The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (16 page)

Dear Abby would have written, “Acknowledge to yourself that the two of you are at fault, take a breath, politely switch the subject to the hostess’s cooking.” But fuck Dear Abby, I was in a cantankerous, crab apple of a mood. “How can you pay dues to a synagogue
that teaches its daughters that they are dirty because they menstruate? Benji, you went to medical school, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t say that at the table,” Benji said, disgraced. He covered his eight-year-old daughter’s ears. “Such garbage. Aunt Sylvia, you should reel your daughter in.”

“She’s almost twenty-five,” Mom sighed. “She has her own mouth.”

“She sure does,” Dad said.

Was it
Christ
or
menstruate
that got Benji to head for the coats?

Will had said I should write a letter of apology to them as soon as we got home, but I’d stewed in my arrogant juices.

The next morning in
the hospital waiting room, I promised my mother that I wouldn’t see the band. Then she wrangled my current work situation out of me.

Mom made me call Temp Solution immediately to cancel my stint with the smut mill. Selena was sick. I didn’t have to cop abuse from her about my lack of professionalism in not completing the job.

“What kind of feminist are you?” Mom asked when I finished lying about “my infected sinus” to Harry, the other job placement counselor. “You should report the agency to the Better Business Bureau for sending you there. Sign up with another agency, and in the interim why don’t you cash in the bond Virginia bought you at your confirmation? You should have considerable interest by now.”

I hadn’t thought of that bond. At least five hundred dollars.

“I’m not going to give you money, but you can eat at our apartment.”

It was their apartment again.

Janet’s vacation was over,
and now that Stuart was under medical attention, she’d returned to work.

I called Janet at her cubicle at the Mayor’s Office of Film and Television. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“I’ll need you to help spackle the walls for my paint job next month, don’t you worry. You should be more frightened that Veemah and Frieda are on to us—they’re sure I know what’s going on with you. What can I tell them?”

“Tell them I’m in love.”

My mother was talking
to Stuart, who was pale but cognitive again. Through her old PR sonar, she’d tracked down the name and address of his mother’s cousin in Buffalo, who was not to be found when Stuart had arrived after his “murder.” Leigh Ann Harmond. Except Leigh Ann had moved from the address some time in the past two months.

“If anyone can find someone, Stuart honey, it’s me. I should have worked for the FBI.” With this new martyr about, Stuart had reconfessed that he could not read, and Mom had taken a quick cab ride from the hospital to Barnes and Noble’s Textbook Annex, where she’d purchased a few adult literacy picture books to work on with Stuart. I flipped through one of the books on the table-tray. “
B
is for
B
ank teller,
C
is for
C
onstruction site.” They sent me
deeper into my trough. I excused myself to the waiting area and thumbed through an old issue of
Time
. Staring at the lithograph of mollusks and sea horses above the corner couch, I couldn’t pair the two Colins I now knew, the unpretentious teddy bear and the callous Machiavelli. I needed him to be there with me. No one else could calm me down. I started talking to myself: I was Colin calling me self-absorbed with a big unthreatening grin. I missed my Colin, who now I saw was an idealized cutout. The Colin who could take the wind out of any crisis by offering me his arms to hide in.

By his fifth day
in the hospital, Stuart looked somewhat better. My parents were talking to the nurses down the hall, making plans to take him back to our apartment. Now that his head was clear, I led him through the details of how we’d checked him into a private hospital without insurance.

“How do you say that? Lupschutz?”

“Lip-shits.”

“Thanks for doing this, Rachel.” My whole family was in the room. “You’re all so nice.” My mother and Frank had bought him two pairs of Levis, socks, and three different black T-shirts at Canal Jeans. They even bought him a pair of hip-again suede Pumas from Athlete’s Foot. Stuart was seated in one combination on the edge of the bed: Pumas, prefaded jeans, black socks, black T-shirt with pocket.

Frank admired his prodigy. “Flawless, if I may say so myself.”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Not so good,” Stuart said. “My knees hurt.”

“His knees?” Frank said out loud.

“Obviously not a withdrawal symptom in
Super Fly,
” I said, half to myself.

“That movie was about coke, not junk,” Stuart said, with a Ganelli-siblings informational lilt.

“Hear that, bitch?” Frank laughed just as Dr. Mentoff entered the room. He looked over at Frank, obviously annoyed. “So are you ready for some more info, Stuart?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Stuart said uncomfortably.

“That’s my man. Now listen hard. There are two of you inside there. The innocent little boy and the addict. We’re going to kill the addict.”

My parents seemed pleased by this tough stance, but personally I found the word
kill
distasteful. So did Frank, by the look on his face.

“Going cold turkey without knowledgeable assistance is useless. If you can’t make it we’ll have to put you on long-term methadone. Seventy-five percent of methadonians use secondary drugs like pot, or it’s back to the powders—heroin or crack. There’s no easy way out, Stuart. You’ll need at least a month of supervised aftercare. After that, I suggest being an outpatient for six months to two years.”

“I don’t know how I’ll pay for that,” Stuart said, like he’d broken a car window with a baseball.

“I’m processing you for Medicare with your passport. We can do that occasionally. There’s no need to keep up the Stuart Lipschitz charade. We used your given name on your passport, Ian MacKenzie. Stuart’s your middle name?”

I winked at him so he’d say yes. “Yeah,” Stuart said.

“We’ll have you eligible for the aftercare program in about ten days. Rest up at home. Aftercare can be strenuous. It’s a daily supervised program.”

“What do I have to do?” Stuart asked.

“The methadone maintenance treatment program is like having an elaborate system of foghorns and buoys to guide the way. It’s a twenty-eight-day structured rehabilitation. You won’t have any free time. You’ll attend
one hundred and sixty-eight
lectures, workshops, and twelve-step meetings.”

“Worse than law school, eh, Stuart?” Dad smiled, flashing his first smile since he’d met his newest charge. Dad’s teeth are super-white, he had them capped for his sixtieth birthday.

“Wouldn’t know,” Stuart smiled back with a mouthful of decayed teeth.

“Ninety-nine out of a hundred go back to using junk if they don’t have aftercare. If you miss group therapy,” Dr. Mentoff continued, “you’ll be asked to leave the program. And you can’t leave the room unless you have a note from me that you have a bladder problem, which I’m not going to give you.”

“A sensitive caring program for the addict in your life,” Frank said under his breath.

“Son, we’ve won awards for our program,” Dr. Mentoff said.

Frank smirked. When he hates someone he smirks. “A touch of irony to lighten up the day, sir.”

“Frank, I think I need to hear this,” Stuart said. “I deserve this.”

“Don’t buy into this shit, you need the program, sure, but you don’t
deserve
anything,” Frank said.

“You want me to speak in plain English, Mr. Ganelli?” Mentoff said to Frank. “You better keep your smart mouth clamped shut. This
shit
is the only thing that’s going to save Stuart’s life. If he doesn’t buy into this
shit,
I wouldn’t put a nickel on his life.”

“I’m sorry,” Frank said, visibly humbled.

“So, where were we?” Mentoff continued. “Everyone in the family will have to be there for support. You can’t check in with a dirty sample. Dirty Urines won’t be admitted.”

“Here’s the rule, Stuart,” Dad said. “You screw up, you get sent to your room and no ice cream.” He extended his hand. “The Ganellis will not let you screw up. We’re going to be there for you.” Dad put his arm around Stuart. Stuart rubbed his hand on his jeans, a nervous habit he displayed at any nice word directed toward him, even when I’d complimented his doodles in Melbourne.

“Watch the medicine cabinet,” I overheard Mentoff say to my dad, as I helped pack Stuart’s belongings into a weekend suitcase Mom had brought from home.

“I don’t get you,” I heard Dad respond. I had a sudden revelation. The cough syrup, by Frank’s toilet. Maybe that’s why he didn’t get over the hump.

“The Robutussin. Heroin addicts are obsessive-compulsive people. You have to think ahead.”

“I can do that,” Dad said. “I play chess.” I felt the sharpest twinge of shame just then that my never-bounced-a-check chess-playing father was caught up in all this.

After my parents signed the final release papers, the Ganellis and one Gibbs-Mackenzie-Lipschitz entered the elevator. In the corner an administrator was talking to a nurse. “My son is in
finance—he put off jury duty seven times. They had bailiffs come to his office building and arrest him. There’s a new push to up the quality of jurors.”

The jury-duty notice I’d left to rot on the kitchen table! I’d received a deferral from my last one because of an editorial conference, and then my parents had notified officials that I was abroad three times. When we got home I took another look at the slip. My jury duty was to start the next day.

Phillip threw his green
silk shirt off into the sea of faces. A girl sausaged into a glittery seventies-style tube top caught it and proceeded to suck his sweat out of it. Above us, on the enormous screen, the camera zoomed in on her mouth. “Look up,” Mick-O motioned with a drum stick. I craned my head back. In the past week and a half, the girls of Buffalo and Syracuse had done crazy things when it came out that we were sleeping a few doors down from Michael Hutchence. But this attention-seeking girl took the fucking cake. I laughed my head off in front of 90,000 hysterical people. The camera caught me doing that, which caused a second eruption of laughter from the Carrier Dome. It was the end of our set, and I was sweaty myself.

“Thank you, Syracuse!” Phillip hollered after a not-quite-thundering applause, like he’d done this for a thousand years. For the not-so-unexpected reprise, we played a cover of “House of the Rising Sun” we’d rehearsed in Buffalo; Angus thought Phillip’s ballad we’d always played last in Australia, “My Heart,” didn’t have enough punch. On our final exit we heard an impatient roar: “INXS! INXS! INXS!” A Carrier Dome official with a harelip escorted us back to our dressing room.

“Bugger me sideways,” I said. Mick-O laughed in obvious agreement. Memorial Auditorium was huge, but the Carrier Dome was the most terrifying place we’d ever been in.

“How were we?” Mick-O asked Angus after we’d reentered the dressing room.

“Overall pretty good, though everyone should’ve been more animated. Phillip was the best, the way he took command of the whole stage. We’ll have to work on things before you get to Madison Square Garden. That’s the show that matters, right? Colin, you can’t stand with the bass in one spot, Americans love action, show business, mate. The best moment came when you laughed at the girl eating Phillip’s top, that was excellent.”

“How was I?” Mick-O said, plopping himself on the sofa.

“Fine,” Angus said, like Mick-O didn’t even register. Two pretty girls were calling out to Phillip from the door; he leaped over to sign their autographs.

“How did you girls slip in here?” Phillip asked, sickly sweet.

“We work on the concert board,” the leggy black girl said. She had blue eyes I could see from where I was standing. I didn’t thinks blacks could have blue eyes.

“The promoters give the concert board backstage passes if we help with the clean up,” the other girl, blond with major mascara, added.

“Which one do you think he’s gonna fuck?” Mick-O said half asleep, wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve.

“Neither,” Kerri said from the corner, and Phillip spun over and put his arms around her. She shot Mick-O a bloodcurdling
look; he was fucking lucky his eyes were closed when it came his way.

I poked my head out the door to see if we could get ice for the Cokes. A small black-haired girl sat on a stool to the right of our dressing-room door. She had a clip-on yellow security pass and her head in a book. A little chunky, but cute. Amazing white skin, like a China doll.

“What are you reading?”

“Poems by Baudelaire,” she said, unfazed. I walked towards her to see if she was really reading Baudelaire, like a mini-Rachel. She was. She looked almost smug when I did that.

“Can you get us ice, Miss Baudelaire?”

“That’s Ms. Baudelaire to you.”

“I stand corrected,” I said.

She called to Harelip and asked him to arrange for ice.

“Did you like our show?”

“Didn’t see it. I had to stand guard outside your room.”

“But you couldn’t stop a flea. How much do you make standing guard over me and my sweaty mob?”

“Five dollars an hour. We have work-study grants to help pay for our tuition, and Dressing Room Guard sounded more interesting than last year’s position. I do the basketball games, too, you know.”

“What was last year’s job?”

“I was the mimeographer in the philosophy department.”

I laughed, but there wasn’t the slightest curl to her lips. Andrew Farris from INXS walked out of the band’s top-billing dressing
room to go to the toilet. The security girl pointed to him. “I recognize him from the poster. What do you play in the band?”

“I’m not in INXS,” I said, “I’m in the opening band. Tall Poppies?”

“Tall Poppies? That’s a dumb name.”