Make Something Up (24 page)

If he failed to return, his son, that tiny model of his self, would bear the brunt of his wife's animosity.

Felix's own son, on the morrow that boy would discover the same fate. Felix's wife would awaken to find his portion of their marriage bed empty. Soon after, she'd learn he'd not been summoned into work. Worry would descend, followed by fear ripening into despair. Choosing his own wife, despite her virtues, Felix had been drawn to a submerged potential for vengeance. A trait of character not far removed from his mother's emotional frugality.

A train passed by in a tunnel somewhere far above. To describe how the ground shook, Felix vacillated between the words
abbeltomish
and
abbelhomish.
The skirling noise was everything, and then it was gone.

His fury spent, Felix paused to draw a breath and in the stillness heard the tread of distant footsteps coming toward him in the darkness. Not the stranger's, these were dragging, stumbling, heavy footfalls. The monster he imagined as every horror in his mind took shape in the tunnel ahead.

The glory of anger was how it left no margin for fear. Whether what approached in the lightless gloom was the trickster guide or his grotesque infant, Felix made ready to throttle it. To free both his hands, he tucked his journal into a pocket of his coat. Lest the advancing creature anticipate him, he quieted his ragged breathing, bracing his body from legs to neck, ready for the moment he and his adversary came into blind contact. Pitched forward, he ran full-out, pell-mell, throwing punches at thin air, fighting everything and hitting nothing.

His fists became bombs ready to explode on contact. When he sensed the being within arm's length, Felix threw himself upon it. Every hard joint he wielded as a weapon, his knees and elbows, his fists and the heels of his shoes. As cudgels and truncheons, this arsenal pounded the shape he couldn't see.

He felt his weight balanced atop and hammering down upon the crushed meat and mangled organs of his unseen foe, and the opponent made little effort to defend himself. Although larger than a child, the figure seemed nonetheless frail. Having rage on his side, Felix pounded away until the other offered no resistance.

The heaving mass beneath him issued a great sigh. In a voice rusted and dusty from disuse, it made a sound. The voice crushed with certainty, it said, “Sohnemann.” In doomed tones, it sighed. “You've come.”

In the darkness, the monster offered up a prayer, saying, “Please don't be my boy.”

Struggling to strike a match, Felix traced the sound of the voice, back, to among his oldest memories. The match flared, and he put it to a page of the notebook.

In the guttering light, a face shut its eyes and twisted to look away from the brightness.

Felix froze in shock. It wasn't possible. What a cruel trick. The guide, the trickster ruffian had known something of his past and staged this false reunion. It was the prank itself that was monstrous.

Still pinned beneath Felix's knees, the apparition bade, “I've waited, always hoping you'd never arrive.”

Here was merely some hired beggar, a gross imposter, and Felix sneered at the clever sadism of the stunt. He made ready to shove the corpse aside. “How dare you?” he snarled. So wounded was his heart, that he backhanded the frail old man, toppling him to the floor. Standing over him, unable to step away, frozen to the spot by both love and revulsion, he cried, “You are not my father!”

The old man inspected him. “He's fooled you, as well.”

“No one's made a fool of me,” Felix swore.

The monster said, “Tyler has.”

In a desperate frenzy, Felix M—— shouted for the guide to return. Wrong-worded as that label had proven, for a guide's task was to lead one to a destination while this had only led him into confusion and
disorientation.
Choking back rage and despair, Felix bellowed, “Your fine prank is accomplished!” He shouted, “You have wounded me far worse than any blade or blow might!” He looked down upon the figure on the floor and shouted, “Now make an end to this or I shall—on my word—I shall thrash your vile accomplice!”

The only answer was his own words: blade and blow, thrash and vile, echoing back from the darkness. To make good his threat, Felix lifted the frail figure and gripped him 'round the bony throat and felt his pulse beating like a hare's heart in the moment before its spine is broke.

At this, in a strangled, gargling voice, the imposter inquired, “My boy, do you still enjoy to invent words? From the first, you've always harbored your own secret language.” Here was a detail from childhood that Felix himself had never confided to anyone except his father.

Hearing these words, Felix regarded his tormentor with a closer eye. The man's brow was the one depicted in a daguerreotype the family owned but disdained to display. The man's eyes were more-aged versions of the eyes Felix saw each morning in his own shaving mirror. His grip softened on the sagging throat. Felix could only ask, “How?”

The sad eyes met his. The voice, crushed to a whisper, said, “My boy, the same as you.” The lips smiled with resignation. “Tyler will not return, not for many more years.”

Felix asked, “Tyler?”

His father, this man, said, “Your guide.”

Without him there might be no escaping this place. Clearly this man, if he was indeed Felix's father, clearly he would've discovered an exit after searching so long. Still, that was a possibility impossible to entertain. Too appalling for Felix's mind to accommodate.

Felix considered his own son. The child at home, still abed, asleep. How in an hour that boy's world would change course, and he would become his own guide. Another boy forced to invent himself from scratch. Another young man who'd grow up helpless in the face of any sullen or angry woman.

“You will see him again,” his father assured him. “That is the sadness of it.” The older man smiled wanly. “In perhaps twenty years. Then, your son will knock you to the floor, in anger and love, just as I struck my own father.”

For here, in these gloomy halls, had Felix's father found his own father. And here had Felix's grandfather been reunited with his own sire. Here were his father and his grandfather as well as the bones of his great-grandfather and all who'd been before. Exceeding them, here were the fathers of countless sons.

“This Tyler,” Felix asked, “what purpose does he serve?”

As if the old man could anticipate his son's growing panic, he smiled warmly. Already, purple bruises were blooming on his pale cheeks and forehead. “Do you forgive your papa?”

Tentatively, Felix said, “I do.”

“Do you forgive God?”

Felix shook his head.

With that, his father swung one arm in a wide arc, slamming a fist into the side of his son's skull.

Fireworks exploded, sparks that only Felix could see. He rubbed the spot, whining, “You've smote me in the ear!”

“Our salvation lies in not only forgiving one another,” his father intoned, “but in forgiving God as well.”

Without apology, his father said, “I will search with you.” He said, “We will search together.”

With this Felix turned to retrace his homemade words:
sarcophagied…trickaricious…sepulchrious…mesoesomerical…miasmire…polystenchous…diamonsity…glulubrious…abbeltomish
or abbelhomish. He set alight another page of his journal, hoping to backtrack to the first word before his light went out for good. As he sought the trail he'd blazed, Felix heard his father call out.

“Let's not be so quick to find our way back,” the old man bade. “Let us go deeper.” The words, sonorous against the stone. “Let us discover some worthwhile adventure before we return to the light and the air we already love so well.”

The old man had turned and was progressing farther into the labyrinth, plying the darkness. Delving blindly into the dense unknown. After a moment's hesitation, Felix turned to follow him.

Don't ask how I know this, but the next time you think you're fat, there's a whole lot worse you can look. Something to picture, when you're at the gym counting stomach crunches or hanging knee raises to flatten your ab muscles, just know that some people have a whole other person growing out of that spot on their body. That fleshy, jiggly area under the bottom of your rib cage, where to you is just a “muffin top,” those other people have arms and legs, most of a whole other person hanging over their belt.

Doctors call this an “epigastric parasite.”

Some doctors call that extra person a
“heteradelphian,”
a fancy word for “different sibling.” It means somebody who should've been your brother or sister only got born with their head still inside your stomach. That extra person, he's born with no brain. No heart. He's just a parasite, and you're the host.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

And, please, listen. If I'm telling you this and you do have another person growing out from underneath your arm right now, please don't get all bent out of shape.

The only reason I'm telling you is I kind of, used to have one, too.

And trust me, what's worlds worse than some jiggling subcutaneous fat is you popping out some heartless, brainless stranger. Sometimes that happens even years and years after you're already born.

Don't ask how I know this, either, but after you've done a hundred million stomach crunches, when you apply to be one of those Chippendales-type sexy dancers—just to get hired as a buff, naked exotic dancer—they ask you: “Do you suffer from epileptic seizures?”

The question's on the form they give you at the doctor's office for the physical exam right after your audition. The nurse hands you a clipboard full of forms and a pen and a Dixie cup she wants filled with piss. And the dance company, it's not even the real Chippendales, but you ask any has-been, washed-up male exotic dancer what troupe he was with, and just to shortcut a lot of explaining, he'll tell you Chippendales.

We all recognize those copyrighted white paper cuffs and the black bow tie.

Really, my audition was for the Savage Knights. That's “Knights” with a capital “K.” The Savage Knights are your Chippendales type of all-male, high-energy, feel-good touring exotic dance company that caters to a ladies' audience. Their home office ran this ad on the website Backpage. Under the category “Adult Jobs,” their ad led with the headline: “Live Your Fantasy.”

In the banquet room of the airport Holiday Inn, on that Sunday afternoon, my smile on my face was a lie. My tan was a lie. So was my hair being blond. On the job application, when I wrote one hundred eighty-five pounds, that was a lie. Under eye color, I wrote the color of my contact lenses. During the sit-down part of the interview, I said I wanted to be a Savage Knight because I enjoyed traveling to interesting places and meeting new people.

The truth was, really I just wanted a career where every night, hundreds of drunk young virgins, they would stuff cash money into my underpants with their teeth.

For my age, I lied away three years and wrote down twenty-four. Every one of my capped teeth, it was a shiny white lie.

I buzzed off my brown pubic hair, and the agent for Savage Knights said they had an opening for another Mister Elegant. At any moment, she told me, sixteen different companies of Savage Knights are crisscrossing the world, meeting the male-stripper needs of global billions. Each troupe includes a fireman, a police officer, a soldier, a construction worker in a yellow hard hat. Like a roving high school Career Day. Plus Mister Elegant, who makes his entrance in a breakaway tuxedo and gives roses to all the women in the ringside tables. All smooth and cosmopolitan. A cool James Bond.

Troupe Eleven, their last Mister Elegant had turned gun-shy and bailed after some coked-up birthday girl in Fairbanks yanked him a torsioned testicle.

That's when my own parasite started coming out.

In that Holiday Inn ballroom, I looked like nothing I'd ever seen in my bathroom mirror. Tanned and oiled. Blond and smiling.

And the agent shook my slippery hand, saying, “Good.” She said, “From now on, you'll be Mister Elegant…”

The emergence of my new heartless, brainless different sibling. Life is nothing if not a baby-oiled slope.

What was true was, I figured if I made a relentless and ongoing effort I could pass for twenty-four, forever. For my dance part of my audition, the song “Bodyrock” by the artist Moby gives you your best 3:36 grabber. Call my taste a little retro, but you start with a song folks like and you've halfway won the game. Plus the dropout toward the end, when the track cuts to just lyrics, that gives you your perfect window to nail some stunt work. Inside that frame, I pegged a standing flip, dropped to splits, and recovered with a kip-up. After all my tanning and shaving and smiling, the agent for Savage Knights, she gave me a sheet of paper printed with directions to a clinic. The nurse gave me a cup for piss. And the forms asked:

“Do you have a history of epileptic seizures?”

So after all that bullshit, it was easy to check the little box marked: NO. I just made sure and took my Clonazepam.

If you've seen the video people uploaded on the Internet, of the naked muscleman flopping like a fish, surrounded by women holding Rum Hurricanes and Blue Hawaiis, his pink balls popped out one side of his black G-string and slapping in a puddle of his own piss, then you know what kind of mistake that last lie turned out to be.

Everybody in the world's seen that video. Little bastard teenage kids, now they even do a dance they call the Mister Elegant where they keel over in the middle of the dance floor and wiggle like hyperactive spastics being electrified. Little shitheads.

People imagine it's so easy to be a Chippendales-type, high-energy exotic dancer. Male people, they imagine your worst problem is not sprouting a woodie.

Some other questions on that same medical examination form, they ask you: “Do you suffer from stress-related incontinence?” And, “Have you ever had an episode of narcolepsy?”

Just from those questions, I should've seen where this was headed. Lawyers don't just pull those questions out of a hat. Any big dance company from your Bolshoi Ballet to Chippendales, they've mapped out their doomsday scenario. Maybe smack in the middle of
Swan Lake,
some swan pitching a fit center stage, her eyes rolled up to only show the whites, drool gushering out from her long, yellow beak. Sweating. Pissing her lovely white feathers.

In the Savage Knights training brochure, they teach you to watch for anybody in the audience with a pad and pencil taking notes. Some deal called ASCAP—stands for American Society of Composers and Something-Something—if they catch you dancing to a song and not paying a royalty, they'll sue you and Savage Knights. Besides them, every state sends liquor commission spies to fine you for touching a patron
inappropriately.
Even just wearing white paper cuffs and a black bow tie, you risk a cease-and-desist letter from the real Chippendales for copyright infringement.

Don't even ask me about managing body hair. Really, the worst part of this job is paying to buy people a new tequila sunrise after you boogie off a pubic hair. Just a single good hip check can mean you buying the front two rows a fresh round of banana daiquiris.

Live Your Fantasy…Again, you couldn't make this stuff up.

Getting a drunk anybody to put money in your pants with their teeth, it's worlds harder than it sounds. So is staying twenty-four years old. One minute you're shaking your bag in the face of some bachelorette so shitfaced on Long Island Iced Teas you can smell your pube stubble curl from her lit cigarette. Her ugly bridesmaid is sticking a dollar bill up your ass with her tongue, and her mother's shooting video. That's how drunk virgins behave. Police officers or firemen—I mean real ones—they complain about job stress. They don't know real stress. Dancers I worked with, they used to soak their bag in salt water, the way a boxer will pickle his face to tough it up before a big fight. Every bit of your free time, you spend pickling your balls and managing body hair.

The only other most-important part of job training is telling time by songs. David Bowie's “I'm Afraid of Americans,” that gives you an exact five minutes of fuzzed power chords. Keith Sweat's “One on One” is a slow-grind song (5:01) perfect for choreographing an elephant. By that, I mean any dancer too bulked up to move except for hitting competition poses. Step, flex, step. The Double Bicep. The Crab.

How you keep from getting a hard-on is you're counting all the time to anticipate the end of each song. You name a song, and I can peg the time—and not just the minutes and seconds listed on the jewel box liner. I can tell you the actual time that shows on the deck in the booth. A good dancer knows the Digweed remix of Bryan Ferry's “Slave to Love,” the liner says four minutes, thirty-one seconds, but in actuality it's twenty-four seconds. A lazy dancer will find himself still waist-deep in drunk women when the music stops.

You shaking your private junk to a pounding mix of Underworld's “Mo Move”—a relentless bass heartbeat for six minutes and fifty-two seconds—that's artistic. But if you don't make it backstage by when the music stops, even in just one moment of silence, you shaking your shaved parts at strange ladies—that's just harassment.

Again, another slippery slope. And do not ask me how I know.

Silence. Silence and the closing lights coming on, bright, that's Cinderella turning into a grinning, naked, greasy, and sweaty guy with his penis too close to your face and your watery ten-dollar White Russian.

As outlined in the Savage Knights training brochure, Mister Elegant makes his entrance, handing out roses to the front tables. He dances the Joey Negro club mix of Raven Maize doing “Fascinated.” A three-minute, forty-two-second grabber song. Then he moves to the edge of the stage and dances one shorter high-energy song to bait out the folding money. He works the edge and the floor, humping laps and taking tips, and he's offstage just one beat before the Police Officer's grabber song.

The next night in Spokane, same deal. Then Wenatchee. Pendleton. Boise. A job so simple even a brainless, heartless parasite can do it.

Mister Elegant loved the dollar tips and the phone numbers. Phone numbers written on dollars. Phone numbers on scraps of paper towel, looped under the elastic leg straps of his black G-string. All the way up until Salt Lake City.

Don't ask how I know this, but there's people with Milroy disease, where their lymph nodes in their legs never develop and they end up with feet the size of suitcases on legs like tree trunks. Or cyclopia, where you're born with no nose and both eyes in the same socket.

Mister Elegant, his nipples looked too small and pale pink, so to make them swell, big and red, he learned to paint them with something called Lip Plumper. Comes in a bottle with a little brush, like nail polish, and when you paint it on your nipples and lips and the head of your dick, they all swell up, huge. Mister Elegant outlined his washboard abdominal muscles by drawing between them with a mascara. Then blending with a wad of tissue so his belly wouldn't look like Tic-Tac-Toe.

If he popped out one blue contact lens and looked at himself in the steamy mirror of a motel bathroom, yeah, he could still pass as twenty-four. But between Billings and Great Falls and Ashland and Bellingham, between the Fireman's giving everyone crab lice and the Army Soldier's snoring, Mister Elegant was feeling wore out. By Salt Lake City, his pickled balls were dragging.

Mister Elegant strutted out with his armful of red roses. Still in his breakaway tux, he gave out the roses, then started into the buttons on his pleated shirt. The only thing that makes Salt Lake City any different from Carson City or Reno or Sacramento is after the tux broke away, after Mister Elegant was counting into his second song, smiling and keeping his pubic hair out of people's drinks, watching the dollar bills come out of purses and pocketbooks, the virgins writing their phone numbers on old bank machine receipts, between his dropping to full splits and bouncing back in a perfect kip-up, one deep breath before his handspring and a full midair flip, two minutes and thirty-six seconds into the N-Trance cover on “Stayin'
Alive”—(4:02)—the
faces and drinks and dollar bills started to blur. Mister Elegant thumbed up the elastic loop around each hip, high and tight for his handspring, crouched down, jumped—and that's all I remember.

In case you didn't notice, the music's stopped and here I am still shaking my dick in your face. Like after all this time I didn't learn any better.

What a spaz.

Early as I can remember, I used to have Simple Stare syndrome, a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. My mom or dad would be talking to me, and I'd freeze. My vision would blur and all my muscles would stop. I'd still hear my mom talking, telling me to pay attention, maybe snapping her fingers in my face, but I couldn't talk or move. Breathing is all I could do for a half minute, which seems like forever.

They took me in for MRIs and EKGs. I couldn't ride my bicycle except on deserted streets. I climbed trees and my vision would start to blur. I'd wake up on the ground, my friends asking if I was okay. One school play, the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, six shepherds, three camels, an angel, and two other kings waited what felt like a year while I stood frozen with a gift of frankincense, Mrs. Rogers leaning out from the wings, whispering, “Bless me, for I bring you this humble offering…I bring
this
!”

But after ten years of Clonazepam, I pretty much had that licked.

Trouble was my prescription ran out in Carson City. Being tired makes it worse. Drinking and cigarette smoke, fatigue, loud noise, all risk factors. In Salt Lake City, I'd pitched what's called a tonic-clonic seizure, what people used to call a grand mal seizure. I woke up in the back of a screaming ambulance, just in time to see a med tech stuff a thick stack of piss-soaked singles into his wallet, saying, “Mister Elegant…” and shaking his head. A blanket wrapped with belts held me flat, and I could smell shit. I asked the med tech, What happened? And he stuffed his wallet in his back pocket, saying, “Buddy, you don't want to know…”