Amp'd (28 page)

His mom sobs a giant snot bubble, and just when I think I may have gone too far, she manages, “Thank you.”

“Should I continue?”

She wipes her face and nods, and if the teacher has any objection he keeps it to himself. “I had this plaque made and affixed to a tree here.” I step back to the small patch on the tree draped in a length of fabric. “These trees were here long before Jimmy, and they'll be here long after we're all gone—”

“Where are we going?” A little girl asks, sad.

“Extinction,” I comfort her. “And this plaque will be a simple reminder of that ordinary day for a boy who never wanted to be special.”

I pull the fabric to reveal the small bronze plaque embedded in the tree just below Dad's bullet hole:

JIMMY FERRIS

HE WAS AN ORDINARY BOY

His mother tears up all over again, and the kids manage tiny, uncertain applause.

“I also want to take a moment to remember my father here, in this special place where they both felt alive and vital.”

I take out Dad's ashes and start to shake them out at the base of the tree. It feels right, and natural—Dad literally returning to the earth, and in the final place that mattered to him. Then a sudden shift of the wind blows a great gust of ashes at the kids, and some of them are blinded and begin to cry while others choke on Dad. They're still coughing when their teacher hustles them back onto the bus.

Now I know how the sheriff felt with all those Boy Scouts.

 

LOVE

As I walk Mom down the aisle, her hand resting on my only arm, and present her to her fireman, I consider for the first time the queasy notion that this union might technically make the former Mr. February my stepfather. He says “I will” and she says “I do” and somewhere, Dad looks down on all this while my lost arm hugs him in a creepy but well-intentioned effort to console and assure him that we all still love him.

I'm forced to think about love, about who might someday love me and what kind of woman I can love in return. If I could assemble the perfect female from the best parts of the women I've known, she might have sixteen-year-old Pam Jaffe's innocent allure, Ariana's adorability, Lilith's … prominence, Consuela's boldness, the tolerance of Cancer Boy's mom, Jackie's tenacity, Mom's Zen, and my ex-wife's willingness to marry me. Even with all those attributes, would this Frankensteinian ideal be the equal of Sunny Lee?

I'm about to find out because Jackie's “date,” I discovered upon arrival, is Sunny. Having reached out to reconnect, Jackie invited her to the wedding in a most generous act of date swapping, especially since I brought no date to swap.

“You seem surprised to see me,” Sunny laughs musically.

“I admit, you have me off balance. Even more than usual.”

“Remember what I said about symmetry being overrated?”

“I actually did some research, and you're right. Turns out most of the universe is actually asymmetrical.” I tell her about spiral galaxies and the DNA helix and seashells that only coil in one direction, and a universe that is more matter than antimatter. “I think it's called
chirality,
” I say, enough to spur anyone else to excuse themselves to the bar and spend the rest of the evening dodging any further attention.

Instead, Sunny pokes an abbreviated version of all this into her phone and tells me, “Don't think I'm not stealing this.”

The reception is a modest affair emboldened by the presence of the men of the firehouse who, when not battling blazes or posing for calendars, apparently eat and drink like pirates. The theme is “firefighter,” everything dressed in fire-engine red, beer flowing through a fire hose, and the wedding cake, shaped like a firefighter's helmet, is cut with an axe. Mom's classy touch is the frozen bottle service of Fleischmann's on every table, alongside tiny potted zinnias Jackie and I were forced to steal from our old backyard. (I couldn't believe the assholes who bought our house said
no
.)

Over a meal of five-alarm chili I gush to Sunny over her book, which I had insisted be recovered from the wreckage—
No, you can't buy me a new one, I need that one!
—and consumed in the hospital. I'm able to cite specific instances of lunar cycles and cicada invasions and tide pool tadpoles until she makes me stop, impressed and embarrassed. So I shift our focus to the new material around us, and Sunny starts Googling while I dash off notes on our paper tablecloth.

On marriage: “Theories concerning the origins of marriage are many, including a man's need to assure the paternity of his children; he might therefore be willing to pay a bride in exchange for exclusive sexual access.”

“Do you take this woman,” I scribble, “to carry your seed to full term?”

“Romantic!” she observes.

On drinking: “The first clear evidence of distillation comes from Greek alchemists working in Alexandria in the first century
A.D
.”

“Thank goodness for the Greeks, who gave us…”—I scratch out a list—“philosophy, democracy, hangovers, and awkward mornings-after in strange beds.”

“You're good at this!”

On weddings: “The wedding ring possibly originated in the Roman belief in the vena amoris, which was believed to be a blood vessel running from the fourth finger directly to the heart…”

“That still doesn't explain nose rings. Or toe rings. Or—”

“
Cock
rings,” Sunny announces, snatching my pen and writing it down in big bold letters. “I'm not sure we can use it, but I'm not letting it get away.”

She said
we.
My face is on fire, and I hope it's not another infection.

On dancing: “Dance is a type of art involving body movements set to music, also sometimes used to tell a story, or as a prelude to mating.”

“I think the story being told by those two,” I say, gesturing to a clutching, wiggling couple on the dance floor, “is that there will be mating later.”

On love: “Interpersonal love refers to a more potent sentiment than a simple
liking
of another. Biological models view love as a mammalian drive much like hunger or thirst.”

“I don't know about a radio segment, but that's a great title for a song, “Mammalian Love.” ‘Baby baby baby, I hunger for your thirst.'”

“‘You make me wanna burst,'” she joins in.

“Catchy! What rhymes with ‘mammalian'?”

“Italian!”

“I smell a hit.”

“If we're gonna be rock stars, we should drink like rock stars,” Sunny pronounces, grabbing the slowly melting Fleischmann's bottle.

“That's pure rock-star vodka, the best $5.98 can buy.”

When the Fleischmann's is seemingly gone, I demonstrate Dad's eleven drops hypothesis to Sunny's appropriate astonishment. Having depleted those drops and then those from our neighboring tables, we head to the bar to drink flaming shots and then move to the dance floor, where we create art with our body movements set to music. When a slow song comes on, without hesitation Sunny steps up to me, takes my hand in hers and places her other hand squarely on my shoulder nub, as intimate an act as one is likely to commit in front of a roomful of people outside of an orgy.

I make it a point to dance with Mom and congratulate her new husband before stealing their limousine to ensure Sunny gets home safely, earning a peck on the cheek and a smile before watching her recede into the darkness. Before sending the limo back, I drop myself at Fred Weber's. He's still at the wedding of course, so I let myself in the back door—which, in a stupor of alcohol and infatuation, I leave open, allowing Ali to escape once more. He'll turn up nearly a year from now, startling an underwater munitions diver after the dam, having been deemed an “insurmountable hazard to endangered fish species,” is decommissioned and scheduled for removal. The resulting explosion is quite spectacular.

 

THINGS I NEVER DID WITH TWO ARMS

Jog

Wear handcuffs

Count fish

Rescue an alligator (twice)

Show-and-tell

Show a dying kid a good time

Pick up a slutty Viking on Halloween

Hire an undocumented nurse (later hired by Homeland Security)

Star in a YouTube viral sensation

Pimp a van

Build a bomb

Steal zinnias

Aid and abet a bank robbery

Manipulate a credit card whacker

Take care of my father

Eliminate my brother-in-law

Realize my sister loved me

Dance at my mother's wedding

Assemble a perfect 1970s configuration of stereo components

Cowrite radio segments, and a terrible song

Sell my children's book about a river of magic fish and a dam-busting sea serpent named Bob

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, thank you, Mitchell Waters, who I first met in high school and then decades later blind-queried without recognizing his name. I remain astonished to have found you again and grateful for your representation, your tolerance, and your thoughtful notes on
Amp'd
. Thanks are also due to Steven Salpeter for responding to my sample and knowing it would likely appeal to Mitchell. Thank you, April Osborn; I was thrilled by your enthusiasm for
Amp'd
and grateful for your promise to be our champion—I hope for many years to come.

It is with deep gratitude and admiration that I acknowledge authors Bruce Cameron and Joseph Monninger for taking the time to read an early draft of this work and offering praise beyond my wildest dreams tempered with well-considered suggestions for improvement. Similarly, I thank those who graciously accepted the presumptuous imposition to read a debut author and offer blurbs—the kindest of acts in the face of the most thankless of writerly tasks.

I gratefully acknowledge Sandra Loh, voice of
The Loh Down on Science,
who inspired the character of Sunny Lee, and with whom, like Aaron, I perhaps fell a little bit in love upon first hearing her disembodied radio voice on my arrival in Los Angeles. I must also acknowledge that when stuck for a name for a character both warmhearted and rock solid, I looked no further than former seaman Fred Weber, who, to my knowledge, has had no firsthand experience with lawyering or medical marijuana.

With so much “real” science and medicine at work here, certainly there should be sources to acknowledge (beyond a sweeping nod to Wikipedia), but I have only these: a June 2008
60 Minutes
segment on endangered salmon, “Fish Fuss,” as reported by Lesley Stahl and produced by Karen Sughrue; a pair of e-mails from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Portland District, dashing my fantasy above-water fish counting scenario and forcing me to, quite literally, dig deeper; and multiple visits to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Web site. But although I visited many sites on fish and dams, amputations and medical marijuana, this is after all a work of fiction, and I confess to fabricating nearly everything: from the aggressively ugly blue paddle-snout sturgeon, which does not exist in reality, to the many strains of medical marijuana I had great fun in naming. (I confess only a passing acquaintance with the effects of Vicodin and medical marijuana, and in far lower doses than those consumed herein.) As for any credible-sounding passages of one-armed experience, I can only admit hours spent attempting the simple tasks of an ordinary day using a single arm, grossly insufficient to the reality of such an injury but enough to inspire awe and admiration for the daily courage of anyone so afflicted.

On the subject of fictional liberties in a work populated by oddball family members, it seems appropriate to acknowledge that no character here is based on my actual family. My mother was a devoted, engaged parent at a time when such a thing was considered unfashionable, and wildly supportive into adulthood; my father is far from a withholding stoic; rather he's vigorous and engaged, interested and interesting, and always a friend. My younger sister is ebullient and giving where the fictional Jackie is all manic calculation.

Finally, I must acknowledge and thank, too inadequately, the efforts of my extraordinary wife for her meticulous editing of
Amp'd
beginning with its earliest drafts, from proofreading to her good sense to encourage some flight-of-fancy deletions, much to the betterment of this book. And, as during the writing of this book, we worked almost daily in a shared home office, back-to-back, I am forever aware of, and grateful for, her quiet omnipresence in my writing and living.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR