Cannibals in Love (23 page)

“What are those retarded glasses on your face?” he sniggered as I ducked my head into his bedroom. I'd ripped my last contact lens that morning: a three-month pair that I'd been wearing for over a year.

“These are my glasses.”

“Well, they make you look fat and ugly.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you for your honesty.”

Avi laughed and unpaused his video game again. A barrage of military caterwaul and confusion, turned up like a jet engine. I watched the killing field blankly for a beat.

“I thought Dick and Virginia took away your hard drive?” I asked rhetorically.

Avi just laughed airily. I knew he knew all his parents' hiding spots. As hiding spots go—in the closet, under the bed—they were truly uninspired. This was the problem really, all these half measures.
I
was a fucking half measure!

“You're a disgrace to the honor system,” I said flatly. “You know that?”

“What the cocksucking hell is the honor system?” Avi asked over his shoulder.

My phone started ringing in my pocket and Avi paused the game again. He spun around in his chair to face me. “Who is it?” He asked this every time my phone rang. More than anything, he wanted to know if girls were calling me. He wanted to know how many female names there were inside my cell phone. Avi had a lot of earnest questions about how and where an adult man meets adult women. The idea seemed to titillate and stress him all out of proportion.

“It's your mother,” I said.

“It's
your
mother
,”
Avi mimicked reflexively. I answered the phone and walked back into the hall.

“Hello, hi. You've arrived?” Virginia asked. “Oh, good. Did you see my note?”

“Your note,” I said, looking back at Avi. “Where was it?”

“Right on the front door,” Virginia said blankly. I watched Avi put the note into his mouth and chew it into a wet pulp. He looked incredibly pleased with himself.

“Oh, right, I see it now. Avi brought it inside for me.”

Avi fell off his chair, making a comic show of choking on the paper. He laughed and coughed the wet note onto the floor like a dog. I knew Virginia was just going to go over everything on the phone with me now anyway. She would read me a list of things that had been taken away from Avi that week, like the computer. A list of restaurants that we could and could not visit. Movies that were and were not acceptable, etc., etc. None of this meant anything unless I could actually get Avi out of the house.

I hung up the phone and he looked at me expectantly. “Do you want me to tell you to get off the computer?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Too bad. I don't give a shit. Do whatever you want. I'm on the clock.”

“What do you mean?” Avi asked suspiciously. But I was already walking back into the hallway, where I'd seen a
New Yorker
on the table. I was more than happy to let him play his video games and wear himself out. I would read, and we'd both be happy.

But as I sat back down in his beanbag chair, he looked at me with something like contempt. As soon as you gave Avi permission to do anything, it lost all its magic. He had no interest in playing video games anymore; he was pissed.

“You can't read,” he said. “I'll tell my parents.”

“Go ahead. I'm not afraid of your parents,” I said, cracking the magazine. Avi was never sure what to say in these moments. He liked to hold the threat of termination over my head, but I knew he didn't really want to get rid of me, either.

This was when Avi smiled sickly. I followed his eyes across the room to a big dent in the drywall. “Jesus,” I said, remembering the crash I'd heard downstairs. “Did you put that fucking hole in the wall?”

“No,” he said, matter-of-fact. “I threw the chair. The
chair
put the hole in the wall.”

I looked at him in disbelief. He wasn't even smiling. What do you say to a person like that? “Well, let's not be stupid. Help me move the dresser in front of it.”

“You move it,” Avi snorted. I reached out and grabbed him by the back of the neck then. I was losing my sense of humor.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said, and I let him go. We pushed the dresser over three feet. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was have a conversation about this with Dick and Virginia. This was not my problem.

I was actually annoyed that Avi wouldn't just sit still and play his fucking computer games like a bad little boy. We both knew that's what he wanted, and it was my experience that a little video-game violence had a pacifying effect on the kid. Two hours of unbroken mayhem and slaughter was like a little shot of laughing gas for him. It would make our whole day together a little more pleasant. Avi would get giggly and tired, and we would move on to something else.

There was, of course, a whole other period in which Dick and Virginia tried to swap out Avi's war games for educational fare, like
Flight Simulator
. But they eventually saw what I saw, which was Avi crashing the plane on purpose over and over. He was aiming at the buildings, like it was some sort of pimply jihadi training game. Avi loved that this could inspire a more genuine outrage than simply blowing the heads off of alien zombie Nazis or whatever.

I told him to stop crashing the flight simulator and he refused, so I yanked the plug right out of the wall. Oh, man. You should've seen the little guy freak out then, telling me about RAM and ROM and memory space, while I tried my hardest not to laugh.

“Fine,” he said now, after we'd moved the dresser. “Let's just go eat, then. I need some mo-fucking French toast.”

And that's what we did. The whole day went by like this, the way our days always went. We made plans, then argued and stonewalled each other. I would resist or give in, and then Avi would get bored. All these endless little battles in a zero-sum game.

Somehow I never could seem to explain it to him, either. We were on easy street here. We had carte blanche. Dick and Virginia had given me a credit card that we could use to go eat lunch, and watch PG-13 movies, and play arcade games, whatever. But Avi refused. He was deeply suspicious of every idea that wasn't his own. He acted as if I were trying to trick him. I told him to come up with something else, then, anything. I didn't care what we did, as long as we did something. But he refused. Avi took great pleasure in refusing me. Grinning with the word no.

We would end up walking around endlessly, riding the city buses in circles, doing nothing. We would make a plan, get all the way there, and Avi would call it off. I would try to force him to follow through, to strong-arm him. I would get mad, but it was no use. It seemed like this was the thing he'd wanted all along: to get a rise out of me.

I would try to relax and remember I was on the clock, and it didn't matter what we did because I was going to get paid either way. But the time just
crawled
this way. We were wallowing in a thirteen-year-old boy's infinite boredom.

*   *   *

The strangeness of the job was not lost on me, either. My friends thought the whole situation was hilarious. They would beg me to recount days spent babysitting for their own amusement. They were charmed by this little boy's prankishness and off-color cuss words. They wanted me to bring Avi out to the bars and make him do parlor tricks. “We'll give Little Bro a handful of quarters for the pinball machine,” they would say. “And then you can set Daddy's credit card up on the bar.” Har-har-har, everybody wins.

But I never did bring Avi around, which was too bad, really. He would have loved these stupid dudes. They were living out a teenage boy's wet dream of adulthood: drinking and smoking and watching skateboard videos all day. If they wanted to look at porno on the computer, or eat pizza and ice cream for dinner, they just fucking did it! There were no adults to say no to us. We were the adults!

*   *   *

It would be unfair to say I didn't take the job seriously, though. I tried to look out for Avi without pandering or kissing his ass. I was brutally honest with him in a way that I wasn't sure anyone else could be. He was a good kid deep down, I knew. He was lucid and funny and spontaneous around me. We had our inside jokes and little routines. We were capable of having honest-to-god real fun together.

In the end, though, I had no idea how to help this kid. The only great wisdom I had to impart was to stop being a shithead. I told him this over and over, waiting for it to sink in. This is the reason you have no friends, I would say to him in earnest. You lie and then you laugh about it. You talk shit on people for no reason, and that is a terrible, terrible plan. But I never really got anywhere this way. Avi loved my little pep talks. He would squeal with delight whenever I tried to play the adult.

If anything I am understating the lying. You could hardly have a real conversation with the kid. It was like a reflex that he wasn't in control of. Lies about everything, constantly. Lies about the lies. Lies right to his parents' faces that they didn't bother calling him on. Dick and Virginia never stopped it, that's for sure. There was an air of frazzled obliviousness about their house. Dick told me about a therapist they'd taken Avi to the previous winter, but the kid knew exactly what she wanted to hear him say. He had a whole act of contrition he was able to perform at will. He could be very smart that way.

So the lies carried on, unchecked. Lies about bands I didn't listen to and movies I didn't watch and celebrities I didn't know. Lies about parties and tests and sports scores that never happened. Lies about the plots of television shows and summaries of book reports that Avi claimed to be writing. Lies about the crimes he had committed and the girlfriends he had unceremoniously dumped. All these endless exploits with a revolving cast of imaginary friends. They were eternally skipping school and drinking beer and smoking cigarettes together. They were destroying public property and finger-banging ninth-graders. This endless litany of dangerous things that Avi claimed to have seen and done. The thing that killed me was that most of his lies weren't even in service of anything. He wasn't lying to avoid punishment or gain tangible things; he was just lying.

At first I found it amusing, and sort of refreshing, that Avi was still so sheltered about the world that he had to invent danger this way. I would play the game with him, peppering him with follow-up questions to see how far he could stretch the lie. I would call bullshit on him endlessly, until he finally admitted that what he was saying was impossible. I would hector him into giving up.

But Avi would just laugh because it didn't mean anything. It didn't stick to him. He saw no consequences; there was no remorse. Every empty contradiction was a chance to reset the lie. It was incredible. I never
really
got him to cop to anything.

*   *   *

Our relationship had soured lately, though. I was locked into the hard routine of it: the bike ride, the bus routes, the school schedule. Sadly, I needed the money. I was every bit the paper tiger I'd despised: the adult
in loco parentis
. I knew that Avi could tell I was getting tired of his bullshit, too, and it only made him press harder, almost unbearably.

As I rode my bike into the West Hills toward the Jewish day school, I tried to put him out of my head entirely. What I was thinking about then was an email that had come to me, out of the blue, from a New York literary agent named Bettina Kleins. She'd read a short story I'd published in a small magazine about fighting with Lauren Pinkerton. She wanted to know where I was, and what I was doing, and what else I had written. Bettina was excited and I was easily flattered. Having smoke blown up my ass was a brand-new experience, and I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed its gross effects.

In a fit of vanity I sent Bettina Kleins four hundred pages of
A Cattle, a Crack-Up
, my convoluted novel about a dairy farmer on the verge of mental and physical collapse. And almost before I could regret it, Bettina got back to me, saying that she loved the book and felt certain she could find a publisher, as long as I was willing to do a rewrite.

“You just have to rewrite it a little,” Bettina assured me. “It'll be great. There's a wide-open market for this Middle America hipster ennui stuff right now…”

This embarrassed me a little. “Is that what I wrote?”

“Well, no, not the book. You!”

“Oh,” I said, feeling queasy. I had no idea what this meant, but I already doubted my ability to pull it off.

Bettina and I exchanged three more emails, and another rushed phone call, about what exactly
rewrite
meant to Bettina. Rewrite how? In what way? To what end? What exactly was I supposed to keep intact in the rewrite process? Bettina seemed to think it all pretty much self-evident, imparting her confidence in the repetition of the word
rewrite
. This was the proverbial punch in the arm.
Go get 'em, tiger
, she might as well have said to me.

Bettina was exceedingly kind, but I wasn't sure I trusted her taste in my book. Or any books, frankly. I had reread
A Cattle
again and lost my nerve completely. I was clearly punching above my weight, and I couldn't imagine having the thing published at all now. It was a fucking mess. Who writes an Iraq War allegory about a dairy farm in the midwestern United States? And was that stuff even in the book anymore? Hadn't the country moved on? I wasn't sure how to stand out in front of any of it. I mean, Jesus Christ.

The prospect of rewriting anything in this book was daunting, to say the least. I could barely remember having written it to begin with, and now I had no way of getting back into that space.
A Cattle, a Crack-Up
became an albatross that I carried around my neck like so much dead weight. The book hung in purgatory: not published, not rejected. Everything hinged on the simple idea that I could just
rewrite
it.