Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (20 page)

He pulls a cardboard tube out from under the basement stairwell and unrolls a poster inside. The title says
LETTERS TO GOD AND THE THIRD REICH.
In the foreground, the poster shows a younger, military-uniformed Bambert Tolby, with blacker hair, standing on a beach, sneering angrily into the
distance, and carrying a laser rifle in one hand and, in the other a dead soldier wrapped in the German flag. The slightly faded faces of different characters float in a Mount Rushmore-like cluster in the background: a fresh-faced soldier with a cigarette in his ear and a smirk; a Native American with a feather headdress; and, then, this gremlin-like creature with butterfly wings.

“And,” he continues, “when it becomes work, you ask yourself, do you really want to continue this project? Do you even like this project anymore? When I asked myself that last question, suddenly I could no longer create—” He puts a pause around that word to let it get fatter. “I would go home at night after shooting a chase scene in the parking lot of Wegmans, pace around my house, and say ‘I need to kill myself!' over and over again. ‘God it's so bad!' That's when I knew I had to quit White Power. I was so embarrassed about that movie I used the money that all those generous and stupid people gave me to travel to Africa. I have two million Zimbabwean dollars left from that trip. And when I returned, when the court sentenced me, I needed to let myself be punished—to end that part of my life. Relationships end. I've grown, Andrea's grown, even since I met him. Sometimes the only way to accomplish a goodbye is through violent expulsion. It's interesting you bring up McVeigh, an Upstate New Yorker himself, who, after all, said goodbye to whoever he had left as friends by destroying a federal building.”

A finger stabs up into my brain: “Wait. What do you mean?”

Toby and Lip Cheese have no reaction. Bambert leans back and recrosses his legs.

“After McVeigh left this area, left town forever, he journeyed, some said shiftlessly, into the small towns of the country and desert. In transition, he sent back some sixty-six letters to a childhood friend of his. The sixty-sixth was sent the summer before the Oklahoma City bombing. In its twenty-three pages, McVeigh, already very lonely or at least isolated, explained that he was ending their friendship, which had been poisoned irreparably by their political differences. ‘Blood will flow in the streets,' he wrote at one point. ‘Good versus evil. I pray it is not your blood, my friend.' Just like this,” Bambert snaps his fingers. “Farewell old friend. I'm off to blow up a building.”

Bambert stands up and dusts off his thighs. Conversations from upstairs turn hearable again. “Well on that upbeat note, gentlemen, we should get back. I am sure my guests are awaiting you and they don't even know it yet.”

We follow him up the white-painted staircase, wooden with no support beams between the floor and the top. Light re-enters my head. I realize I've been picking at the corner of my pinky nail until it's frayed into three or four mini layers.

Bambert leads us past the people in the kitchen and living room, who stand around holding small plastic wine cups and paper snack plates.

“I don't know if Andrea'll be back, but you guys stay as long as you like,” Bambert says, and he wanders into the front yard under the floodlights.

In the front yard, more people are here than when we showed up: collared shirts, khaki shorts, Docksiders and no socks, shadows in the floodlight stretching to the road. More
people have joined whatever dancing game the church kids are playing, and it becomes clear that Necro's not coming.

So Toby shrugs, opens the cooler next to the front door, and scoops a can of Surge floating in the ice water. And so we spend the evening wandering around a total stranger's front yard. Some lady with tiny shoulders, a paisley vest over a short-sleeve shirt and gray, mushroom-shaped hair introduces herself to Lip Cheese. As tax law changes, we're always adapting, I overhear Lip Cheese say. Toby drifts toward the grill, positioned at the garage-end of the driveway, and shakes hands with a man who is dressed like a golfer. People walk by me. Toby assumes grill duty, pressing hamburgers with the flat of the spatula; checking blood color; opening up hamburger buns and setting them on the warming rack, serving them on paper plates.

“But the screw threads were all English standards,” Toby maybe tells the man. And it annoys me that I can't get talked to even among the nicest people, and that Toby and Lip Cheese, maybe, haven't so much been pretending to be grown-up as: This is how they act when we aren't around one another.

And my brain, for a second, darts in a direction I don't mean it to, and I think about the Evening with Raw Dog, and then I wonder if, maybe, Bambert L. Tolby this whole time has been lying to us.

Someone grabs my forearm. “Quick! Will you be the new person?” a bulky girl in a Brockport High soccer uniform says.

Have I ever danced before? Maybe probably not. But the girl leads me into the two lines of church kids dancing. In the
yard, on a wooden chair, there's a radio, and she presses Play, and the disco-y Jamiroquai song that plays sounds extra loud and tinny, like it might give the radio a nosebleed.

The teenagers around me do the Charleston and assorted chicken-wing dances, throwing themselves hard into the moves, like they've been practicing, during homework nights, for this exact situation. I bend my knees a little. I feel the weight of the fat in my arms. And, just in case Toby and Lip Cheese see me, I grab my ankle and swing my knee back and forth so I can look like I'm actually totally ripping on all these people. But I figure out very quickly that the knee-swing is funny only once, and I can never use it again.

The girl presses Stop. I stand on my left foot, holding my right foot behind me. Some of the younger kids look at each other and giggle. I squint one last time at all of these people and relax my arms, cram all my energy into my left leg, and settle in. The last one of us not to fall wins.

But then, the Saturday before the Fourth of July, I drink some of Mom's Sam Adamses and type in NecronicA. The white screen scalds my eyes: “VivaWeb cannot find page,” the screen says. I refresh. Same message.

A gyroscope turns in my stomach. Because, as much as NecronicA made me feel like I would never earn more than 1,500 Holy Grail Points and that Necro didn't want to be my friend anymore, I could at least imagine him, in his basement, alone, drawing something.

So I lie on the bed and stare at the receipts Toby gave me. That's what I'll settle for: reading the explosives—quickmatch, dextrin, etc. The dot-matrix-y print on the receipts has been thumbed away from the receipts' being in various pockets of mine, and the paper has been crumpled and recrumpled to have the texture of Kleenex. One receipt is dated 4/02/99 at 3:21 p.m. The last four digits of Necro's credit card are 9214.

Except the next day, on July 4th, the news reports a small fire that took place the previous night at the Monroe County
Democratic Committee Headquarters. A broken front window in the office; a roll of paper towels doused in lighter fluid. The burns, shown on TV, look like somebody emptied a can of black spray paint on an office corner near the window. Police say witnesses saw a “tall man” in a hooded sweatshirt—maybe a gray one like the one Necro used to wear to tag football, when we did that sort of thing in certain Septembers. I call Necro: Robot Voice Machine. Because I think: Maybe when Necro lit my room on fire in that one painting, this is all his way of saying goodbye to me.

“Sticking around tonight Nate?” Fake Dad No. 3 says from the living room. “We have cheesecake.”

“Oh no thanks!” I try to say as cheerfully as possible.

Nonetheless, though: Fake Dad No. 3, despite his black Dungeons and Dragons jeans, Tevas, and parachute-y white button-down shirt, on a scale of 1 to 10, he's okay. He drives me to Wegmans every Friday to pick up dinner for NBA Food Jam Weekends.

Nonetheless, I'm tying my shoes to take the car out, to find Necro—maybe just to have one last nice time with him, or maybe just to say goodbye before he goes to prison.

“Stay in,” Fake Dad No. 3 whispers, maintaining eye contact even when he sucks his wine through the space in his front teeth. “Fuck people. It's cheesecake. It's devilishly, devilishly good,” which he says in this handlebar-mustache, exquisite-cuisine kind of way. “There's a
Seinfeld
on before the Macy's show.”

It used to be the
Simpsons
for me at 6 p.m., then I'd go out. But Fox has begun airing back-to-back
Simpsonses
from 6 to 7,
and I've been gliding, with age maybe, into
Seinfeld
, which is on at 7, and waiting until
Seinfeld
ends to go find my friends. But I, tonight, apparently, have a best-friendship to ruin.

Fake Dad No. 3 follows me through the kitchen, watching me check my pockets. “Did you read the literature I provided?” he says. “Have you given any thought to it?”

“What thought?”

“King! Of! Prussia!” he pounds the table, rattling a stray spoon, to the rhythm of a crowd saying, “Wheel, of, Fortune!”

“King of—Fortune?”

“The BLT, Nate! Bacon, lettuce, and Truth!” he says. “You should really make the leap, today, if you'd like to join us for our August retreat. People might accuse you of seeming above them afterward, but that's only because you
are
.”

“I haven't had time to—”

“One would be dismayed if our last openings were commandeered by another stressed out MBA from National City looking not to expand the space between his inner constellations, as in pure astronomy, but only to alter his economic and testicular luck, a testiculoeconomic fortitude.” He gives two or three quick, microscopic shakes of his head. “Forgive me, I'm just doing a little free association.”

When right now, I would love nothing more than to drive far away and shut the fuck up. But my shoes are tied, and my pockets are checked. So after driving to Applebee's, and then to the bagel place, and to the Necro Flammable Chair in Greece and out to the Pylon of Awfulness in the canal, I find Necro's Vomit Cruiser parked in the grass that Veterans Park has made into a parking lot for the Fourth.

People in khaki shorts and fluorescent hats set down coolers and blankets and lawn chairs on the grass. It's dark enough to see a kid's floating face staring at a lit sparkler. I look across the park. Necro's at the opposite end, head sticking out over everybody else's, standing where the grass meets some pine trees.

I make my way through the bug spray smell and the four-year-olds trying to do somersaults. Up closer, the sleeves of Necro's Section-8 Dad's Air Force jacket are rolled up. His triangle brows look thinner. He's wearing a pair of those shoes that look like bowling shoes that people wear in the bigger cities. He waves when he sees me, arm still like a windmill blade. Lip Cheese is there with him, holding a large plastic bottle of green Pucker by its neck.

“Get something in the fifty-thousand PPS range,” Lip Cheese is telling Necro, “you could really have something robust, get those rakes of light going, like what they have with Pink Floyd at the Planetarium.”

I pretend like I'm really interested in the ice-cream truck at the park's edge, and the manila-colored light coming from the truck's server window. Really interested in that.

“They use lasers in more and more things—give spectators that jolt,” Lip Cheese says. “Throw that in there, that would be a fireworks show.”

So I tell Lip Cheese, just so I can have a turn in this conversation: “I'm sure that'll work real well, Washcloth Master.”

Which Necro ignores. Lip Cheese, though, smirks, and backwashes into the Pucker bottle. “It seemed to work on you just fine, Nate,” he says.

I begin to ask What does that mean, Washcloth Master? But right then, Lip Cheese pulls a laser pointer from the pocket of his jean shorts. He squiggles the dot of laser up my pant leg. Two large objects, made of deep gravitational space metal, slam together in my chest. Because, my God: Was that Lip Cheese, in the cornfields, on Night of Nintendo Power Bucolic Farm?

“You got Jungled, Nate!” Lip Cheese says, so excited that he jumps, keeping his legs together and his arms braced against his body while in the air.

When, Lip Cheese? This is the kid who, the last time he tried stalking anybody was when he tried following Deandra Esposito when his car was stopped in
front
of hers at a stoplight, and he essentially reverse-followed her into Spencerport, watching her turn signals through his rearview mirror and squeezing in his turns accordingly, until he ripped his front tire open on a curb. This is the kid who, on one dance night, when we were on the roof of Gates Chili High School looking through the gymnasium windows so he could spy on Karen Lombardi, walked off angrily when he spotted some kid with her in the gymnasium corner, just hugging. But he forgot to stop walking when he neared the roof ledge, and he walked straight off, bounced off some tree branches, and landed in a bush. “What? I'm tired!” he said from below.

And now he's going to stand here, like he's Detective Emil Von Schaufenhausen, in this new world, pointing a laser straight into my mouth because he can do that now.

“Why did—how did you even—” I start saying.