American Spirit: A Novel
Read American Spirit: A Novel Online
Authors: Dan Kennedy
Also by Dan Kennedy
Rock On
Loser Goes First
Text copyright © 2013 by Dan Kennedy
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Little A
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
Author photograph by Maria Lilja
Cover design by Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover art © Daniel J. Cox / Getty Images and
© Fotodesign Holzhauser / Getty Images
ISBN-13: 9781477800775
ISBN-10: 1477800778
Maria, Trish, and another long-distance dedication to Milton.
1 If You Lived Here You’d Be Alone by Now
8 The Problem with Leaving One’s Phone On
15 How to Ace Therapy’s Stupid Trick Questions
17 In the Morning, at the Door
19 Pottery Fair: A Blind Mongrel Bitch Bent on Bloodlust and Degenerate Hunger
20 Two Counties, Separated by a Common Gene
22 The City of Angels Bleeding and Peeing
24 Tic Tac, Modoch, and the Bearded Lonely Pervert
28 Living Like Your Food Was Drugged Is Fine Entertainment
29 The Buffet Is Having Problems. So Is the Business Center
If You Lived Here You’d Be Alone by Now
T
EN YEARS AGO
when someone asked Matthew the question, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” he remained silent and tried to look like he had an answer and was only considering how to phrase it. Inside the head, however, the only answer he could hear was,
Those days will eat me alive,
and Matthew knew that probably wasn’t what you were supposed to say. It’s ten years later and if he can swing this storm of time that’s standing still in front of him, fortune will smile like it never has. But it is hard to find a hint of promise in a calendar found suddenly blank; Monday through Friday wiped clean against one’s own wishes or plans, a wide-open grid of Valium-and-Heineken-kissed dead end days with a horizon way past the weeks on the
page. Maybe thirty-five now, maybe forty, close enough anyway—in America these days, one’s forties seem to start at twenty-five.
So this morning, west of the house and on the wrong side of thirty, Matthew Harris is sizing himself up to see how things are going; looking at his reflection in the mirror, in a men’s room, in a gas station, on Post Road, a mile or two into Norwalk. The mirror is right next to a wall-mounted vending machine offering up condoms and small packets of knock-off designer cologne, which speaks volumes, really, about how things are going. If you were a camera tracking left to right in here, things would look like this as you drifted along making sense of it: empty paper towel dispenser with just a tiny torn tag of why-bother hanging from the stoic slit of its chipped metal grin; then the scratched-up, dented, bereft vending machine offering up second-rate items for the neck and penis; then the mirror offering up the reflection—long, lanky, slightly underweight now, hungover, semi-moneyed, tall, and medium slim, with no evident interest in shaving. A man with only semi-decent winnings in life’s genetic lottery, but with enough patrician features in the face to have landed somewhere better than a Norwalk service station men’s room, one would have imagined.
Living in Westport, Connecticut, seemed like a good idea at the time; lately most of Matthew’s life falls into the category of having seemed like a good idea at the time. Letting a decade and change slip by working at New Time Media in Manhattan seemed like a good idea at one point as well. But
let’s commend him for at least having avoided the sartorial trap most men in Westport fall into, the one where it looks like they dress only in clothes from the in-flight catalogs one browses up in business or first; clothes that look paid for with membership rewards points from the platinum American Express, which is how Matthew shopped and dressed until recently—until that last day, the day all of this shit started basically, a day heretofore only referred to as the Incident. That was the day Matthew made his way into the closet at work and switched things up a bit. The closet was actually a room on the twenty-eighth floor at New Time, an office without a desk, and instead stacked wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling with clothing in stacks, sacks, boxes, and racks. The closet is where thin people made politely droll by fame were routinely allowed to rummage through and take away free designer clothing that they could’ve never afforded when they were broke anonymous people, and had no reason to be taking for free now that they were wealthy. From the so-called closet, Matthew took what he thought he might look good in. Or more specifically, what he thought he might look strong and able in, fashionably casual armor to weather the days in front of him, days that would bury the sensibly dressed, steadily employed, soft, agreeable man he had been before this day came.
It was the moment in any epic myth when the warrior chooses the armor that will allow him to undertake the journey in front of him, or in less noble terms, it was the moment when the doctor’s bad news, and the subsequent beer and
Vicodin, urge one to finally take from life what has not been given. Take it, and then slouch off in a golden haze, defeated by bosses who don’t understand what it’s like getting the X-ray that leaves one no choice but to start living like today is the first day of the rest of one’s life. Defeated, sure, arguably, but at least he was making the exit like a champion, in a long slow-motion walk that felt like the whole thing was being shot through a soft amber pill-and-lager lens—a foggy but determined, low-spirited stroll with arms bear-hugging the big stack of clothing not intended for him, holding it close to the chest and clutched up under the chin. In the blurry background, the colleagues that noticed were just shaking their heads in the same slow motion that Matthew was walking with.
The digression of bad news and bad habits and bad attitudes aside, hats off to our hero! His new look seems to borrow a page from nineteen sixties European motorcycle racing fashion, albeit a type geared toward hungover, fatigued, lonely, careless, lazy motorcycle racers with a couple of days of stubble; if only on the outside, he’s doing great. Matthew leaves the restroom like a major league pitcher mustering what it takes to go out there and give life 110 percent for just one more inning, even though the game has already been decided and fans are trickling out of the seats to get to the parking lot before it’s a madhouse scene, heading into traffic jams on the surface streets in order to get home a little early and make a wife happy.
He musters what it takes to leave the gas station restroom
and buy his coffee inside the little market attached to the gas station by the expressway like he always has on weekday mornings like this one. And a gas station market a mile or two outside of Westport, Connecticut, is as close to honest as Westport is going to get. Evidence of the human condition thriving here no matter how hard these people try to deny it; a little concrete hut that seems to be saying,
While I am just an ugly little bunker of a store, and while I may sit just outside your well-scrubbed, exfoliated, moisturized, leafy, conspicuously status-laced suburb, my profitable inventory lays bare the secret of what you people crave beneath your stainless veneer: pornography, cigarettes, tabloid magazines, diet pills, and beer.
Matthew walks up to the cash register and pays for his cup of coffee, trying to affect the usual bored, dull, lithe stroll meant to telegraph a dependable stream of fat and steady checks that has not dried up suddenly; which is to say, he approximates the gait he had before last Friday happened.
On the rack is one of New Time Media’s magazines, and on the cover is an actor wearing the same outfit that Matthew is wearing, the same narrow, lazy gray designer tee shirt, the same gray canvas pants with articulated knees, the black boots, the reissued nineteen seventies Italian watch. The head does the production calendar math and, oh, wait, right: Actually, those are in fact the exact same clothes that were on the second stack on the right when he walked in to the closet at work to steal clothing that fateful day, the clothes that were shot back in March for the May cover of
the magazine here on the magazine rack. Matthew nods the same silent hello-and-good-bye to the same clerk that he’s nodded to weekday mornings for years. As far as the clerk can tell, Matthew will drive into the city like he always has, and go to work like he always does—because as far as anyone can tell, nothing has changed, except, fine, yes, the way he dresses, and maybe the way he isn’t shaving as much, and maybe the rest of the shit that’s going down the drain weekdays between the hours of nine and seven.