Futureproof (10 page)

August

I've been talking to Lana on the phone every night and she's been telling me everything. She says that she is in love with love itself. Perhaps it's not Corey she needs after all, because she thinks her heart might finally be cutting loose from him. But at the same time, she says, he was the only one that
ever
understood her. He was the only one who listened to her. He was the only one who appreciated thunderstorms as much as she does.

“I like listening to you,” I say. “I like thunderstorms.”

She says she's coming to Trizden's next party to see me. My palms are sweaty with anticipation. But when she shows up at Animal Mother's apartment, she's with Corey. He's alright, I guess, but what if she's told him that I've been talking to her all this time, what if he knows that I'm
that
guy, the guy that conveniently presents himself for the
hot chick when she needs a shoulder to cry on? After all, I
am that guy.
But it doesn't matter. I still yearn to be near her.

I decide I'm going to be honorable. I will go right up to Corey, shake his hand, tell him I've heard a lot about him (all good, of course), and wish the two of them the best together. And then I will go to Lana's house and sneak in her bedroom window and tell her she was right all this time. She was right about me, about life, about everything.

Corey's sitting on the floor, leaning against the back of the couch. The room is completely dark except for a shaft of blinding light blaring through the kitchen entryway. I can hear Lana's chipmunk giggle squeaking under the front door, where she's out on the porch with Splinter and Animal Mother smoking cigarettes.

“What's up, man?” I say to Corey. He is totally bombed, his eyes sliding closed. He turns toward me, slowly, and grins.

“Hey, dude,” he slurs. “What's going on? Luke, right?”

“Yeah, dude! Lana told you about me?”

“Oh, yeah. She thinks you're a great guy.”

“Well, I'm just trying to be there for her when she needs a shoulder—I mean, when she needs an ear.”

“That's cool, dude. You got any weed?”

“I was just going to ask you that,” I say, even though I wasn't just going to ask him that.

“Well, look man, my friend Tom is supposed to hook up a fat sack tomorrow. We'll stop by and get you totally zonked,” Corey says.

“Sounds great.”

Sitting there on Trizden's crumby carpet I realize that Corey really is a good guy. He's the kind of guy that people are drawn to.

Lana laughs her way back in the door with a cigarette and slides down beside Corey. She tries to hold his hand but he can't be bothered.

 

Corey shows up on a Tuesday with this lug of a guy named Tom. Tom says his band opened for Soundgarden once. Tom's a pathological liar, Corey informs me. We get stoned in Trizden's bathroom.

The next day they come by again and we smoke up again. Animal Mother gets pissed. He quit smoking weed and wants everybody else to quit too.

Tom pawns his video game system and we buy another bag of weed. I tell Corey I think the world of Lana. He says I should be careful. “She just uses people for whatever she can get off 'em and then throws 'em away,” he says. “But other than that, good luck.”

I call Lana on the phone every night after that, without guilt. For two weeks everything is going great, I'm plotting out the rest of my life with her and all—and then she drops the bomb.

Her mom is moving her out of state, way up to Bumfuck, Ohio, where she'll straighten up by living on her uncle's farm. No matter, I tell her, we'll talk every day, even in Ohio. I will not abandon you, I say. And I keep my word. The phone bill is obscene. Animal Mother threatens to kill me.

But then I have an idea.

I heard somewhere that car dealerships make hundreds or even thousands of long-distance calls a month and because of the great call volume they never check the long-distance log; they just pay the bill. It's almost too easy. But I'm desperate and so I call the operator one night and tell her that I need to make a long distance call and charge it to my residence (that is, the car lot, though I obviously don't tell her that), and just like that she puts me through. I talk to Lana for three or four hours a night at the expense of Henry Taylor Toyota or Big Jim Slade Ford. Every night I choose a new lot from the phone book. There are literally hundreds of car dealers in the metro Atlanta
area. The plan is fucking flawless. And I do it guilt-free, too, because money should never be an obstacle to love and these greasy car dealers are loaded down with cash anyway.

Hearing Lana's voice every night is what I live for. Every moment at work I think about her perfect voice. I keep a 5" x 7" photo of her at my telemarketing phone station. Corey won't even talk to her, so now she has pretty much let him go, even though it kills her to say that, she says.

Animal Mother says she's going to mess up my head. He says he can tell these things. I tell him he's just jealous. He says that could not be further from the case. But that's what everybody says when they're jealous and don't want to be jealous.

September

Corey's friend Tom is going with me to see Lana in Ohio. I bought this piece-of-shit 1980 Ford Fairmont for three hundred bucks and Tom has graciously volunteered to pawn his guitar to help with the gas money. He says he doesn't have anything better to do so he might as well take a trip.

“You're sure Soundgarden isn't going to need your band to open for them?”

“Fuck you, dude,” Tom says.

Before we're out of Georgia the radio fritzes out. We ride in silence, which is excruciating at times and makes the miles go by in slow motion. Tom has a bag of weed, though, so at least there's that.

By the time we make it to Lana's uncle's farm eight or nine hours later, it is already dark. Lana is standing on the porch, waving and all smiles, when we get to the top of the driveway.

The house looks like it was put together by drunken narcoleptic elves. The windows are all different sizes and seem to be located randomly, with no discernible aesthetic consideration. The siding is peeling and falling apart. The porch is covered in dog shit.

“Spanky's old,” Lana says in defense of the shit piles. “He doesn't like to walk down the porch steps at night.”

Lana's uncle is in the kitchen. He is just as she described him. He looks like a total pervert. He has white gunk caked around the rim of his mouth and beneath that is an unkempt and graying beard. He's egregiously fat, his gut lapping over his belt buckle, and when he talks you can hear the phlegm rattling around in his throat. I find myself clearing my own throat, hoping that he will do the same. He doesn't take the hint.

Her uncle says Tom and I will be staying in the bedroom next to Lana's. There are sleeping bags on the floor, his phlegm says. I hug her hard and she says we'll talk in the morning. I sleep on top of the bag with my clothes on because who knows what could be nesting in there.

The next morning we drive around the town with Lana pointing out the so-called sights. It has to be the most boring place I've ever been. Everybody hangs out at Dairy Queen.

On the way back to her uncle's place, the car runs off the gravel road leading to the house, Dukes of Hazzard style, and we all scream as we're momentarily airborne before the car lands on some sapling trees. I realize as we scramble up the embankment that Tom and I might just be stuck in Ohio forever, because there's no way a tow truck will be able to reach the car way down there in the brush. It dawns on me that I am
happy
about the possibility of being stuck in this godforsaken place, because Lana lives here now.

But then her uncle brings his tractor down and pulls the car out with a tow chain as easily as if it were a toy. We check the fluids and find there's a small hole in the oil pan, but other than that it's good to go.

“You'll just have to keep checking the oil,” Lana's uncle says, the white around his mouth clinging to itself. “School starts tomorrow, so you'll need to be getting going in the morning.” He hitches up his pants under that giant belly and creaks back into the house.

That night Lana says to me, she says, “Luke…I just want you to know—I mean, I think you should know—that…that I still love Corey.” I have sex with her anyway. She comes to me in the night and takes me to her room. Her body feels perfect in my hands. It makes me love her more.

“I want to be inside you like this forever,” I say.

“I know,” she whispers. Then she tells me that she doesn't deserve me, that Tom approached her after I was asleep the night before and she let him finger-bang her but, she assures me, “I didn't do anything to him.”

“You let him finger you?
Finger
you?” My throat tightens. “Why did you let him finger you?”

“I don't know. He seemed needy.”

“Needy?”

“Yeah. I don't know how else to put it. But I just wanted to tell you before he did,” Lana says, her voice cracking.

“Well, you're too late,” I say. “He told me this morning that you're a slut and let me smell his fingers to prove it.”

“Do you think I'm a slut?” she says.

“Can we do it again?” I ask.

 

On the way home Tom crawls under the dash to mess with the radio wiring.

“You know, that guitar was my prized possession,” he says.

“So you said.”

He touches the wrong wire and shocks himself. I laugh appreciatively. He knew Lana was loose, just like Corey said, and that's why he wanted to come with me all the way to Bumfuck, Ohio. That's
why he pawned his piece-of-shit, two-dollar guitar. He'd planned all along on getting some off her, too. It didn't matter that I was talking about loving her and shit like that. Fuck no. It's every goddam man for himself.

And then it is so silent in the car that I can feel myself going crazy. I can hear it, the approaching insanity. It sounds like that “Jabberwocky” poem my uncle Sonny used to tell me just to freak me out when I was a kid. The Jabberwock with his blade going snickersnack.

The miles drag by in silence. And we've smoked all the weed so there's nothing to take the edge off. Snicker. Snack. Snickersnack.

 

Corey greets me with a joint at Animal Mother's the next morning.

“She fucked you over, didn't she?” he asks, more a declaration than a question.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Let's hit this. It'll make you feel better.”

I look out the front window to make sure Trizden's already gone to work. We blow the smoke into the bathroom exhaust fan.

“Dude, bitches like Lana are a fucking dime a dozen,” Corey says. “They don't mean shit in the big scheme of things. They always say things to make a guy feel good and they pull the right strings, but when it comes down to it—they're only in it for themselves.”

“You mean like your dickweed friend Tom?”

Corey's eyes widen, the smoke still held in his lungs. He exhales loudly. “Tom? Tom fucked her?!”

“Fingered.”

“God, she is a total whore! She always told me she couldn't
stand
Tom.”

“Evidently she can stand his fingers just fine.”

“I'll bet Ricky was just the tip of the fucking iceberg, man. I'll bet she slept with fifteen or twenty people in the ten months I went out with her. She was always telling me she loved me and she couldn't live without me and shit but the reality is she can't live without dick. What a total fucking slut.”

“I wish I could hate her,” I say, seriously wishing I could hate her. Because that would be so much easier.

I hit the joint hard, angry. It chokes me.

“Damn, G, don't kill yo-sef! Shee-it,” Corey says, in mock ghettoese. He's always pretty good at lightening the mood.

“Wait here, I've gotta go to the kitchen,” I say.

Hell, yeah. The bottle of Jack, still in the freezer where I left it. I take a monster swig. It's cold and thick, smooth going down. I bring the bottle to Corey. He chugs some.

“That bitch wanted me to smoke fuckin' banana peels,” I say.

“What?!” Corey tries not to laugh up his hit.

“Yeah, dude, I told her I wanted to get high, told her we had a little money to buy some weed, you know? And she comes back up the stairs with a baggy of fucking shriveled-up, black banana peels. ‘I read about this in
The Anarchist Cookbook
,' she says.”

“So—”

“What?”

“Did you smoke any?”

“Hell, yeah, we smoked all of 'em!”

Corey laughs uncontrollably. Like he hasn't been in the same position.

“What? We were desperate, man. I can't tell you how fucking boring it was up there. Couldn't fuck her or anything until her pervert uncle was asleep.”

“So they don't get you high?”

“Banana peels? Nah. I don't know if they were cooked wrong or what. A total waste of time.”

Corey hits the joint again, passes it to me. I watch him slowly exhale. The smoke moves in sleepy, languid circles until the exhaust fan catches it and then it is gone.

 

I call Lana a few days later. Her uncle answers and says she can't talk. She is on “phone restriction.” Goddammit I need to talk to her. To tell her that she was right. God, how can this sixteen-year-old girl know so much about everything? Lana says it's because she has an old soul and my soul is brand-new. Mine is just learning to comprehend life, she says, and hers is on to the upper levels of understanding. Maybe this is why I chew my fingernails to the nubs. I'm careening blindly through this thing and hitting every possible obstacle on the way through.

 

The next morning I call Lana again. “Look, I know she's on phone restriction and everything, but I have to talk to her. Please. Please. It'll just take a minute.”

He says she isn't home. “And she won't be home for quite a while because she's in a hospital,” he intones, “a
treatment facility
, where she'll get some help and hopefully some medication. But I'll give her the message.” He hangs up and I listen to the dial tone and then the machine-gun stutter of the off-hook sound for so long it becomes music.

Everybody of our age and disposition ends up in treatment at one point or another. It's a rite of passage for the suburban fucked-in-the-head set. Usually when you have a friend that disappears into the bowels of drug treatment or incarceration or military school or whatever else parents can come up with to fuck up your life, you never hear from them again—just rumors about them having sex changes or becoming born-again Christians.

This gay guy I knew from the
Rocky Horror
days named Evan was seriously the most feminine man I'd ever seen and his parents sent him away to this camp that “deprogrammed” homosexuality out of kids under eighteen. We never heard from old Evan again, but there were two primary stories regarding him. One was that he had escaped and fled to Europe and had finally become the woman he'd always said he should have been. The other slightly less triumphant yet entirely possible ending for Evan was that the brainwashing had worked and he was now a certified Bible-banger. He wore neckties, the stories went, and chose as his primary line of condemnation the practice of homosexuality. Regardless of what the truth was, though, he was dead to all of us except for the legends.

And now I'm thinking Lana's going to be in that same boat. We'll hear stories of shock treatment and her biting her tongue off and choking to death on it, being chained to a fucking slate-gray slab and screaming for hours on end until she has a brain aneurysm—all really stereotypical mental hospital stories.

Those of us that do make it back from the storied institutions tell tales of our parents ruining our lives by sending us to “Peach Ridge” and “Windswept Meadows.” They could be the names of apartment complexes if you didn't know better. But we know all about them. These places are revolving doors. They drain our parents' health insurance and then turn us loose more fucked up than we were before.

I am an anomaly among most of the kids I meet, though, who count days spent in treatment like tours of duty. Institutionalization is our Vietnam. And in some way I'm ashamed of never having been shipped anywhere, a draft dodger shirking his duty, squatting in Canadian parks and bus stations until the shit blows over.