God Hates Us All (16 page)

“Kennedy or La Guardia?”

“Kennedy. International Terminal. And not to sound ungrateful, but if you could find it in your heart to repay me that hundred you ‘borrowed’ from me, this would be a good time.”

He arrives an hour later. I climb into the passenger seat.

“You okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine. Let’s go.”

Dad stops staring at me long enough to look into his side mirror. He pulls away from the curb. “Is this drugs? Are you into drugs?”

“I’m not on drugs.”

“Good.” He punches the dashboard lighter and pulls his cigarettes out of his pocket. “You want one?”

“Yes please.” I’d smoked my last Camel somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. My father hands me the pack and, when the lighter clicks, gestures for me to light mine first.

“It’s actually about a woman,” I say.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“That I’m into women?”

“That you’re shaping up to be as big a dope as I am.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” I say with a smile. “You’ve left me with big shoes to fill.”

“Heh,” he sputters. “Listen. Your mom’s not doing so well.”

“I know. I know I’ve haven’t been so good about visiting, but I’m going to be better here on out.”

“Here on out’s not that long, is all I’m saying. Do we have an actual destination?”

“Train station, assuming you have my money.”

“I have your money. So where the hell were you, anyway?”

I bring him up to speed, or try to. The story has just reached Hooker Hill when we reach the station.

“Guess we’ll finish it another time,” he says, handing me a hundred bucks. “Maybe over a couple of drinks.”

“I’d like that.”

“I’m sorry for being such a dick.”

“You aren’t a dick. And I haven’t always been the best son, either.”

“Visit your mother,” he yells after me as I walk away.

I make it into the city in time to put in a half-day of work, and I’ve got enough money to return to the Island that evening. My father proves to be a master of understatement. My mother is barely conscious when I walk into her hospital room, doped up on serious meds that at any other time I might have coveted. She smiles when she sees me, but can’t quite muster the energy to speak. I’ve been sitting with her for an hour when I see Dr. Best pass by in the hallway. I chase him down.

“She doesn’t look that good,” I say.

“You’re going to have to remind me who you are again. …” I do. “Right!” says the doctor. “I thought we already talked about this?”

“Maybe with my father?”

“Right! So no, not good. Maybe a week or two.”

“A week or two?”

He crinkles his eyes into a face he probably learned at med school on the day they studied Dealing with Terminal Patients and Their Families. “I wish we could have done more. I’m sure she appreciates you being here. Even when they can’t respond, like she can’t, they still appreciate it. That’s what they say, anyway.” I realize for the first time that he’s shaking my hand.

I spend the night in her room, listening to her breathe until I fall asleep in a chair. I repeat the same ritual for the rest of the week, waking up in the chair each morning, catching the train, and filing in and out of the city like the rest of the clock-punchers. Each night I return to my bedside vigil, watching my mother slip closer and closer to the finish line.

“AT LEAST SHE DIDN’T SUFFER LONG,” says Dottie, apparently disregarding the twenty-two years my mother was married to my father, who seems as numb and detached during her funeral as he’d been during her life. Not that anyone shows much life during the solemn and humorless service. My dad’s temperament or lack thereof matches the demeanor of my mom’s stoic relations, several of whom have flown in from the Midwest.

The obvious exception to the emotional void is Tana, an absolute wreck before, during, and after the service. When the service ends, she grabs me in a hug. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Walk with me while I smoke,” I say. By unspoken agreement my father and I have avoided lighting up in front of my mother’s family, so as not to remind them of the lung cancer that killed their nonsmoking relation.

“It’s weird,” I say upon reaching a thicket of trees that offers some privacy. “I think I always saw her as a two-dimensional character—you know,
Mom
. She lived a whole life inside of her mind that I never gave her credit for. That I’ll never know. I guess it’s true what they say: We all die alone.”

“What the hell is wrong with you guys?” Tana asks.

“That depends on what you mean by ‘you guys.’”

“Men. You all say the same stupid shit. ‘The world is meaningless. We all die alone. Nothing means anything.’”

“If anything meant anything,” I say, “my mother wouldn’t have died of somebody else’s disease.”

“My point is that she didn’t die
alone
,” says Tana, staring at the mourners filing out of the cemetery. “Maybe we’re all out there, floating by ourselves in some big black void. But we build connections, you know? We build our own worlds with the people we love. Your mom didn’t die alone. She had friends and she had family, and even when they let her down, she always felt like she had a home.”

Tana is bawling again. I hug her again. “I’m sorry,” I whis-per into her ear.

“Me too,” she replies. “But let’s not fucking dwell on it.”

I hold Tana tight, two lone figures surrounded by trees.

A FEW DAYS LATER, I RETURN TO THE Chelsea Hotel for what will be the last time. I skirt past Herman without his noticing me and sprint upstairs to my room. The locks have been changed.

“Deh you ah,” says Herman when I return to the lobby.

“Hi. I seem to be having some trouble with my key.”

“Ya seem ta have a little trubble widda rent as well.”

“Yeah, about that …”

“I also tawkt to a friend at the
New Yawkah
. Dey nevah hudda ya.” Herman grins and holds up his key ring. Except instead of leading me upstairs, he unlocks a supply closet behind him. My duffel and typewriter are inside. “Tanks fah stayin’ widdus. Besta luck widda poetry.”

I’m lugging my stuff through the front door when Nate holds it open for me. “Weed Man!” he yells. “Where the hell
have you been?” I look at K., who’s standing next to him. She seems more interested in something on the floor. “You’re not leaving us, are you?”

“Moving out,” I say.

“Well, good luck and all that.”

K. finally speaks. “We should buy you a drink.”

“I can’t, baby,” says Nate. “I told that reporteress from
Rolling Stone
I’d call her back an hour ago. What time is it, anyway?”

“Well then
I
should buy you a drink,” says K.

K. and I wander into the restaurant next door. Just a month ago, it was the birthplace of our relationship; now it will host our postmortem. “What happened to you?” she asks as the drinks arrive.

“I went to Korea to see you.”

Her blue eyes play emotional hopscotch, starting on confusion, then bouncing through guilt, remorse, and sadness before returning to the starting point. “You came to Korea? Why didn’t you …”

“Nate.”

She looks back at the floor. “I swear to you I had no idea he was going to be there. He just, you know, showed up.”

“With a lot of flowers, I’m told. And jewelry.” My eyes dart toward a string of diamonds sparkling around her neck.

“This is my fault,” she says. “I think I might have given you the impression that Nate and I … that things were a lot more settled than they were.”

“You think?”

“I know. I feel horrible. We were … You were great. You
are
great and you deserve so much—”

I hold up a hand to stop her. “First of all, spare me the breakup speech. I’ve delivered enough of them to know how you’re feeling.”

“You don’t know how I’m feeling. …”

“Second, I have to say, I kind of got what I deserved.”

She pauses before continuing. “I was just so confused. And then when I got back, you were gone. No note, no phone call.”

“It’s been a little crazy.”

“Your mom?” she asks. I nod and leave it at that. K. looks at me sympathetically. “You must hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” I reply, mostly meaning it. “So how about Nate?
Rolling Stone
? He’s the real deal.”

“Maybe. For now. Who knows what the future might bring?” I can see she’s opening the door for me. Offering me a glimmer of hope.

“Who knows?”

We hug good-bye. I struggle with the bag and the type-writer for a block before setting both down in an alleyway. I walk to the station empty-handed and catch the first train back to Levittown.

I COMMUTE TO WORK FROM THE ISLAND for a couple of weeks, until I’m summoned by the Pontiff to the apartment on the Lower East Side. He tells me that it’s a downturn in the economic climate, maybe just seasonal, and that business is dropping for all of the Faces. But he’s got a copy of the
Post
open next to him, a lurid story detailing the first day of the
State of New York v. Daniel Carr
, and I know the real reason why I’m being fired. I love the Motorola too much to smash it against the stairwell, so I hand it to Billy on the way out.

My father and I turn out to be pretty good housemates, in that we stay out of each other’s way and keep the place relatively clean. We’re too sad or superstitious to smoke inside anymore, so instead we fill coffee cans with butts outside, near the part of the house that remains scorched from Daphne’s adventure with fire.

I visit her a few days later. She’s finally trimmed the dye out of her hair, which has grown down to her shoulders. Her eyes, which moisten with tears when I tell her about my mother, have regained their sparkle. When my own eyes burst like a dam, she holds me and whispers in my ear, “It’s all going to be okay.”

When I finally pull myself together, she escorts me to the front entrance. “They think I’m getting better,” she says. “Do I have them fooled or what?”

“Does that mean the institutional phase of your life is coming to a conclusion?”

“This week’s episode, anyway.” Her sense of humor is back: It’s the same old Daphne. I remember what it was like to fall in love with her. How the few years’ difference in age had seemed like a great mystery to be unraveled. She introduced me to the Ramones and Jonathan Richman and to parties that lasted for three days. To sex in semipublic places. To the idea that love and pain often go hand-inhand. I’d been naïve when I met her, an eighteen-year-old kid cocksure and maybe a little happier for it. I’d never be that person again. But now, looking at Daphne, I can see that kid reflected in her eyes.

“I might get out by the end of the month,” she says. I hug her good-bye and tell her to call me at home as soon as she knows.

A few days later, my dad moves out of the house. “It’s Janine,” he says. “She won’t sleep in your mother’s bed. Like she’s going to catch cancer from a bed. Dizzy broad, that one.”

“The best ones always are.”

“Anyway, she finally left that drip she’s married to, and we were thinking about getting an apartment together. Actually, we
did
get an apartment together.”

“Congratulations.”

“You can stay here as long as you want. I’m not planning on selling—not now, anyway, with real estate in the tank. Maybe you can contribute a little when you start working again.”

“Thanks, Dad. I know it’s weird, but I honestly hope you and Janine are happy together.”

“Happy,” he says with a snort. “No one ever said it was about being happy.”

FOR THE FIRST COUPLE OF WEEKS
after she returns to college, Tana and I speak on the phone almost every night. But after a couple of weeks, the calls evolve into something shorter, less frequent, and decidedly more upbeat—a side effect, I suspect, of a guy named Todd she’s started seeing.

“Gay?” I venture, during one of the times we are actually able to connect.

“He’s really into the Waterboys,” Tana admits. “But I’m happy to say that he otherwise seems to display all the necessary characteristics associated with a red-blooded man.”

“You little vixen,” I say. “You’re getting laid.”

I can’t see her, but I know she’s blushing. “So tell me about your new job,” she says.

With no job and no girlfriend, I’d poured my focus into the house, specifically the walls and carpets still charred by
Daphne’s attempted arson. It was during one of my trips to the hardware store that I ran into Zach Shuman, my former boss at the Hempstead Golf and Country Club, who’d been fired for my misdeeds. Surprisingly, he looked at me without anger.

“Heard about your mom,” said Zach. “Fucked up.”

“I know. Thanks.”

“You know I’m managing Beefsteak Charlie’s over in Garden City,” he said. “I could use a waiter.”

My mother’s final gift to me
, I chuckled to myself as I donned slacks and a tuxedo shirt a few days later.

A couple of weeks into the new job, Daphne calls. “Guess who’s escaping the loony bin?” The day she’s released, I pick her up in my mom’s Buick.

“Where to?” I ask.

“Someplace with a noncommunal shower,” says Daphne. I take her back to my house. As we pull up, I see her examining the exterior for signs of fire damage, but I’ve done a pretty good job with the paint. Inside, she eyes the bathroom (recently retiled and regrouted) like a castaway might view a steak. She doesn’t come out for an hour. I finally muster the courage to knock, steeling myself to the possibility that she might not be as well as she claimed.

Daphne opens the door, dripping wet and totally naked. “I forgot to ask you for a towel,” she says. We fall into each other’s arms, kissing hungrily. Despite some trepidation on her part—“The fluoxetine is supposed to affect my libido,” she
warns—everything still fits where it should. We spend the night in my parents’ bed, a practice that continues without interruption each night that follows. I bring her with me to the Kirschenbaums for Passover dinner.

My father arrives with Janine, who shows no signs of defrosting despite a warm embrace from the collective crowd. But the mood is festive, with much of the focus on Todd, Tana’s guest from school. Despite some residual teenage acne, Todd seems very much to be what older folks call an “upstanding young man.” More important, he seems intensely devoted to Tana and maybe untainted by whatever baggage haunts the rest of us. The room is swarming with so many good vibes that Dad embraces Daphne, never mentioning the fire. “Break it up!” yells Uncle Marvin when the hug goes on a little too long.