It Feels So Good When I Stop (2 page)

Just because all sorts of shit happens all the time in New York doesn’t mean people don’t like seeing it when it does. A couple fighting in a restaurant is almost as entertaining as a medical emergency or a fire.

I kept telling Jocelyn to keep her voice down. She told me to grow up. She said people in “adult” relationships yell, and sometimes the yelling takes place in public. I told her to lighten up for once. She slammed some money on the counter and told me to go fuck myself. I told her I’d do just that. She was wearing a white German Air Force tank top and a denim miniskirt with no stockings. As she got up to leave, I could hear the back of her thighs peel off the revolving vinyl seat like a Colorform separating from its glossed cardboard tableau. I finished my bowl of mushroom barley soup, trolling for comradeship in the droopy faces of two old guys speaking Polish.

I mumbled all the way to Port Authority and caught the next bus back to Amherst. I renewed my often-broken vow to remain broken up. When I got home there were eight messages on my machine from Jocelyn. They ran the gamut, from viciously accusatory to weepy and contrite. She even went as far as confessing to having “hooked up” with a coworker named Geoff; he pronounced it “Joff.” She said it was after the Freedy Johnston gig at Fez. Geoff told her he knew she was spoken for, but he could let himself fall in love with her, no problem. Just say the word. I knew she was probably lying, but I couldn’t help imagining the worst. In her final good-bye, she begged me to make the shrinking remainder of my life remarkable because I deserved no less. She asked me not to call her because I had to let her get beyond me.

The fuck I did.

I caught the next bus back to Port Authority and showed up exhausted and crazy at her apartment in Park Slope. She was a beautiful mess. She’d just dyed her hair the bloodiest red she’d worn to date. She looked like a
Breathless-
era Jean Seberg with a mortal head wound. She asked me what I was doing there. I said I wanted to tell her in person that I knew it wouldn’t make her happy, but if it did, she and Geoff could fuck each other deep into their twilight years. She slapped my face. My glasses came to rest beneath a small red stepladder used for holding potted plants. She broke down. She threw herself into my arms and begged me not to cut her loose. She said she could be good. Just give her a chance. I told her she was good. I am? You’re the greatest. No, you are. I rubbed the back of her neck, twisting the fine under-hairs into forgetful knots. Within two minutes, we were fantastically make-up-fucking each other back into our ever-deepening mess.

 

I COULD SEE by the discomfort on James’s face that he could see the discomfort on my own face.

“I sure as fuck don’t want to live here anymore,” he said. “But you’re welcome to crash until the place sells.”

I started to feel guilty for thinking he was anything but bighearted.

Seagulls passing overhead blitzed the partially covered boat. James reached up to strangle any one of them floating high above the spindly treetops. “Friggin’ sky rats.” He wiped the bird shit with the sleeve of his Dress Gordon flannel shirt. “So, Pamela tells me you and Jocelyn got hitched Friday, and you’re already splitting up?”

“Pretty messed up, huh?”

He pulled firmly on the nylon cord to test the integrity of his knot. “I don’t know. Marriage and divorce are two of the best things a man can do for himself.”

 

IT WAS DARK by seven o’clock. Two months earlier East Falmouth had been a madhouse of vacationers who couldn’t afford to buy or rent farther out on the island. Now the town was nearly deserted.

Before heading back to his furnished separation pad in Orleans, James slipped out and bought me a case of Miller High Lifes, a pack of Marlboro reds, and an orange lighter.

“You can’t smoke ’em if you can’t friggin’ light ’em, right?”

“Thanks, man, but I don’t think I have enough cash to cover all this.”

“Eh, don’t sweat it. It’s not like I gave you one of my livers.” He swung the case of beer to me like we were members of the bucket brigade. “Welcome aboard.”

 

I SAT ON the screen porch in the crisp autumn night and watched a few random lights reflected on Opal Cove just beyond a row of ranch houses and summer cottages opposite my sister’s.

When I’d bolted from our honeymoon suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I left a note on the floor where Jocelyn would see it. It said, “I’m sorry.”

I drained a beer and swallowed back a belch. From outer space they can shoot a pimple on a nomad’s bag while he’s taking a leak in the desert. Hiding out on Cape Cod did not exactly qualify me for “off the grid” status. If Jocelyn wanted to find me, she could.

I lit the next smoke with the end of the last one, then extinguished the butt in the backwash at the bottom of a bottle. I could hear a single boat motor shrinking in volume as its propeller chewed the water’s epidermis, pushing both boat and contents in the direction of Gay Head.

I drank another beer, and was about to go inside for the night, when I caught sight of a shadowy form moving up the street. It appeared to be hugging its midsection as if it were privately suffering from indigestion or a knife wound. I wasn’t overwhelmingly compelled to involve myself in anyone else’s trauma, but if whoever-the-fuck- it-was died while I was hiding inside, well, shit, what kind of person would that make me? I’d stay put until it passed out of my airspace. After that, it was someone else’s problem.

When the body entered the circle of streetlight adjacent to my sister’s driveway, I could tell it was a woman. Her Kelly green track jacket and purple Doc Martens hummed. She stopped momentarily and straightened up when she spotted me watching her from the porch. She slipped back into the darkness, and when she emerged, she was coming up the walkway, straight for me. I was more surprised than anything. I mean, if something happened—unless she had a gun or something—I felt pretty confident that I could take her. I tightened my grip on an empty bottle just in case.

She came up to the bottom step. I made her to be in her mid-thirties. She had a round face, capped by a grown-out black China-doll bob. Her steamy breath left her in truncated puffs. Both legs of her jeans were wet up to just below the knee, as if she’d been standing on the beach long after the tide had begun to roll in.

Her voice was raspy, like Brenda Vaccaro’s. “Who are you?” she asked.

I could tell she wasn’t straddling the peak of Mount Shitfaced, but she was either on her way up or at the corresponding point coming down the other side. I was actually slightly amused. “Who am I?”

“Mmm.”

“Who are you?”

She nodded, like that was a reasonable answer. “Marie.” She pointed in the direction she’d been moving. “From there.”

I looked at the blemished blackness into which she was headed. “That’s nice.”

“It was.” She pointed at me. “You got another one of those?”

“Of what, beer? Smoke?”

“Both.”

“Sure,” I said begrudgingly. As a drinker and a smoker, I knew the code: If your supply is visible—which sadly mine was—you always share when asked. I loosened my grip on the empty bottle and handed her a full one. I didn’t think she was going to pound it on the spot. I watched the beer pass from one receptacle to another, restricted only by gravity and the unfortunate narrowness of the bottle’s opening.

She swapped the cold, empty bottle for a cigarette.

“You need a light?”

“Mmm.” She cupped the flame and leaned into it. The backs of her hands were a multicolored filigree of tattoo ink. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

And then she split.

My eyes followed the glowing orange tip down the street until it was too small to see. Welcome to Cape Cod, I thought.

 

I ARRANGED MY makeshift bed on the barren living room floor, which was covered with a sandy, mange-afflicted gold shag rug. I chose a spot close to a small color television perched on a milk crate that James had set up in the early days of his own separation. I covered myself with a moving blanket and hunkered down.

I couldn’t sleep, so I started jerking a disinterested dick towards a distant conclusion. I flipped through the wank bank, finally stopping at a love scene starring me and a Bay State Games bronze-medalist pole-vaulter who was in the same Major British Writers study group as me. I couldn’t remember if her name was Catherine or Kathleen, but she went by Cat or Kat, so it didn’t matter. Jocelyn kept crashing the vignette no matter how hard I tried to write her out of it. And then I stopped trying.

Jocelyn was sitting across from me in an empty bar in Hadley. A torrential downpour was in full swing. It was close to midnight. Our relationship was new. We weren’t even on farting terms yet. We planned on walking through the muddy cornfields beyond the back parking lot, but we never made it. “I’m Your Puppet” was playing on the jukebox. Jocelyn was singing along out of tune. She filled her cheeks with Wild Turkey and motioned for my mouth to meet hers in the middle. When she kissed me, she let some of the booze drain into me.

As I was coming, it felt almost as good as the real thing. But it had a lonely finish, like a nonalcoholic beer.

IN THE WINTER OF 1994, I graduated from UMass after four and a half years with a BA in English. I did pretty average; a lot worse than I might have done if I had given the tiniest of fucks about school. I decided to dick around until the summer and not think about my limited prospects, my withering University Health Insurance, and the looming crush of student loan repayment. I picked up three shifts waiting tables at a mediocre Italian restaurant in Amherst called Esposito’s. I ended up working there for almost two years.

Richie could be charming as all hell, whether he was sober or not. Being decent-looking didn’t hurt. He was decidedly closer to a Dennis than a Randy Quaid. He’d been a waiter at Esposito’s for a couple of years when I got there. I shadowed him my first week. I liked him right of the bat. We both played guitar and were into a lot of t.same music. Neither of us gave a fuck if it was Doris Day or the Frogs. If it was good music, it was good music. On my first night we made tentative plans to do some four-track recording together. He said he had written a ton of songs and already had the best band name: the Young Accuser. He said he’d gotten it from a newspaper article he read about Michael Jackson. All he needed was a band.

“No shit,” Richie said as he showed me how to fold a napkin into a swan. “I’ve read more books than any professor I ever had.” I never would have made a statement remotely as bold. I knew my education was held together by large fugues and obvious holes. “I’d go toe-to-toe with any of them and win.” Such braggadocio made Richie rub as many people (men) the wrong way as it did (women) the right. I sensed almost immediately that his whole “I couldn’t conform to the bullshit academic mold” claptrap was mostly a smoke screen because he couldn’t hack it. It was one of his flaws that made him approachable to me.

The owner-chef at Esposito’s was a prick named Lello, whose entire personality can be extrapolated from the following: (1) he loved cocaine even more than he appeared to love himself; (2) literally minutes into my first shift, a black waitress named Suzanne called him on his racist, sexist shit and stormed out. The restaurant was going to be packed because it was Valentine’s Day weekend. Lello was so furious he nearly blew a testicle. He ordered the entire staff into the kitchen, grabbed the biggest, blackest iron skillet off the rack, and screamed, “From now on, whoever calls this pan something other than Suzanne can get right the fuck out.”

I felt like a real shit for not having the backbone to tell him to fuck himself on the spot. I dusted off the “I really need the money” excuse and fell for it. In the end, when I finally did quit Esposito’s, I merely stopped showing up. In the men’s room there’s a urinal named Kenneth. The one next to that is named after me.

At the end of the night, after Richie and I performed our setup duties for the next day, we sat at the enormous black marble bar, each drinking an allotted half-priced domestic draft beer. I was still blowing smoke here and there about how much I’d like to tell this Lello character to jam his job up his fat ass.

Richie made it easy for me to stay weak and still come off like I had principles. “You can’t quit. If you do, the wop wins.” He ordered two neat shots of Jack Daniel’s from the bartender, Rita. Her arms were as hairy as any man’s.

I pretended to be watching the pour. “Wow,” I said, “those are really something.”

“Rita knows how to fix a healthy drink.” He slid a ten across the bar.

Rita winked. “If these won’t get the taste of come out of your mouth, I don’t know what will.” She slid Richie two fives change. He stuffed one of the fives into her tip snifter. We toasted my survival of the first night, then slammed our Jacks. I could feel my esophagus beginning to molt.