Demonology (9 page)

—Last time it worked fine.

—Look, I gotta go. Train’s pulling in. My dad’s —

—
Sit down on that stool.
Damned if you’re going to sit in here for two hours on a bunch of coffees, eighty-five cent cups of coffee, and that’s going
to be all the business I’m gonna have all week, you son of a bitch. I know one place I can get this egg to fit. Goddamn you.

And this is where the ostrich egg broke, of course, like a geyser, like an explosion at the refinery of my pop’s self-respect.
Its unfertilized gunk, pints of it, splattered all over the place, on the counter, the stools, the toaster, the display case
of stale donuts. Then Joe Kane, who was already at the door, having managed to get himself safely out of the way,
laughed bitterly.
My father, his face pendulous with tusks of egg white, reached himself down an additional ostrich egg and attempted to hurl
it at Joe Kane. But, come on, that was like trying to be a shot-put champion. He managed to get it about as far as the first
booth, where it shattered on the top of a jukebox, obscuring in yolk an entire run of titles by the Judds.

Next thing that happened, of course, was the bloodcurdling shriek I already told you about. Sorry for it turning up in the
story twice, but that’s just how it is this time. My father, alone in the restaurant, like the bear in the trap, screamed
his emergency scream, frightened residents of Pickleville for miles around, especially little kids. People who are happy when
they’re speculating about other people’s business, they might want to make a few guesses about that scream, like that my dad
was ashamed of himself because the trick with the ostrich egg didn’t work, or my dad was experiencing a crisis of remorse
because he couldn’t ever
catch a break.
And these people would be right, but they’d be missing a crucial piece of information that I have
and which I’m going to pass along. My father screamed, also, because he was experiencing a shameful gastrointestinal problem.
That’s right. It’s not really, you know, a major part of the story, but there was this certain large food company marketing
some cheese snacks with a non-nutritive fat substitute in them, and that large company was test-marketing its cheese snacks
guess where? Buckeye State, of course. Where these companies test-marketed lots of products for people they figured were uninformed.
These snack foods were cheap, all right, a real bargain compared to leading brands, and they had cheddar flavoring. Only problem
was, since your intestine couldn’t absorb the non-nutritive simulated fatty acid, it was deposited right out of you, in amounts
up to two or three tablespoons. The food company was trying to find out how much of this we’d tolerate in Ohio, this oily
residue that didn’t come out in the wash. If you ate a whole bag, it could be
bad.
So, truth is, on top of having
egg on his face,
my dad, right then, was having a rough day, and he wasn’t tolerating it too well.

You’ll be wanting to know how I know all this stuff, all these things that happened to my father in the restaurant, especially
since I wasn’t there and since Dad would never talk about any of it. Especially not
anal leakage.
Wouldn’t talk about much at all, after that, unless he was complaining about Ohio State during football season. You’ll want
to now how I know so much about the soul of Ohio, since I was a teenager when all this happened and was supposed to be sullen
and hard to reach. Hey, what’s left in this breadbasket nation, but the mystery of imagination? My mother lay in bed, hatched
a plan, how to get herself out of this place, how to give me a library of books. One night she
dreamed of escaping from the Rust Belt, from a sequence of shotgun shacks and railroad apartments. A dream of a boy in the
shape of a bird in the shape of a story, a boy who has a boy who has a boy: each generations dream cheaper than the last,
like for example all these dreams now feature Chuck E. Cheese
(A special birthday show performed by Chuck E. Cheese and his musical friends!)
or Cracker Barrel or Wendy’s or Arby’s or Red Lobster or the Outback Steak-house or Boston Market or Taco Bell or Burger
King or TCBY or Pizza Hut or Baskin Robbins or Friendly’s or Hard Rock Cafe or KFC or IHOP or Frisch’s Big Boy. Take a right
down by Sam’s Discount Warehouse, Midas Muffler, Target, Barnes and Noble, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Super Kmart, Ninety-Nine
Cent Store. My stands at the end of the line. Fresh poultry and eggs. Eggs in this county they’re the biggest darned eggs
you’ve ever seen in your whole life.

N
obody likes a guy who can foretell the future. Let me tell you. A guy with foreknowledge of events. Its like having really
bad acne. I had that, too. You’ll need clinical trials probably.
The bull market will come to an end,
for example. Any idiot will tell you that, and yet a persuasive demonstration of my skills requires that I start small and
build to a spectacular conclusion. The Dow, in spite of its reliance on blue chip issues, will chase NASDAQ’s tail down. My
own employers will come face to face with some nasty accounting practices that lead straight to a cadre of cocaine-snorting,
Lexus-driving tech-fund specialists. Then some really bad international loans will surface.
Jesus, make a loan to Canada, or something.
My position, here at the retail desk, where I am not well liked, will be one of the first declared obsolete in the merger.
They’ll let me know first thing on a Monday, after I’ve been up for three consecutive nights, worrying about my brother’s
kid, who has leukemia.

I tell my wife this stuff, she doesn’t believe me.

Here’s a historical account of the first ever public demonstration of my skills: I told Bobby Erlich that he was going to
get paralyzed in a motorcycle crash. This was in 1977. Erlich didn’t like motorcycles or mechanical stuff of any kind. He
had a tentative approach to the sciences, too, though we were sequestered there, in chemistry, at the pleasure of the New
York State Board of Regents. The laboratory tables were always marbleized, always black, swept clean of hazardous accumulations.
Songbirds in our town, New Rochelle, sang parochial songs, jingles, light fare. The windows were open. It was late autumn.
The chemistry teacher, Miss Rydell, said,
Bobby, you work with Everett here.
No one else would work with me. Not even the two Hispanic kids. A pairing off had transpired, boys of incredible beauty with
girls as perfect as in the Old Masters. What was my crime? Bobby Erlich, that blond, said nothing, accepted a glass beaker
from Miss Rydell, shoved past me toward the lab station. At the beginning of the experiment, sodium and water in equal parts,
I smiled genially at Bobby, thanked him for working with me, but this was simulated, because, when he still wouldn’t talk,
wouldn’t collaborate, kept taking beakers away from me, I had no choice but to deliver his fate, which came to me with a sort
of uncanny trembling that you associate with early stages of fever, as if foresight and shingles, or chicken pox, were identical:
You’re going to get maimed in a horrible motorcycle accident. It’s really going to hurt, too. The part you can feel, anyway.
Just remember we had this chat.

Know what, Bennett?
said Erlich,
I
always thought you were a jerk. And I was right.

The exchange in its entirety. Two lines. Had I known what was going to happen I would have feigned illness and taken a city
bus home, lugging my ring binder, my unused baseball glove, and the remains of my bag lunch. Why worry about the opinion of
Bobby Erlich? I could just as easily have said something polite. Nevertheless, class proceeded without incident, almost like
it was supposed to, despite discord between lab partners. Miss Rydell hummed as she circulated from lab station to lab station.
We performed the experiment, I balanced the equation in my lab notebook —Erlich didn’t know how to do it —I passed our results
to the front of the class. We got an A on the homework, and afterward Bobby avoided me wherever possible, especially in chemistry
class. I would see the rear view of him in the cinder-block corridors, a faded red backpack retreating.

Eventually, Erlich turned out to be, well,
gay,
the preferred colloquialisms in those days being
fag, mo, felcher, queer,
and so forth. Foreknowledge of his blossoming condition would have been possible among my prognostications, though in truth
I had a basis for my surmises, namely that Erlich had repeatedly been beaten and tortured by the
lobotomized physical-education students
of my school, most of whom are now plumbers with collections of child pornography taped inside their vans, or this seemed
to be the implication at our recent twentieth reunion. Anyhow, I didn’t tell Erlich he was
gay,
I just told him he would be maimed in a motorcycle accident, and the year passed, and I was grateful every time I saw Bobby’s
retreating backpack on the way to band practice, where he was first flute, or easing into the Green Room backstage at one
of his
beloved high-school dramas. (I was property master for several of the shows that year.) I was grateful because Bobby was intact.

Then we were seventeen (along with everyone else in our class except the aforementioned
lobotomized physical-education students).
An age of promise, an age of adventures, of intoxications, of epiphanies. Bobby Erlich the seventeen-year-old meanwhile seemed
to be having an
intergenera-tional romance,
that was the rumor, and one night he was riding in an Olds Cutlass Supreme beside this off-duty policeman from our town,
Officer Meineke, a policeman with a wife and kids who nonetheless had found himself all dizzy over a flute-playing, theater-obsessed
boy from the junior class of the local high school. I’m conflating characters and scenes, you understand, in order to spare
certain parties bad publicity. It was rainy. It was June. That intersection at Four Corners was, and is still, noted for scofflaws
trying to make it to the station before the local train pulled out. Bobby and his policeman were locked in a kiss at a stoplight,
a devouring kiss, and I would like to think that in spite of my robust heterosexuality I could render that kiss for you. The
instant eclipsed all the years of Bobby’s woeful adolescence. It was
interstellar.
It was
pantheistic.
He wanted to see Meineke’s locker, at the police station. He wanted his own dog-eared photo of Meineke as a little boy.

However, as they were sundering themselves from this embrace and preparing for its duplicate, Joey Kaye’s father, who was
coming home impaired from a nearby tavern, was trying to catch the tail end of a yellow traffic signal. Joey’s dad:
thirty-eight miles per hour on a street zoned for thirty.
In a Honda Civic. He struck the passenger side of Meineke’s
Olds, and was uninjured, since drunk. Meineke, except for a few hematomas and his reputation, was also intact. Not so Bobby.
Lots of witnesses could corroborate this account. Melissa Abdow, for example, was on the corner, eating mint chocolate chip
in a sugar cone (it was dripping badly). She told me the next day. In math class. She had a sequence of images lodged in her
brain, she said, like evidentiary photos:
Bobby in the front seat of the car, smiling, then Bobby curled around the mashed engine of the Olds, which was right up in
the front seat of the other car. Then the Jaws of Life.

I didn’t visit him in the hospital, since, like I say, he couldn’t stand me. But I should have visited him, because instead
I was spending weeks in my room, gorging on remorse. I lay awake nights, debating with the dead white people of philosophy
about
my prophecy.
Could it be true? Did language, when you petitioned with it, cause such devastations as Bobby’s crash? Did the stuff you
mumbled on a bad day in chemistry class despoil a family of a policeman
who happened to like boys,
but who hadn’t yet told his wife, and was then undeservedly pulled mostly uninjured from the detritus of his car alongside
the paralyzed body of an underage flute-player? Did I cause all that? It was supposed to be a
joke!
And, besides, I said
motorcycle crash!
If only I had played football, if only I had worn shoulder pads, worn that war paint of football players, if only some hulking
alcoholic wife-batterer in the Pop Warner League had cared enough about me to make me feel like I was more than a barnacle
at New Rochelle High, then I wouldn’t have had to do what I did; if only I had played football, and had heard, at the line
of the scrimmage, the crunch
in which my own
neck buckled,
in which the ether above me gave way and the songbirds blew the play dead for now and always, if only I had heard the hoarse
commands of stretcher-bearers.

Once I told my mother she was going to inherit a lot of money from an aunt in Lithuania. What did my mother know of Lithuania?
She was raised in New Jersey and she had an Irish surname. Maybe I was trying to get
attention,
as guidance counselors had it then. Maybe I had an
active imagination.
Maybe I was trying to best my charming, handsome brother in the competition for her affections. Maybe it was because my dad
had absconded at the first opportunity, back when I was in single digits. Of course, by virtue of my forecasting gift, I realized
that my old man had another wife and family elsewhere, in Moline, Illinois, if you’re interested. I could see their shrubs
and annuals, Siamese cats, sugary breakfast cereals,
it just dawned on me.
I had known this just as I knew that the 1974 Mets would win no more than eighty games. Some days in my room, when I had
exhausted a stack of pulps and
The 4:30 Movie
was a romantic comedy not to my tastes, well, I felt I could contact my father, through extrasensory perceptions.
Dad,
I would say,
this is your son Everett calling, would you be willing to accept charges? You have, by my estimation, now missed seven of
my birthdays, and I feel, if you’re worrying about it, that you could just go ahead and roll some of those birthday moneys
into an, umm, interest-bearing account toward my education at CCNY, which will probably start in about sixteen months. I’d
be happy to acknowledge receipt of a cashier’s check or a money order. If you want to know my personal feelings about the
fact that you have missed seven of my birthdays, I guess I would say that it’s a little irresponsible,
and I wonder if this had to happen to you, if your dad had to blow your childhood environment to smithereens in order to make
you the kind of person who could take a seven-year business trip and forget to write. That’s about all I’ve got today, feel
free to contact me at your earliest convenience.