Arkansas (16 page)

“I got held up. Also, you were at the end of my route.”

“Excuses, excuses.” Robert peered suspiciously into the bag I had just handed him. “And what have we here, pray tell?”

“Shepherd's pie—”

“Shepherd's pie! Didn't they tell you I absolutely loathe shepherd's pie?”

“It doesn't say on the manifest—”

“Plus it's almost two. I told you people distinctly, my doctor says I'm supposed to eat lunch before one. Otherwise the medicine won't absorb.”

“I'll make a note—”

“Whatever happened to service? The tightest ship in the shipping business, my ass.” (He fiddled with his IV.)

“Well, goodbye,” I said.

“If this goes on, I tell you, I'm switching back to the good old P.O.”

“Is there anything else you need?”

“Only to have my packages delivered on time. I mean,” he shouted as I descended the staircase, “this is supposed to be America. Is it too much to ask to have your packages delivered on time?”

 

At the time I hadn't been living in Los Angeles very long. By breeding and disposition, I'm a New Yorker; indeed, I had come to California only for the most banal and cliched of reasons: I had fallen for an actor and, needing an excuse to follow him west, taken on a commission to do a television screenplay about growing up in the sixties, a sort of spin-off from an essay I'd written a decade earlier. But the actor dumped me a few days after I arrived, at which point I developed a case of writer's block so severe that until I started delivering for the Angels, I was spending most of my days talking dirty on phone sex lines, or cruising the parking lot next to the Circus of Books, or wandering through the Glendale Galleria, occasionally buying something overpriced and useless: a bottle of Swiss skin moisturizer, or a foot massager, or a “Sony Dinner Classics” CD complete with recipes. I drove a rented car and lived in a West Hollywood hotel room, both paid for by the development company that had commissioned the screenplay. My employers never called me to ask how my work was going; indeed, never called me, period. It was my impression that they had writers cubbyholed all over town, far too many to keep track of, and none lower priority than myself. As for the car and the hotel room, these represented for the company the most trivial of tax deductions, the equivalent of what writing off thirty-seven cents' worth of stamps, or the cost of a Bic pen, would have been for me.

Sometimes I thought of phoning Dr. Delia. Dr. Delia was a radio psychotherapist whose live call-in program (1-800-
DR-DELIA)
aired every weekday from eleven to one, exactly the hours I spent in my car delivering for the Angels. Dr. Delia had a demented cackle and a savage sense of rectitude. She was deaf to pleas for pity, felt no qualms in telling her callers (mostly young women) just how stupid or selfish or irresponsible they'd been in getting pregnant, or marrying drunks, or going to bed with strangers. Indeed, so insistent a companion was Dr. Delia on my rounds that now it is her voice, as crisp as newly ironed sheets, that narrates my memory of these events, reading the words back to me even as I look them over on the computer screen.

I used to make a game of planning what I'd say if I ever called Dr. Delia myself. For instance: Dr. Delia, I'm a thirty-five-year-old writer who can't write. The person I loved most killed himself a few months back. Now I watch porn videos and call phone sex lines obsessively.

All right. What's your question?

How do I get back to who I was, or who I used to think I was? That boy—productive, energetic, unburdened?

But in this fantasy, just as Dr. Delia is about to answer me, the same thing happens that happened whenever I drove under a bridge, or into a garage, or by a police station: her voice disappears into leaps and squeals of static.

After I dropped off my last meal, I made it my habit to drive over to the Circus of Books on Santa Monica Boulevard and return the videos I had rented the night before. I always rented my videos at the Circus of Books, not only because the store had such a big selection, but because as I lingered behind the frosted Plexiglas door that said “Over Eighteen Only,” picking among the films like an Italian housewife choosing vegetables for her minestrone, invariably I would encounter three or four other men doing the same thing, and some of them would be dressed in cutoff sweatpants with no underwear. I had a thing about cutoff sweatpants with no underwear.

Today I chose
Barracks Detention
, which was new, as well as
Pump It Up,
which I remembered having watched with Julian in the late eighties. It's funny the things that become enmeshed in that web of tenderness that underlies every marriage, even the worst one: not just flowers and fields and halfmoons of heart-stopping luminosity, but also squeezing the pimples on a loved one's back, or sitting on the toilet while he brushes his teeth, or watching pornography together: something Julian and I did, like everything else we did, compulsively. A little less than nine months had passed since his suicide. Now I found that rewatching the porn videos we'd looked at side by side in our New York bed eased the ache of his swollen and enflamed nonpresence. The porn videos were psychic Shiatsu, fingers rubbing the sorest kink I'd ever known. They made me want to scream, but somehow I knew that only by suffering them might I unknot the ligaments of grief.

Two was always the formula. The future and the past. Adventure and nostalgia. Memory and desire. Having made my selections, I'd then head back to the hotel, check my voicemail messages (there were usually none), switch the air conditioner on high, and take the first of the videos—this time
Barracks Detention
—out of the box. All as I undressed: I was a master at pushing buttons with my toes while switching on lamps with my fingers, pulling off socks with one hand while inserting cassettes with the other. “Always doing two things at once,” Julian used to say. He called it the “Rosemary Woods Dance,” after Nixon's secretary, who'd revealed the latent skills of a contortionist upon being asked to explain “accidentally” erasing the tapes; which, over the course of years, got abbreviated to “doing a Rosemary.” Perhaps marital conversation always evolves into such shorthand.

In any event, having put on
Barracks Detention,
I propped myself up in the bed. With my right hand I dialed the phone sex number. With my left I fast-forwarded through the assurances that all the models were over eighteen (“proof of age on file”), the admonishments not to try this at home, the credit sequence.

The world of the porn videos intrigued me. About their making I knew very little, though I did have a German friend in New York who told me that sometimes he made extra cash working as a “stunt dick.” A stunt dick, as he explained it, was a kind of sexual understudy who waited in the wings only to be brought in if one of the models in the video couldn't get it up, or couldn't ejaculate, or proved to have a smaller penis than anticipated; in such circumstances, close-ups of the stunt dick's dick were spliced into the footage in the hope that the viewer wouldn't notice the substitution. “And it happens more than you think,” my German friend added. “Next time you watch, keep an eye on the editing.”

I took my finger off the fast-forward button. On the screen two lanky young men, one with bad teeth, lay on cots. They were wearing khaki-colored boxer shorts and dog tags, conversing about ... something; though I'd switched off the volume, I knew from experience that the dialogue was probably running something along these lines:

 

Luke:
Scott! How's it hanging, dude?

Scott:
Not bad, Luke. Yourself?

Luke:
Can't complain. Found some dirty pictures in the Sarge's desk Have a look?

Scott:
Sounds like a winner.
(Pause.)

Luke:
Gee, that thing's getting pretty hard. Want me to suck it?

Scott:
Sounds like a winner.
(Pause.)

Luke:
Hey, Scott, ever fucked another guy?

Scott:
No.

Luke:
Bet my asshole'll feel better, than your girlfriend's cunt.

Scott:
Sounds like a winner.

 

And so on. The phone sex line picked up, interrupting this little reverie. Following the prompts, I punched in my access code. “Are you ready?” said that breathy recorded voice on the other end with which I had become, over the weeks, at least as familiar as I was with Dr. Delia's. “Do you know what you want? Do it ... now.” (Music.) “Press one if you want to talk to one other guy at a time; press two for the group; press three for the audio bulletin board—”

I pressed one.

“And remember, if you finish with one conversation, just press the pound sign—that's the button under the number nine—and you'll be automatically reconnected with somebody else. Oh, and of course, zero always returns you to the main menu. Your connection is being made.” Click.

“Hello?”

“Hey, who's this?”

“Jerry, who's this?”

“Steve. Where're you calling from, bud?”

“West Hollywood.”

“Shit, I'm in Long Beach. Good luck, man.” Click.

Again, that breathy voice. (Who did it belong to?)

“Please hold on just a second while your connection is being made." A running loop of music.

I turned my attention back to the video, in the utopia of which the boxer shorts had come off; the sucking had commenced.

I didn't have a hard-on. The truth was, I didn't feel horny at all. “Failure is forming habits”—wasn't it Pater who said that? And certainly anyone who might have seen me at that moment, naked on a hotel bed with a phone cradled against my neck, not really watching the video I had rented, my pathetic posture not even dignified by an erection, for God's sake—well, that person would have deemed me the most dismal of failures. Dr. Delia would have deemed me the most dismal of failures, and in no uncertain terms.

In the world of the phone line, of course, none of this signified. In that pocket of consciousness defined only by sound, the blind led the blind. Subjects became objects. The fat fifty-year-old man became the twenty-year-old football hero he'd adored when he was twenty. “How long have you been here?” people sometimes asked, presupposing that there
was
a “here,” that so many voices defined a physical space, a place. But they did. All those voices defined it, tendriling the complex weave of fiber-optic cables like some voracious species of vine.

A beep sounded. “Your connection is being made,” the breathy voice said.

“Hello?”

“Hi, what's your name? I'm Doug.”

“Hey, Doug, I'm Jerry. How you doing, buddy?”

“Great, dude. You?”

“Great, pal. Real horny.”

“Yeah? So listen, sport, you looking to connect or just get off on the phone?”

“I don't know, guy, maybe connect.” (Only connect.) “Sounds hot, champ. What do you get into?”

“Pretty versatile. Like jacking off a lot. More a bottom than a top.”

“Cool. What's your dick like?”

“Seven and a half long, five around.”

“Let me hear it.”

“Hear it?”

“Slap it against the phone.”

Now this was something new.

“Okay,” I said, then, putting the receiver under the covers, did what Doug had requested of me.

After a few slaps I lifted the receiver to my ear again. “Hello?” I said.

“Sounds big,” Doug said. “Thick.”

“Can you really tell?”

“Sure you can. A small dick makes a small noise. Now listen to mine.”

I listened. In the distance I could hear the faintest tapping, a kind of castanet clack.

“Like it?” Doug asked after a few seconds.

What was there to say? “Yeah, I like it.”

Click.

“Please hold on just a second while your connection is being made—”

I hung up.

 

When I arrived at the rectory the next morning, the second of the Keiths smiled at me in a way that I knew meant he had a favor to ask. “Were changing your route,” he said. “Hope you don't mind. Gin's back from vacation, and she always does Beverly Glen.”

“No problem.” It was my policy not to make problems. “Just warn her about Robert Franklin and the shepherd's pie.”

“Is he complaining again? It's better to ignore him. Listen, if it's okay, we wondered if we might give you Olympic South. That's out toward the airport.”

“Sounds like a winner.”

We went over the manifest, after which I packed up my lunches and headed out. The route in question took me down La Cienega, past Olympic, and toward Venice Boulevard. Here some of the cross streets had extraordinary names: Cadillac Avenue, Airdrome Street, Saturn Street. And it was on Saturn Street, number 6517 to be precise, that my last delivery lived. Phil Featherstone. Apartment 25. No fish. “If not home, leave lunch with #24.”

Dr. Delia was taking a call from Trish in West Covina. “So here's my problem, Doctor,” Trish was saying. “The other day I caught my husband, Todd, like, flirting with my best girlfriend.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“And how old is Todd?”

“He's twenty-two.”

“Uh-huh. Any kids?”

“Yes, two. Kirsty's three and Tiffany's six months.”

“And how long did you and Todd date before you got married?”

“I don't see what that has to do with—”

“Don't talk back to me. How long did you and Todd date before you got married?”