the seat to get the roll of cash he needs. He yanks the glossy, torn, and wrecked pornography free and sets it out absentmindedly behind him on the gravel without looking; same with the candy wrappers, and the smokes that are empty.

The owner may be happy to get some cash, if it’s coming, but he’s currently just staring from the porch at the wrappers and torn pages of glossy porn shifting a bit in the breeze like leaves; at the dead cigarette packages—it’s like a hurricane picked up a hard-luck convenience store and slammed it down right here in his driveway. Matthew is grunting and yanking and finally: The roll of cash comes free—just a little more than he needs to pay for a two-night stay in a two-story cabin here in the beautiful Catskill Mountains of New York. Call it rehearsal for travel—Big Indian, New York, is a far cry from Italy and taking lovers for spiritually fit boning like that woman in the book did, but it’s good practice. One can’t just go from one’s car and out into the world so large without a dry run or two. Better to be working out bugs like all this shit jamming the cash flow here than in the parking lot of LaGuardia or JFK. A half-spent prescription bottle of Vicodin hits the gravel and Matthew immediately reaches back and down without looking and snatches it right back up with urgency. Yes, cabin owner, this is your distinguished guest, the
man on his knees under the American flag waving over your American white-gravel driveway, surrounded by the filthy litter of broken-down days; the one you’re about to let pace and weep and masturbate all over the beautiful cabin where your beautiful American family spent its summers and holidays.