The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (26 page)

That experience let me see how weakness (we’ll call it that for now) can be strength. None of that crowd went to his funeral but me. The family tried to have me arrested. “He was a friend,” I told the cop. I didn’t mention that mainly I wanted to see that tooth, which, sure enough, they’d glued back on. I know that sounds cold, but I couldn’t really see his death as a tragedy. Not for me, anyway. I did almost cry a little, but the sunlight on his coffin had a spunky kind of brilliance, which made me happy to be alive and weak and wearing a suit.

I didn’t tell Val this story while we were screwing, but I may have been distracted because when she couldn’t come and could barely, for that matter, stay awake, she said, “Just go ahead. Don’t wait for me.”

A few minutes later, the ski pole slipped loose and the window slammed down with a bang, and I came so suddenly I didn’t manage to pull all the way out.

“Don’t worry about it,” she told me. “That was really great.”

Clete: Some months before Clete moved to the mountains, he and I went to our ten-year high school reunion and found ourselves at a party in somebody’s crowded house. Twelve framed photos lined the dinner table, one for each of the dead in our class—all from drugs, or driving stoned into the giant saguaro by the post office, or drowning in a bathtub (that was about drugs, too), or falling over face-first onto a pool table. These were people we thought of as friends or at least people who wouldn’t screw us over when we were too high to know better. They were all dead and it was a dull party.

Someone called Clete’s name and then mine. It was a guy who we’d named the
Flirge
in high school because he was a liar and he’d smoke your pot without ever bringing his own or offering to go in on some. His family had a swimming pool, so we put up with him but no one liked him. One time we were in the pool (on acid but that doesn’t have anything to do with the story) and the Flirge starts in all nonchalant about raping a girl, like it was this thing he’d done and he wasn’t going to lie about it.

Clete gave me a doubtful look, then said, “Where’d this happen?”

“A parking lot,” the Flirge said. The girl had passed out. He leaned her over a hood and did it to her from behind.

“What kind of car was it?” Clete asked.

“Black Mercedes,” the Flirge said.

“That has a hood ornament.” Clete is the kind of person you can’t slip much past. “You wouldn’t bend her over a hood ornament.”

“We were on the side by the driver’s door.”

“Too high,” Clete said. “You’d have to fuck on your tiptoes, which is fatiguing.”

My point is, the Flirge was the kind of guy who lied about whether he had raped a girl, and he didn’t chip in for drugs. You know the type.

He found us in this crammed full room and said, “I’ve been looking for you guys.”

I was thinking,
Let’s flee,
and giving Clete
Let’s flee
looks. But Clete was thinking,
People can change,
and he gave me a look that said,
If even the Flirge can shape up…

“I got married last night,” the Flirge said. He wanted us to meet his wife. “Wait right here?”

Sure, we said. The Flirge knifed through the crowd, so excited to introduce us to his wife that I was willing to believe Clete was right. We started enjoying the party more. Clete and I talked to a girl who’d had a thing for me in high school. Her husband had just got a job with NASA, and their firstborn was walking but not talking except for “muh” and “duh” for “Mom” and “Dad,” and she had another bun in the oven right now. All the time, I was recalling how crazy she’d been for me and how that baby could be calling me “duh” and how that could be my bun in her oven, and it seemed like somehow I’d even given up a chance to be an astronaut.

I was straining to figure out why I hadn’t liked her back when, but then I realized she was still talking and I remembered: she had a big mouth.

Was it worth not walking on the moon to avoid this fat mouth for the rest of my life?

Without question.

But it was a sacrifice, too. It seemed like I’d given up some portion of the heavens in order to have integrity and look for true love and avoid endless small talk.

About then the Flirge reappeared. The woman with him wasn’t beautiful, but she had on a sweater that fit in a certain way, short happy hair, and a face you’d always like to see. I could tell she wasn’t a big mouth by the way she smiled at people and walked close to her husband, and I thought,
What a weird honeymoon.

I was also thinking the Flirge had made out all right. He’d turned a corner and would never pretend he’d raped a woman again, even if maybe he might bring cheap wine when you invited him to dinner or make waitresses figure separate checks. What’s the big deal about that? In my head, I was commending Clete for recognizing this and thinking what a rare friend he was and also how I’d like to screw the Flirge’s bride. I wanted to marry her. You can tell sometimes.

Here’s the unbelievable part: I was happy for the Flirge. I felt a wide-open kind of gratitude that rarely descends on a person. I’ve been that happy maybe three times in my life. It thrilled me that such a loser could turn it around.

He led her right to us, but at the last second he looked away. He bumped into us as if it were an accident. Right then, I knew. He was still the Flirge and about to prove it.

“Hey,” he said. “I want you to meet my wife.” He leaned in close to us, made a quizzical face, and said, “What’s your names again?”

Without even a second to register this, Clete moved his head right past the Flirge to his wife. He said, “You’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life.”

She smiled for less than a second, less time than it takes for the television to come on after the remote is punched—that’s how fast the human brain is—and then her features made tiny complicated twists and small turns. We left them like that.

I could tell you about a thousand other nights like that one, but the point is always the same: Clete is the kind of person who knows what it is to be alive and the knowledge causes him no shame. How many people in your acquaintance can you say that about?

The others: Many other people did stints in the dog-sitting house. A guy we called Skins slept on the couch without a sheet for a month and turned it brown. When he left he stole Stu’s boom box, a weedeater, and two decks of cards. One guy—I don’t remember his name—pretended to be an opera singer and made voicey proclamations about art. Another one—we called him Heller, which might have been his name—tried to prove he could levitate by sitting on the bathroom scales and showing us how his weight diminished the longer he meditated. Clete saw through the act. “His butt is sliding off the feet marks,” he told me, but we didn’t say anything to Heller, who had only that one trick. Another guy who insisted we call him Hawk liked to argue about whether the world was flat. “What?” I said. “It’s a big conspiracy?” He explained: “Put a level on a field and that shows it’s flat. That’s what flat is. Sure, the planet is round, but the earth is flat.” There was a chunky girl I won’t name who went down on every guy in the place during her weeklong stay. Some of us tried to like her, but she had her own agenda.

Most nights we sat on kitchen chairs in candlelight immersed in some form of inebriation, and talked. The roof over the back porch had a leak that should have been fixed, but we liked to sit on the softening planks and breathe in the odor of the rain-sweetened wood. The morning sun dried it out, and the afternoon rain softened it again. The porch was like a great dark lung that would, days before the end of our summer, collapse.

One night on the porch has stuck with me. Clete got us going. “This man has to raise a boy who isn’t his own son but his brother’s, and the brother died because of this boy in a boy-caused auto accident or house fire or poisoning incident that kills the parents but not the boy. The man who has to raise him one day gets the hiccups and to get rid of them he drinks water upside down.”

“Standing on his head?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what kind of story it was.

“Like this.” Clete got a glass and demonstrated, bending at the waist and drinking from the opposite rim.

“That really does get rid of hiccups,” Lila put in. Several of us were on the porch.

“The boy watches him drink this way. And you have to understand that the man hates the kid because he’s ruining his life. He doesn’t want some diaper-needs-changing kid hanging around. Also he blames the death of his brother on the kid. He doesn’t act outright mean to the boy, but it slips out.

“He sees the kid drinking this way and he encourages him. ‘That’s the way to drink,’ he says. The boy goes around all the time drinking upside down. The man thinks it’s funny to see this kid drinking upside down. He takes a mean pleasure in it.”

“Insensitive bastard,” Lila said. Stu and Val and some others were there, too.“But what this does,” Clete said, “is give him an outlet for his anger. It lets him get to know the boy. He feels sad for his brother and for the boy. When the kid is old enough to go to school, the man tells him, ‘I was only fooling about drinking that way. You don’t have to drink that way.’ But the boy says, ‘I like to drink this way.’ The man says, ‘Kids will make fun of you if you drink that way.’ The boy says, ‘I know, but this is the way we drink.’ He raises a glass of water in toast and they bend over and drink upside down together, and the screen goes black.”

“This was a movie?” I said.

“He’s kind of a smart kid for kindergarten,” Lila pointed out.

“They could be in some remote place where school starts later,” Clete said.

“It’s a beautiful story,” Val said. “It’s perfect just the way it is.”

“It
is
a good story,” Lila agreed.

Lila’s respect for the story made me want to tell one of my own. I was drunk enough to just start off and see where it would go, but right as I opened my mouth I remembered a girl named Eve I used to know. She was a pal’s girlfriend—beautiful girl with hair so pale we used to say it was the color of spit, and who was diagnosed with brain cancer and given six months. I visited her in the hospital after her surgery and she asked me to be one of her pallbearers. It’s a hell of a thing for a living person to ask, especially a pretty girl no older than you with bandages on her head.

“Sure,” I told her. “Doesn’t look like you weigh too much.”

That got a laugh out of her.

But she didn’t die. Instead, she dumped my friend and got together with a guy who robbed convenience stores. They put together some money from their various robberies, and when she finished chemotherapy they moved to Alaska. I saw her once long afterward at that same high school reunion. Her hair had never grown back and she wore a scarf over her head, but she was still beautiful and married to the robber, who sold cars now and they had a summer cabin on the Oregon coast.

“What a time we had for a while there, huh?” she said to me.

We wound up sitting in her car and somehow started kissing. We had never done that before. I pulled my head back just a millimeter or so and spoke softly.

“They said you were going to die.”

“Disappointed?” she asked.

We kissed some more. Maybe she wanted me to take her to bed, but that didn’t happen, which led to my story petering out in a nondramatic fashion.

“I remember her,” Clete said once he was sure I was through. “She never did die.”

“That’s a lovely story,” Val said.

“That robber guy,” said Lila. “He thought it was just an adventure with a dying girl. But it was his whole life.”

Anybody can go to a bar and hear some character complain how the world has never lived up to his potential and his own nowhere life is everyone’s fault but his own. All you have to do is sit on the wrong stool. To get to the good stories, you have to make an effort. You have to become a regular part of someone’s life and keep mostly to yourself so when you offer a word or answer a question she can see you’re giving up something to talk to her. She starts to trust you, even
owe
you. You can’t just sit next to a woman and expect this stranger to unfold her life like a shirt she’s asking you to wear.

What I’m saying is, this was the first moment I thought Lila might like me.

Stu started in on a dream he’d had about deep water, a dental assistant, and walls in a room that flapped like the loose vinyl roof of an old car. I have opinions about other people’s dreams. They tend to be like paintings by surrealists who don’t have any goddamn imagination.

The dream ended badly (by which I mean it was tedious). He tried to redeem the story by wrapping his feet behind his head, which reminded me that he wanted Lila as much as I did. He didn’t even have to get up from his chair, and just sat like that.

In situations like this we relied on Val to have a kind word, but even she couldn’t comment. She did save him, though.

“I had a boyfriend who could bend his thumb flat against his arm,” she said. “Like this.” She bent her thumb flat against her arm.

Lila touched her nose with her tongue, inserting the tip in either nostril. We had to hold a candle up close to see, and we must have singed her hair. There was that burnt hair smell.

I told them about my idea of what makes a tragedy and how there really weren’t many. A death (you can’t have a tragedy without a corpse) could qualify only if it didn’t once make you think:
I’m glad it’s him and not me.

Val disagreed. “We’re all tragedies,” she said. The assertion made her stand up and cross the porch. She sat on the ice chest, right across from me, and patted my knee. “But you told it really beautifully.”

Clete took it a step further. “The real question is, What would you kill for? What would it take for you to claim the life of another person?”

“I’d never kill anyone,” Val said. “Not for anything.”

“Then that’s who you are,” Clete said.

“I tried to strangle my boyfriend when he wouldn’t quit whistling,” Lila said.

“Well,” Clete said.

“That
can
be irritating,” I put in.