American Spirit: A Novel (17 page)

And when Matthew sees him try to reel it all in and tear
the heart off the sleeve, Matthew waits until the executive director of The Norwalk Developmental Work Training Center isn’t looking, at which point Matthew catches Chris’s eye and acts like he’s humping a case of mugs as he puts them into the car’s trunk. And the twisting and laughing and smiling are all back! Full bore! Full tilt! Who can hide it! Who would want to! Matthew is cracking up, too! For some completely predictable and wholly unseemly reason called the human condition, nobody really jokes with people like Chris, so acting like you’re fornicating with a boxful of coffee cups—a chestnut to begin with—gets an even bigger laugh than one might expect while standing behind the car and loading another case in. Another case into the trunk—mugs, once blank, now fired and glazed and burned and brave. Maxims clear, beautiful illustrations blurry. Crude paintings of heads and phones, and hands holding guns, and tall girls that are Tatiana, all drawn by way of shaking hands, and heads that bob like those of jazz musicians feeling phantom time signatures and meter that we can’t keep no matter how hard we listen, a curse on days, a ballet of this earthbound urgency.

There’s a little picnic table on a concrete slab next to the place and Matthew sits with Chris while Chris has lunch. Matthew smokes, which is probably another in a series of the bad hunches like guns and jogging. Chris points at the cigarette, shakes his head, makes a
tsk-tsk-tsk
sound, and starts smiling. Matthew smiles bashfully back, shrugs his
shoulders like he’s busted, rolls his eyes like he knows Chris is right, and Chris starts laughing and claps his hands.

“Oh, no, I’m busted now, right?”

“No! Hey, don’t!”

“No, I was just kidding. I’m not leaving, I was just saying you busted me for smoking, get it?”

“Yeah. But if, you know when people go? I miss them. It doesn’t, but it doesn’t, make me sad. Some people get a baby inside of them and then they’re gone; it’s boring. Boring baby, boring baby. I don’t have a baby inside. I can’t have a baby inside, since I’m a man.”

Chris starts cracking up and he won’t stop. It is pretty funny, actually, and Matthew is laughing, too, mostly because Chris points to his crotch a superlong time when he says it, which, again, is kind of one of those classic hits no matter how you play it. When he’s had enough of it for a laugh, he gets back on track and talking.

“I keep working. I get haircuts with it. I get pizza with it. One day you can stop, one day you are dead again. But not now because we’re lucky and sad, like wizards. There’s other ones that didn’t come with you; they couldn’t find a belly to come out from. So you forget you knew them. Until you meet them alive. That’s why people fall in love. Because from when they were dead together. But then they came to life and got lost unless they meet again.”

“You’re a smart guy, you know that? I’m not fucking being cute, you’re smart and I mean it.”

“I’m joking! We are not sad wizards!”

Fucker. How’d he do that?

“Mmmusic is. Good!” Chris says like he’s glad to finally get it out in the open.

“Not all of it, Chris, I’m afraid I have to draw the line here. I’m tired of some of it. Like the sad kind. It gets boring.”

“Music is litter. I have so much money, so I keep working.”

“Why?” asks Matthew.

“To help you. Then you’re gone. To help me, then I’m gone, too.”

“I hope you and I don’t go away for a long time. I get sad when people go away, too.”

“If you get sad, just have fun. First have fun, THEN close your eyes, THEN die.”

“Yeah, no duh, I already know that.”

“You need a belly to get here, but you don’t need a belly to die. So the mom goes away. She has fun, then she closes her eyes, too.”

And then there’s a little bit of silence while Matthew and Chris just sit in the afternoon sun, just two men thinking for a minute.

Matthew is thinking:
I love you.

Then Chris quietly says, “Work, pizza, haircuts.”

This conversation with Chris, it’s the only talk lately that makes this much sense. And the heart and head are together for once, working in concert, agreeing with each other. It’s one of those times when a man thinks to himself:
It’s that
same old thing all guys deal with, where you’re in love with the thirty-six-year-old man with Down syndrome who makes coffee mugs, but for some reason it’s always a woman you want.

The lull stays there between them the way lulls will when any two men on earth sit at a table sizing up their own lots during lunch. Chris gets up, starts to walk back inside to work, thinking about something, almost not noticing Matthew, but then he stops and turns and waves good-bye, making a hilarious stupid-guy face and saying bye-bye-bye instead of bye-bye. The head says to make something sad and beautiful of times like this one, but it’s too late for following the head, and maybe it’s always been. Two hearts know it’s a good laugh, this super hilarious, weird face Chris makes, this bye-bye-bye riff.

The woman at the craft class, the teacher or whatever, she couldn’t handle the volume and pace, not even with a cut of the eventual profits that Matthew promised. One case of mugs to fire (not even to do the art on!) was too much apparently, unthinkable, evidently. So never mind talking to her once the UPS man was showing up at the doorstep with two cases. Fuck anyone who doesn’t feel how fast life is ending; fuck anyone who hasn’t got the heart of Chris and his helpers and friends. These people are excited and determined—they soldier right into coffee-mug production; and news flash: They know, they know, they know. They know they forget to tell someone about the burr in their sock that’s wearing a
bloody spot into their ankle. And they know they’ll be lucky if you ever figure this out from the way they stop walking for a minute and start to cry at the sting of frustration that comes with knowing something simple is probably causing their pain. They know that you won’t know why they suddenly decided to try and punch the sky instead of continuing to cry. Punch it. Punch the Goddamned heaven that spat down the genes and bad codes that brought these physical limitations; these cruel and permanent grifts and gyps that play out in the wombs of people never expecting them. Fuck average people; fuck everybody who can’t be bothered to race death and beat its perverse pace to win any argument for sticking around another year or decade; fuck everyone who can’t handle any number of mugs waiting to be turned into ones, fives, and tens rubber-banded.

So when the normal people look at you like you’re crazy, there’s one place to go, go to where the definition of normal means nothing—to the place where you can infer that one who is normal is sadly average. Go to The Norwalk Developmental Work Training Center where people with so-called behavioral and physical challenges will prepare 144 mugs; where they will shake and twist and smile when they’re excited. It starts to feel like common decency when they do it, it starts to be a relief compared to so-called normal people; with normal people, you have to stand there second-guessing how they’re feeling. After a month or two of coming around picking up mugs for selling, one starts to believe that everyone
should shake and twist when they’re excited—when so-called normal people are excited about something all they do is drink, or say something like,
New Time Media couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to be a part of Fashion Week.

Pottery Fair: A Blind Mongrel Bitch Bent on Bloodlust and Degenerate Hunger

H
ERE’S THE THING
about the pottery fair situation in the little gazeboed block of grass and walking paths centered downtown: It is a cruel and vicious little labyrinth of bureaucracy, greed, and craft. Matthew tried, you know. He tried to procure a space. But there were forms to fill out, there were EIN numbers to submit, there was money to be paid up front, there were only certain half-assed spaces available to newcomers like Matthew. If you’ve never done it before, they stick you next to the obese Christian who makes these super tiny, basically dollhouse-scale plates and jugs, and who won’t stop yammering about faith and kingdoms and shit. Forms to fill out, lines to wait in, money to pay out
of thin air; all the same things that made Matthew skip college and hurry his way to making low six in a high-rise.

He tries to lament the oppression of this system with the other pottery men and women, but for what’s left of a sixties counterculture, they seemed quite content with fees and rules and an application process. Yes, these tamed social insurgents, virile and possessed decades ago, seem to be just fine with the shit crockery scene; mugs that don’t even say anything! Little teakettles that make only one cup of tea! For $180! Matthew smiled politely when noting prices and thought:
What, did you make it from your fucking jawbone and mortar from Versailles?
He walked the grounds; he tried to figure out where he fit in with these artisans, as they were referred to mostly by themselves. He carried one of his mugs around, he tried to catch on to talking the talk of craft and glazing and firing.

“So, are you gas-firing those, or wood?” This from a stout and gray man that looked like folk singing had beaten him badly enough to saunter to his plan B or C or D.

“It’s… I do UPS for these. From a Web site,” Matthew said, and he said it cheerfully, in his good-neighbor voice, and it was still met with traces of snide derision.

“When you get serious about seizing the clay, you’re gonna have to figure out what your kiln situation is.”

“Oh. Okay, well…”

“See,” the stout guy says, looking at the mug in Matthew’s claw, “technically you’re a graphic designer, not a ceramics artisan.”

“Fucking, seriously? That’s how you’re going to come at this, that’s how you’re going to talk with me, your little fucking spoon holders or whatever they are put you in league with, what, da Vinci or somebody?”

This kind of elbow rubbing is the kind that seems to happen when one crushes some fat lines of decongestant to get going, to get in the mood for reaching out and being a little less isolated. And Matthew is as surprised as anyone that the conversation goes like this, given that a fair amount of morning beer was taken on to balance the speedy kick; one would think the combo would land one in the zone a little more dependably. Walking away to try again, Matthew thinks:
Maybe it’s the speed and beer, and maybe it’s the world that has a problem.
But in the spirit of trying to make this work, Matthew walks down to the end of the pottery fair, to the Siberia where they put new exhibitors, just to see what he’s missing by not coughing up a ransom for rent, plus a deposit, plus a one-time administrative fee.

“Hey, how’s it going, nice work.” Matthew reaches out with the standard craft-culture greeting to a very large man spilling over a pair of paint-stained trousers, his hair having run back to the halfway point on the skull, presumably corresponding to the point on the front of the skull where Matthew sees a slobbered-up baby-pink bud of a mouth.

“It’s not my work, actually.”

“Oh, well, tell whoever did it, I guess. Tell them I like it.”

“I will.”

A long pause grows between them, time that Matthew uses to consider suicide as a solution to all of it.

And then the giant man-baby continues. “I’ll tell him when I talk to him tonight. I talk to him every morning and every night.”

“Okay. Well, tell him someone likes this stuff. I guess.”

“I’ll tell him you like all of his work.”

But suicide is messy, ultimately. And sad in that it’s so hostile and cruel to the body, which is a nice body and had nothing to do with this morning going like this.

“Fair enough. Even though I haven’t seen all of it. I’ve seen these, the miniature, what are these, you would call them jugs, maybe?”

“You’ve seen everything he’s created. Look around… the sky, the trees, the grass, everyone you’ve met, you yourself, even me, even my work that you’re appreciating. Do you want to tell him yourself?”

If not suicide, then maybe compulsive travel. Just fucking going places, like the lady who wrote the book about eating and sleeping and praying, maybe. But it’s time to reply, time to talk again, each lip so leaden now, and so much work to make more than a slit with. And what do you say to this, because you can’t break people’s spirit. American spirit is all these people have, and you can’t roll it up and beat them with it, even though abuse is arguably precisely the thing that would make them interesting eventually. There must be a way out of this. Matthew says the only thing left in him for this.

And with that, walks away with a tepid wave good-bye, thinking:
That is fast becoming my favorite prayer.

“Oh… fuck, I don’t know, ya know?”

So what? So what to all of this; so what that Matthew is a man who orders his mugs premade in boxes of a dozen; where is the crime in that?
Where,
thinks Matthew,
is the crime in not wanting to sit in the mountains of Upstate New York staying up all night to stoke a wood fire in the barely maternal belly of a kiln while listening to a formerly fecund and virile folk singer coo about serenity through a little set of portable speakers?
Matthew tried to be a part of the pottery fair, but the pottery fair is a mongrel bitch bent on degenerate hunger and nourished by fistfuls of a bloody mulch of purism and exclusion. Well, the pottery fair is about to be tamed.