It Feels So Good When I Stop (14 page)

“Anything else before we close up, Captain? ” He slid the bill under my drink coaster and waited for me to pay up.

“Would it be okay if I just sat here for a little bit? ” I showed him the remainder of my cocktail.

“For a little bit, sure.”

He went back by the register. I lit a smoke. Todd Rundgren came over the stereo, singing, “Hello It’s Me.” It fucking figured. I used to like Todd Rundgren a lot until he got contaminated. I started going out with Jennifer, my first serious girlfriend, in the fall of our senior year of high school. After we made out for the first time, she iced me down by saying she was years away from having sex. I told her I was willing to wait. Months later, on the fourteenth fairway of the Presidents Golf Course in Quincy, I managed to finger her through a tear in her jeans that was all the way down at her knee. I tried—with little success—to get into her pants via the conventional routes. And then I college-tried.

A couple of weekends later Jennifer visited her brother at the University of New Hampshire. I didn’t want her to go, but she said September was less than three months away. It was important that she get used to being at UNH. Plus, it was Spring Fling Weekend, and she’d always wanted to see Terence Trent D’Arby. I told her I would have skipped seeing
London Calling
-era Clash to be with her as much as possible. She said she’d never ask me to do something like that. It made me feel like shit. When she didn’t call me until the day after she got back home, I feared fall was coming a season early.

We were in the Bickford’s House of Pancakes in Brock-ton when she told me “something happened” between her and her brother’s roommate. She wouldn’t go into detail. She said it didn’t matter anyway because it had nothing to do with her not wanting to go out with me anymore. She was young. She wanted to date all kinds of people. I was crushed. I asked her to marry me. She tried breaking my fall by saying she wished we’d met when we were twenty-seven instead of seventeen. I would have forfeited the entire meddling decade.

She handed me a cassette she’d made especially for the occasion. It had one song on it: “Can We Still Be Friends” by Todd Rundgren. She said it summed up exactly what she wanted to say. I said there was no way we could still be friends. She thought that was too bad, but if that’s how I felt, there was nothing she could do about it.

It was after eleven p.m. Her brother, his girlfriend, and his roommate appeared in the Bickford’s foyer. The waitress tried to seat them, but they said they weren’t staying. Jennifer got up. She told me to please listen to the tape. She joined the other three. The roommate was a UNH crew Nazi. I’d never met the guy, but he wanted to kick my ass. He was still sneering at me as Jennifer and her brother led him out the door.

I listened to the Rundgren tune a bunch of times, parked in my parents’ driveway. I tried to read deep into the lyrics and twist their meaning so they’d support my hope of hopes that Jennifer would beg me to take her back. But what I heard was what I got. As far as Jennifer was concerned, I was the past. That night I cried myself to sleep. I woke up the next morning to my old man tapping on the driver’s-side window.

From then on, all of Todd Rundgren’s music was off-limits. That included bands he produced, such as the Psychedelic Furs and XTC. It was a shame, really. None of it was Todd Rundgren’s fault. It was almost time to start thinking about thinking about forgiving him.

 

I SAT ON Sweet Thunder in the Crow’s Nest lot and had a smoke. The stars looked like a spray of luminescent grapeshot. A station wagon full of rowdy high school kids pulled in from Plymouth Street. The car was covered in green and gold streamers and bar soap graffiti. The Sister Sledge tune “We Are Family” was punishing the speakers’ tiny woofers. The driver tried three times to do a doughnut. I moved well out his way.

A girl yelled out the window, “Nice bike, queer bait.” The car accelerated with youthful aggression onto Plymouth Street and disappeared into the darkness. If they all got killed it wouldn’t be because I wished it on them.

I biked along the beach. Two holdout fishermen were surf-casting from within the glow of a trash can of fire. The lures dangling from their rods were as big as a fish I’d have been proud to catch. I left the bike where it fell and walked toward the light like a dead man not quite sure if he’s ready for the afterlife. Regular people were home sleeping or watching the news. I coughed loudly as I got closer. The crashing waves made the beach sound like an airport.

I finally yelled, “Any luck yet? ” like I was about to traipse through a grizzly bear’s pantry. The colossus in the rubber hip waders and New England Patriots parka locked in on me. He gestured no a single time, then went back to fishing, like I wasn’t even there. The other fisherman did absolutely nothing to acknowledge me. He, too, might have been a lure set up to tempt a big one right onto the shore.

By my third and last cigarette, it became apparent that neither man nor mannequin was going to have any good luck. And I wish I had split on that note. But I stuck around just long enough to identify in me a kinship with these fisherman ghosts.

I started thinking about the bellboy who’d carried Jocelyn’s backpack into our honeymoon suite. He looked younger than me. I tipped him five bucks. He said he and his retirement savings thanked me. There wasn’t a single cunt hair of sarcasm in his voice.

 

I WOKE UP in my shoes and clothes. The morning sky was the color of a gray polyester shirt. I got up and kept the moving blanket thrown over my shoulders like I was Crazy Horse. Certifiably Crazy Horse.

James had had the environmentally unsound idea of turning a well-used kerosene lamp into a bird feeder. I stood at the kitchen sink window and polished off a box of toffee popcorn. I took a drink from the faucet. The water was so cold it hurt one of my molars. I hadn’t seen a dentist in years because I was afraid of what he’d have to do to fix me. I dug my knuckle hard into my jawbone to crimp the furious nerve.

The next-door neighbor’s woodpile taunted me from an open-faced shed painted to match the house. The only fireplace in my sister’s was boarded up. I considered pinching some wood and building a campfire in the backyard, but I knew James would blow a gasket.

I started thinking about an episode of
The Beverly Hill-billies
where Granny sets a fire—complete with kindling and logs—in the electric oven. It should have been funny, but it just made me sad. Like when I was in fifth grade, and me and a few other students were tapped to demonstrate to the new first-graders the proper way to use a urinal. When Sister Catherine John asked if I’d be willing to help them out, I felt very grown up. Seconds after I agreed, I wished I hadn’t. Before I could show him the right way to do it, little Timmy Homesick dropped his drawers, sat on the urinal, and took a shit in it.

That bird feeder worried me.

JOCELYN AND I were bored stiff, so we rode the ferry to Staten Island and back. That night she took me to a gourmet Peruvian restaurant in the Village that seats ten people. The food was pretty good, but way the fuck out there, and the portions were too small. I leaned across the table and whispered something about feeling guilty for eating some poor kid’s iguana. Usually a good line like that would have caused her to laugh her balls off.

The cab ride back to her place was a pretty quiet one. I put my hand on her thigh. She smiled, but stopped me from doing any impromptu spelunking. When we got home, we watched
Cries and Whispers
in bed as planned. Afterward she gave me an unsolicited, low-passion hand job. Then I asked her what she wanted me to do to her. She told me to let her go to sleep. I asked her if she still loved me, and she said yes. I had to work the dinner shift on Sunday, so I caught an early bus back to Amherst. Connecticut always was—and always will be—the state in my way. Somewhere between the pilonidal cyst that is Stamford and the perforated bowel that is New Haven, I felt something with my foot under the seat in front of me. I drew it closer. It was a royal blue three-ringed binder. It said Bank of New York in white. It belonged to one Viola Sporney. I flipped through it. It was full of pink Bank of New York forms executed by Viola. I couldn’t make any sense of them. The last page was white. On it was a handwritten to-do list:

I phoned Jocelyn when I got home and read her the to-do list. No, she didn’t think it was that depressing.

I WENT TO SEE a shrink once at UMass. He said me being on Prozac was the right move. As soon as I heard that, I turned him off for three reasons: (1) I didn’t want to risk anyone finding out. (2) You’d practically have to throttle your dick to death before you could come (a non-issue). (3) Prozac made Del Shannon kill himself.

I backpedaled and told the shrink that maybe I’d exaggerated some of my story, and that just talking about it had me feeling better. A lot better. He didn’t buy it, but what was he going to do, force-feed me antidepressants? It wasn’t like I was opening veins or making bombs in my dorm room.

I finished the semester, landing squarely on academic probation. I went home to my childhood twin bed in suburban Boston. I got my old summer job back, packing orders in an office-supply warehouse in East Bridge-water. Del Shannon’s tormented voiced lifted my spirits during rush-hour traffic jams on Route 24. I had always thought of Del Shannon as being right down there with Pat Boone. Why? Because I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. The part where Del wonders where she will stay, his little runaway? And the chorus of “I Go to Pieces” ? Fuck me. They’re still hard to listen to.

The small-headed kid at Spunt’s pointed at me from behind the counter. “Hey, look, it’s Pay Phone.” It was better than being called Dogshit.

“Hey.” I grabbed a special three-for-the-price-of-two pack of Winstons. I speed-read the J-cards of the cassette tapes that filled a lazy Susan. There was no Del Shannon.

“You don’t need a job, do you? ” the kid asked. He was twirling a point-of-purchase pinwheel sticking out of a bouquet of them.

“No, but thanks, anyway.”

“I do. If I didn’t have a job, I’d be nobody.”

When I got back to the house, James was waiting there to pass Roy off on me. He already had him strapped into the stroller.

“I didn’t think you were going to show,” James said.

“That’s funny, because I knew you would.”

 

“ I T ’S SAD WHEN anyone dies, Roy.” I pushed the stroller along our usual route. One of the small, bone-jarring wheels was seized up. “Even bad people.” Opal Cove Road was a dead-end street. Number 97 was the last house on the left. It was a weather-beaten ranch identical to my sister’s. It didn’t appear to be in worse shape than any of the other houses left unattended for seven of the year’s harshest months. All of the window shades were drawn. The front lawn was sand and twigs. There was a wet case of empty Bud Light cans at the end of the driveway. I looked around, then scooped it up. I jammed the case into the stroller’s mesh undercompartment. I had never returned cans that were not of my own—or my party’s own—emptying. But twenty-four cans was a buck twenty. Smokes were two-fifty a pack. I’d come a long way, baby.

A few days later, when I took care of Roy again, there was another case of empties and a beat-up Subaru wagon in the driveway of 97 Opal Cove Road.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, kid.”

I heard the unmistakable sound of a dog’s collar jangling at charging speed. A muscular Doberman rounded the corner of the house and stopped at a safe sizing-up distance. He growled like a wood chipper. Raw egg white saliva swung from his fangs. I moved slightly, and so did he. Roy and I were pinned.

“Go home!” I ordered. “Go home!” The dog did not obey.

“Tinker, no! ” someone screamed. “Tinker, no! ”