American Spirit: A Novel (2 page)

The key goes in the ignition like it always has. The upholstery is trying hard to act like summer; to do that thing where it stays cool in the morning even though the weather is already getting warm outside; but it’s only the end of spring, so it hasn’t really got the swing of it. The key is turned like it always is, the dash beeps the fast little beeps, the tiny orange lights on the console wake and wink, and the Bavarian Motor Works are started.

While the car idles, Matthew looks in the rearview mirror, reluctantly presses a bit on his cheeks and under his chin in a forfeited negotiation with time that always ends with the half-assed determination to soldier on:
Fuck it, I’m not old. Unless you’re, like, nineteen, and sober, and looking right at me from a few inches away in natural light.
It’s clearly evident that this is exactly what Matthew is thinking, mostly because he picks up his phone/email/everything device and starts typing the very phrase on the tiny keyboard. He emails this little maxim to himself. Lately, he prefers doing this late at night, fairly or full tilt into a decent buzz after killing another
ten-hour workday in his parked car; this way he can be pleasantly surprised on mornings like this one by email containing his moments of insight and words of encouragement. As if one morning, the little life maxim he receives from himself will jump-start things, as if somewhere out there in the ether is the perfect slogan waiting to get his life back on track again. The coffee is in the beverage holder like it’s always been. Yesterday’s half-spent nest of free community newspapers is on the passenger floorboard, and triplets of Heineken empties have left the nest; rolled under the passenger seat to find their own place in the back and make a go of it on their own in this world, as we all must at one point.

Therapy has not been officially canceled, but now with no paycheck coming in, let’s be honest: How long can it last, really? It’s a cruel irony that when one has a job, a life, a paycheck, and is relatively on track, there is money for therapy and even sometimes insurance to cover it. Another fine practical joke from the universe, because the days ahead, to put it mildly, are the ones that will probably require a little navigational assistance. But to be clear, the man that we’re referring to as a therapist is really, basically, a licensed social worker, and one who has taken up amateur stand-up comedy at age sixty-five, which can be a little awkward in sessions. This is an important clarification—the credential, not the comedy—since the practice of a psychotherapist brings to mind visions of the fortunate lying on a couch and complaining about luxury problems to someone getting paid to nod and not act on their instinct to physically strike the complainer.
Milton Mills, C.S.W., is a sixty-five-year-old Southern gentleman, lanky and long, almost always in a well-worn and frayed suit from about September to late spring, and those are the only few things you really need to know about Milton. Lately Matthew suspects that Milton is teaching him how to release himself from the mandible of the serially unfaithful land mammal he snared and married as if there was a bounty on Connecticut game so unwieldy.

Here in the car, the coffee hits blood, the blood races its commute through veins, the veins lead it to the brain, the brain realizes it’s awake and decides to join the race. Fits and starts, first spitting a few images; tripped and triggered memories of largely anonymous sexual encounters that Kristin—the briefly aforementioned, unfaithful, unwieldy, retired fashion model wife (wholesale winter-coat catalogs, but she’s been very clear with Matthew that this qualifies as fashion and modeling and, by definition then, fashion modeling)—would certainly not approve of. Little score-settling trysts in the car that never manage to provide distraction from remembering the fact that Kristin always had the house to herself during the day to undertake her relatively normal scenario of minor adulterous moral bankruptcy. Managing one’s score-settling trysts in a leased car you can instantly no longer afford, in parking lots, carries a certain stigma if you’re looking at it from a high horse, or even a normal-sized horse, really.

Matthew prefers to stick to the outlying sections of the animal-themed lot at Stan Leland’s Grocery Emporium, each
section’s designated letter decorated with a corresponding animal to form a convenient mnemonic to jog a shopper’s memory as to where they parked—
W
for Whale;
Y
for Yak;
Z
for Zebra, for Zealot, for Zero, for Zoloft. The brain kicking in, and reminding, even insisting this: For the record, any colleague (former) or neighbor (the faceless strangers to the left and right of your home) would tell you that you are sane; that you are a normal man and an upstanding member of this community.

Matthew grabs a piece of it, runs with it: I am normal, normal I am, I am la norm, moral man. The brain aborts this little anagram seizure; sends a synaptic signal that says to hit the numbers and the accelerator. Eleven hundred. Fifteen hundred. Two. Three. Forty.

Eleven hundred. This is the number of people in the company that by now, Monday at 9:00
AM,
have certainly received an official piece of corporate email notifying them that Matthew was fired from the job he held for eleven years up until last Friday. They maybe even know the circumstances by now—which is essentially more than Matthew knows, since he fainted as far as he can figure.

Fifteen hundred. Probably the number of dollars that it costs monthly, all told, to drive a leased BMW 745 around Connecticut trying to find something to do until 7:30
PM
so that the seasonal-outerwear-model wife, as well as the neighbors, as well as the guy at the gas station minimarket, will still be under the impression that there has been no loss of a job, no loss of a check, no loss of leafy suburban status,
no hint of foreboding doom. It’s probably fifteen hundred, but it could be more, or less, because Matthew never sees a bill. All of it—the lease, the gas, the insurance—hits the American Express and the platinum program lets you carry a balance, and the balance swells; it should come with a gun, this program.

Two. Number of years married. Matthew chose poorly. In fairness, they both did. Matthew has only ever chosen women who would be certain to start off very sweet then sneak up on him slowly and cause great pain, like those amateur hour drinks that taste like candy and leave you in a grave; the kind that have an energy drink and a few different kinds of booze in them. They wait in the glass to drag one’s ass to the floor, the heart toward stroke, the face and neck halfway to permanent nerve damage. Drinks with names like the Mind Eraser, Dead Bull, Cherry Bomb, the Kristin Edwards-Harris. And Kristin has made the same wrong choice, obviously, believing she could find a man who is both stable and not without an edge; who is somehow at once content, staid, predictable, driven, contentious, and restless. She was trying to find the best of both worlds, or five or six, and she’s tried to find this combination in a man too many times. And so if she’s a lethal drink, he’s essentially a candy bar designed to appeal to everyone, and of course, one that lands in the benign middle, ultimately appealing to no one. He is something that’s supposed to be light but dark, mild but strong, rich but not, a nut and, at the same time, never one. A candy bar like this never works out. A candy bar like this may as well be
called a We Tried Our Best Bar, or a Mutual Disappointment Cup.

Three. This is the number of what could be described as mostly minor parking lot hand-job (more or less) situations. Matthew drinks himself into the idea of it. And anyway, he is convinced he’s quit. The score-settling trysts, that is, not the drinking, he needs the drinking these days, thank you very much.

Forty. This the age he used to be nowhere near. Matthew was nineteen about a month ago, just like you, just like everyone else in America.

There is usually a time in life when one wakes up wondering where life is leading, the future still a rushing brace of questions and ambition and opportunity. Lately for Matthew, waking up feels like one thousand rhetorical questions asked without urgency, in sleepy disbelief. The one currently wedged into the head like something parasitic with spiny little fins or teeth to anchor in with is this:

Am I living in a Goddamn Steely Dan song?

Matthew will insist he is not a fan. There are several bands with a much more current supply of boozed and pained urbane pathos; New Time Media has a murder of them locked into record deals and shotgun-patterned across the full field of magazines and cable shows they own. For every nineteen seventies steely measure of moping around, there’s a dozen more recent bands to bring you down; The National Death Cab, A Dead Horse for Cutie, His and Hers Morning Suicide Jackets, whatever you need, really. But the head finds
it hard to start the cataloging process all over again with a new downer band. The head is all etched up with every Steely Dan lyric and everything there is to know about these songs and tracks and albums and the men who made them; the brain, a gray wall, its every carved and scraped graffito a fact about Walter Becker, about Donald Fagen, about every single member, former member, quasi member, and guest musician—Dias, Hodder, Purdie, Gadd, Feldman, Carlton, you name them. This is only because the fear has long been that Matthew might wind up one of the marginalized beautiful losers in these songs’ lyrics and so the head studies the songs and band since age nine or ten, like a cautionary tale of how Matthew could wind up if things get bad, like a schematic of what might go wrong eventually or suddenly, at any minute. There’s the older guy dating a teenage girl—“Hey Nineteen.” There’s the guy in “Deacon Blues” who complains that they have a name for the winners in the world, and who says he wants a name when he loses, which, lately, seems fair enough.

The other thing is this: the brain has probably confused the words
loss
and
loser
for as long as it can remember. Matthew has never told anyone but Milton this, but here it is: He lost his biological parents early on. All he has said about this is that they saved a considerable amount of money on airfare; two deeply discounted round-trip tickets to Florida. Evidently the deal was that by having the pilot slam the plane violently into a swamp at the end of the journey—as opposed to using a costly, fancy airport runway—the airline
was able to offer significant savings on fares compared to other full-price airlines. So, at the age of nine years, the brain heard the word
loss
about seven thousand times in one year, from people wearing the kind of sad faces that bad television actors wear, and that might have been when and why the brain latched on to Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen’s songs about losers and tales of suburban failure. The little head swam in the lyrics on the radio copped from a box of foster home donations and stuck under the pillow that never felt like his own, the lyrics of these steely siren songs of the modern and downtrodden swooned their way in as the heart pondered and feared fate beyond its nine years.

This many years later, thirty-one of them, it is now around 10:20
AM,
and Matthew clings to routine, piloting the BMW, the Bavarian Mother Womb, speaking softly but aloud. This might suggest to anyone motoring along next to him that he’s talking into the car’s speakerphone, or maybe calmly repeating a daily affirmation of the successful and spiritually fit.

“No, damn it. No, damn it. No, damn it. No, fuck, no.”

And apparently the way to punctuate a mantra like this on one’s fake morning commute is to spit casually—with poor, lackluster aim—out the driver’s-side window.

The majority of the spit lands inside and runs down the leather interior that can’t really be afforded right now, then onto the forearm and elbow resting on the leased armrest. At first, Matthew looks upset, then deflated, and then, fuck it, he’ll spit again, and again, spitting, spitting, spitting, and
making so Goddamned sure it all lands on the inside of the stupid door. And even spitting and spitting and spitting at the passenger-side window and onto the inside of the windshield. The mouth becomes as dry as it does on the days he got bad news. The breath starts to taste like fear and regret. The mouth’s spat saliva is the color of the convenience store coffee, and all of it is inching slowly downward across the car’s black interior so that the gray interior of the head will start to curse. At first, the gray deals up a sensible assortment of three- and five-syllable profanities, and then both the profanity and the car accelerate. The same one-syllable profane word is repeated over and over in a short and fast staccato. Maybe six or eight times and then it seems that Matthew is about to either cry or punch something. He hasn’t cried since he was nine. He has never hit anyone or anything. And that’s when the fit stops and the lull of recent memories begins.

Last night was beautiful; the kind of beauty that doesn’t seem to get much mention. This was the last (probably, most likely, ideally) situation involving entertaining a young lady in the car instead of the home. These girls in these bars around here, they’ve all had twenty-five or thirty years of fine living in good houses and they are eager to make one wrong decision. But Matthew wants to believe that last night was more than just good skin dying to do something bad, but he was probably simply the body double for a professor this girl spent New Haven days dreaming of fucking in a summer house. But for now, try to forget that part of it, and just think
about the dark suburban horizon and the calm of it; the subdivided patterns of rooftops that any number of betrayals, or struggles, or joys, or highly experimental sexual encounters, could be happening under. Think about the symmetrically white-lined and well-lit calm of the night’s ample parking—everything clean, vast, and finally, after all of those daylight hours, so sparsely populated. But in the middle of the calming, very recent memories comes a cautionary lyric, worming into the ear, continuing to map everything finally going according to Steely Dan’s terrible and seductive F Major 7th plan. The one about crawling like a viper through suburban streets to basically have sex with folks who live on those streets, and then it rhymes words that are all too close to home right now; words like “languid” and “bittersweet” and then the guy starts waxing poetic about dying behind the wheel. Jesus, it’s all happening.