American Spirit: A Novel (5 page)

Kristin disappears; the night drifts by, thanks to this lovely oxycontappliance. In the blue glow of this hibernation, grateful for something so powerful that it can make four and a half hours on earth race past without too much time for serious reflection, Matthew figures that maybe what he prays to is, in fact, television; that maybe this is the thing that has taken care of him. The channels dish up an accidental dose of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that Ted Turner invented; the
brain is littered with stories of unemployment on the rise, houses in the west going upside down at the bank, banks going sideways down on Wall Street, gunmen storming things, cars piling up in fog, planes crashing in Brazil and Spain, fraud, forced entries, you name it. Matthew uses the remote to set something called parental controls blocking the cable news networks. From now on if he wants this stuff pumped into his head and chest, he needs to enter a five-digit code to allow it in. A few more moves on the remote and he arrives at a string of channels specializing in showing classic reruns that originally aired way back when life made a little more sense. But it might be too late for this sort of nostalgia tonight, because the flurry of news channels that blew through earlier have the brain reeling to think what these old sitcom episodes would be like if they were updated to fit what the cable news anchors say is happening outside every day. The brain crosses wires between the grim news it’s already seen on the screen. In an episode of
Seinfeld,
George tries to get Jerry’s tax records back after he stops dating a former IRS worker. He approaches her at the diner, not knowing that she carries a knife, and he is stabbed in the chest and thigh. In an episode of
Everybody Loves Raymond,
Ray has a lot of explaining to do to Debra when he is caught hiding a handgun in an oily rag and putting it under their bed, and when the situation is hilariously blown out of proportion by the Barone family, Debra decides to get a gun of her own in case somebody ever tries to break in. In an episode of
Friends,
Joey finally lets the cat out of the bag about his fertility test
with Melanie, who was starting to suspect he was gay, then Ross shows up at the café to drop off a birthday present for Rachel. Ross then announces that he’s going to China to buy something called a seven-point sword, a rare type of Chinese throwing star that was used as a deadly weapon in the days of warring states and feudal lords. Chandler and Ross secretly arrange for an underground dealer of rare Chinese weapons and torture devices to meet Ross in Shanghai in hopes of Ross being able to also purchase something called a Din Tek Tu Iron Talon.

Moving forward down the line, the television screen dishes up nine women doing these cardiovascular exercises to hip-hop music. The head has stopped its game of polluting everything. The one woman who is leading the exercises, the sort of queen bee in all of this, is beautiful. And she says what one needs to hear when one is in a period of days like this. She has this amazing way of encouraging everyone in a loving way; she’s perfect.

“If it starts to burn too much, just ask yourself if you can just do it for one more minute. Hey, nobody’s watching. You can struggle as much as you want in your living room, right?”

Yes.

“Feel it?”

Yes.

“Just do your best today and you’ll do better, eventually.”

I love you.

Life: All You Need Is a Gun

T
HE THING ABOUT
the morning after one is hit by a car is that it’s a morning of pain; a great deal of it, really, but apparently nothing to waste a small reserve of copay Vicodin on. And nothing severe enough to face the sheer humiliation of calling Human Resources to check if getting fired after the Incident leaves one with any continuation of health insurance benefits. So, eventually, a morning snack, a handful of Tylenol 3—with its little nudge of codeine lying in the liver waiting to be metabolized into morphine. And then one must leave the house on schedule and get one or three miles down the road—which involves getting the coffee, getting onto the throughway in plain view of the clerk,
and then exiting three exits away, out of view, and coming back into town on surface streets.

Matthew has settled into the
Z
is for Zebra section of Stan’s again. Three sections away from where it all happened yesterday, but there will be no jogging this morning. But choosing the same lot again is important; it feels like one hasn’t given up their ground after one bad event. Matthew radiates a casual and positive impression, like an athlete on the bench. Sure, there’s an early-season injury, but the athlete still has the focus and spirit to show up at the stadium to sit on the sideline and watch practice.

There is an ad in the free community newspaper that was picked up at the gas station during the morning’s coffee purchase. The paper is free, which is a great type of newspaper when there is no job or office; the kind of newspaper or magazine one pays for is the kind of paper taken to an office and read. The large and silent Bavarian land yacht is anchored just aft and to the starboard side of the white-and-black zebra-striped poles of lights that will come on in eight or so more hours for respectfully employed grocery shoppers. This lot, one would basically call it a jumbo lot. Your biggest parking lots in an area like this are going to be in front of big box retailers, or grocers based in shopping centers and maybe flanked by smaller shops. Old money, family-owned super grocers like this one stand alone on tarmac horizons, without the indignity of a strip of smaller shops propping them up or feeding off them. Stan’s is a cross between
a grocery warehouse superseller and amusement-theme park thing, basically. It’s a cruel trick. Kids will think it’s an amusement park and then when you get them inside, it’s just a grocery store.

The outside of something like this is perfect though, because the parking lot is large and for the most part the outer perimeter is roomy enough that you aren’t going to have to endure the surprise of a familiar face. Inside, yes, it’s emotionally confusing. There’s a mechanical black guy, for instance. Black milk, chocolate milk. He’s inside the store with all the other animated electronic life-sized characters that sing and talk and wave. And he sings, kind of a garbled metallic ribbon of Negro spiritual with an indecipherable bluesy sentiment. And the white animated robotic milk cartons just sing; they don’t dance at all, so… racist, right? They have the dignity of just standing tall and producing a choir’s anthem of national pride about America being a land of plenty. The brain and head hear all of this and request that the topic is retired, they tell Matthew that the only thing worse than a racist is a white guy in Westport, Connecticut, acting like he knows what racism is and that he is offended by it.

“Life: All you need is a gun,” the mouth says silently without much permission.

And then the eyes realize the first headline of the very first ad they see actually says, “Life: All you need is a plan.”

And Matthew thinks barely aloud, “Oh, okay, I see. Yes. Perfect. One should have a gun; it’s difficult to argue against
having one, isn’t it? That’s all that’s missing for me, I bet. And I bet you anything the rest of the world has one.”

He stops reading to think how there must be houses full of them on the outskirts of parking lots like this one; munitions bunkers, basically, where normal folks are armed to the teeth. He should have a firearm too, and never has. And at the very least, it will be a means of preventing further backslide or misfortune or unexpected hardship. Good. Decided. He’ll get one. And then the synapses fire slightly out of time like half-assed jazz and the next question that flows from the gently dyslexic tangle inside of Matthew’s head is this:
Okay, so how do I go about buying a gun?

On the cable television documentaries about failed or fallen pop stars, there is always the somebody-who-knows-somebody-who-can-get-you-a-gun method of securing a firearm, but there are some obvious red flags here. The first being that the transaction always seems to take place in a parking lot, so there’s the idea that one shouldn’t do this kind of business in what is, for the most part these days, one’s home. Having said that, buying a gun this way speaks volumes about being properly connected, which is all anybody in Westport ever wanted to be, so there’s arguably a certain cachet to it. On the other hand there’s an unspoken code of honor in Westport. For instance, parking lot deals that lead to cocaine or low-grade violations of fidelity are largely seen as forgiven—maybe even a somewhat honorable risk to take—but there is the implicit agreement that the lowest one should stoop in securing a sturdy weapon is
to steal the firearm from a highly appraised family collection in a self-medicated moment of suicidal panic, marital distress, and/or sudden financial insecurity. With no access to such arsenal, this leaves only one other foreseeable way of buying a gun, which is at the big chain sporting goods stores, and this paints an ugly, premeditated, passive-aggressive portrait of filling out forms, patiently waiting for state approval, and then in thirty or so days’ time actually paying a reasonable price on any major credit card for a gun that one is completely allowed to have. And, as one stand-up comedy routine of Matthew’s certified social worker pointed out in the past, if you are of mild enough manner that buying a gun this way seems just fine, then you probably don’t want a gun the way the rest of us want one from time to time.

Besides, there’s risk involved any way you cut it, isn’t there? A sidearm is great for the self-esteem, possibly, sure, but it’s easy for Matthew to imagine that a gun is the type of thing one might absentmindedly take out in a spirited moment of conversation to impart gesture or flourish and accidentally shoot oneself in the thigh or foot, surviving and carrying on with even lower self-esteem than you had before bolstering the ego with the purchase to begin with. Guns don’t kill people, the dangerous potential of suddenly losing the self-confidence that presumably comes with owning a gun kills people. Anyway, the ad that says “One Needs a Life Plan” advertises a meditation class, not a gun. And the eyes have been trying to tell the brain that they’ve long since noticed the mildly aphasic miscommunication way back before
all of this. And word is sent systemwide about the correction, and the mouth whispers a note of retraction.

“Oh, a plan. Right, so, a… meditation class is the plan they’re talking about.”

Matthew supposes he should use meditation to stay levelheaded since somehow the plan has become to go forward in this life with a gun under the seat or at his side.

The ad copy under the headline says that classes are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons at the community center. Participants are asked to pay what they wish. The community center is maybe three parking lots away from where anchor is set at the moment, so commuting to the first class is basically just a matter of moving down a few lots. If there’s one thing you can say about spending so much of your time in a car, it is that you are almost always relatively close to anything you want. Realizing this has Matthew feeling just slightly ahead of the curve. It’s a small curve, admittedly. It doesn’t represent much, this curve, relatively speaking. But it’s a curve and he’s ahead of the others on it, and this can’t be said about many curves currently, so that makes it a pretty decent curve to pay attention to at the moment. The broken gray matter issues more warped marching orders in the name of preparing for today’s meditation class; the plan is to drop off and get a few beers.

Choices in miniature merchants are made, since going back to the usual morning convenience store would be out of the question and basically the same as being a week unshaven
and asking if there’s any chance the clerk has heard of job openings in the area. So, something small and much farther west than the morning stop; this one is not attached to a gas station, and this one has upped the ante of honesty by having a porn magazine that features very portly women, and another title that seems focused on African American women with gigantic stomachs and breasts; almost medically odd in shape and size. This, in a town of mostly upper-middle-class white people striving to stay thin by moderate exercise and robust prescriptions. Both racks are half empty of the issues within them. Beer procured, and even a pack of cigarettes, but only the spiritual ones with the Indian chief on the front of them; cigarettes that are free of big corporate additives and designed to basically prepare one for communion with the Great Spirit and powerful meditation. The plan now is to park far enough away from the community center’s large front windows so that one can drink and smoke, but still be close enough to make it into the meditation class under the spell of an intoxicating mix of low-grade Canadian morphine, lethargy, off-brand Heineken-type beer, smokes, and denial. Matthew calls this distance “the sweet spot” of a medium-sized lot.

And in this medium lot in front of the community center, the first beer is opened and the ceremony of pre-meditating begins. It is understood between the brain and heart that drinking does not make situations like the one Matthew is in any better, but for now, let’s give alcohol a round of applause;
it has convinced Matthew that he’s doing great and that he has some sort of mobile private social club that boasts a roster of one. It’s a mobile social club with leather upholstery, an always extremely central location, air-conditioning, reading material, jogging equipment, and a great sound system. The music playing on satellite is of the Adult Contemporary Rock variety, mid tempo, with a mildly fortunate loser vibe disguised as self-appraisal or spiritual honesty. Not Steely Dan, but might as well be. Maybe Fleetwood Mac after all the members had made and lost the money the first time and had slept their way from the left of the band’s lineup to the right and all ended up back with the drummer in the middle again. So that plays and says something about going your own way, or finding your own way, or giving it all away; there are still three bottles of beer left, and all Matthew is certain of is that he’s in the zone. And he sits there thinking,
Oh, I’ll go my own way, sister. No problem. As a matter of fact, it will probably be the best way to go considering it’s twenty minutes before class and I already feel like I am meditating. If you ask me, everybody should go my way.