Flatscreen (27 page)

I ran.

Possible Ending #16 (American Coming-of-Age):

Done with this town and all who have done me wrong, get in my new used car, drive toward new life as represented by the ever-nearing horizon. Old song on the radio about days and their dawns. Down Grande, past the card store—Amy in the window scooping slushy—past the empty Little League field, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Blockbuster, QHS, radio tower. Onto the highway, west like a true American. Into motel country, among the strip malls, mega malls, golden arches, cell-phone towers; through waves of wireless signal, satellite beams, these carpets of information that hover in the air like invisible clouds, ropes of data binding everything but our bodies, so as we move apart, we are still hopelessly connected.

Thing I hate about those movies with the highway ending is they never tell you what comes next: profound loneliness. Not to mention complete lack of direction, stuck in the Midwest, no friends, no job, just this fleeting feeling of freedom before the guy realizes what he had wasn’t great but at least it was the start of something decent, what with his okay brother, rich father. Still heartbroken over Alison, Jennifer, Mom, Kahn, etc., still longing for something I’ll never achieve because the thing I’m longing for is home, family, and maybe this freedom thing’s overrated or not freedom at all because America hates a loner, Middle America hates East Coast Jews, etc.

Sat on the bench outside Starbucks, watching high-tech strollers roll, complete with sunroofs for ultimate vitamin D consumption. Kids viewed windy world through designer shades. Nannies shivered. Single frigid hands controlled stroller handles, weaved charges through paths of Kapler Park, eyes forward, unblinking, other hand holding cell phone to ear to listen as lovers spout grocery lists, parents praise persistence, doctors handle prescriptions, cubicled former sorority sisters in the adrenaline thrall of schadenfreude waste the nine-to-five whispering weakly stimulating gossip about which Tiffanies and Ambers have gained a couple pounds.

We’d been in Amy’s talking to Amy, checking out cards, sampling games where death was a mere door to another, fresher life. A regressive step, but also comforting after previous night’s events. Nothing to look forward to, it seemed, but the card store and its too-smart children whose joystick hands were quicker than my pot-slowed dinosaur thumbs.

Benjy answered his brand new cell phone, said, “I can’t talk now … no … baby … no, I know … look … look, I’m coming later… I love you, okay?… I know… I love… I
know… I’ll call you in an hour … yes, I’ll pick up the … yes … sourdough … right … and soy milk … look, I’ll, I mean, I love you, okay, bye.”

“I wish I had your gene for cooking,” he said.

“I wish I had yours for bullshitting.”

“I wish I had yours for … actually, I only want the cooking one.”

“If I were her I would hate you,” I said. “I see that now. You are an absolutely terrible person.”

“She does. But she also doesn’t. It’s complicated.”

“Everything is more complicated than it might appear to be,” I said.

As if to prove it, I unfolded a crumpled mini-map of Massachusetts that had mysteriously appeared in my wallet, hidden beneath years of concert tickets and old receipts that raised my bony ass, bent my crooked back. Map was whitened and wilted, impossible to refold. I opened it up, sounded out the names of foreign towns, ones that might hold more promising futures for myself.

“Quincy,” I said. “Beverly. Waltham. North Adams. Marblehead. Lenox.”

Benjy took it from my hand, briefly scoped Boston’s nonsensical public transit system, then ripped it a thousand ways, watched the paper snow fall from his hands, float on the wind.

“We’re working things out.”

“Yeah?”

“Actions aren’t always forever. She knows it was a mistake. Your thing was probably a mistake too.”

“My thing was the truth I refused to look at.”

“Nothing is fucked here, dude,” Benjy said, like he was Dan or something now, quoting from movies, saying things that meant nothing.

“You’re awfully optimistic.”

“What’s meant to be will be.”

Benjy looked at his phone, unconvinced. Put the phone in his pocket. I kicked a cigarette butt, lit another. A black-haired chub of a child rolled happily in wet leaves, oblivious to pants stains. His mom or nanny brushed the leaves off without comment, rubbed his little neck, hoisted him, for a moment, into the air. Wondered if things like that had happened in my childhood, if there were times when I’d been cared for without condition, without scorn, when someone had picked me up by choice, held me like a living trophy. Didn’t remember any of my babysitters. Apparently Uncle Ned had slept with one, or so my mother had insinuated. Wondered who she was and where she was now. If I could seek her out, call her up, ask her what he’d said so sweet to coo her in, and if, after, he’d fled, had forced her from the nanny job with shame. Maybe I could say I was sorry. Felt like everything anyone ever said could be an apology if phrased and toned in such a way.

“Mom and Dad never got back together,” I said.

“Mom and Dad were a shitty couple to begin with.”

“How do you know what they were like to begin with?”

“I’m older than you.”

“By two years.”

“Your memory’s been compromised by drugs. Dad was always a cheater. I once heard him on the phone. A woman whispering about a blow job. I was old enough to know what a blow job was.”

“Sure your memory hasn’t been compromised?”

“I got a six-seventy on the math SAT.”

“That was a while ago, and that’s not even that good.”

“My memory’s been strengthened by the indelible events of our childhood.”

“So why did you never hate him?”

“I think I sort of understood. He was married to Mom. Maybe I’ve been recently trying to understand. Maybe it’s time you yourself forgive and forget.”

“Oh, fuck off, cheater. If I were her I’d cut your balls off,” I said, though my anger was misplaced. He’d been a mensch about my troubles, was here for me now when no one else was.

“Besides, no one’s asked for my forgiveness.”

“Maybe I’m asking.”

I flicked his earlobe, pinched his wind-red cheek.

“Maybe I’m offering.”

We sat for a while in postcard repose, nannies gone, sun down, Kapler Park an empty field, covered only in patchy grass, dropped bottles of Vitamin Water, withered Band-Aids, wet leaves. Whatever Benjy said, I would still walk home alone, and he would be off to Erin’s to win back the love he had tainted, changed. Time passed.

Possible Ending #17 (
American Chef
, Wednesdays, 10 p.m.):

But is there a chance that I
do
become a TV chef, that I
have
charisma, superlative cooking skills, more so than the other wannabes facing the food-tube, dreaming Rachael Ray’s breasts wound around our schlongs like sugar-cured boob-bacon incongruently (if deliciously) tied to all-beef kosher hot dogs? Wouldn’t that be ironic, me, on the output end of the same digital network I’ve sat receiving for years, wasting away in starch-saturated solitude, failing to think myself away from the glow, letting my eyelids flutter and close, sinking irreparably into the couch cushion? The show is called
American Chef
. I have a catchphrase—“Yowza!”—a signature soufflé, multicolored name brand cookware, funny chef’s hat with baseball-style brim, legions of middle-aged mom fans tickled by my keen wit, overuse of butter. Soon there’s a cookbook empire, barbecue sauce with my face on it, foodie ex-vegetarian groupies sucking marrow bones, among other things. Wash my hands so often they become permanently shriveled, but otherwise I’m okay, soft in the gut, softhearted. Sit in the
steam room, soft-boiling, towel off, last night’s lover misting me with spray-fan lemon water in the otherwise empty Back Bay mansion. Just a cab ride from Benjy and Erin’s (issues resolved) little new-parent pad (because he apologized and vowed his loyalty), and Mom’s penthouse high-rise I got her and Jeff under the sole condition they stay together, lifelong companions eating real food (no shakes), drinking aged booze (no screw-top wine), fucking into infinity (behind closed doors), loving life enough to love me too. And maybe the thing is, we’re all happy with our food, stuffing ourselves with cold pork belly, hot bouillabaisse, chilled half-shell oysters flown directly from the North Pole, sealed in vacuum bags, delivered by my cadre of overworked interns, each of whom gets a take-home prize. We’re nourished in this nuclear winter (2012?), still living off the land while the rest of the world is crying over robots killing robots in Asia, everyone sense-stripped, eating protein pills for breakfast, unconsciously ambling across the webs looking for physicality, not finding it, and here’s my happy family, bodies big, full of feeling, full of foie gras, full of joy.

The other thing I should have seen coming—natural postscript to that shitty night, but too bluntly devastating to truly expect; an extreme act more willful than the average action-paralyzed slacker can conceive of, let alone decide upon, force upon himself—was Kahn shooting himself in the head, which happened the next day.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Erin on the phone. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

What you say even if it’s not the right thing to say, or what you mean.

Was in the apartment alone. No Benjy in sight. Maybe he was already by Erin’s side, using this chance to comfort, console, forget the bullshit, focus on what was truly important. Wanted to walk, stare at leafless trees, think clichéd thoughts about life and death, imagine myself in a third-act montage, taking slugs from paper-bag whiskey, watching the sun disappear behind a cloud. The only way I knew how to react, had been taught to deal with the confrontation of mortality: to imitate grief as I’d seen it on television, hope its methods proved cathartic.

Instead got on my bike. Angry more than anything, still angry at Alison, angry at Kahn for this, angry at Benjy,
my parents, etc. Angry but also in pain, shit-scared, guilty-feeling, confused.

Assumed Kahn had done it with the gun he’d shot me with. Maybe a catalyst for a seismic shift in his life, just as it had been in mine, though in my case the shift had propelled me forward toward a closer-to-healthy social life, and possible job. Also nearing a driver’s license, had learned to do laundry. Didn’t Kahn know that the shooting was good for me? Maybe he did know, knew it was his last great act, had nothing for his daughters. I was his child to save. By killing himself he could teach me some vague lesson about the decay of the soul (which he believed in) that comes with being blown by a twenty-year-old stripper.

But I was being narcissistic again. Kahn’s death, like most things, had nothing to do with me.

Wanted to call Erin back, find out if he’d left a note, if she was okay, needed a hug, a homemade babka. Not that there was much to explain. One of the more obvious suicides in history: handicapped, lonely, drug addict. But there had been something in the way Kahn spoke, the words he used, the way his eyes popped while ranting, that made him seem very much alive, more alive than the rest of us, because a failing body can’t deny the existence of the body itself.

Biking around, realized I was looking for Alison. Knew I wouldn’t find her. Hated her, hoped she was okay.

Rode past her house, then onto some back roads, out of Quinosset. Houses were smaller, cheaper probably, touch faux-rustic—forest greens, deep maroons, maybe a shed out back. Away from the suburban metropolis into what the suburbs used to look like on TV: white picket fence type shit. Basketball hoops hung from garages. People rode bicycles in normal clothes: no spandex, no helmets. Saturday
morning, light snow in the dying grass. Middle-aged couple wrapped in scarves holding Styrofoam coffee cups. Teenage boy on snowboard atop half-melted snowman. Tried to imagine Kahn’s body as it fell, bones crumbling, blood dripping into the grates, into the central heating where it burned, immaterial ashes propelled back into the air.

Stopped at a diner, the kind in a train car. The waitress smiled even though she must have been freezing in her short skirt. Ordered the eighteen-wheeler, trucker’s breakfast complete with pancakes, three eggs, OJ, coffee, bacon, sausage, corned-beef hash, home fries.

Imagined the cops questioning me.

“How did you know him?”

“I sold him drugs and he took my woman.”

“Were you there that night?”

“I was there in spirit.”

“Cuff him, boys…”

“What I mean is he bought my mother’s house. Our house. It was never really his house.”

“Didn’t he shoot you?”

“I think he was in love with me.”

Got the check. She drew a smiley face on it, wrote, “Thanks, Fran.” For some reason it made me feel a bit better.

Rode past Whole Foods, past the high school. Thought the world would be changed, but everything was as I’d left it.

Possible Ending #18 (Triumphant):

Maybe you’ve been waiting for the ending where I write a movie based on these experiences. The writing itself is cathartic, helps me get over all the shit. Success of the film helps me with the other stuff, including finding a true calling. Hollywood becomes my home. Make dear friends who are moved by my story. These friends become family. Eat a lot of sushi. This is the ending you’re supposed to imagine happening after the get-in-your-car, head-west ending. Head west until you’re in Los Angeles, surrounded by the kind of people who can make things like this happen. Become a waiter for a while. Struggle while you try to write. Hold personal vigils for Kahn. Keep him in your heart. Maybe a new mentor helps. Maybe a girlfriend teaches you to believe in yourself. But this ending is really the beginning to a different kind of movie. It’s a movie I’ve seen. Doesn’t end well, and it’s a stupid movie to boot. The writer lives alone amid a pile of books. Grows reclusive, heads for the hills. Still hung up on the girl who taught him to believe in himself. Too bad he’d left her soon as his first paycheck arrived,
soon as that blonde put a hand on his shoulder, shoved slick tongue down his smoke-sore throat. So the writer lives in the hills in solitude, drinking himself to death. He’s working on a follow-up, something epic, something he will never finish.