American Spirit: A Novel (8 page)

“Woops.”

“What are you…”

“Nothing.”

“Clearly, you’re doing
something.”

“Your dog pisses in my office at least once a week.”

“That doesn’t make it okay for you to do it.”

“I’m speaking the only language your dog understands.”

“Have you been drinking?”

Matthew considers. “I had a doctor’s appointment, yes.”

“I think you’re done here.”

“I am, I know, I just have to…” And with this, a nod down at what he’s hiding beneath his hands.

“I don’t mean done pissing in your office, I mean you’re done coming in to the office. You don’t need to come in on Monday. You’re being fired, that’s what’s happening here, in case I’m not being clear enough.”

“I literally told her no calls, no visitors,” says Matthew, looking at his boss shaking his head, hoping for some shift in focus here, but again, no luck.

There was no surprise in the heart or head; he knew that if it ever fell on him, it would be a Friday. But questions rocketed through, Does this mean no severance package? Does
this mean no more health insurance? Does this mean not taking long expense-account lunches to drink and see movies? None of the questions had anything to do with a second or third chance. None of the questions had to do with wondering if the job could please stick around or come back, so there’s some comfort in that. And if a day like this is going to happen, good that it should happen on a day of the week when everyone in the entire building was being belched out of the revolving doors downstairs, being blown out to a two-day tiny taste of freedom. It would be hard to notice one who has been asked to not come back on the third day. A weekend seemed like the best way to ease into the abyss, if one had to be met with a fate like his, as if every weekend up until this one was rehearsal; the way every night of sleep is rehearsal for one’s death; one tiny little termination after another, all of it, really. And here, now, in the car reminiscing as one does, the Steely lyric that comes earthbound from the satellite in space, out of the speakers as a sound, like a tattoo the way it has stuck around, is going around again seductively crooning about how black Friday has got to come eventually and then the lyric accepts this, but simply asks that it not fall on the guy singing. Well, fair enough, but if it fell and missed him, then it certainly nailed somebody.

The Problem with Leaving One’s Phone On

T
HE PHONE, THANK GOD,
interrupts remembering how all of this happened. The small typing device nesting between the seat and center console is, one forgets, first and foremost, a telephone. Matthew regards its ringing with the cool reserve of any terrified isolationist; on the first ring he looks down at it, as if there’s no chance he would stop reading about his new craft class and consider answering it; on the second ring his resolve weakens just a bit; on the third ring he lifts the device out of the dark little fjord in between the seats where it is wedged in order to at least investigate what name appears on the screen. He sees
TIM. MOBILE
backlit, and he caves in, presses the little green button that will let someone in. He says hello into the little distraction
pressed to the side of his head; in the distance the meditation instructor is leaving, rubbing just a bit where the punch struck him above the ear. Matthew puts his free arm out the window and waves while he stays on the call, and the instructor waves, a little hesitant and uncertain, ideally just because of the distance making it difficult for him to recognize Matthew. The instructor ducks into a beat-up Japanese econo-box that limps and sputters to the far exit of the parking lot and Matthew is left with his call from Tim.

Tim, it turns out, is also a little bit down on his luck and embarking on his own personal recession. Which is comforting in the happens-to-the-best-of-us sense, even though Tim Kell is not exactly the best of us. Tim isn’t exactly a friend, mostly because he runs in circles about two atmospheres above mid-six-range media cogs like Matthew. The only reason the two of them met is because ten years ago Tim spilled a drink on Matthew at the restaurant downstairs in Black Rock, the building a block north of New Time, and the only place to get a drink during lunch without looking like hard luck ducking into one of those Irish pubs on Fifty-fifth. And when this spill happened, Tim was more than cool about it. Whipped out cash on the spot, eight hundred bucks, and when Matthew looked at him stunned, he added a couple hundred bucks to make it a grand and also added that he was pretty sure Matthew’s sweater wasn’t 100 percent cashmere. Tim’s clients were well fed and gone, but he stuck around, bought himself and Matthew a round, and they sat drinking it.

Tim nailed pay on Wall Street; the kind of thing where bonuses stacked, a couple months earned like a year of whatever anyone else was doing, and the fringe benefits were weighed in grams and girls with names like Destiny, Cheyenne, and Blue. He came from a long line of that type of thing apparently, his dad made a killing, his grandfather made a killing, by the time Tim came of age he was drafted in, automatic bones, a made man. They exchanged cards that day at the restaurant in Black Rock; Matthew considered keeping in touch with someone in finance to be a sort of passive action taken with regard to planning for retirement; but an action taken nonetheless. They killed a bunch of time then stopped hanging out together a year or two before banks and planes and towers and the dollar all crashed. They milled around places like Cipriani and Odeon back then, like two people who had read all the novels about excess a decade and a half too late. Making friends was easy back when friends were made as fast as venture capital and dot-com cash. After that it wasn’t about keeping in touch as much as it was about keeping track. Checking in to see who was doing better, and the answer always seemed to be Tim; but now Tim is in some of the same shape Matthew is in, partly because of the recession, and partly, certainly, by way of his own hand.

Deadwood and loose cannons are the first to go when the economy gets slow, but nobody ever tells you that when things are fat; the economy goes south and suddenly taking a leak all over your office is a crime. And in Tim’s case, suddenly it’s a crime to almost marry a sex worker, start doing
tons of her mostly uncut cocaine, stop going to the office, sell short a huge chunk of your fund by doing the churn-and-skim, and hole up in your $12,000-a-month apartment in Tribeca, sucking up the last of the drugs and dodging calls about where the money is going. Actually, come to think of it, at least two of those things are actual crimes. Tim ran out of town, headed to Yellowstone National Park in Ohio or Michigan or Seattle or wherever Yellowstone National Park is.

“I’m not gonna lie; it’s kind of ugly, Chief.”

“It sounds… yeah…”

“That shit was pure. Shit that would’ve killed most men. It probably left a fucking trail of dead tribal elders in the Andes.”

“How the hell did Yellowstone become the solution?”

“Oh, I don’t know, let’s see, maybe we should get you hooked on the shit she had, burn through your cash and then a small fortune that your clients trusted you with, get the SEC on your ass, and shave your head while you’re gagged with socks and electrical tape in your own home, in the bed you tried to share with someone you thought you loved, but who turned out to be someone who handcuffed you and padlocked you into a leather hood, then started inviting her dealer friends over to set up shop. Maybe we’ll give you some of that and see what solution you come up with, Chief.”

“Jesus,” Matthew says, now having picked his community center course catalog back up to read the crafting course description.

“Oh, and we’ll put you under four or five months of back
rent at twelve grand a pop. Trust me, a plane ticket to Bozeman to slow down and nurse the one credit line you still have starts to seem like a pretty decent way to fucking catch your breath.”

“Okay, I didn’t, I wasn’t, you know… I was just talking, just asking.”

“Right, okay, well, I was just replying. Anyway, I don’t know, listen, I’m kind of running my own program out here, getting my head straight again, and I need somebody to check in with, so keep your phone on.”

“Well…,” Matthew starts, distracted by noticing that the grid spells out how one could actually take back-to-back crafting and meditation on Fridays at the community center. “You know, I’ll leave it on when I can. My schedule’s a little crazy.” This said from the side of the mouth, while lighting another Native American cigarette.

Stop to Go Faster

I
T’S A BRAND-NEW DAY
again. It’s as if Matthew is being taunted with an endless supply of them. Jogging was a bust this morning. The outskirts of the lot were mostly empty early on. But in the time it took to change into jogging clothes, do a little bit of drinking, smoking, and general warming up, the lot had enough metallic predators moving in and out of it to give Matthew pause; this, on a day when he had thought to bring actual shorts along. So, like most middle-aged men who have decided not to jog and remembered their plan to purchase a secondhand gun, Matthew has made his way over to a parking lot called Park and Ride. An amazing invention, it turns out. A parking lot that boasts both the static isolation of a decent-sized small-to-medium lot, and the chance, every hour on the hour, to climb aboard
a train and swing into motion and start the day. These lots, he’s heard of them—people who are too smart to burn cash driving into Manhattan commute into the city from these lots—but only recently has it hit home what a perfect combination they had been all along.

You may or may not know that there’s a guy named Hernan who will meet you on Ludlow Street, between Houston and Stanton, to sell you a gun for a pretty decent price. If you know this, it’s because you must know or at least keep in touch with the likes of Tim, as Matthew has. Matthew is still scraped with rash, still aching from the fight in meditation class, still occasionally seeing mostly blood in the urine and experiencing pain in the testicles, but at least one thing is coming together—at least one thing is making him ten feet tall. Matthew thinks for a minute before locking up and leaving to head up to the platform:
It’s like God will help you find a secondhand gun, but not until you’re grateful and reaching out to friends.
Typed down on the little tiny keys and jammed back down into the athletic socks covering the calves almost to the knees. While money is still in the checking account, a few hundred dollars have been fetched from the machine on the side of the bank in Westport, and the Germanic leisure sedan has been parked here waiting for the train that will rocket into Manhattan so that life’s plan can get under way. There’s suddenly so much on the horizon of these days; craft class; firearm ownership; Fridays that offer meditation and crafting back-to-back; a book jammed and momentarily lost under the seat, a book that was entirely free and now
ready to read. The train is arriving, all aboard! Darting from the car commences, an empty gets kicked out and clinks on the ground before rolling off on its own travels, point the key chain at the car/house/office, press the button, make it chirp back confirmation that home is safe and secure, forget about the empty bottle rolling, there’s no time, dart away, and up, and along, and on board!

Once on board, of course, it becomes clear to Matthew that he hasn’t bought a ticket. But you can buy one on board, and since the jogging shorts have a little zippered pocket with three hundred dollars in it, this shouldn’t be a problem. When the porter comes down the aisle checking tickets and monthly passes, Matthew needs to buy a round-trip.

“Get a round-trip to Grand Central?”

“Twenty-six,” and this is said with a raised eyebrow as the conductor sees that Matthew has whipped out a tiny nylon pocket from under the jogging shorts’ waistband and just above his penis, unzipping it to reveal a wad of cash barely contained. He pays, and the man sticks to his own business; tucks a bent and hole-punched tab under the seat’s leather strap where Matthew is sitting, and then lays out a little matter-of-fact line that makes Matthew want to kiss him: “Bar car, three cars ahead.”