Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (17 page)

“I can't do anything right,” I say.

The waitress yells something in Spanish. One of the cooks dials on a rotary phone.

“All anyone does is lie to me,” I say.

“Cab is on the way,” she says, then pats my shoulder and hands me a napkin. She does this all with one hand, because, with her other hand, she's holding a dinner plate with a hamburger on it.

After the cab comes, I'll get thrown out and walk the rest of the way when the driver finds out I have no money. But for now, sliding up the 490 onramp, I listen for the different grades of pavement—the way the cab sounds like water through pipes on a gray patch of bridge, or the way it sounds creamier over sections of newer, blacker pavement. Cars with blacklights mounted to their undercarriages blast by, and the cab feels better than a bed on wheels, with me finally knowing, my God, the city actually ends.

A tornado-swipe later, my head is on Mom's lap in the backseat of Fake Dad No. 3's Hyundai. Street lamps are overhead, a BlueCross BlueShield blimp in the sky. The fluids in my head shift as the car shifts lanes.

“That's not a fight,” Fake Dad No. 3 says, his voice weirdly non-Thundertrident-ish. “In a sustained physical altercation, there would be a real mangled quality.”

“But look at him bleed,” Mom says. Her palm is sweating when she places it on my forehead.

“Please try not to Patronize the Victim, Debra,” Fake Dad No. 3 says.

“I'm not Patronizing the Victim, Gareth.”

“Goddammit Debra you are Patronizing the Victim, you're only using one parental tool. If you only use one parental tool, you're going to inflict trauma!” he says, yanking the car over a lane. “I'm only being transparent with you, okay; I'm only being transparent with you.”

Mom leans over me, so I can only see her face and a little
bit of one of the Holy-Shit Handles above the rear passenger-side window. And Mom, whose maiden name is Portfolio Insurance, she literally whispers to me:

“If somebody hurt you, in a fight, I can call a friend who knows someone who is a trained professional, who can take care of people who do these things.”

“Mom, what?” I say.

Which makes me start crying, because even if I am laughing, I'm still bleeding operas all over the car. Mom tries to squeeze my arm, but I twist toward the seat well because I don't like it when she touches me.

Later that night, two butter-colored curtains separate off my hospital bed from the other beds. When the doctor arrives, I stare at his mouth cover. Out of the corner of my left eye, I see him pull a thread, stretched tight, thin like a saliva strand, out from my forehead. The X-rays show a white, pencil-line crack running across my skull's cheek, ending at the eyehole. Otherwise, my skull looks like every skull I've seen in history, and this causes a Sadness Custard Montage within a Sadness Custard Montage.

“Do I need a skull-cast?” I ask the nurse.

“Heads generally heal on their own,” she tells me.

Back home, the afternoon is beautiful, tree leaves like flashing camera bulbs in the sun. Outside, Mom runs the lawnmower underneath the living room window. On the TV, celebrities walk around with their smug, unscarred foreheads.

Before dinner, while I'm in the bathroom, I hear the phone ring. “He's not here, Toby,” Mom says. I peel the bandages off. A crayon-line of scar curves across the right side of
my forehead. I have a swollen werewolf brow; my right eye is maroon and puffed shut.

When I meet Real Dad at his room in Penfield Manse, I barely recognize him. His hair is buzzed short, and he's wearing a tweed jacket, plaid shirt, and black jeans. His place, for whatever reason, is bright, well swept, and smells like Windex. The hardwood floor shines, the fish tank with music magazines is gone, dishes no longer piled up to the chin of the sink faucet. The little ashtrays he made out of tinfoil, that he folded into the shapes of boats or stars, that he set on everywhere so he wouldn't have to lean forward to ash out his cigarettes—gone too.

“After the last time I saw you, I figured: Time for Change. Mötley Crüe,” he says. “The way that album is all Midgets and Piss, and then impossibly, inexplicably, the last song is ‘Time for Change,' with a children's choir.”

I sit down on the loveseat, whose cushions and creases have been cleared of crumbs and novelty rock cards—which are like baseball cards, but with members of Saxon.

“Because,” he continues, “all I've spent my money on since I've moved here is Belgian beer and these workplace training and conduct videos that I like to make fun of. What would the nightlife guides say? Saunter around the ‘suppository-wrapper-littered' bedroom floor in this BoHo entry with the ‘finest samplings' from the ‘condiment fridge?'”

Which immediately reminds me of how Raw Dog described my non-Nate-HQ, and I get that knot in my throat, the Sniffling, Part 8: The Proto-Proto-Stachening. The tightening in the pipes, whole parts of my life pulling out of me through my eyes.

He leans forward, standing over me. “Well, your Mom is still with BCBS,” he says, in his stable, un-sneery, talking-to-Mom voice, which he never uses around me. Which can only mean I've done something horrible or really acted out in some way I can't even understand.

“The stitches alone: probably a $2,000 operation,” Real Dad says. “You're expensive.”

My shoulders buckle. His hand hovers over my back, like he's trying to figure out whether to pat it.

“Okay, let's not,” Real Dad says, looking around for a Kleenex, maybe. “Just settle down for a second.”

He sits down next to me. He has a new coffee table as well—black and rectangular in a sushi-place way.

I drag a few sniffles the weight of staplers. “I have a question.”

Real Dad sits forward, forearms on knees, and folds his hands and looks at me. No Wall of Comedy.

“You don't think I'm stupid, right?” I go. “You think I'm funny, right?”

Real Dad cycles through a few facial expressions. I stare at the floor, and feel his weight shift on the loveseat.

“You know, the last time I heard of anyone being down on Lake Avenue was that Foreigner song, ‘Rev on the Red Line.' Only song, ever, about Rochester that went national,” he says. “Completely inaccurate. This is the most difficult city in America to get laid in. You've seen me keep the two-second distance; seen my well-placed signaling. Women here are not at all after good drivers.”

I laugh. The snot muscles diffuse a bit. I can breathe regularly again.

“At least there's this.” He reaches down under an end table between the loveseat and the wall, and tosses a crumpled ball of birthday wrapping paper in my lap. “It's late. But Guns N' Roses never performed on time either, and you know what it got them?”

“Are you asking? Right now?”

“Pussy. The old Bensonhurst Grapevine.”

“The old Manchester Pizza Hut,” I sniffle residually.

“The old Klem Road North Medicine Ball.”

I toss the wrapping-paper ball from hand to hand. Real Dad runs his thumb along his cheek, like he's unused to how it feels after shaving.

“How about you just open it before I start to hate myself?” he says.

I un-wad the Happy Birthday layer of the wrapping-paper ball. Then, in a way that sort of looks like finding a piece of steak spit into a napkin—and I mean that in the most neutral way possible—I see this piece of loose-leaf paper, folded into eights. Written on it are the letters G, A, D, Bm, G, A, D, Bm, all the way down the page.

“Oh wow! Thanks Dad! Wow! This is—this is great! Wow! Thanks!”

He plucks the piece of paper from my hand. “You don't know what it is yet—you don't even have the perceivability to even
intuit
what this is.”

“So what is it?”

“What—it—it's a song!”

“Oh.”

“The lyrics aren't all in place yet,” he goes. “Still sort of in the conceptual phase.”

“So, it's just chords?”

“Chords is half the song, Nate! Did Van Dyke Parks walk into the studio and shit out the Metropolitan Museum of Art? He had chords.” He shapes the chords with his left hand. “But the song's about, I've decided right now, it's how you don't take crap from people when, say, you're stopped at a red light, and some guy comes up, opens your hood, and jerks off into your brake fluid.”

The sun gets some cloud cover, which rounds away the sharp shadows but makes the room brighter. “I know you're on the rocks with your friends,” he says. “Debra said something about this Toby guy. Calling you. And, I can sense, this Toby, he's been stressing you out, man.”

“It's Necro. He's supposed to get thousands of dollars from this guy—” I begin to say, but Real Dad's pulling out his bass guitar case from under the loveseat and unlatching it, and I think the case rumbling across the wood floor drowns me out.

“That's what I'm getting at with this song,” he says. “Because Toby? He's thinking, this Nate guy, he's got one up on me. He's thinking,” and, then, Real Dad plucks a single note on the bass quietly, “he's thinking, ‘I have nothing. So how can I jerk off into Nate's brake fluid?'”

Before this conversation gets strange, I go: “Wow. G, A, D—this sounds good.”

Before I even get to the hallway to leave, I'm already squeezing out laughter to myself, joke material squiggling through my head like mosquitoes.

But one evening, warm with almost-June, the phone rings.

Ring!
The thin wall of air between my heart and my chest. I'm thinking: Pinning Bow Ties on the Dead still, Toby? Why don't you take your dairy-quake face and—

“Nate?” a girl's voice says on the phone. “Hi! This is Mindy Fale!”

Immediately, I'm pacing in the dark in my kitchen. My face still looks like a drag-queen werewolf—my eyes are marooned and yellowed, my brow still swollen. The white in my right eye is deep red. Since water is bad for the scar, I still shower with Mom's shower cap.

“I've been looking through the phone book.” Her voice is milder, less like an angry Bills fan's, on the phone. “And I thought: Nate!”

She goes on. “You remember Goody, Ertsy, Ninjacotta—those guys are back. And I was calling, well, because my friend Chad knows about a party at the Pines, and he's pretty cool, and, so, you should go.”

Immediately, I'm polished by choir voices. I slick back my hockey hair and grab my black windbreaker, the nice one, and head out the door.

The party is in Fairport, a suburb on the Erie Canal with craft-showsy houses. The Pines of Perinton is Fairport's equivalent to the projects—these white, plaster-sided apartment buildings hoisted up by steel beams, with parking spaces underneath.

I walk up the steeper-than-normal stairs and hear music rubbing up against the walls. Inside the apartment, it's Pubertypalooza. Here was me at any party, thin enough to shine a flashlight through my chest; me, before I started carrying my wallet in my back pocket.

The oven light is the only light on in the place. Whoever's apartment this is is furnished like a porn set: no pictures on the walls; a single chair in the living room and one of those fold-out sofas that's all foam padding and no wooden frame—the idea of a furnished place. A sweatpantsed woman with a wide part down the middle of her hair reads the newspaper and eats microwaved fish at the kitchen table. A glass pipe is next to her coffee mug.

Through the living room, I step over a few bird-shaped girls with baggy pants and greasy hair dye who sit Indian-style on the office-gray carpet; girls with chain wallets who will either rediscover the Gap and grow into the nasal, flat-A's Rochester accent, or commit permanently to Gargoyle Trashdom. The boys have their various neck beads, skater pants, and T-shirts that go down to their thighs. One comes up to me and says, in a robot-type voice: “The only system
that can function is an egalitarian system because humans by nature are non-autonomous.” He marches away. All his friends laugh.

In a spare bedroom with no windows or closet, Mindy Fale is sitting on a bare mattress on the floor. She has blond highlights in her hair since I last saw her and extra cheek mass. She's touching the arm of this wolfman-looking guy who has a full head of wild gray hair and a shirt that says “Chaditude” on the front with a picture of him skydiving. She's still in what look like work clothes—black pants and those black, both-sex Reeboks, white button-down shirt untucked.

You talk to Necro, and he'll yell out: Night at the Stalls! Which was Necro's phrase to describe loud, lumbering girls. You talk to Toby, he'll tell you how she married that twenty-six-year-old guy, named Jamie Something, who went off to the military, and how they divorced after he came home and he spent all day wandering Irondequoit Mall, buying nothing. But I always thought Mindy Fale was nice. I liked having her to stare at. I got high once and told Necro I wanted to drink her face.

“Whoa Nate!” she says to my face. “You in a fight?”