Driver's Education (14 page)

“Finn.”

“But—but no.” I claw at my thumb with my forefinger until the skin has turned red, until it's in that solid-liquid place between flesh and blood. “But no, they must just not know what they're talking about. Did they give you a reason? I bet they did, right? Ha, ha. I bet it was awful. I bet we'll just have to show them that they don't know, right?”

“Finn, I'm doing everything I can.”

“No,” I say, maybe I yell, but I think I just say. “No, tell me what reason they gave you.”

There's that sort of silence that you wish would never be broken. The kind where you wish you could just stay, suspended, between dimensions: a sort of Bizarro world where you're allowed to reconsider asking your last question.

“They've got something else in the pipeline. Another show.” Karen's voice is soft. It cracks between different keys in different octaves.

“No.”

“It's true, Finn. I don't know what else to tell you. Like I said, I'm doing everything I can, but this is just the way it works. They've got something else. Something that they think fits the new demo.”

I will, at this point, refrain from saying the name of the new show, because—again—it might be something you'll see, but just trust me when I say that it features a trifecta of terrific awfulness, which includes mostly dead famous people, babies, and plastic surgery. Basically, in the way of some sort of summation: you have these youngish mothers. And they have these babies who are cute, but maybe not the cutest. But that isn't the point: the babies could be the cutest babies in the universe and the youngish mothers wouldn't care because, at the end of day, they want their babies to look like famous babies. Or some of them want their babies to look like famous
adults,
and that's where production really expects things to get interesting, I guess, but most of them, most of them want infants. Which is where the wigs and the costumes and a very, very potentially unethical Fort Lauderdale–based cosmetic surgeon enter the picture, and—yes. Yes, fine, fuck it, okay.
I Want a Famous Baby.

“It ends,” Karen says, “with a pageant.”

“A pageant.”

“To see which baby looks the most like a famous baby. Or adult. A famous adult. There might be different categories: babies who are supposed to look like babies, and babies who are supposed to look like adults.”

She pauses for a moment, then asks, “Are you liking Pittsburgh?”

“We can't let this happen.”

“Hugo says hello.” Then, cooing: “What will happen to us, old boy?”

“For the sake of the future of the universe and Goodness and little unfamous children everywhere, we honestly cannot let this happen.”

“I'll call you when I know more,” she says. “Send me a postcard, all right?”

•  •  •

Downstairs, in the Forbes Avenue Suites commissary, there is no cat food and so, after some deliberation, I pay $11.59 for two cans of tuna and a box of wheat crackers. But then, when I return to the room, I find Mrs. Dalloway munching on a 3 Musketeers bar.

“Jesus, Randal,” I say, snatching the chocolate away from the cat's paw. She looks up at me, her eyes narrowed into this space between loathing and longing. A piece of chocolate dangles from one of her whiskers.

“What?”

“That shit will kill her.” I open one of the tuna cans and drain the excess water into the bathroom sink. In the middle of the fleshy chunks I wedge two wheat crackers. I present it to Mrs. Dalloway who examines the meal with her standard look of distaste and disdain.

“Finn.” Randal wears the same clothes he's sported the entire day, though now he emits the vague scent of a cheap hotel shower—hard water and Ivory soap. “That cat witnessed the fall of communism. It was there when the
Challenger
exploded and the first case of AIDS was reported. It was already a year old when Kennedy got shot. A chocolate nugget will not end its life, however unfortunate that might be.”

Mrs. Dalloway nibbles at the corners of the wheat crackers, taking bites as dainty as her ill-balanced form will allow. She rolls on her back and sighs, spreading out in all directions.

“She's going to hate me,” I say as I watch her.

“Probably, but I wouldn't take it personally.”

I sling my camcorder over my shoulder and retrieve my granddad's map from the back pocket of my shorts. “We need to get going.”

“Where to?”

I unfold the map and point to the first of my granddad's new notes, one of the three that he's written specifically for me, the letters curving through the blue space formed by the Atlantic.

I say, “To scout out this house of records.”

•  •  •

We walk east down Forbes, where we decide there's more lights and more life and just pretty much less per-capita desertion. We walk with our hands clenched in fists and shoved in the pockets of our shorts. We walk till the street's emptiness gives way to people, to small flocks of women, to packs of men in Steelers jerseys, all huddled in globes of grey ash air that hover outside the bars. We jump in the wet gutters alongside them, inhaling the smoke from their lungs as we pass.

We walk till the street begins to empty again. We stop for directions at a pub that bows just a hundred yards away from the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, this opulent and overthought structure that throws a shadow even at night. Inside, we sit on red vinyl stools and look across the mahogany bar to the faces of three weathered men who have their chins turned up, their eyes reflecting a TV turned to a local sports channel, and I can tell that it is the type of place where you come to finish, as opposed to start.

I order us both Lowland scotch, which sets off brushfires in my throat when I swallow it, and I suck on ice cubes between sips. When the bartender—who has a long blond ponytail and bone-white skin and a certain softness you can tell other boys mocked when he was younger but began to silently envy as he got older—when he asks us if he can get us anything else, Randal says yeah, yeah he can, something to eat.

“The kitchen closed about five minutes ago,” he says, and he begins wiping at wet spots on the counter with a black towel. “I could get you some fries, though. They've got tons of fries back there.”

“All right.”

“But you—you're going to need to turn that camera off first.”

“It's not even on.”

“It is. I can see the red light.”

I suck on my upper lip. The men who have their chins turned up begin to howl at the television.

“Look at them,” the bartender says. “Sitting there, yelling at the top of their lungs like someone's actually listening.”

He sets both hands on the counter, spreading his fingers away from one another. “To hell with it. I'll get you some fries.”

Randal says, “Thank you.”

“They're good,” he tells us. “They're famous. Get that. If you're going to keep that thing going, get that—get me saying they're famous.”

“I got it. What makes them famous?”

He looks into the camera and waits and I expect him to say something strikingly brilliant. But then: “Fuck if I know.” He stops wiping and tightens his apron and disappears into the kitchen. Across from us, all three of the men wince in unison at something on the television. One of them whispers
Jeez-o-man
.

“How are they?” He's brought back a red plastic basket lined with wax paper, heaped with French fries. Randal eats one, or half of one, and he winces as it singes his gums. “Should've given you warning—they just came out of the deep fryer.”

“They're good,” he says.

I suck on another piece of ice.

The bartender reaches across the bar and takes a handful. “Probably not good enough to be famous, though?”

“Probably not.”

He refills our glasses, then turns around to ask the men if they need anything, and they answer him with
Dabby good
and
Hauscome you gotsa ask
and
It's cordorda two
and
We got a whole nother hour
and
Keep 'em coming downa minute,
and none of it, absolutely none of it sounds anything like English.

“What are they saying?” Randal says.

“Who knows what Yinzers are ever saying?”

He pushes his hair, which looks too soft, synthetic cotton, out of his face.

“I don't know what a Yinzer is.”

“Yinzers. People who say ‘yinz.' People who speak Pittsburgh English. Pittsburghese.”

“That isn't English, what they're speaking.”

“Ha,” he says. “No? No, I guess it doesn't sound like it, does it. I guess I'd probably say the same thing if I were hearing it for the first time.”

“But what is it?”

“Oh, I don't know. It's just how they talk. A lot of it comes from Scotch-Irish, I think. Or German. Maybe some Slavic.” He pulls more on his hair. “Whatever the ugliest languages are. Those are them, right? Slavic, German, bastardized Irish?”

Randal watches how they move their mouths, how the words and sounds sit in the middle of their fantastic melted throats. He tries incredibly hard to copy them.

The bartender puts up his hand and there are cuts on his fingers. “No,” he says. “No, don't try. You're setting yourself up to sound worse off than them.”

A clock above the bar blinks 1:45 in green perforated numbers. The scotch spins in whirlpools as I make circles with my glass and when I drink it the brushfires seem smaller, or at least more contained. I ask, “Can you tell me how to get to Wylie Avenue?”

“Wylie Avenue?”

“Yeah,” I say, standing.

He says: “That's over in the Hill. You don't want to go there.” I watch as he drops two fresh ice cubes into Randal's glass. “You go there right now, looking like you do, putting that camera up in people's business—you're not coming back with your face intact.”

“I'd like to go. There's something there that I'd like to see.”

“There are other places to go.”

I say, “Tell me anywhere else.”

He reaches for a white square napkin from a stack of them that's 8 million inches high. Pulling a pen from behind his right ear he says, “Everywhere. There's everywhere else to go.” He scribbles as he speaks. “There's a mattress factory.”

“A mattress factory.”

“There's a Warhol Museum. There's the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. There's the South Side and the Phipps Conservatory and the Strip District.” He looks at the napkin and slides it across to me. “There's everywhere else to go.”

We thank him. We finish the scotch. We eat three more hardly famous fries, and we leave.

•  •  •

On the street, Randal and I sit on the curb and we swat at gnats clawing at our bare ankles and thighs before finally, after twenty minutes, we flag down a cab. The driver takes Forbes to the Boulevard of the Allies. We sail down giant hills. We roll down our windows and the wind crashes around us in towering waves. To the south everything sleeps, but most of all the Monongahela, which looks inky black and is interrupted only by the city's bridges, its silver bones that stretch at uneven intervals and angles.

“They're trying to cancel the show,” I say when we've reached Kirkpatrick. “I spoke with Karen tonight.” There's a stoplight, and there's the first traffic we've seen and so we're forced to stop.

“Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's time.”

“That's not what you were supposed to say.”

The light changes and the cab lurches forward. I lean my head against the window and I open my mouth to catch more of the night, to eat it in great wide gulps.

North along Kirkpatrick we're stopped by another traffic light, the longest one in history. The buildings on all sides of us have shrunk into sad affairs, their warped windows sloped downward into frowns.

I say, “They're replacing it with a show about having famous babies.”

“I think I've seen that show before.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It's about these parents—these young mothers—who want their babies to look like famous children. Famous babies. So
they do all these things to make that happen. Like buy them wigs and dress them up. Find doctors who will perform plastic surgery on them.”

“Oh.
Oh
. Ha. That's particularly awful.”

I ask, “But would you watch it?”

“Maybe? All right, it's particularly awful, but doesn't that also mean it's particularly fascinating?” Then, after a few moments: “I suppose my biggest worry would be that there'd be just too many obvious choices.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well. I'm assuming that unless they've got, like, weird cuteness-competition issues, these mothers would want their kids to look like adorable baby stars, right?”

“Right. Right, sure.”

“Have you ever seen a picture of Freddie Mercury as a kid?”

“I haven't.”

Randal stretches his arms out and sets them on the seat in front of him. Flexes his ten fingers. “No mother would want that. No mother would wish a baby that looked like that on anyone. But, like, Shirley Temple?”

“Sure.”

“Can't you see it? Every episode would, simply by default, feature at least one Shirley Temple transformation.”

“I'd say at the very least.”

“By the end of the first season you'd have an army of them.”

“An army of Shirley Temple babies.”

“That's what I'm trying to say with obvious choices.”

The driver shifts in his seat, drumming his thumbs on the steering wheel.

“But what about the moral issues?” I ask.

“The what?”

“The moral issues? Of deciding for a baby that she'd like to look like Shirley Temple? Without even asking her?”