Making Nice (13 page)

A)
you can’t trust water.

B)
you can’t trust trees.

C)
you can’t trust girls.

D)
you can’t trust people.

E)
you can’t trust yourself.

F)
you can’t trust.

G)
trust often leads to betrayal, which occasionally, if you’re lucky, leads to something lovely.

A)
Yes

B)
No

C)
Sometimes

D)
It depends

E)
It depends who’s hitting me

NO TEST MATERIAL ON THIS PAGE

IV

We were ten and lined up in center field of the Locust Avenue Little League ballpark practicing our pop flys. When I stepped forward, the coach, my father, hit it as hard and as high as he could. I ran a clumsy zigzag all over the outfield, spun here, stumbled there, got underneath it, jogged in place, danced nervously waiting for it to come down. I squinted and strained to keep my eyes on it, made last-second adjustments, fidgeted, followed it down with unflinching concentration right up until it hit me in the face. I’d forgotten to put my glove up, woke on my back in the outfield grass on a warm summer afternoon with a pretty lady holding an orange Creamsicle to my swollen-shut left eye. I felt peaceful for at least thirty seconds, and for that I’ll love baseball forever. Years later my father admitted to me that he never wanted to coach, and that he chose his players based on who had the best-looking mothers.

A)
history

B)
psychology

C)
medicine

D)
sports

E)
pretty ladies making things worthwhile

F)
genetics

V

I was twelve years old and running counterclockwise laps around the outside of the house, counting them out as I crossed the stone path that curved between the front door and the bashed-in metal mailbox with no number, but if there were a number it would’ve been a three. I was running and I was counting and I was losing count, distracted by the sound of my own breathing, two or more inhales for every exhale: inhale-inhale-exhale, inhale-inhale-inhale-exhale. I had more trouble remembering the first digit of the lap than the second, so if I was off I was off by tens. Eight or eighteen, nineteen or twenty-nine, fifty or forty, or fifty, it didn’t matter. The number wasn’t the thing, the thing was the thing. Simply, I hadn’t thought of any other thing to do that particular morning, and because I had the energy to do it, that’s what I did. I ran laps around the outside of the house, and I counted them out as I crossed the stone path.

After crossing the stone path there was lawn. There was nothing special about the lawn except that it was the lawn that came immediately after crossing the stone path. It was the beginning. After the beginning was the driveway, where I made a left turn and ran up and over and past the oil stains that were blacker than the blacktop they were on, then another left down the cement alley between the back of the house and the rotting stockade fence, on the other side of which lived Zion, a Jewish guy who threatened to cut my father’s ears off with a chainsaw during an argument about tree branches and rain gutters. Then out of the cement alley and onto the other section of lawn, past the Japanese maple with bamboo wind chimes, the only wind chimes that don’t make me think of walking into Ben Franklin with my mother. Around the patio, more lawn, then the stone path and a number that might or might not have followed the one that preceded it. I’d been going for an hour, maybe more, around and around, because I could, and then I tripped headfirst over a rake that I had most likely left out myself. I’ve never had the kind of patience it takes to put leaves in bags or rakes back in garages. I hit hard and slid a few feet, stopped and opened my eyes. I stood up quickly, embarrassed even though there was no one around to see it, and looked myself over, blinking and marveling at my indestructibility. Then I looked at my right hand. The pinky and ring finger had seemingly exploded, their insides outside. I sucked air through my teeth and took off running again, faster now, left arm swinging, right arm not, my ruined hand up and out in front of me as I went up the stone path and into the house screaming for my mother, screaming, “Mom! Mom! My guts are out!” She was in the kitchen on the telephone and told whoever it was that she’d call them back, hung up, and pulled me by the shirt toward the window for better light. There, she studied my hand for a few seconds, looked closer, said, “It’s dog poop,” huffed and wiped it off with a paper towel and sent me to the bathroom to wash up. Only then, when I knew that my hand was fine, did I start crying.

A)
Mind over matter.

B)
I am matter.

C)
I matter.

D)
I do not matter.

E)
Pain is preferable to pleasure.

F)
The virtue of overwhelming pain is that it takes your mind off of problems.

VI

The karaoke guy had been calling us “party people” all night and I’d had enough. He was trying to convince a few of us to go sing songs, so I put my face close to his face and said, “You are a fuckface, Fuckface, and I’m not going anywhere.” Then I walked out and found myself hanging on to a parking meter watching the time-remaining zeros peekaboo at me while I considered my left eye. It had begun winking wildly, my impaired brain letting me know one or both would have to close, simply because the inside of an eyelid is dark, and dark doesn’t move around so much. I clamped it shut and waited for things to settle. When the right eye started to give me problems I switched over and waited for things to settle. I alternated between the two and waited for things to settle. If you wait for things to settle long enough they usually do, and even though I felt steady enough to stand unaided, I held on to the meter anyway as I took a piss on the white minivan parked there. The puddle looked alive as it moved down the gutter.

Tuck and zip and one step back, I stuffed my hands in my pants pockets and pulled them inside out. A few crumpled dollar bills spilled onto the sidewalk and I bent at the waist like girls do, some of them anyway, picked up the dollars, and stood and began uncrumpling them, felt what looked like a piece of licorice stuck to my hand, looked closer and saw little antennas. I said, Hello, slug, I’m gonna name you Cherokee Bob, and then I thought to see if anybody was watching me. Standing against the outside wall of the bar and the birthday party I’d just removed myself from, below and to the left of a Budweiser neon, was a group of three girls with cigarettes in their hands, staring at me. They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and then after that they didn’t say anything. I looked at Cherokee Bob tenderly, then placed him down on the sidewalk in a slow and careful way, nudged him with my index finger, and whispered, Run, go on damn it, run for your fuckin’ life, and then I looked at the three girls, who were still looking at me, and the one on the left took a drag of her cigarette, and I said, Nobody touches this fuckin’ slug, and began backing away from them, never taking my eyes off them, and the one in the middle took a drag of her cigarette, and none of them said anything.

A)
sentimental heart vs. skeptical mind

B)
skeptical heart vs. sentimental mind

C)
heart

D)
heartbroken

E)
heartbroken and furious about being heartbroken

F)
heartbroken and furious about being heartbroken and blind drunk

G)
the slug symbolizes his dick

EXTRA CREDIT!!!

Now, considering everything you’ve read, here and everywhere, ever, in your whole fuckin’ life—and be honest—what’s the point?

A)
to help

B)
to witness

C)
to endure

D)
to document

E)
to attack power

F)
to be an enemy of bullshit

G)
to give pain meaning

H)
to instruct

I)
to entertain

J)
to find comfort

K)
to fuck as many women as possible

L)
to save small animals

M)
to avoid loneliness

N)
to avoid a nine-to-five

O)
to make nice

P)
everything dies

Q)
don’t die yet

R)
revenge

S)
style

T)
restraint

U)
fame and fortune

V)
F and J only

W)
the point is always moving

X)
the point is what we do in the meantime

Y)
there is no point

Z)
Mom

T
OAST

I once dated this other girl who, when faced with restaurant-toast, would take only one bite of each of her four restaurant-toast halves. She said she didn’t want any of the restaurant-toast halves to feel neglected. “You’re a very nice girl,” I told her. She thanked me, then complained about the ice cubes in her orange juice.

She had this other habit, too, of putting on ChapStick before drinking her coffee. The first time I noticed it was at the zoo near the giraffes after we patronized the Perky Bean cart in the Wild Time Food Court. She told me she does it because she likes the greasy feel of the ChapStick on her lips with the warm coffee going in. She said, “I like it so much that one time I left my coffee on the porch to go get my ChapStick out of my bag, and while I was inside I got a phone call from my mom that lasted for like twenty minutes. When I finally remembered about the coffee, all these ants had drowned themselves in it, but I drank it anyway.”

I looked her up and down and up again and then at a trash can, and then at a yellow jacket flying messy figure eights above the trash can. After a while the yellow jacket started hovering over a piece of what I think was chewed-up gum stuck in the ashtray on top of the can, almost landed, then zipped off to someplace else.

“You drank ants,” I said.

“I did.”

“Did they taste like anything?”

“Yes,” she said. “Like coffee.”

I nodded at her, then together we turned and sipped our coffees and watched the giraffes chew leaves. Later, we watched an otter jerk off.

We started dating intense-style, talking all the time on the phone and in person about this and that, our regrets and our fears for the future and lawn care and breast-feeding and the wipe-wash feature on cars, but mostly about what we wanted to eat for dinner. The answer was usually, I don’t know, what do you wanna eat? And the answer to that was usually, I don’t know, what do
you
want to eat? And so on. Eventually she would go
hmmmm
, then list off ethnic groups in the form of questions—Japan
ese
?—and I would get really frustrated and say Let’s just go to Joe’s.

Joe’s was this dump on Cannery Row with mediocre food but there was no freezer in the kitchen so it was always fresh and pretty cheap, and the first time we ate there we heard an old guy say, “Where the fuck am I? Miami? I hate glass bricks.” We liked it immediately. One table was shaped like a rowboat and one an actual picnic bench. The silverware was mismatched, too, the floor painted-over cracked concrete, the baby-blue walls decorated with pictures of boats and big fish, and a framed newspaper article about a WWII submarine hung outside the only bathroom. It quickly became our special place, and we went at least twice a week. We even had a favorite table in the corner, and got to know one of the waitresses, Jessica, pretty well.

Then one morning my girlfriend followed me into the kitchen and watched me pour myself a bowl of granola and milk and scoop a big spoonful of it into my mouth and commented, “Eating granola, huh?” I was so confounded I stopped chewing to look at her, exactly one-half of me wanting to pinch her cheeks, exactly the other half of me wanting to punch her across the room. I stood quietly for a few seconds until the feelings passed, and when they did I resumed eating my granola. Realizing that I wasn’t going to bother with a response, she turned her attention to the window and, noticing a cat outside, declared, “Ohhh, look! A cat!” Then a few seconds later, “That cat is
cuuuute
.”

That afternoon, after she’d gone home, she called on the phone to ask if I’d done my laundry.

Also, one night, when she was standing still and naked and backlit by the bathroom light, I noticed a kind of white, almost invisible fur all over her body. It bothered me. I never said anything about it cause I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but she had no problem commenting on how my dick is browner than the rest of me. “It’s like the dark circles around Indian people’s eyes,” she said. I pretended I didn’t care, but I did, but not as much as I cared about her shoes. She always wore high heels, like even on bike rides always, and to the beach and batting cages always, and to a Super Bowl party we went to once. And believe me, it wasn’t so much that she was a half inch taller than me when she wore them, which she thought it was about—it was that I got sick of hearing her clomping around everywhere like a pony. At first I just made little jokes about it, started calling her Trusty and offering her carrots all the time, said things like, “You can lead a lady to water but you can’t make her be sneaky.” Soon enough, though, I was promising to shoot her if she ever broke her leg. She got upset, and I said, “It’d be real sad, but I’d have no choice. Sorry.” Then I pointed my finger at her like a pistol and went
pchoooo
.