Want Not (19 page)

He hadn’t smoked pot in—what, twenty years? And in that weedless meantime he’d turned against it—bitterly so, after then-candidate Bill Clinton made his oily crack about smoking but not inhaling it. He’d forgotten, until now, how much damn fun it had been, sneaking out back of the house as a teenager, giddy and terrified as he fired up a bowl, then floating back inside to giggle right beside the old man at whatever was on the tube. He’d had a girlfriend back then, Alcee Vercellino, who wouldn’t fool around
unless
she was high; though after that, man, it was no holds barred. She’d unstrap her bra before he’d even dug a hand in there. They’d drive to the Newton Reservoir in his mother’s big brown Delta 88, find the blackest, most secluded place to park, jam some Styx or Molly Hatchet into the cassette player, pass a poorly rolled joint back and forth in the backseat, and then just go
at
it, like rabbits, stoned rabbits. (Dave still saw Alcee, every now and then, at the ShopRite, and once at the Home Depot over in Newton. She’d gotten fat as a house, which gave him the liberty to pretend he didn’t recognize her.) Shifting from his reminiscence, which left a warm, briny residue in his mind, he looked down at Lexi and wondered what the setup was for kids like her: whether or not the Newton Reservoir was still fuck central, and how these poor kids managed to get it on comfortably without the plush generous expanse of an Oldsmobile’s backseat. Shit, at seventeen, she had to be getting it on—but where, and with who? He sized up Miguel again, tilting him sideways in his imagination so that he was on top of Lexi, then tilting him the other way (whee!) so that he was under Lexi . . . naw, he decided. Lexi was too snotty to be plowing the blowman’s kid. Wait a sec—too snotty to be blowing the plowman’s kid, he’d meant. What was this shit?

“Thanks for the overshare,” she said coolly, immune to his insult. She was used to him making fun of her Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which he sometimes called Irritable Butt Syndrome. “Glad to hear
something’s
working for you.”

“Seriously,” he said, his voice pinched and wheezy from trying to hold the pot smoke captive in his lungs. “I’m the world’s greatest shitter.”

Miguel put a hand to his mouth, stifling a laugh.

“I didn’t know there were, like, competitions,” Alexis said.

“Here.” He fetched his cellphone from his belt holster. “Check the proof.”

“What, you keep a record?” Apprehension paled her face.

“I got proof, just hold on,” he said, squinting at the phone, thumbing its buttons.

“You’re so fucking
weird.
”

“Check this,” he said, holding out the phone.

Jumping back from the sight of it, she bounced into a dwarf boxwood before Miguel caught her. “Fuck!” she bawled. “Did you just show me a picture of your
shit?
”

He turned the phone inward, smiling, to re-admire the photo. “That’s what you’re aiming for on the can, baby. That right there.”

Flatly, she said, “Ohmygod, I am so going to hurl.”

“I’m just sayin, that’s a keeper.” He was still admiring it as she passed the joint—now just a half-inch nub—back to him. He offered a view to Miguel, who did that same crossed-arm wave with which he’d refused the joint, but when Dave said, “C’mon,” with a fat exhale of smoke, Miguel leaned in gingerly and took a wincing peep at the photo. “That’s an achievement, right there, huh?” Dave said, turning the screen back to give it another look of his own. He frowned at it, rotating the phone. “It’s kinda corkscrewed, isn’t it?”

“I cannot fucking believe you took a photo of your own . . .
shit.
That is so, so wrong. You’re, like, the ultra-perv.” Like an unexpected gas bubble, however, a burst of laughter escaped her, which caused Dave to laugh, too: those raucous, infectious, irrepressible marijuana giggles. “Oh my fucking
God,
” she squealed, that sideways smile now open and wide. Miguel just shook his head, by all appearances hoping his father might lasso him at the soonest possible moment.

“And I don’t even need no performance-enhancing drugs,” Dave said, taking a final, fingertip-scorching drag from the dying joint, then flicking it down to the snow.

“You are so,
so
sick,” Alexis said, as a clear compliment. Another spasm of laughter convulsed her.

“What, ’cause I poop?”

“No, perv. Because you take
pictures
of it.”

“Just this one. That’s a framer.”

“Uh,
no.
”

“Uh no,
what?
Like you can do better?”

“Dude, I can’t even
do,
remember? IBS?”

“Wah wah.” Dave made a sad-clown face. “Excuses.”

“You’re really a dick, you know that?”

They froze, suddenly stricken. “Dave?” a voice was calling from around back.

“Oh shit, it’s Uncle Jeremy,” Lexi hissed.

“Fuck me,” Dave snapped, panicking. Jeremy finding him getting high with Alexis: That was nothing short of the apocalypse. Liz would sound the sirens at full volume. The entire world would crack open, sending Dave to his death in a hot bath of lava. “Okay, call me,” he heard Alexis saying to Miguel, and from the corner of his eye he saw Miguel plant a quick smooch on Lexi’s cheek before he went scampering toward the front of the house. Dave wasn’t worrying about Miguel just then. He stomped his boot in the snow, roughly close to where he’d tossed the remains of the joint. Then he stomped again, beside there, and once more, beside there. He looked like he was trying to kill the rare New Jersey snow snake.

“I’m gone,” Lexi said, scooting out between the dwarf boxwoods and fleeing toward the front of the house, the same scamper-route Miguel had taken. Dave started to follow, then reconsidered, then reconsidered his reconsidering, his feet going one way then the other.

“Dayyy-eeeve?” Jeremy shouted again, either louder or moving closer. Jeremy’s shouts, Dave couldn’t help noticing, sounded like yodels.

“Right here,” Dave called back, sucking on his cigar to build up the biggest, masking-est Costa Rican leaf cloud possible, then gulping cold air and re-sucking it like a hungry infant at the dry end of a bottle. Very very slowly, he walked back down the path, trailing a steam engine’s billow of smoke. At the corner of the house he collided with Jeremy.

“The beer’s right by the door,” Jeremy said, all measly-faced and contrite.

“Been looking everywhere,” Dave mumbled, still puffing wildly on the cigar. His mouth felt like he’d been chewing on a sweater. In addition, he couldn’t feel anything from the waist down, as if his thighs had broken loose and would at any moment abandon his torso to continue down the path. This, he knew, would be regrettable on several levels.

“Sorry, man,” Jeremy said. “Thought I’d save you a few kilowatts, stashing it out here.”

“I can spare the fucking kilowatts,” Dave grumbled.

Back in the family room, Jeremy and Dave found everyone (save Lexi) still gathered in front of the big-screen, Sara now nestled between her mother and father, the Cowboys having maintained their lead into the fourth quarter, Aidan still watching from the floor with that far-out, far-off expression of his, which might possibly be evidence of another marijuana habit in the extended family. Maybe pot brownies were a remedy for gluten allergies. For the first time, Dave noticed how big the kid’s feet were—they were huuuuuge, like floppy clown feet, maybe larger than Dave’s own feet, which he felt the immediate need to check, to confirm they hadn’t scooted out ahead of him.

Dave was lurking at the edge of the room, examining Aidan’s sneakers vis-à-vis his own Weejuns, when Raymond exclaimed, “Dave!’” Startled, Dave glanced up. Raymond was six inches off the seat, risen with glee as if they were reuniting after a multi-year separation. “Thought a bear might’ve got ya,” he said. Dave watched Bev’s eyes crinkle in amusement. So did Raymond, who crinkled his own eyes back at her. Crinkle crinkle crinkle. “Did a bear get ya, Dave?” he said.

“Bear . . .” This was as much as Dave could say, and even this he didn’t say skillfully. More like “Burrrrrr . . .”

All eyes, none of them crinkled any longer, turned toward Dave. “You all right, honey?” Sara asked. At this a jolt of panic went rattling through him, and he pulled his gaze away from Raymond to meet Sara’s stare directly. She looked baffled. And possibly angry. He noted an irked eyebrow, riding just a bit higher than its opposite-eye partner, the way the fur on an annoyed cat’s spine rises. Could she smell it on him? Holy fucking macaroni. Could everybody? And where were his goddamn legs? “Yeah,” he said, more chirpily than he’d intended—more chirpily, in fact, than he’d ever spoken the word
yeah
in his life. Like a chipmunk had hijacked his vocal cords. Then, by dint of explanation, he added, “It’s cold out there.”

“That’s my fault,” Jeremy said, returning to his position behind Aidan. He seemed genuinely penitent, which Dave liked to see.

“Well, take a load off then,” said Raymond. “You sure were right about those Cowboys. It’s just . . . a massacre, I tell ya.”

Sitting—God, sitting down felt like the greatest thing that had ever happened to Dave. It was as if he’d spent the entirety of his forty-six years upright until some samaritan had confided to him, “You know, bending your legs, and putting your ass on something—it’s really quite pleasant, give it a whirl.” He emitted one of those meaty-sounding groans that tended to alarm Liz. Beyond the physical relief, however, sitting also brought some clarity to his mind. To wit: “Medical-grade” marijuana, whatever that was, was a vastly different species of grass than the shit he’d been smoking in 1980, back when Alcee Vercellino weighed 110 pounds and would put out, oh so spectacularly, for a doobie hit. He was in over his head, he realized, and needed to be
very
careful; he didn’t remember ever feeling this way, back when he’d sit giggling at
Barney Miller
punchlines beside his father—he’d never felt this woozy and trippy, this freakin
legless.
Also: Aidan’s feet weren’t really
that
enormous, upon closer inspection. Must’ve been the angle, he thought. Huh. Furthermore: The color quality on his eighty-two-inch LCD screen was miraculous, and incontrovertible proof that God not only existed, no matter what Liz and Jeremy might say, but that He loved us all. It was as if God, wearing a divine Best Buy jersey, had personally installed a rainbow in Dave’s family room. As well: There was a beer in his hand, but he couldn’t explain how it had gotten there. And woweee was it cold.

The Raiders threw a TD with four minutes left on the clock. “Ope, ope, ope,
ope,
” Raymond chanted, though the Raiders’ chances—Dave swung his hundred-pound head at the big-screen to confirm this—were nil. Along the way he noticed a one-inch zipper gap at the top of Sara’s slacks, a little almond-shaped cleft opening just below a minor roll of bellyfat that he’d never detected before. This wasn’t much to behold—it was Thanksgiving, they were all puffed and bloated—until his gaze shifted two feet to her left, where Bev was displaying a similar gap in her own zipper, topped by a much fuller, much more major tube of bellyfat. His gaze went darting back and forth, from paunch to paunch, until he’d incised a mental line between them, at which point a whole series of lines appeared in his mind’s eye, a visual grid superimposed upon the two of them: one from Sara’s lush lips to her mother’s parched, lipstick-clotted lips, from Sara’s longish golden hair (the hair that had been lathered, so sexily, in that old Coast soap commercial, the one in which a younger Sara had cooed, “Oh, that scent!”) to the fluffed white poodle curled atop her mother’s scalp, from Sara’s long, slightly Olive Oyl–ish neck to Bev’s also long but wattled scrag, between their identical sockfeet . . . he’d never quite noticed, until now, with all that THC floating through his brain, what an exact replica of her mother Sara was. Could he stand that, twenty years hence—fucking Bev? He looked at Raymond, who was thrilling at the last pointless minute of the game, saying “Oh boyo” when the Raiders threw for a first down. Shuddering, he envisioned himself in Raymond’s cheap little blue house in Ohio, wearing Raymond’s clothes (navy cardigan with oversized buttons over a plaid flannel shirt with easy-on snaps in the back, twill putter pants with an elastic waistband and fake fly), begging Bev for some gray nookie.
That’s
what he’d worked for? Surely Raymond must’ve spent a thousand and one nights walking outside, to plead with the moon:
More. More. I want more.
But here Raymond was. Here Dave was. The game ended. “They sure gave it their goshdarn best, didn’t they?” said Raymond to no one.

Dave’s cellphone beeped. Grunting, he unsheathed it from its holster and flipped it open. What appeared on the screen brought forth from him an explosive, room-shaking laugh, as if he’d belched up a Roman candle. He stifled it as best he could, though not before everyone’s attention—quizzical, from some quarters; contemptuous, from others—had been drawn to him.

“What is it?” Sara asked.

On the screen was a photo message. In the photo was a single, small, demure-looking turd, like a fat little
perfecto
cigar, lying at the base of a toilet—Dave recognized it as the toilet in the downstairs half bath. In the photo’s foreground was a raised middle finger, its fingernail adorned with chipped purple polish.

“Pete,” he lied, with a fingertip sponging a tear from his eye. “It’s Pete. You know how Pete is.” He snapped the cellphone closed. “Not for family consumption.” He frowned at Aidan. “Man stuff.”

Vacantly, Sara nodded, while Liz shook her head and gave Jeremy a peeved black look signaling
Time to go.
Dave tried to suppress further giggling by drinking his beer, but the actions clashed, causing the beer to boil and go spurting down his chin and neck.

“Something’s wrong with Uncle Dave,” said Aidan.

“Be polite,” said Jeremy, kneading the boy’s shoulder in very very clear agreement.

T
HE EAST RIVER, ON ITS SHORT,
telescoping passage from Long Island Sound to Upper New York Bay, picks up speed as it forks at Roosevelt Island, then slows back down until it narrows near Delancey Street and the Williamsburg Bridge, where it begins hastening again as it goes churning ’round the bend at Wallabout Bay and past the yellow-pine caissons sunk beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. At this point it is flowing at a slightly faster pace than the average human walker—more equivalent, that is, to the ever-hustling pedestrians of Manhattan. On its western bank, from 125th Street down to the South Street Viaduct, the river’s course is hugged by the FDR Drive, parts of which were built upon rubble imported from Bristol, England, after the German Luftwaffe bombed Bristol to gray smithereens. Prior to that, the river lapped Front Street, one block to the west, which has retained its name despite no longer fronting anything; before that, it bordered Water Street, two blocks farther westward, and no longer, of course, on any water; and before that, the East River met Manhattan at Pearl Street, which was named for the glittering oyster shells that once adorned its shores. This fattening of lower Manhattan, 350 years in the making, was accomplished via landfill, the streets and buildings overlaid upon the shattered remnants of bombed foreign ports, upon infinite piles of brown earth hauled from where hills were leveled and cellars and subway tunnels dug, upon shipwreck debris, broken stoneware, ash, offal, horse carcasses, dung, apple cores, glass shards, grease, and other assorted garbage, piled onto the banks via shovels, pails, horse-drawn carts, bulldozers, and dump trucks.