Venus Drive (9 page)

“Thank you,” I say, today.

“You're welcome,” says the young Cuban.

“Thank you,” I say again.

If I believed in brief moments of cosmic alignment, I would have to say things feel fairly aligned right now. Better than aligned. I'm one up on universal niceties.

Then I realize I'm still in love with Rosalie, or Rosalie's tit, or Rosalie's tattoo. This must be why they call them brief moments.

I sit there until I'm good and tardy.

 

It's almost lunch by the time I get to work. This used to be somewhat allowable, but Rosalie has made an effort of late to make us quiet and punctual and professional-seeming in our one big room, all on account of the corporate types who have been dropping by to inspect their acquisition. I'm sure they want us to stay “funky,” but it's not as though we turn a profit, and our salaries and overhead are siphoned from their graver silicon concerns. Our parent company makes simulations of hypothetical amphibious invasions for the Navy, and also some kind of spree-killer game for the kids. Rosalie gets pretty jumpy when the men in tasseled loafers pop by.

This one, though, he's got on suede sneakers with his suit. The new breed. He's a smarm engine, torquing himself over Rosalie's work module. He talks in a hush and Rosalie offers up her specialty, low moans and conversational coos floating up from the seat of her lust like observation balloons. Everyone else is locked into monitor glow, code jockeys with their Linux books open on their laps, producers scanning the latest posts from Cyberbitch5.

“I've always been partial to low-hanging fruit,” I hear the company man say.

Rosalie waves me over.

“This is Gene,” Rosalie tells me. “Gene knew Kyle.”

“And I know you!” says Gene.

“I don't think so,” I say.

“I doubt you remember, except that we once French kissed. Think back, Chicago, ninety-two, ninety-three. You guys opened for somebody. I can't remember. I can't remember because you were so fucking awesome. You blew my mind. I mean blew it open. I was up front, just a little high school shit. I'd never seen anything like it. Oh my God, Rosalie, you should have seen it.”

“Oh, I've seen it,” says Rosalie.

“And this guy, he goes down to all the men in the room and starts trying to kiss them. I mean kiss them with these real gentle kisses. Unbelievable. I mean, it was Chicago, okay? Shaking it all up, this guy. I was so turbo'd. A whole new thing. A whole new idea. No rock bullshit. You know? I mean, sure, it had been done before. I mean, maybe you guys were pretty derivative. But still. Like little butterfly kisses. And the music, man, if it even was music, if it even needed to fall under the rubric of music. Shaking it up. Changing the terms. The terms of the experience. Not just sexually, either. Not just with the microphone in your ass. And what was that stuff you said about the corporate police state? You know, that we had a choice, that we had to choose between a police state or a police state? That really stuck with me. I admired it, man. Truly. All of it. Really. It altered me. Somehow. I don't know how, but I wouldn't be me if I hadn't seen it. You know? Look, I'm scaring him. He's like, Back off, man. Hey, it's cool. But I've got to tell you, I was so psyched when Rosalie told me you were on our team. It all fell together for me when I heard. Rosalie was like, You probably never heard of him, but I hired this guy…Never heard of him! Shit. It all fell together. Here's a guy, I've seen musical equipment in his ass, I've seen him literally crying and shitting and bleeding because the rest of us were too scared to, and here's me, right, always thinking to myself, I saw that, that moved me, so how come I wind up here, doing this? You know, like am I a sell-out? Because I wondered about that. But now you're here. You're here where I am and we're doing this thing together. So, now I'm like, oh, right, this is what we should be doing. You know? The next step. It all falls together now.”

“It really,
really
makes sense,” says Rosalie.

“Total,” says Gene.

“So what's the deal with you?” says Gene. “Are you still playing music?”

“No,” I say.

“No? Well, I'm going to sign you up for the company talent show. We do it every year at this great club. It's for real, I mean it's not bullshit. There's a programmer at our San Francisco office who does poetry slams.”

“You've got to be fucking kidding,” I say.

“No,” says Gene. “It's going to be awesome.”

 

There's another e-mail from Rosalie asking me to meet her later in the stairwell. It's our unofficial conference room, though there are plans for expanding into the suite next door. I diddle around on the web for a while, do my umpteenth search on the name of my old band. It's pathetic, I guess, but it beats the heartbreak of a scrapbook. It's always the same hits, too. Some kid in Bremen selling bootlegs, a girl in Wisconsin who posted a review of our last ever show. “They sucked,” she wrote, “and in sucking proved their point about American consumerism. We won't see the likes of this band again.” I used to have a fantasy about flying out to Green Bay to sweep her off her feet, but I tended to sabotage the dream by playing out the scenario to the finish. Little girl grows up and sees through me, puts an end to her dark time.

I hear Shrike's barks long before I see Rosalie. She's down on one knee with the big boy in a tender headlock. He's got a wet biscuit in his mouth, jerks his snout around, lays into me with a sloppy eyeball as though he knows something I don't.

“Did you hear that,” I say, “Gene worships me. I forever altered his consciousness. Think I have a shot at V.P.?”

“We need to talk,” says Rosalie.

“Last night,” I say.

“That, too,” says Rosalie.

We talk there in the stairwell. Much is noted about my underutilization in the company structure, even more about my eclectic skill-set going to menial waste. Rosalie doesn't really fire me. I don't really quit. Somehow, though, it seems I'm out of a job.

“Does Gene know about this?” I say. I picture him hearing of my departure, looking up from the Full Amphibious Scenarios: Weehauken demo running on his desktop, stunned, worried about the talent show.

“Gene supports the idea,” says Rosalie. “But it's up to you.”

“What about us?” I say.

“I think we need to move on in all aspects of our lives. You're not happy here.”

“How do you know?”

“If you were happy, you wouldn't be so busy denouncing my style of bowel evacuation to the staff.”

“I'm sorry,” I say, and probably mean it.

“It's okay,” says Rosalie.

“Fine,” I say. “But I want you to know I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she says. Fraught. Considered. Her delivery makes my declaration sound cheap.

“I'll clear out my things,” I say.

“No rush,” says Rosalie, and starts to push the dog down the stairs.

“Wait,” I say.

“What?”

“Let me ask you something. In the motel. When we went to see your brother.”

“Yeah?”

“What was my secret?”

“Are you testing me?”

“No.”

“That's sad. You don't remember? That's really sad.”

“I know. I can't remember my secret. What the hell was my secret? I must have had something I was running from. What the hell is wrong with me?”

“Nothing's wrong with you,” says Rosalie. “You peaked a little early. It happens sometimes.”

“Rosalie, tell me my goddamn secret,” I say.

“I've got to go.”

“The show's over, bitch,” I call, but too softly, as though my throat knows to close it off.

I clear out quietly. I don't really have any things.

I go over to the bean-bag bar. The door is locked and I look through the window. There are no bean bags there. There are some stacked boxes and a broom. Maybe it's a new theme.

Somewhere in this city somebody is probably peaking right now, getting high on a couch and talking about a bootleg he bought from a kid in Bremen. I should locate this fool, tell him what a lout he is, but he's all I've got.

Too bad I sold the Merc. I could sail it off the Verrazano. I'd be a footnote to a footnote, food for carp.

Maybe I'll fly out to Wisconsin, instead. Or take some slow hearse of a bus. They have movies on the good lines now, so you don't get so bitter about the landscape, big windows that open with manual levers in case of bad aquatic luck.

The crazy thing is I'm not even Jewish. But when I showed up at Dana's house with that beanie on my head, her dad didn't even blink an eye. Maybe that's because he doesn't have any. Well, he does, but I think he pops them out at night before he goes to bed. Dunks them in a water glass. Actually, I'm not sure if that's true. I know he can't see. At least he can't see me.

Dana got mad and told me to take the beanie off. She called it the harmonica. “Take it off, you idiot,” she said.

“Take what off,” I said.

“That fucking harmonica,” she said.

“Why,” I said, “Is this Spain?”

Dana didn't know what I was talking about because she's not in World Studies. She's in all these college-track classes. But they don't teach her shit.

Dana gets mad at me all the time.

Like when I try to squeeze her sno-balls behind the maintenance shed fifth period.

“Get your fucking hands off me,” she says. “We're in school, you idiot. You'll get us expelled.”

“Nobody ever gets expelled,” I tell her.

It's true.

Except for the time Steve Redillia stuck a knife in John Preston's ear. Other than that, no one gets kicked out. And no one in the history of Nearmont Regional High School East ever got the boot for copping an honest feel—off his own girlfriend no less.

Hey, we live on a chunk of dirt called America.

We have a little piece of paper.

It's called the fucking Constitution.

But Dana is a terminal Jervis, and she's always getting pretty pissed. Like if I spark a bone in her car, or make her blow off a stop-sign, or make her pull over so I can tag that sign (because I'm a tagger, and a legend in this town), or all three in whatever order, Dana gets pissed.

“You're going to get us busted,” she says.

“Nobody ever gets busted,” I tell her.

Which is not truly true. Chief Howie arrests me all the time. He's some kind of uncle of mine, from the alcoholic semi-retarded branch of the family (like there are others) and he arrests me whenever he feels like it. For whatever. Sometimes just to talk.

Like tonight when I'm tagging the dumpster behind Dave's Good Spirits Wine and Liquor all bent out because of Dana and the beanie incident, with her thinking I was goofing on her religion when I'd just been thinking about the whole Torquemada thing because of this report I gave for Ms. Fredericks's class and felt bad for Dana because they would have fucked with her in Spain and just wanting to show my solidarity and finding in my closet this beanie from when my neighbor Todd Feld had that party at the Jewish temple and they gave out free beanies at the door with his name on it so I'm standing in her living room with the Todd Feld Autograph Beanie on my head and Dana's being a total cunt and then I hear her dad shuffling around at the top of the stairs going “Dana, Dana,” like he's going to ask her where he put his eyes because they're not in the glass and since weirdness always increases exponentially I throw the beanie down on the rug and bolt, saying “I'll be back,” but of course it comes out more squirmdog than superheroic, and now I'm here alone behind Dave's when Chief Howie pulls up in his cruiser.

“Got a minute?” says Chief Howie.

“Busy,” I say. I roll the almost empty spray can under the dumpster with my foot and lean up against the tag, hoping the paint's as quick-dry as advertised.

“Wrong answer,” says Chief Howie, and gets out of the car. He comes over like a TV cracker sheriff and administers the beat-down, cuffs me and throws me in the back seat, careful to press my head going in like they do on all the shows. We drive up Spartakill Road, past the Burger King and the Hobby Shop and the Pitch-n-Putt, until we're going by all the big houses with the huge lawns I used to mow and the big bay windows that you can look through if you want to see people alone or in groups feeling like shit and not knowing why.

“People up here treat me like the garbage man. Which is what I am.” Chief Howie winks in the rearview. “Know what that makes you?” He takes a pull from something in his hand. I can hear bottles clinking together on the rubber floormat.

“Don't worry about me,” I say.

“Why would I worry about you?” says Chief Howie.

We turn on Venus, cop wheels crunching on the gravel edge of someone's driveway. I make out the shapes in the darkness, gigantic mounds of earth, big sleeping tractors, rows of brand-new houses wrapped in moonglow plastic. I've been up this way already tonight because at the end of the drive is the model house where Dana and her father and her father's eyeballs live. It's Dana's cousin's company's development, but so far they're the only customers.

“That dumb hebe,” says Chief Howie.

I don't say anything because I don't know what he knows about me and Dana, if he's actually trying to fuck with me or we're just up here because he felt like driving, because if you are just driving around it makes some sense to end up here if you're curious about what all the dark shapes are and then one with a few lights on in it.

The lights are out in Dana's living room and you can see the TV screen reflected in the big front window. It's hard to tell exactly what's on the screen, but what it looks like it is is pussies. That's right—in the plural, shaved and flaming, smooching in a close-up grind. What's a blind man doing with porn? Or is it Dana? Stretched out on the couch, spelunking with one hand and pinching her little sno-balls with the other.

I see Chief Howie has taken a sudden interest in the cinema. I see he's staring at the window, too.

“My, my,” he says. “There ought to be a law about that.”

“There is, Sheriff,” I say. “It's called the fourth amendment. Privacy and shit.”

“You little fuck!” says Chief Howie, whips a bottle back over the seat at my head. The ability to duck is a perfect example of why the nature-versus-nurture argument Dana's always yapping about is a pile of crap. It's both. Still, what does it get you? There you are, cuffed in the back seat while your pissed-off retard cop-uncle pulls off the curb and drives you far, far away from the big soft couch where your girlfriend is all alone with her juicer on frappé, just hoping you'll come back like you half-assed threatened to, and now you are driving cruel distances from anything that could be reasonably called joy. So the bottle doesn't open a big red smile on your forehead. So fucking what?

There's no question left in my mind that this Saturday night is shot, is history, is a tiny meaningless point on the time lines Ms. Fredericks makes us copy down in World Studies. Chief Howie dumps me down at the bottom of the hill, takes off the cuffs, “impounds” my shake, my papers, a few bucks from my wallet.

“Go home,” says Chief Howie, and peels off like somewhere there's a crime being perpetrated besides his own sorry-assed life.

 

A brisk nipplebreeze jaunt across the moonlit links of the Nearmont Country Club and I find myself once more in a familiar spot, leaning on the big white birch in front of Steve Redillia's house, wondering whether I really want to go in there again.

As part of my project to ascertain whether I really want to go in there again, I crouch down in the bushes next to Steve Redillia's house and peek through the basement window. Bilious smoke of the kind hangs nimbus-like in the half-lit room, and there's Steve Redillia flopped out on his ratty couch, headphones on, Zildjian sticks flying in tight four/four air-drum formation. Steve Redillia is the third best speed metal drummer in New Jersey, or so he was told by Archbishop Chickenhawk of the Non-Dead, when he tried out for them and didn't get the gig, and so he has repeatedly informed us.

I hate listening to music with him, not only because so-called speed metal is slow as shit as far as I'm concerned, but because he's the type who when you listen to a song with him will in the middle of it nod his head and say, “Nice,” like in the middle of all that double-kick-drumming and guitar he heard some subtle shit your dolt ass could never comprehend. Then, if you don't immediately smile and agree with him, Steve Redillia gives you this look, goes off on how nobody actually
listens
to music, and then maybe starts throwing shit, with you, as closest representative of a species he detests, the target.

“You fucking twats don't get it at all!” he'll say. “Goddamn puppets on a string!” And then objects, sharp and heavy, will receive the gift of flight.

Fuck it.

I book.

 

I'm coming home to a beat-down either way, so why procrastinate? I'm standing outside the kitchen door looking in, and now it's like the third time tonight I'm sneaking around windows like a perv. Dad's on the phone, probably with the Big Chief himself. Dad's leaning up on the refrigerator—and I swear to God I catch him pulling one of those stringy boogers out of his nose, the kind with the dry handle and the gooey tail. He pulls it all the way out, holds it up for inspection, and then, I swear on Dana's dad's missing eyes, my fucking progenitor reaches under the edge of the Formica and deposits the snot jewel.

When I was a crawling babyboy, I used to hang out under that Formica, tagging the cabinets with my orange crayon, and whenever I looked up, I always saw these dried snots like tiny cave spikes dangling down. Once Mom found them there and chewed my ass but I denied it, which just got her madder, and Dad was sitting there the whole time shaking his head even though we both knew they were his boogers. I remember a look on his face like it's a shame the world is like this before he got up with his belt.

Not to say this event was some big revelation, like before this he was taking me to the hobby shop on Saturdays and teaching me how to fly kites and shit, and then suddenly everything changed. It's just another point on the time line.

So I go around to the garage door, hoping to get in that way—but Dad must have cloned himself, or built replicants, because by the time I get there I see another one of him through the garage window standing under the lightbulb with the only sound the hum of the meat freezer. He's surrounded by all his tools, his hands on his hips like he's the royal torturer taking a moment to reflect on the hot debate of the day, the rack versus the thumbscrews.

I guess this occurs to me because for Ms. Fredericks's class I made that report on the Spain Inquisition situation. “A bit over the top, but informative,” was how Ms. Fredericks described my report, because I went into detail about the various devices any good torturer was familiar with, like the special skillets to fry up your testicles and the two-handed saws they wedged up your ass to saw you in half with.

Some of the Jervises in my class were all offended or something, like I approved of the whole thing (though no doubt Steve Redillia, if he hadn't been expelled, would have), like I wasn't fucking going out with a Jewish girl anyway, wasn't sensitive to what her feelings might be in regards to Torquemada, if anybody were to tell her what the man thought of her, instead of seeing that I was just trying to do what any decent historian would try to do, too, namely to describe all the sick shit that went down, which Ms. Fredericks says must be done so we learn from our mistakes and so history doesn't keep happening again and again. But I have my doubts about that theory. Because like remembering or not remembering your last beat-down has shit to do with the next one coming at your ass. And what help is a skinny black line with dots on it besides just to say this sucked, and that sucked, and do not doubt it all will suck again?