The Walking Man (20 page)

“He certainly is,” Steven said, seeking to be polite in the presence of his beloved Faith.

“Just ignore him when we go back to the table, okay?”

“Okay,” Steven said with a faux smile as he walked back to the dinner table, “no problem.”

“I know there was no fucking sheet cake,” Copter said to Steven, his face covered with lasagna remnants, mainly ricotta and sauce. “I may be a drunk, but I’m not a stupid asshole.”

“Glad to hear you’re not a ‘stupid asshole.’ I was beginning to think otherwise,” Steven said.

Faith winced.

There was a moment of tension before Copter spoke again.

“Copter!” Dan said, but he wasn’t listening.

“I tell you what, Stevie boy, I was once a good-looking fuck like you,” Copter said. “But, somewhere along the line I stopped giving a shit, and let me tell you something, you little dickhead, once you really, really, really stop giving a shit, it is almost impossible to recover. For there is nothing more powerful in this fucked-up world than really, really, really not giving a flying fuck about anyone or anything. Got it, you little dog fucker? The freedom is – intoxicating.”

“Really,” Steven said with a glare that would have scared any man with a blood alcohol level below point three percent.

“Really, Stevie boy,” Copter said. “You heard it here first. No bullshit applied. Some day, if you’re really LUCKY, you’ll know what I mean…you lil’ fucking preppy ass shitbag.”

“Back-off, Copter,” Dan said. “You’re outta here.”

“Okay, Captain Dan,” Copter hissed.

“Sorry about that,” Faith said to Steven. “Most of these men have issues.”

“Not to worry, I’m not afraid of drunks,” Steven said, with a nod to Copter.

“Come here, Copter,” Faith said sternly as she stood and walked away from the table.

Copter followed without saying a word.

Steven could not hear the exchange, but he saw Faith’s finger in Copter’s face, and then to his utter amazement. He watched Faith give Copter a bear hug before presenting him with her “eternal rose.”

When Faith returned to the table, Steven politely asked, “Faith, what was that about?”

“I told him he had to leave without making a fuss and then I told him to always remember that I loved him, and to prove it, I gave him your rose. I hope you don’t mind?”

“You love that guy?”

“Yes,” Faith said. “I love all these guys.”

“You’re something, Faith,” Steven said.

After dinner there was a movie,
The In-laws,
starring Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. The howls of laughter from the men intensified the comedy. Both Steven and Faith were quite certain it was the funniest movie ever produced.

After the movie, the odd couple said goodbye to the men of Dan’s Place and then walked hand-in-hand to Dan’s parking lot where they found “Linda” tireless, sitting on concrete blocks.

“Why didn’t they steal the whole car?” Steven asked Faith.

Faith sighed. “They were probably too short or too young to drive.”

Steven started the car to make sure nothing else had been taken.

“Steven,” Linda said. “I have been violated.”

“Would you like me to call the police?” Steven asked.

“Too late, I just did,” Linda replied.

Steven turned to Faith and smiled. “You sure know how to show a guy a good time.”

Faith smiled, forever burning her image onto the surface of Steven Zangst’s soul. “I’m glad you had fun.”

For the next fifty-two weeks Steven helped Faith run Sock Night. On the first anniversary of Steven’s inaugural visit to Dan’s Place Faith consented to a real date. Twelve months later, Steven Zangst and Faith Inman were married.

~Chapter Two~

Dandy Andy

Andy “Dandy” McCormack grew up in a working-class neighborhood in South Boston. He was the youngest of eleven children and a great embarrassment to his family.

Where Andy grew up, men were considered good guys, douche bags, or fucking assholes. Andy’s problem was he was smart, so he was considered both a douche bag and a fucking asshole.

Although the family never spoke of Andy’s affliction, it was difficult to ignore because Andy was the youngest person ever to become a tenured physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unfortunately, one day, Andy’s notable genius caused him to be profiled in the
Boston Globe’s
Technology section. The newspaper article, entitled “The Southie Savant” caused Andy’s mother to go into hiding for several months. The last thing June McCormack wanted was to be known as “the mother of a fuck’n nerd.”

Growing up, Andy tried to cover up his love of math and physics by out-daring his brothers. He often started fistfights at Boston Bruins hockey games and drank whiskey through his nose. At fourteen years of age, during one of his father’s legendary man-only Super Bowl parties, a drunken Andy mounted a seventy-six year old hooker on a pool table at the Hibernian Club; the act caused several witnesses to immediately join AA or the priesthood. And on his sixteenth birthday, for no particular reason, Andy stole a mail delivery truck and drove it into Fort Point Channel.

Normally, Andy’s youthful indiscretions would have been considered a standard rite of passage and excellent fodder for future barroom howls, but to his friends and family, Andy’s bad-boy act was recognized for what it was: a smart kid’s pathetic attempt to be a regular guy. Looking back, Andy was ashamed of his ruse. He should have known his fellow Irishmen were on to his act. As his grandfather, Paddy “Scratch” McCann once noted, “You can’t bullshit a bunch of bullshitters.”

Although he would never admit it, Andy knew visible electromagnetic radiation, a.k.a. “light,” was indirectly responsible for his juvenile delinquency. Since he was a young boy, for reasons he could never understand, Andy was greatly troubled by the nature of light and other physical phenomena.

Andy was bothered by the fact that a photon emitted from a ten-billion-year-old star could somehow end up on the backside of his eyeball. He also wondered why light rays were bent by gravity, and he spent many sleepless nights thinking about why people age at different rates depending upon their acceleration through “space-time.”

Ultimately, Andy’s curiosity about the physical sciences resulted in a prodigious accumulation of knowledge that eventually yielded a shamefully perfect score of eight hundred on both his math and physics standardized achievement tests.

Unbeknownst to Andy, the cause of his genius was a “hockey puck” shot by his brother, Matthew “The Stick” McCormack. The incident occurred when Andy was thirteen months old after his eldest sister, Mary, “M&M” McCormack, strapped him into a baby stroller like he was Hannibal Lecter, so she could spend the afternoon exchanging bodily fluids with her boyfriends, Bob and Rory. Unfortunately, Mary parked Andy behind a street hockey net that her brother Matthew was using to practice his slap shot.

Matthew’s street hockey puck had ball bearings embedded in its surface, so when smacked it would behave like it was travelling on ice. The one hundred mile per hour slap shot that tore through the net and hit Andy above his left eye knocked him out for a day. In response to the trauma, Andy’s brain repaired itself as best it could, but the damage was severe, so lacking viable alternatives, Andy’s body repaired itself by generating an unproven neural network that contained a series of innovative thought channels, which ultimately turned Andy McCormack into a mathematical savant. Specifically, Andy could not only do math better than the average genius, he could also comprehend five dimensions of space, which made him uniquely capable of thinking great thoughts about the weird subatomic particles that make everything happen.

In the end, Andy’s “inexplicable” intelligence landed him a four-year scholarship to MIT, a feat that caused Patricia Sullivan, his high school sweetheart, to dump him on the spot.

“Andy, I’m not going to date some fucking nerd who goes to the fucking Massachusetts fucking Institute of fucking Technology, I have my reputation to fucking think of,” a distraught Patricia said before running into the arms of Buckey Doherty.

Buckey was an unemployed fork truck driver. He drank on D Street and slept on E Street. His ambition was to return to work at Gillette one day – when they moved their big warehouse in Cincinnati back to Boston.

Eventually, Andy made peace with his past by limiting his family visits to the safe holidays: Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, the three days a year that the McCormacks obeyed the no Budweiser before noon rule.

At every family event, Andy’s brothers and sisters would inevitably jibe him for betraying his kind by not working with his hands or getting wasted on Friday nights at the Shaky Shamrock. Usually, disapproval was expressed with an elbow followed by the words “pussy,” “nerd,” or “jack-off.” But on occasion, when local barroom chatter determined that Andy had violated the enigmatic Southie Code of Conduct, an older sibling would be recruited to teach his little brother a lesson.

Such was the case at the christening of Billy McCormack the fourth, the youngest of Andy’s forty-seven nephews. During the baptism Andy’s brother, Declan shot him with a Taser for failing, three years earlier, to attend their father’s fifty-ninth birthday bash. Andy knew his dad did not sanction the hit because Johnny “Yawny” McCormack, a Korean War Veteran and MBTA bus driver, was a good-natured man who was difficult to offend. In fact, at the keg and pasta reception after the christening, in a rare display of affection, Yawny addressed Andy’s poor fit within his brood by sharing a few words of wisdom with his prodigal son. “Andy,” Yawny said. “Family is over-rated. The only thing that really matters in life is beer.”

Life at MIT was not much better for Andy McCormack. Erik “The Particle” Gunther, the chairman of the MIT Physics Department, loved Andy like he was his son, but his jealous colleagues hated Andy for being so fucking smart and so insanely normal.

Being academia, disdain for Andy was usually expressed with snide comments, but on occasion things would get outright nasty. Once, during a mandatory peer review, after Andy challenged a theorem offered by a struggling associate professor. An intense hissy fit ensued, in which the whiny Ph.D. indirectly expressed the jealous sentiments of the entire MIT Physics Department. “Okay, McCormack, my theorem may be wrong, but at least I’m not dating a cheerleader from Boston College, you freak!”

Among his colleagues it was difficult to determine the greater source of animosity they held toward Andy; for some it was the beautiful babes, for others it was Andy’s scientific method, which he arrogantly called, “thinking.” Andy did physics without a pencil, or a blackboard. Instead, he read prevalent theories then conducted thought experiments to advance scientific discovery. Andy did not have a laboratory, or a cell phone, and he only owned one personal computer. Yet, he was able to consistently propose new theories about the nature of space, time and light, which stunned the physics community.

In practice, Andy was the idea man and Gunther did the proofs. To many physicists this meant Andy was a dilettante. Andy countered by claiming his colleague’s math “mumbo jumbo” was a “smokescreen” that hid their incompetence and prevented true insight. Over time, a pile of awards eventually validated Andy’s approach, but they came too late to prevent the nickname “Dandy Andy” from sticking.

Ultimately, Andy fought with his colleagues to maintain the illusion that his work was somehow important. In truth, Andy could not imagine a less vital occupation than generating knowledge for the few folks in the world who cared about advanced particle physics, but in a reality that required money for food and housing, Andy was not unhappy with his profession. His work was easy, and it paid the bills, so Andy, an inexplicably devout Catholic, considered himself blessed and looked forward to a long and happy life of relatively meaningless postulation.

Of course, a life rarely matches its dream, and such was the case with Andy McCormack. Andy was super-intelligent, but he also had self worth issues (leftover from his youth as a “fucking-asshole douche bag”) that left him susceptible to exploitation by others. Consequently, it wasn’t long before Andy lost control of his destiny. The process started with Hope Wynsome, the woman Andy almost hit with a saliva-coated Frisbee.

Hope was a first year graduate student at the MIT Sloan School for Business. Sloan was the place where techies went to get a degree if they weren’t really techies. Andy “met” Hope on the lawn outside the MIT’s Student Center, a block away from the banks of the Charles River. It was the first warm day of spring, after a long hard winter, so the dresses were out and the boys were hunting. Andy was throwing a Frisbee to his dog, Twister, so he could run about the courtyard and check out the ladies without seeming like a predator.

Twister was a Golden Retriever. Andy named him Twister because he looked liked a tornado when he chased his tail, which happened often. Twister did not have a brain; he was petrified by ants and drooled excessively. He also ate golf balls and was once run over by a Ford Escort station wagon without sustaining any obvious injuries. Perhaps due to his unrivaled stupidity, Twister was interminably happy; he was also fiercely loyal. Twister’s sole mission in life was to consume at least four cans of Alpo a day and to be at Andy’s side whenever possible.

Andy recognized Twister was not the most intelligent dog in the world, but he loved him nonetheless. Twister offered Andy unconditional love without asking him to do the dishes. He also never barked and was a good TV companion due to his warmth and strange fear of popcorn. Twister could also jump five feet into the air and turn his head two hundred degrees, which made him a most excellent Frisbee/hunting partner.

The first encounter between Andy and Hope Wynsome happened due to a purposely-errant Frisbee toss. The drool-coated disc landed at the feet of Hope who was sitting on a wrought iron bench reading a business case about some greedy bastard who made a fortune doing something that was technically legal because there was no law against it. Without thinking, Hope picked up the Frisbee and flung it back to Andy. The fling caused a three-inch-wide swath of doggie saliva to slap Hope across her chest, staining her brand new J Crew cotton blouse, turning mauve into burnt umber.