American Spirit: A Novel (30 page)

“You still managing?”

“Managing nicely, thanks, Neil.”

“You know what I mean, baby.”

“I’ve got one of the three vampires and that’s pretty much it. And you just said baby, which will answer the next question about why I’m getting out of managing.”

“Your vampire’s pretty much gone, which I shouldn’t be telling you, but I’m telling you: We’ve got the other two and they’re leaning on your guy pretty hard. It’s not my thing, the agency obviously wants the package, so they’ve got everything on high.”

“I don’t give a hard, sweet fuck what you do, to be coy. If you guys took him today, I’m still paid on his last seven years of net plus worldwide DVD and a bunch of ancillary in perpetuity.”

“Hey, plus… don’t forget the cat books,” Neil says, with every ounce of jeer one imagines it laced with.

“Yeah, I cashed royalties on three million copies of
No,
Kitty, No!,
plus I’ll never wake up at three in the morning to a phone call from a wasted kitty threatening suicide because another kitty got more covers or was bigger on the poster. I don’t get the call telling me that my kitty is blowing another kitty in a cabana at the Four Seasons and that it’s my job to make sure every red state box office is selling PG tickets to families that believe the kitty is straight. I don’t wake up at six in the morning to a phone call from an angry director firing a kitty because the kitty was caught banging a bag of junk in her trailer after it cost said director more than my client made for him on the last movie just to insure the set since she’s turned into a junkie. So, yeah, I won’t forget my cat books, Neil.”

“Three million, seriously?”

“Two hundred and twenty adorable snapshots of people’s cats doing silly things around the house, three million copies for the paying American public, one large loft in Manhattan for me.”

Neil takes a sip of his drink. His drink is in a coffee mug that says,
God will help you find a gun if you’re grateful.
In the second circle, the circle called People Whom One Recognizes But Is Unsure from Where, the guitar player from a band called We’re Working on a Comeback Album but So Much Has Changed about the Business talks to a man from the circle outside of his, a man from the Remember When circle. He is probably better known as Guy Who Plays the Dad and he’s a guy who is basically a poem that goes:

It’s like what the fuck

I’m not even that old

five years ago I was still reading for the

Hot Neighbor and shit like that

but now it’s The Dad

hey, I don’t even have kids

hey, I’m not even a dad in real life

hey whatever, I need the work

and anything that allows me to pay the bills

and work on writing a screenplay is fine with me

that’s the way I look at it.

But he hasn’t written a screenplay; he hasn’t written a thing. He stands and hears himself talking the same way he’s been talking since he got close to having what these vampire kids have, back in maybe 1993, back when he was something, like, twenty-three. He keeps a good game face and thinks about how you get your shot, you get your taste, and then it seems one loses the right to hope for another try even after a decent little bite of it, even after years of waiting in line again. The world takes a look at you up on the shelf and thinks:
Well, he got his taste, had a shot, not a bad shake, got a lot closer than some, no love lost that he’s working whatever job he’s gotta take.
He thinks about how you can feel the world pull away when they aren’t sure what to think of how it went for you, when they’re not sure of what to say. He thinks about how you can feel it when it leaves for
you; how you no longer have your little schoolboy prayers about how God must have some purpose for you and some work for you to do here; any of the little thoughts like that which may keep one going are gone after the first taste, because what if the little run you had was all God had planned? What if one seventeen-year-old just needed to hear the thing your character said in the sitcom you had for half a season back when you had your chance? Thinks all this stuff, staring at the vampire boys who are having it, having it, having it, and he says something gamely to the band guy about just doing the work because doing the work is all one can concern themselves with, really; says something sporting about how that’s the real reward anyway. But the only work he’s doing is working his way into a conversation with someone from the circle closer to the action, and closer to a chance at another shot happening for him. The guy from the band smiles as best he can, ducks away, writes some stuff down on a napkin with a pen he bummed from a girl working for the caterer:

The good days were one long kiss

that came with one little twist

all my teeth would fall out

if I stopped to catch my breath.

And about 707 miles north-northeast, Matthew keeps the midsize Ford Taurus or similar on course and straight, due southwest for another day at least, and the head is bored of
singing, and trying to forget about home, and trying to run alone, so it kills time making anagram mash of whatever it can: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a heathenish loner utterly, a heathenish rottenly lure. Three thousand miles east of all of this, in a bed not so far from the work training center in Norwalk, Connecticut, Chris is sleeping. He’s dreaming of how Matthew hasn’t been coming to pick up his mugs, how they’re building up. In the dream, the boxes of mugs stack up higher than he’s ever seen them, higher than the whole building, up through the roof, going higher than the sky, higher than clouds, as high as the moon. There’s an astronaut floating around way up by the top of the stack, way up by where it gets close to the moon, and the astronaut looks over at Chris and acts like he’s humping a box of the mugs. Chris starts laughing, starts coughing, wakes up staring at the ceiling, not quite able to articulate to himself that his eyes feel like they’ve been doing that heavy water thing that happens from sadness or laughing.

Eventually, Matthew is falling asleep in the sky against an expensive sweatshirt rolled up and jammed between his head and an economy-class window; Tatiana is sitting at her place in Los Angeles, drinking coffee, telling herself she’s not going back to cigarettes even though her last pale actor in the knot of simulated vampires is as good as poached; Tim and Modoch and Tic Tac are still pounding Yellowstone’s higher ground, the season will wane and they will start to tire of setting sacks of fuel aflame at night and hurling them into Montana’s gigantic sky as reasonable facsimile of ghostly replies.

Every day Matthew spent on top of, under, and next to mountains has been a day of email piling up, and the night spent on a plane with a dead phone and no charger will be the same. Email stacks up high and unread, from Tatiana to Matthew, about how complicated things are with her; about how complicated it feels to explain; about oh fuck, never mind, it’s simple and disregard what she was saying and who knows what’s happening; about how she could help Matthew make a good chunk of money; about how millions of suburban girls who dumped their pony phase for a vampire kick will want a coffee mug that says,
It starts off cute, and then it gets ugly,
and that she’s noticed that someone stole two of his mugs from her party; and how it was probably the same person who is stealing her last client making money. All of this is to say: The slow-motion drag of Matthew’s days is about to turn a corner and hurl into the straightaway. Finally.

Living Like Your Food Was Drugged Is Fine Entertainment

M
ATTHEW WAKES UP SLOUCHED
in a leather chair, the lighting dim and barely enough to cut through the smog of menthols drifting over from the little glassed-off corner where razor-sharp, small, and tanned men in suits are smoking them. The walls in here are mirrored gold and smudged, and on the little black lacquered table next to him, there’s a small fountain with a little plastic dojo or temple or altar or something in it—it’s plugged into the wall with a thin extension cord. Everyone is basically Chinese and staring at him. Mostly businessmen, well dressed, peering over the tops of complimentary copies of
The International Herald Tribune
and
Jakarta Times.
Oh, that’s a hit waiting to happen. That’s a mug waiting to be
turned into a giant hit. Matthew picks up a small pad and pen on the table next to him and underneath the EVA Air logo writes this:
Everyone is basically Chinese.

The head posits that waking up like this must be exactly what it feels like to realize you’re in a Quentin Tarantino film, after someone drugged your food, after someone snuffed you with a soaked rag, or pistol-whipped you, and you’re starting to come to. That woman back in craft class, Jan or Lynn, the one that bought the mug for her son because he likes
Pulp Fiction,
her son would love waking up like this. The head rants a little, shows whatever footage it has, think, think, Goddamnit, think a minute, the head screams tough, like some ham looking for work in those movies on network television. But, yes, right, okay, it’s coming back in clips: made it back, the last fifty miles the pain was bad, those hills on 5, Santa Clara or wherever it is all the way to the Hertz rental return lane, that was a side-bent crunch of ureter pain and scrape; returned the car; upgraded to the big soft seats with a sad combination of two credit cards, cashed miles, and even wadded cash at LAX. This must be the layover in Taipei, this morning or night or whatever time it is outside of the airline lounge; last night, the legs allowing just enough go-again to get from the gate to this place and that’s about all the memory there is, save for the fact that there was another long push of ache, a fucking blinding pain at the urinal during the interminable wait. Blood all over the white porcelain there, then a fast, fast, fast search online, on the tiny phone screen, for places outside of the United States that have hospitals
that don’t charge thirty thousand dollars to get rocks out of your kidney when they’re too large to scratch and claw their way down and out.

Three grand or something dumb to get here on short notice, still a bargain compared to the States, one credit card smacked down onto the counter and then a second one to make up the balance still due on the fare, but it’s easy to spend it all when there’s internal bleeding and something that won’t need a name or a college fund is clawing its way out and into the world. Doubled over in pain, leaning on the desk not batting an eye at charging up three grand and change. The pills made the pain of the cost go away, the pills turned LAX into a decent song or scene from a movie, the pills made it that much easier to lay the American Express Platinum, and then the less prestigious Visa Greenish Faux Marble, flat on the yellow and orange ticket counter’s cool, flat Formica. The pills made Bali an option, but first there’s this, the layover in Taipei, and the haze has left the head a cruel narrator in their wake, it’s a fog of hurt to try and figure out where the biological container has wound up this morning. Jesus, stare all you want, you lazy sons of bitches, read your papers, peek up and over them, judge your fellow man, savages.

Up, up, up, and out the door to the last Starbucks one is likely to see between here and Denpasar. A Starbucks like any other except that they look sideways at anyone ordering with their hands crammed into the front of the pants in order to hold the nuts firmly so they don’t bring jagged referred
pain with each beat of the heart. The mouth smiles a little bit, because for once it’s scaring the world instead of being scared by it, instead of smiling politely, instead of stretching thin with worry hoping that it has said the right thing. That’s right, this is what it’s like, you here standing at the gate to the west, you here making the grande iced coffee, this is what it’s like in America at the moment, everyone staggering around like junk zombies, unshowered, mumbling about how everyone is basically Chinese, hands crammed down the front of their pants and holding on to their genitals for comfort, for reassurance, for dear fucking life! I’m telling you, Huang, it’s a Goddamned jungle over there. Companies fattening people for decades then turning them loose in the streets to crush up lines of over-the-counter speed; to hoover up allergy pills and live in cars—you don’t want it, man. You’re looking at one of the lucky ones, this hot mess in your line trying to feed its blood something to wake its brain is the best-case scenario, and that’s only because he’s selling shit in parks and craft classes to round eyes who spend their days anchored at desks until the walking papers come.

Oh, the head is delightful, the head is having its fun this morning. Maybe the book about eating and praying is right and there’s something to this getting up and getting out. The coffee comes, this fix goes in the face, the clock does its thing, and eventually a piece-of-shit plane, something pockmarked in the paint and described in handmade signage at the gate as a
WET-LEASED AIRCRAFT
, this dirty burst of fuel and metal, is hurled skyward for the remaining leg of this little
spiritual/medical journey. Matthew tries his best to not leer at the flight attendant once the retired DC-9 reaches whatever cruising altitude it’s capable of. Look at it in here, begs the stem at the back of the brain, look at it, this ghetto in the sky, this old horse that thought it was long enough in the tooth to go quietly into scrap and salvage, jerked back aloft, ready or not, shoved into service today. It’s all but empty, maybe twenty or thirty people where there should be ten times that. Most everybody took one look at this junked old wheeze and walked back to the ticket counter to rebook. Is that the spirit, though?