The Financial Lives of the Poets (22 page)

Dad stares at me, waiting for the rest of the explanation—
what happened to me.

“I don’t know, Dad. Maybe…you were embarrassed that this girl took advantage of you…ashamed or something. But you didn’t tell anyone. By the time I got there, it was too late.”

Mom spent a decade alone, convinced that Dad would someday return—“after he’s had his fun.” She died without ever speaking to him again, in a sunny hospital room, surrounded by her kids, mumbling in her morphine about terrorists. As far as I know she only mentioned him once, the last day, when she said that she couldn’t wait to see him in heaven. My sister said, “But Dad’s still alive,” and Mom just smiled, as if that was exactly what she meant. That day, hospice was delivering a hospital bed to her house, but she didn’t make it home. One of my sisters joked later that she couldn’t bear having that mess in her house. I left my crying sisters, went home from the hospital and climbed in bed. We’d just moved to this house. Without a word, Lisa climbed in beside me and nestled in behind my knees. We slept like that for a couple of hours and then I got up and called Dad in Oregon. He answered on one ring. I could hear the TV in the background. He listened, sighed, cleared his throat, thanked me for calling and hung up.

He didn’t come to the funeral. After that, Dad seemed to withdraw and I suppose I let him. Life was busy, and then my own collapse began and I looked up one day and realized it had been months since I’d heard from my father. When one of my sisters called to tell me that Dad’s phone was disconnected, I drove to Oregon, and that’s where I found him—like this—early-onset, post-Charity, un-showered, unshaven, unhinged, disoriented, dazed…alone.

“The doctors say you’re suffering from early-onset dementia,” I tell Dad, “which is just another word for senility.”

He leans across the dinner table, nods. Go on. The doctors said that being alone probably hastened his decline; without people to talk to synaptic paths grow over with weeds, and yet, every once in a while, he finds himself on a bare stretch of one of those old trails. Like now.

“The good news is…it’s not Alzheimer’s. Your memory is just…well…it comes and goes. In fact, I’ll probably have to tell you all of this again tomorrow. Or I won’t. I’ll just say a bunch of stupid shit. And you’ll just watch TV and forget you even asked.” I try a reassuring smile. “And hell Dad, maybe that’s just like the rest of us. Maybe we all forget everything the minute we learn it. I don’t know.”

Dad sometimes brings the remote control to the table. He always sets it next to his plate, like a fourth utensil, just to the right of his knife. It’s the same brand of universal remote that he had at his house in Oregon. Dad was terribly disoriented when he got to our house—until he saw we had a look-alike remote control.

Now, at the mention of the word TV, he picks up the remote and stares at it, as if it contains the answer to this thing he’s been trying to understand. Then he sets it down in its place…so…gently. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father be that gentle with anything.

He looks up at Teddy, at Franklin, and then at me.

And the light goes out. I can see it in his eyes. The station is gone.

“You know what, Dad…it’s okay…it’s all going to be—”

“What kind of man was I?” he rasps. And he pats his empty breast pocket.

“A good one,” I say, voice cracking. I look down at my plate; feel the boys’ eyes. These people. Are they trying to kill me?

I look up blearily. Dad has picked up his remote control again, and is staring back out the black window. He takes a deep breath, then lifts the pizza to his mouth and chews. He looks over at me like a stranger, this good man who spent forty years losing the people he loved, and then, in only a few months, managed to lose himself.
(We live like water…)

My gaping sons no longer gape at their grandfather, but at me. I guess they’ve never seen their dad cry before. I wipe my eyes, smile. I don’t know what to tell them: Boys, pay attention to your mother; mothers have a million things to teach you. But fathers? We only have two lessons, but these two things are everything you need to know:
(1) What to do
and
(2) What not to do.
I look from the boys down to the dark watch, jutting from my wrist like a tumor. And my bleary eyes drift up to Dad’s black window and my own faint reflection in it.

I
WAS AN ADULT

T
HERE IS, INDEED, A
rager of a party going on in Larry’s fetid apartment and the first thing I see is the answer to why there were pizza crusts all over the furniture and floor the other day. The second someone finishes a slice they are obliged to yell, “Fuck you, Larry,” and throw the crust at him. It’s a tradition here in low-rent Neverland, where no one grows up and where no one ever has to eat his crusts. For his part, Larry ducks each crust, and says, “Fuck you!” back whenever someone actually hits him, never taking his eyes off the video game he’s playing, in which he negotiates dark hallways and shoots zombies on the big screen with another dude, both of them leaning in and working the controllers (Why does a guy making eight bucks an hour have a better TV than me?) and the whole apartment smells like a stale quiche of socks, garlic, sweat and weed—little huffs of smoky clouds surround clustered kids—all clad in tight black or in bright baggy sportswear; the bass whumps, crusts fly, beer bottles tink and I’m not in the door ten seconds when I’m passed a spliff, little wisp of forgiveness curling off the point, and I very nearly hit that shit—but no. Thank you. I hand the joint back.

I do take a warm beer (I am
that
kind of man) and it goes down easy. “Who’s got a piece? You got a piece?” asks a red-eyed kid I’ve never seen before, and at first I think he means a gun, “I need a piece. Anyone got a piece,” but then I remember that a piece is a pipe and I shake my head no and the kid moves on, working the room, “Who’s got a piece, I need a piece.” There are twenty people at this party—including six girls, and I’m happy for the fellas—six actual females at their party—happy for Larry, for the guy with the Festiva whose name I don’t know, for Chulo, whichever one he is…happy for the red-eyed piece guy who squeezes my shoulder and says: “Damn! Slippers, so you chillin’ or what?”

“Yes.” This is what I am doing—chilling.

No sign of Jamie, but I spot Skeet, same sweat suit as before, exiting a bedroom, arm on the waist of a dull-eyed girl in a leather coat—and I think, parentally:
you can do better, Skeet
—but he introduces me proudly. “Yo, Lana, this our friend, Matt, he like a doctor, some shit.”

“Hey,” Lana says, with a tilt of the head.

“Nice to meet you,” I say back, and I think of telling her that I’m not…like, a doctor or some shit, but what would be the point? Businessman, doctor, unemployed business reporter, failed poet, confidential informant? Really, what’s the difference?

“Wish I knew you was gonna be here, yo. I would’ve brought your loafers.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “Do you know where Jamie is? I’m supposed to meet him here.”

“Yeah boy, he hookin’ you up, or what?”

Hookin’ you up.
It sounds worse than I imagined. I look at Lana. She chews her huge wad of gum rhythmically, turning it every other chomp with her tongue.

Larry calls back over his shoulder without taking his eyes off the zombies, “Jamie went on a beer run, man! Just chill, Slippers, he be right back, yo.”

Yes. More chilling. I want to talk to Skeet alone, but I promised myself I’d wait until after Weedland. Whatever I do, it’s got to be
after Weedland.
My nine grand. I glance down at my black watch. They’re not necessarily parallel paths, of course—what is right and what is best.

A misfired crust hits me in the arm. I mutter, “Fuck you, Larry.”

Skeet leans in closer. “Lana’n me got some twenty-fives.” When he sees I don’t know what he’s talking about, Skeet’s eyes get big and round. “Some tabs? I could sell you one if you wanna trip, yo.”

“No thanks, Skeet. And you shouldn’t either.”

He laughs. “Right.” Silly Dr. Slippers. “So, you just chillin’, then?”

I nod. Yes. I am.

Then the door opens and I come off the wall, but it’s not Jamie. It’s two other guys, and at first I can’t place the lumpy kid in the baseball cap until I see he’s chattering on a cell phone and it’s actually his voice that is familiar, “Yeah, I’m here. Fuckin’ lame-ass party though.” and I remember—it’s Chet. Monte’s little brother.

A crust flies. “Fuck you, Larry!”

“Man, this party totally blows,” Chet says into his phone. “Ugly chicks. Lame-ass party.”

And I have to agree with Jamie’s earlier assessment; Chet is an asshole. The last party I came to here, there were no girls at all. We didn’t even get to come inside. You want to call that a lame-ass party, fine. But this is Halloween at the Playboy Mansion compared to that.

A couple of minutes and two flying crusts later, the door opens again and this time it
is
Jamie. And he’s with Bea. And they’re each carrying two cases of beer. In her mouth, Bea has the largest collection of car keys and key rings I’ve ever seen not on a janitor. She opens her mouth and drops this four-pound key-contraption on a table.

“Beer’s here,” Bea says and then she sees me and smiles. “Hey, you.”

I come off my wall. I am strangely…so happy to see them both.

Bea takes off a heavy coat. She’s wearing a clingy, old vintage dress that comes to her impossibly high knees. The silky material brushes my arm as she leans in and nods toward the party. “You see any sensitive poet boys here?” Then she brushes my cheek with her lips—
small swoon
—and walks away, grabbing a slice of pizza and joining a cluster in mid-smoke.

I try to catch Jamie’s attention but he’s going from cluster to cluster collecting for beer. Then Jamie says, “The fuck’s
he
doin’ here?” and for a second I think he’s talking about me—

—until Chet closes his phone, steps into Jamie’s face and says, “You gonna tell me where I can and can’t go, bitch?”

“Go wherever you want long as I ain’t there.”

I tense for a fight, but Chet scoffs and walks away, trying to maintain some upper hand in full retreat. He joins Bea in her cluster of smokers, shooting me a dark look on his way past, and Bea breaks my heart a little by kissing Chet on the mouth.

Jamie sidles up to me then, leans against my wall. “Hate that guy,” he says.

Before I can start my nonviolence lecture, from the cluster of smokers comes Chet’s amped-up voice—“’Cause I think that dude’s a fuckin’ cop, that’s why.”

And I think my heart might stop and I wonder if people can tell just by looking at me. I ease the hand with the dark watch behind my back. And when I look up—

—Jamie is in Chet’s face—and that’s when everything becomes—wrong. You forget the sound of a fist hitting a head—it’s not that deep satisfying
thwump
of a movie punch but a pitiful sound, a wincing red
chuupp,
and when someone really connects sharply—you can just hear the underneath knock of bone—and here’s the thing: it’s an
awful
sound. Jamie lands two quick deep shots to Chet’s soft face and then Chet hits him back and their feet chirp on the linoleum as the clusters of smokers merge like joining cells into a semicircle, and in the center these two young men flail, jab, whirl, and the circle yells and a pizza box flies and maybe three more punches land before I step toward them and people are yelling—“Chill, motherfuckers!”—just as I reach out to help, but the closest thing to me is one of Jamie’s pinwheeling arms, so I grab it—forgetting that you
always
grab for the other guy, because I get a piece of one of Jamie’s arms and this only allows Chet to connect with a bone-deep fist to Jamie’s eye and temple and Jamie’s knees crumple, and I feel so bad that I step in and push Chet in his lumpy chest and he swings at me as he falls back—just grazes my chin but that completely pisses me off—so I swing wildly and miss, and someone yells “Old dude’s freakin’!” and I suppose I am freaking because I rush Chet, hit him full in the chest and we go down together, air escaping his puffy coat as we fall on that fetid carpet of pizza crusts, cigarette butts and roach ends, and I bring my knee into his gut and we’re all flying arms and grunts and that’s when the air goes out of the fight like the air in Chet’s ski coat—and out of the room too, because once a boxing match becomes a wrestling match it gets boring and even a little embarrassing,
gay,
the fellas would say, and while we snuffle on the ground for a few seconds more, like hogs (side-note: Chet smells like ass), this fight’s done. Jamie and Skeet pull me off, but Chet leaps to his feet and wants to keep fighting. “Come on, motherfuckers! I’ll take all-a-y’all on!” but then he realizes he’s lost something and he pats himself down. “Where the fuck’s my phone? Who took my phone? You got ten seconds to give that shit back or I go out to my fuckin’ car.”

And here’s the thing: I have a pretty good idea what Chet means. (I picture him holding it sideways, like they do in rap videos.) Of course, even when you try to make the right move, another board teeters—two minutes ago I was a forty-six-year-old unemployed narc hanging out with potheads, waiting to go to Weedland; now I’m an unemployed narc—who has gotten into a fight with a guy
threatening to go to his car and get his gun.

There are these lakes in Northern Idaho that are supposed to be bottomless; the Navy used to do submarine training there. They’d think they had found the bottom and then a submarine would find a deeper hole. Of course, the lakes weren’t bottomless. In fact, it turns out nothing is bottomless—except the trouble I get into.

But here’s the strange thing about the fight. Once it’s over, no one says a word about it. The party just goes back to its earlier rhythms—Larry goes back to killing zombies and Bea goes back to kissing people and the other kids go back to drinking bad beer and smoking good weed and throwing pizza crusts and Chet even finds his phone under the couch and then he and his buddy decide to leave—“Lame-ass party”—the door closing behind them—and I try to imagine a party with my friends—say, the old newspaper Christmas party in the company cafeteria—erupting in a fistfight and then just returning to normal five minutes later.

“Sorry about that,” Jamie says. A bruise is forming above his eye.

“I’m
sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have grabbed your arm. You were doing just fine.”

Jamie touches his eye. “You ever feel like you’re outgrowing your own fuckin’ life?”

There’s my writer.

Jamie looks at his hand, sees no blood, and shrugs. “Should we roll?”

Bea sees us leaving and asks if she can walk out with us. And while Jamie goes around collecting for the weed he’s about to buy, I step on to the cold porch with beautiful blond, blue-eyed Bea, who buttons her heavy overcoat, lights a filtered cigarette and blows slow death at me. “I hate that homoerotic testosterone crap,” she says in released smoke and steam. “They should just fuck and get it over with.”

We are a foot apart on this landing. I stare past her, over the railing of the apartment landing toward the lights of another apartment building just across the street—they are stacked in this part of town like egg cartons in a grocery store. These kids at this party were born in egg cartons, have spent their lives in egg cartons…and I’m fooling myself if I think it’s any different in my bigger egg carton.

“Hey. You okay?” Bea asks.

And that’s when I have an epiphany, a real, old-fashioned, religious-style epiphany. And my epiphany is this: there are no such things as epiphanies—no moments of revelation, no great reversals of motive and fortune. No stands, no redemptions, no October surprises; everything is inevitable because the world exists exactly as it always has in this moment: the Rahjiv who mops a spilled Slurpee in the tight aisle of a 7/11 is the same Rahjiv who peels back the hair on a cracked skull in a Mumbai ER; my senile old father holds his remote and my five-year-old hand as Lisa talks to her boyfriend in the same bed where she curls up behind me when my mother dies (even as she tells me,
It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay
). Creeks flow and run dry, and the last free board teeters and all you can do is reach for it—all you can do is all you can do.

I was going to wait until after Weedland, but I might not see this girl again. So I reach over. Gently take her by the arm. “Listen to me, Bea. You have to get away from Dave…he’s killed people. Do you understand me? Dave’s not even his real name. It’s an alias. You have to get away from him. This is all coming apart.”

She stares at me as if I’m nuts; I stupidly show her my watch: “I got picked up by the police…” Still, I get that uncomprehending look from her—“I’m probably going to jail…but if I can keep anything bad from happening to you—I don’t know…”

“You ready, Slippers?” Jamie interrupts, comes out onto the landing.

“Yeah,” I say, and I let go of Bea’s arm.

And so Jamie and I start down the landing, on our way to Weedland. But I stop after a few steps and my eyes are drawn back up to the landing and that’s where I see her, watching me, mouth slightly open—a distant, implacable look in her blue eyes, not at all what I expected—not gratitude, but something else—as the world teeters.