My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (23 page)

Living with my parents again, me and Brewskie’s began making up for lost time. At first it was just the nights that the Pistons were on, but pretty soon it was the off nights, too. Inside, it was cozy and dark, the oak-paneled walls lined with framed jerseys of obscure 1980s Red Wings, decades-old softball trophies perched below. I ran into all the kids from the neighborhood I’d grown up with—playing basketball, baseball, and hockey, riding the same buses to school—but they were no longer kids, they were thirty years old, too, and most looked far older. They had scars on their faces and walked with limps. We sat on stools up at the bar and spilled our stories over beers and shots of Jim Beam. One guy had done serious jail time, another had lost four fingers and half a foot in some vague accident, and the next had four kids and had already gone gray. Most worked for their dads or had taken over their dads’ businesses—Trenkle’s Towing, DiBella’s Flooring—and many nights their dads sat further along the bar with their own crew of buddies, razzing us, and sending over shots secretly doused with Tabasco sauce. “That bitch is on the take,” one of my new/old friends would mutter, spitting out the drink and nodding at the girl behind the bar. “She oughtta warn us, not sell us down the river.”

“That bitch” was Kori Boss, and she’d grown up a couple of streets down from me, just a few hundred feet behind the bar. From grade school to high school, I’d nurtured a secret crush on her older sister, Amanda, and a few times over the years had left flowers for Amanda on their doorstep, along with anonymous mash notes. On an overnight school camping trip in tenth grade, I’d finally come clean to Amanda that it had been me all along, and inside the cab of an abandoned crane we’d found deep in the woods, she’d kissed me for hours, but just that once and never again. Now Amanda was a military wife on an Air Force base in Oklahoma, and Kori was serving me drinks every night at Brewskie’s.

Kori was less pretty than her sister Amanda, but—in an appealing way—far wilder. Anytime someone ordered a round of shots, she poured herself two. She was tall—as tall as me—skinny as a signpost, and had long black hair, gray eyes, and a sideways smile. She dreamed of apprenticing at her friend’s boyfriend’s tattoo shop in Redford, then moving to California and opening a shop of her own. I knew I had a chance with her by the way she drank up my tales of all the places I’d lived since high school. Some guys that came through Brewskie’s had fat rides, others had handsome grins and a Marine’s physique, but I had stories about go-go clubs in D.C., raves in Albuquerque, and epic reggae beach parties in Del Mar, outside San Diego. I understood the currency these stories had with her and slid them across the bar, a couple every night, gently wearing her down. Kori was engaged to a carpenter who’d moved up from Knoxville, but that didn’t stop her from catching me on the way out of Brewskie’s some nights, wrapping her arms around me, kissing me on the corner of the mouth, and breathing the words hot in my ear: “When you leave town, take me with you.”

“How do you know I’m going anywhere?” I’d ask. “I live here.”

I’d feel her lips on my cheek and on my neck. “Fuck you!” she’d cry. “Just take me with you.”

*

The night me and Kori first fucked, and all that other crazy, strange, really sad shit followed, happened to be the night before Thanksgiving, but it began like any other night: I called my girlfriend, Tasha, a sweet, dazzlingly beautiful and sparklingly bright arts reporter for the
Toronto Star
who I’d met on my first big
Found
magazine tour and had been dating medium-distance for a year, and talked to her for an hour. Then I went to Brewskie’s, watched the Pistons blow out a team on the West Coast, and celebrated with the usual cast of characters—Franz DiBella, Bam Walbridge, Randy Wix—and our usual lineup of drinks—beer, tequila, and whiskey—while Kori drank along and passed out a couple of free rounds to top off the night. But on this night, when Kori hugged me goodbye, she said, “In the back of my truck there’s a tarp. Hide under it.” So I did. And twenty, maybe thirty minutes later, I heard her footsteps get close, and her door open, and the truck start up, and we rattled away, down Platt Road, it seemed to me, though I couldn’t see a thing. Eventually, I peeled off the tarp and lay on my back looking at the dull comets of orange streetlights overhead, until we hit a dirt road and they trailed off, replaced by a few cooling stars. Thinking back, this was probably the only worthwhile, positive part of the night—that thrumming anticipation, the cold air ripping over my face, the truck’s surefire
vroom-vroom
s as we tore like a shot arrow toward somewhere mysterious.

At last we ground to a stop and Kori hopped out and slammed her door shut. I climbed down and looked around—we were surrounded by trees, in the driveway of a giant, ramshackle mansion, bats swooping this way and that past a yellow front-porch floodlight. Kori fell against me and shoved her tongue in my mouth. What can I say—it felt pretty hot, and this had been a long time coming, especially if I imagined her to be her sister Amanda, which at times over the next couple of hours I did. She led me inside, and straight to a tiny bedroom in the back of the house, decorated with posters of pro skaters and teen pop punk stars, and lit by only a purplish black light at the foot of the bed. “Whose house is this?” I asked. I knew she lived closer to town, with her fiancé, the carpenter.

Kori was already stripping down to her white bra and panties. “You can’t tell anyone this happened,” she said. “Nobody. Promise.”

“I’m not gonna say a word,” I said. “I’ve got a girlfriend. I’m not trying to put this on the airwaves.”

“Good,” she said. “We’ve both got something to lose.”

“And you got to promise me, too,” I told her. “I don’t need any psychos coming after me, showing up at my house.”

“I promise,” she said, her whole body blue in the eerie light. “This never happened.”

We pounced on each other. I’d always been the tender sort of lover, and tended to lean toward slow, emotion-filled kisses and a fair bit of soulful staring into a girl’s eyes. With Kori that night, it was the exact opposite—we fucked each other like beasts. All that was missing was the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack. She grunted and growled and moaned. “Fuck the hell out of me!” she screamed. “Fuck me, you fuckin’ fucker!” I bent her over and fucked her from behind. I threw her on her back, pinned her shoulders down with my knees, and, upon her instructions, choked her with my dick. I did all kinds of shit I really didn’t know I was capable of doing, but it didn’t seem ridiculous, it fucking made sense and felt right, like I was accessing a part of myself I’d never known before. In the black light, Kori’s teeth gleamed like rows of fangs, and the gray of her eyes turned completely opaque so that her eyes were all white, with no pupils. It was like fucking a witch or a vampire or something undead. Finally, as our cries crescendoed, she shouted, “Come on me, come on my fucking neck!” and I pulled out of her and came on her neck and her chin, and she laughed like she was possessed, then took me in her mouth until I was hard and ready to go again.

After that second time, Kori fell abruptly asleep, and I lay next to her, staring down past my limp, chafed, and stinging dick at my glowing toenails. I slowly became aware of movement at the foot of the bed, and to my horror I saw that the black light was actually housed inside a large glass tank that held a massive black tarantula, nimbly straining for freedom, its back arched, legs outstretched. I cried out and yanked my feet away, supremely spooked. The thing scurried back and forth along the glass, its body curled unnaturally throughout, as though it didn’t want to take its eyes off of me. Then, after twenty seconds, it held still, continuing to stare, its hairy legs bristling and making tiny, slow-mo jabs. “Kori, what the fuck!” I hissed, but she was totally passed out, facedown in the pillow.

I hurdled over her, peeled my pants from a pile of clothes on the floor, tugged them on without boxers, and fled into the kitchen and found a light switch. I opened the fridge, plucked out a beer, popped it open, and stood gazing at pictures taped to the side, still three-quarters drunk. I recognized young, teenage versions of Kori and Amanda in many of the pictures, and also a wedding picture of Amanda with her Air Force husband, in uniform—at Brewskie’s, the same shot was on display, framed, behind the bar (for years, she’d worked there, too). I looked around the kitchen and it came to me that I’d been inside this house before—it belonged to Kori and Amanda’s aunt and uncle, who owned a costume shop called Fantasy Attic, a few blocks from Brewskie’s. A couple of times the summer after high-school graduation I’d ended up at parties here, though I’d barely known Kori at the time, and Amanda had kissed me just that one time and had long since moved on. On the fridge were others I recognized, sort of—the aunt and uncle who owned Fantasy Attic, on a pontoon boat in a lake, and also Kori and Amanda’s teenage cousins, a boy and a girl, on a Florida-looking beach, balancing on a felled tree in the woods, at a table in a restaurant blowing out candles on a cake. Presumably it was one of their bedrooms in which I’d just fucked Kori—or a demon claiming to be Kori—and so it must also have been their giant spider that had freaked the fucking shit out of me. My money was on the girl. In their pictures, the boy looked like a straight-up jock, but the sister had a black guitar and purple hair, evidence of a goth streak that might attract her to creepy-ass critters.

I plucked a recent picture of lovely Amanda off the fridge and studied it—from the past couple of years sometime, in a crowded parking lot, waving a pair of sparklers at dusk, with a gentle smile—and thrust it into my back pocket as a kind of heart-bending souvenir. But then I spotted, peeking halfway out from the empty square where the first picture had been, another picture, with a face in it that stunned me—my own. Carefully, I teased it loose, scraping at the yellowed Scotch tape which bound it to the fridge, and held it up close for inspection. In the picture, I was a teenager myself, maybe thirteen or fourteen. I stood among a dozen others next to a swimming pool in someone’s backyard, a beaming, untroubled look on my face. This was a birthday party, perhaps. Kori and Amanda were in the picture, too, just twelve and fourteen, it seemed, along with a bunch of other kids I recognized but couldn’t name. A strange feeling overcame me, and I found myself crossing to the back door and opening it to the cool autumn night. In the dark, I saw steps that led down to a cement deck, lined with abandoned flower beds, and beyond, a waist-high chain-link fence. Barefoot, my beer in one hand, the picture in the other, I padded my way down the steps. The wind gusted, sweeping cold air across the curls of hair on my chest, crusted with dried sweat, and slamming the back door shut behind me. I was chilled, but the fresh air was rejuvenating, and I felt alive and alert and at the edge of a mystery.

I let myself through the fence, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could just make out, in the thin light from the kitchen windows, the dim shimmer of a large in-ground swimming pool, layered in dark-brown dead leaves, a black plastic pool cover scrunched in a heap at the far corner, half in the water and half out. This, I understood immediately, was the same pool from the birthday party in the picture, and all at once time seemed to fold in on itself. I couldn’t rope in the details, but I knew that, yes, there’d been a birthday party, and that I’d gotten myself invited through a friend because I’d heard Amanda Boss would be there. Even when I’d been back to this same house years later, after high school, I probably hadn’t realized I’d been there before. I held the picture up to study it again, but it was too dark out there to see a thing.

I brushed the leaves, acorns, and twigs off a decayed vinyl deck chair and stretched out to sip my beer and try to make sense of things. My toes discovered a dry, raggedy towel on the deck beneath a leg of the chair and I tugged it loose and wrapped it around myself like a shawl or a cape. I thought of how badly I’d truly longed for Amanda Boss—and for how many years—and then I thought of Tasha, my beautiful, talented, kindhearted girlfriend, who actually loved me back, and was a better fit for me than Amanda Boss could ever be, and who was surely, at this moment, sleeping soundly in her cozy apartment off Queen Street in Toronto, or maybe even at this point, an hour before dawn, had woken early to straighten up her apartment before work, since I was due in for a visit that weekend. I felt suddenly sober, desperately regretful, and sick to my stomach. And yet, some part of me also rejoiced at the strangeness of life, at its darkly comic twists and turns, which had stranded me as a kid at a birthday party chasing unrequited love for a girl I’d never get, and then fifteen years later deposited me beside the same pool to sip a beer, having just railed that same girl’s sister under the watchful eight eyes of a lurking tarantula. As shitty, lowdown, and ugly as I felt about what had just gone down, I couldn’t say for sure that, given the chance, I would rewind the night back to closing time and skip the ride in the bed of Kori’s truck and just head home instead. I wanted badly to be a good boyfriend, not just good but faithful; at the same time, I wanted to live, and this, I felt—buzzed, downing a beer in the woods somewhere, pelted by falling acorns and pine cones, my loose dick tingling, thinking on the past, and hating myself a little but not too, too much, while owls hooted in the night—this, I felt, was living.

I stood and crept to the edge of the pool and dipped in my right big toe. The water was colder than I’d expected, and my whole body seemed to suddenly take notice of how cold it was outside. I turned around to head back in and figure out my next move, when something at the edge of my awareness prompted me to turn back and face the pool. When I squinted, I could see, in the middle of the deep end, tangled up in the pool cover’s submerged folds, just teasing the surface, a large, dark, and reflectionless shape. A sense of dread billowed deep within me. I made my way down to the end of the pool for a closer look, but it was too dark to see much. My toes bumped against a skinny pole on the ground—one of those long-handled pool-scoopers with a flat mesh screen at one end, used to trawl the water for leaves and other lightweight debris. I held it by the base of its handle and stretched my arm out until I felt the screen end bump against the thing in the pool, which felt hard, made of metal, and I exhaled, deeply relieved. It was, perhaps, an old granny’s walker, or an empty croquet rack, tumbled in by the wind. What had I been afraid of, anyway?