Making Nice (18 page)

And then I woke up and then I saw that girl and then I said that thing and then I gave her that look and then she ignored me and then something terrific: that old-paper-colored dog of hers hopped up onto the lawn and sniffed around some before shuffling its rear end forward, arching its back into a position ingrained in its born-brain to take a turd, and right on the corner of the property. I mean, this girl was obviously keen on leaving, leaving me to consider how deep her resentment for her dog was at that very moment. Probly pretty deep, like so deep that if you fell into it you’d at least break your ankle, so about as deep as Peter Parsons’s tree house was high, which Peter Parsons fell out of one time and broke his ankle. Maybe twenty feet? And just as the dog’s butthole dilated and the first piece of poo crested, it turned and looked over its 120-grit-colored shoulder at me, and continued to look at me the whole time, right in the eyes! Audacious.

And strangely captivating, too. I found myself staring back at the little guy, and what didn’t come to mind then but does now is a right-handed Southern girl I never dated, but we were friends. She was from South Carolina or somewhere like South Carolina, like North Carolina, and had the eyes of a Weimaraner that she stared at me with when she told me that as a kid she was afraid of down escalators, and then later and drunker and hiccuping that same night, as we lay like sea lions on her cream-cheese-colored carpet, that her sister was real sick with some girl disease I’d never heard of. I was young then and didn’t know how to be comforting—I didn’t know how to be anything then—so I said, “Ladies’ plumbing,” and shook my head, and she just kept staring until I was grateful for her hiccuping and for the drinks in our right hands.

Another time
another
right-handed girl—but this one was from up North and I’d sexed her a few times—she stopped by my apartment unannounced one day and asked why my microwave door was lying in the middle of the hallway. I explained to her that I ripped it off and threw it there. She stared. My sister-in-law Tara stared at me during and for like a full minute after my best-man speech, and my mother stared at me when I wasn’t old enough to know what snatch was but told her I was going to look for it, and when I was old enough and told her I was going to look for it, and when I got arrested, and when I told her I was talking to a navy recruiter, and when I came home smelling like smoke and beer without the antibiotics she’d asked me to pick up for her, and when I got arrested a different time, and when I pretended a banana was my dick and humped the dog’s face, and like a million other times.

And still another stare that comes to mind now is my father’s. I don’t know why. And I don’t know why this girl’s shitting dog was staring at me because I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to deserve it, but it maintained intense eye contact with me throughout, and after pushing out each section it shuffled a few steps forward and left, eventually leaving a small, semicircular trail of dog shit along the way. I’m from the East Coast so I’m used to piles, but these were more like little eggs, and watching Jeansie collect them with her plastic baggie was a little like watching a sexy kid on Easter.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said, pointing at her forehead. “You could just leave it. Also, I like your outfit.”

She said nothing, not a word, and usually at this point in a rejection I abandon hope and slink away, but here I was emboldened by my desire to fuck her I guess, I don’t know, but I continued. “As a reward for dressing so great,” I said, “I’d like to buy you some food.” She ignored me a third time, and not knowing what to say after “food” but feeling like I should say something—I mean by this point I was committed—I followed my logic or guts or whatever and what came out was, “Yum Yum.”

Food
→
Yum Yum.

Now, by no means am I about to claim that this girl was charmed by my awkwardness and experienced a sudden change of heart and stopped refusing to look at me and, once she did, noticed I was half-handsome and could tell, with her lady-intuition powers they all like to brag about so much, that I am somewhat talented at stuff and can lift heavy things and am good-hearted, and that she decided to reward this general decency by accepting my offer to reward her with food for dressing so great, and that we went out and had a chicken together and that it was a little dry but I liked the crispy skin and the rosemary potatoes a lot, and that after dinner we went for a walk around the cool neighborhood streets and she said, “The sky is beautiful tonight,” but in a French accent, and I said, “Yeah, it’s like a just-turned-off TV—black but a brighter black,” and then we just held hands ’cause there was a real connection being made here or whatever, and after a long while we walked back to her place ’cause I told her I had to pee but I didn’t really, I was just lying to get into her apartment, which was real nice with furniture and everything, and she opened a bottle of white wine with a white wine opener and we drank it out of mason jars and yabba blabba we played a sex game called Tiger Tamer during which I licked her lawn-mower-scented asshole. That didn’t happen.

But if I’m remembering right, and I am, when I said Yum Yum as she stooped to retrieve that last dog-shit egg—right before she stood up straight and hurried away from me forever, because the truth is I haven’t seen her since and don’t expect to—an amused expression came over her face as she tried to suppress a small smile.

Now, despite the relative ease with which I made my terrible passes, it’s never easy. Mustering up the optimism and confidence and frankly just the bother necessary to ask out a pretty girl requires a tremendous, sometimes near heroic effort on my part, especially if you consider all the times in my whole half-not-handsome life that my efforts have not only
not
gotten me what I wanted, but just exactly what I didn’t. Like punched in the face, or cross-eyed Karen, or really sad.

But like my good friend Marc, who during a particularly long pussy drought trained himself to be attracted to fat girls by watching fat girl porn, exclusively, for months (it worked!)—I’ve been trying to expect less, too. To not get so disappointed. To figure out a way where it doesn’t feel so lonely. For the most part it isn’t working, but every now and then something like this happens. Something a little less than bad. Something that feels like almost enough.

I
NHERITANCE

“Is this the Sage Café?”

“No,” I said, because it wasn’t. It was me, on my cell phone, on my boat.

“Is this 971-3415-6217?”

“There’re too many numbers in that … number,” I said.

The woman apologized and hung up, and it occurred to me that I would like to eat eggs for breakfast, and also that—as I was trying to explain phone numbers to her—I hesitated for a second as I was figuring out what I needed to say. And maybe that wasn’t what I needed to say at all. Maybe what I needed to say was that I don’t know what to say. It crossed my mind. Slowly. Like it was tired.

When a red light turns green, all the cars do not move forward at once, instead there is an accumulation of small hesitations between each car. You yourself might be quick, but the farther down the line you are, the more hesitation you inherit. You may not even make the light. This happens other places, this happens everywhere, all the time, even in your kidney, and on the grocery store twelve-items-or-less line. And so my clothes were in the dryer too long and now they’re wrinkled, and the milk went bad in the fridge, and they didn’t catch the cancer early enough so my mother suffered for some time and died. I was the only one in the room with her. Her breathing slowed, stopped, started, stopped, stayed stopped. I tried to close her clouded eyeballs and her mouth but they wouldn’t stay closed, thought that was interesting, then walked upstairs to the bathroom where my brother was stepping out of the shower. He was wrapped in a brown towel. I imagine cancer is brown. I don’t know why.

“She died,” I said.

“What?”

“She died. Just now.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.” Then, for good measure, “Fuckin’ dickhead.”

It’s been a while since, and sometimes I think: She didn’t survive that. And now I’m wondering if I didn’t survive that, and now I’m wondering if I would survive if I filled my pockets with rocks and jumped in a swimming pool, and now I’m wondering how small Time is. I’d like it if, asked that question, someone answered, “As small as a microbe’s microbe’s microbe’s microbe’s microbe’s microbe’s front teeth. So small you could fit four billion years in the space between Elton John’s front teeth.” Wow, I’d say, that’s a pretty great answer.

Me, I think of Time as teeny pieces of party confetti, so small it’s invisible, fluttering all over the place, all around us, it even goes up your nose when you breathe. I also think it’s carcinogenic, like burnt bacon. As for eggs, my mother liked hers hard-boiled, but I have trouble deciding between over easy and scrambled and waitresses make me nervous. As for hesitation, the one that always gets me is the smoker in bed—you figure they’d wake up, sleeping on top of fire.

T
HE
C
OLD
W
AY
H
OME

In September I saw a stray cat jump into the Connetquot River trying to kill a duck. Missing its mark, it swam in confused circles, cried out as the current slowly took it toward Long Island’s Great South Bay, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean.

In October my mother offered me twenty dollars to clean the garage she and my father had filled with junk—warped plywood and dull lawn-mower blades, a mask my father bought when he was in Africa making artificial limbs for So-and-So’s troops, lampshade-less lamps and nozzle-less cans of WD-40, rusted tools, a rock-hard bag of rock salt, shovels and broken bicycles, an outboard engine with a spider web for a gas cap. I moved this here and that there, swept out leaves and folded blue tarps until I found a molding cardboard case of unopened Rheingold beer cans. I carried it behind the garage and buried it under leaves, hid it away like a fat squirrel and waited for my winter.

In November my father’s mother died, and in December he got himself drunk and tried to sleep in a tree. He fell out. You know what they say about apples. I was fourteen.

Then it was winter.

It seemed to snow more back then, was colder. Sometimes the Great South Bay would freeze over entirely, a couple feet thick, and people would drive their cars over the ice six white miles to Fire Island. Sometimes they fell through. On a
low
low tide you could still see one rusting out on the sand flats off Ocean Beach.

And I can remember holding my father’s thumb, watching iceboats slip past the Riverview Restaurant. It was very pretty.

But even back then the snow would melt and refreeze, re-melt and refreeze. We didn’t get powder, we got ice. Branches bent. Things broke. Roads were plowed and salted but to no use and I loved that like I love a good hurricane, floods and tornadoes, the bull goring the bullfighter. I think it’s a good thing when the natural world swells up and knocks against us, interrupts our plans, humbles our false jurisdictions—and in its wake the solidarity of shared suffering.

Every winter storm AJ and I would stand at the living-room windows and watch the triangle of snow fall past the streetlight, and we’d hope and go to sleep and get up the next morning, run to the radio and listen to hear that our school was closed. If it wasn’t, we felt gypped and ate our Cheerios mad and made fun of our mother’s hair while she sipped instant coffee. If it was canceled, we went skitching.

Recreation and transportation for the too-young-to-drive, we stood at stop signs in groups of five or six or fifteen and waited quietly, listening to the sound of our own teeth chattering, nylon jackets shivering. Occasionally someone said something like: Fuck man, I can’t
f-f-f-f
eel my
f-f-f-f
uckin’ fingers … But when one of the few cars still braving the roads approached, we came to life, laid claims and danced around and punched one another in the arms. And when the car stopped we ran up behind it, squatted, and grabbed the bumper and let it pull us along a block or a mile, sometimes more. We breathed exhaust and studied Statues of Liberty. Blue numbers. Trunk keyholes.

The best rides were given by new drivers with their mothers’ station wagons, Oldsmobiles, Nissan Sentras, neighborhood guys who just the year before were standing on cold corners with us. They’d pull up to whatever corner we were at and roll down the window and tell us to get on, wait, ask,
Ready?
and roll up the window almost all the way. This one guy who everybody called Toby ’cause one Fourth of July he blew his thumb off with an M-80 and the surgeons replaced it with his big toe, he would smoke Luckies and drive fifty miles an hour down narrow icy streets, slide around corners, pull us into parking lots and do donuts to try to throw us. When he succeeded he would stop, wait, roll down the window, and tell us to get back on. And we’d get back on.

Of course we’d heard the stories: Someone slid under a wheel and had their head crushed. Someone else fell off and rolled forty miles an hour into a mailbox post. Drivers lost control and hit things, like trees. Telephone poles. Houses. Pricker bushes. People were killed. Children and young adults died. But no one I knew. The killed, comatose, or critically conditioned people in the papers were from other towns. Only once did I see someone get hurt skitching.

A woman pulled up to the corner of Vanderbilt and Cross in a red something with a spoiler. She knew we were up to something because we were happy, and because there were about twelve of us shouting,
Give us a ride! Give us a ride!
, each of us gesturing wildly, each with our own two-handed interpretation of what grabbing on to an automobile’s rear bumper looks like. She rolled through the stop sign and tried to speed off, but her back tires slipped, giving three or four guys just enough time to chase and leap and dive for the spoiler. They made it a few feet before she jammed on her brakes, sending a kid’s face into her trunk. Blood poured out of his nostrils. He licked it. Smeared it with his glove. Stared at the red drops on the ice by his boots, asked, “Am I bleeding?”