It Feels So Good When I Stop (20 page)

I COULDN’T STOP singing the line “What’s so bad about dying?” from the Plush tune “Found a Little Baby.” It was driving Jocelyn crazy.

“Thanks,” she said, without looking up from her
Harper’s
. “I used to like that song.”

“Sorry.” I clammed up for about thirty seconds and resumed speed-reading Emerson’s complete works from a cinder-block-sized
Norton Anthology of American Literature
open on my kitchen table.

I skipped right over Emerson and many like him when I was in college. I didn’t want to go to grad school, but it was still a more appealing option than getting a job selling IRAs over the phone for Fidelity or hawking cases of fluoride treatment kits to dentists.

“What’s so bad about dying?”

“Okay, I mean it now,” she said sternly. “You really have to stop that.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Try and help it.”

I gave Emerson another go. He was making me sleepy. The GRE was the next morning at eight. I’d decided at the last minute to take it. I was cramming. It felt like not-so-old times.

I was applying to UMass and UMass only because I had some suck there with an English professor named Sanbourne. He was a middle-aged, brooding dude made of knotty pine and crooked teeth. He was the kind of guy you could easily picture cursing into John Berryman’s
The Dream Songs
, getting shitfaced alone in a cabin after digging a new sump.

“What kind of suck?” Jocelyn asked, like I was full of shit.

“He told me I should apply.”

“Just like that? ‘You should apply’?”

“Pretty much.”

“Hmm.”

This was the extent of my suck: One morning before class a couple of us were smoking outside Bartlett Hall. Sanbourne didn’t just bum a smoke. He bummed a brand. I gave him a Winston. Before flicking my Bic, he pointed it at me and said I should think about grad school.

“You’ll see,” Jocelyn said. “You will loathe grad school.” She was trying to sound like she’d given up long ago on trying to talk me out of it.

“We’ll see.” I began to sing the melody—sans lyrics—to the Plush tune.

Jocelyn slammed her magazine shut. “I cannot fucking fathom why you’d go through with this. Just go get a job. People do it all the time.”

“You mean like you?” She rolled her eyes. “What, you think I’m wrong?” She didn’t answer, so I gave her the other barrel. “I’m not the one who has the luxury of holding out for the coolest unpaid internship of my choice.”

“Just because I have access to a little money doesn’t—”

“Oh, right, a little money.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“Well, you know what? I have no money.”

“Then, please, I’m begging you, let me give it to you. It kills me to watch you waste your life.”

“I don’t want your money.” I did want it. But taking ten or twelve grand was a lot different from letting her pay for our dates and the odd weekend away. “I’d feel like a fucking loser.”

“Okay, then, borrow it from me.”

“We both know I’d never be able to pay you back.”

“Then don’t pay me back. I don’t care about the money.”

“
I
do. I’m not taking your money.”

She led me onto thin ice. “If we were married, you’d take it, right?”

“Probably, but I’m not ready to get married.” I was hoping she’d forgotten about the hundreds of times I’d proposed to her. That was before the infatuation started losing some of its sheen.

“Oh, I see.”

I challenged her. “You see what?”

“Just read your fucking
Self-
fucking-
Reliance
.”

 

WHEN I WOKE the next morning it was raining like a motherfucker. Jocelyn was hugging me like I was a body pillow. Each time I tried to slip away, she tightened her grip.

“Come on. Let me go.” I was this close to blowing off the exam, but I’d already paid the fee.

“You’re making a big mistake. Grad students are the worst kind of people.”

I ended up regally shitting the bed on the literature subject exam. I did pretty good on the math and verbal. All told, I thought my scores were high enough to get me back into UMass.

I sent Sanbourne a letter at his sabbatical address in Caribou, Maine, letting him know my application package was in the system. The letter went unanswered. Even if he did flag my application, it didn’t do me a fuck of a lot of good. That morning in front of Bartlett Hall, he must have been talking to the fucker who smoked Newports.

MOST OF THE FILMING WAS to take place in Sidney’s old room. Marie led me into the small, dark hallway that ended at his closed bedroom door. She was telling me about some performance artist who had kept the packaging to every scrap of food he’d eaten over the course of a year. Fuck, I’d had roommates who did better than that without even trying.

“His whole thing is measuring intangibles against the refuse of what fuels it.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Was he German?” It was my way of indirectly asking if the performance artist had saved his shit and piss for the year.

“No, Japanese. Why? Have you heard of a German artist who has done something similar?” She seemed genuinely interested to know.

“I might have, but my memory’s crap.”

Marie had her hand on the doorknob. She went into deeper analysis of the Japanese dude’s art. I started picturing mountains of plastic wrap and plastic foam trays soaked with blood from red meat, and crusty-mouthed chocolate milk cartons, and knotted condoms as stiff as potato chips.

She opened the door. “I wanted to do something in the spirit of that.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of stuff.”

Sidney’s room was an overflowing ten-by-ten purple box. It looked like someone had dumped the contents of a cargo net full of secondhand Save the Children relief.

“I trashed or gave away more than that.” She sounded sorry that she hadn’t kept every item—food, diapers, or otherwise—that Sidney had consumed during his short life.

Piles of entangled toys and clothes overran the floor like kudzu. There was hardly a place to stand. A white-barred crib was overpopulated with stuffed animals, like a pen used to turn calves into veal. More clothes and fleece baby blankets buried a toddler bed, like heavy snow on a car. Sunlight poured into the room through two sliding glass doors. A larger-than-life poster of a serious-looking Kermit the Frog watched over everything.

“I called a few of my girlfriends and got some of it back.”

“You tell them what it was for?”

“The ones I thought would understand.” She held up a tiny orange shirt with a purple dinosaur on it. “Some of the stuff, I’m not sure was ever ours.” She refolded the shirt and put it back on the heap. “It’s all here, though, because I can’t be sure.”

I looked out through the sliding glass doors. The small backyard sloped down and butted against the pond-calm water of Opal Cove. Somehow I was sure Sidney had drowned right there.

“So,” Marie sighed, “there is a method to this madness.” I was picturing Sidney running down the small hill to the water, unable to counter the deadly momentum that launched him out too deep. “I want to remove a little at a time until—by the end of the film—it will be just me sitting in this empty room.”

 

I FELT PRETTY good when I woke up because it was exactly the kind of Saturday morning I loved as a kid: cold and gray. The first snow was still weeks away, but there was a sense that anything could happen. I turned on the TV and caught the tail end of a commercial for some acne scrub. Two pristine teenage couples were blasting around a California beach in a jeep, laughing at the fun niest fucking joke ever told. The backing musical track was a note-for-note rip-off of the guitar lead in R.E.M.’s “Flowers of Guatemala.” It started to piss me off, but then I watched some Looney Tunes. The new episodes—the ones without Mel Blanc doing the voices—were depressing, but they tossed in a vintage Bugs Bunny, the one set in ancient Rome. It lifted my spirits back up. I quoted Bugs Bunny while I showered.

When James and Dogshit showed up out of the blue, I was sitting on the porch, reading some film notes Marie had put together for me. I folded up the pages and hid them in my back pocket before they’d crossed the lawn.

“What’s that?” James asked. “Employee handbook?”

“What’s what?”

“I’m fucking with you.” He laughed. Dogshit laughed, too. “I don’t care if it is. I thought about it. I’m cool with you working.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Dogshit laughed at that, too.

James reached for the upper hand. “Even if you are going to pussy out and not tell anybody what exactly it is you’re doing.”

“Yeah, why’s that?” Dogshit asked. “A job’s a job, no?”

James gave wordless confirmation.

Dogshit continued. “I mean, I emptied Porta-Johns. I worked at the dump. I drove around for the MDC picking up roadkill and shit. I cleaned the wading pool at—”

James nudged me. “He found Sinn Fein dead on Twenty-eight,” like I was supposed to know who or what the fuck Sinn Fein was.

“That was a harsh toke,” Dogshit said. He swallowed uncomfortably. “One side of his head was caved in, and his tongue was really long and green. I had to wash the blood off his collar before I gave it back to Finneran.”

“Harsh,” James said.
Harsh
was the adjective of the moment for James and Dogshit. They used it without discretion. In a week or two, it would be
fierce
,
insane
, or
deadly
.

“I never told Finneran that part about his dog’s head being mushed to a pulp.”

“Why the fuck would you?”

“I wouldn’t.” There was a pause. “So what the fuck?” Dogshit asked me. “Who you working for?”

I told them.

“Well, that settles one thing,” James said. “He’s definitely not babysitting.”

“Oh, man, that’s harsh,” Dogshit said. They both laughed.

“Seriously,” James said, “what are you doing for her?”

“I’m helping her make a movie.”

“What the fuck kind of movie?”

“You going to bone her?” Dogshit asked.

“It’s a documentary. No, I don’t think so.”

“A documentary about what?”

“It’s about her kid.”

James shook his head. “Man, you really do have a dark streak running through you.” He said it like he’d had more than one conversation behind my back on the subject.

“It’s just a job,” I said.

“No. What I have is just a job. Fixing boats is just a job.”

“I don’t know,” Dogshit said. “Sounds kind of cool.” James looked at him. “In a fucked-up way.”

 

JAMES AND DOG SHIT convinced me to go with them to the East Falmouth-Barnstable game. If Minnesota is “the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes,” then Cape Cod is “the Land of Ten Thousand Dunkin’ Donuts.” We hit one of them on our way to the game.

“Wouldn’t it be cheaper if we all pitched in and bought a dozen instead? ” Dogshit asked.

“Now you’re thinking.” James canceled his order.

The doughnut girl sighed. She tried to locate the void register key in a mug stuffed with pens, highlighters, and rubber bands. “Goddamnit.” She emptied the mug onto the counter. A pen rolled onto the floor. I picked it up and placed it near the mug.

“How long till kickoff?” James asked.

“T minus five minutes,” Dogshit said.

“Christ almighty. You want to just skip this shit and get something there?”

“Lines will be insane.”

The girl hollered in the direction of the back room. “Who isn’t putting the friggin’ register key back where it goes?”

James looked at his watch. “This is pointless.”

“Look,” the girl snapped, “would you give me half a fucking second, please?”

James said something under his breath.

“What was that?” she asked. I looked at Dogshit, and he raised his eyebrows.

“I said, ‘Take your time.’ ”

 

THE LOT at East Falmouth High School was full, and cars were backed up along Plymouth Street and its tributaries. We parked in Dogshit’s cousin’s driveway.

“What’s his name?” I asked. “Apeshit?”

James laughed.

“Okay,” Dogshit said, “I see how things are here. I was going easy on you because you’re all fucked up, but no more.” He challenged me to a slap boxing match. I wouldn’t put up my dukes. He danced around me, then tapped me, unchallenged, on the cheek. “Down goes Frazier!” he said like Howard Cosell. “Down goes Frazier!” He put his arms up in victory and made crowd noises.

A real cheer erupted from inside Colonel James J. Sweeney Memorial Field.

“Come on, you homos. We just missed something.”

The bleachers on both sides of the field were full, and fans stood three people-deep along the sidelines and behind the end zones. I assumed East Falmouth was the team in green and gold, since James and Dogshit instinctively moved to that side.