What's Important Is Feeling: Stories Read online

  Dedication

  FOR MY PARENTS

  Epigraph

  As if we held in the heavens of our arms

  not cherishable things, but only the strength

  it takes to leave home and then go back again.

  — DENIS JOHNSON, “ENOUGH”

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Soft Thunder

  The Long In-Between

  Things I Had

  December Boys Got It Bad

  Some Nights We Tase Each Other

  We Close Our Eyes

  Tell Me

  Sluts at Heart

  America Is Me and Andy

  What’s Important Is Feeling

  The Porchies

  Milligrams

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Wilson

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Soft Thunder

  No one knows who slept with her first. Besides, sleep isn’t the right word. What we did: pressed lips to closed lips, tried to slip in some tongue; buried her beneath us on carpeted floors and futon mattresses; fumbled for buckles; felt her dry skin against our sweat-wet hands; said, “Don’t cry”; wiped tears with our T-shirts; kept on because she said, “Don’t stop.”

  I met Kendra at Norm’s, the retro-chic diner where I worked weekends bussing tables. This was the end of junior year. Norm’s had a jukebox straight from SkyMall that played the same golden oldies all shift long, and a special sauce—mayo plus Tabasco—you could add on for a dollar, get your fill of fat and spice. The manager’s name was Wyatt, but he went by Madonna. Around close he’d unplug the juke, turn up the kitchen stereo, and lip-sync “Like a Virgin” with a mop for a mic, while the rest of us hustled to count out and clean.

  Wyatt was the first out gay I ever met, a tube-tanned blond who both smoked cigarettes and chewed Nicorette. He took personal calls on the takeout phone, ducking behind the counter to answer, whispering to what I imagined was a variety of lovers, the covert homosexuals hiding out in my hometown. The markings of a clandestine existence were enough to make him my hero. Plus, he bought me beer and smokes without double charging like Tim Qwan from school, who had a fake ID and a sense of enterprise.

  “Big Daddy,” Wyatt called me in his lispy southern drawl. “Big Daddy, baby, unplug that juke for me, old man.”

  “Yes, boss,” I said, and saluted. “Right away, captain, boss man, sir.”

  It was early to close, but Norm’s was pretty empty. Just a couple in the corner drinking decaf, dreading home. Wyatt slipped me some Nicorette. I was new to tobacco, and the gum gave me a low buzz, like an ice cream headache that sinks down to your stomach in a sickly, nasal drip. Wyatt’s mixtape came over the PA: drum machine and synths, Michael Jackson in falsetto. Wyatt pogoed the serving floor. He slapped Claire, the lifer waitress, on a veiny, muscled thigh.

  “The way you make me feel!” Wyatt sang.

  “Old.” Claire said. “You make me feel old, Ms. Madonna.”

  “Hush, now,” Wyatt said. “You’re as young as the last boy you opened your legs for.”

  “Then I must be getting on sixty,” Claire deadpanned.

  “Bless your heart,” Wyatt said. “Bless your generous heart, Clarice.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Claire said, and touched the cross around her neck. She was among the last of our town’s Italian Catholics. They lived on the north side, by the lake. Had their own unofficial mayor, Alessandro D’Ambrosio, a nose-broke man of late middle age with half a dozen daughters and supposed ties to the North End mob. D’Ambrosio was always in the local paper, posing at christenings, serving sausage to kids on Columbus Day.

  “But what you really need, Clarice, is a young stud like old man Big Daddy Benjamino here,” Wyatt said, and pointed at me.

  I must have been blushing ketchup red. Ernesto, the Costa Rican cook, caught a case of the giggles. The cooks were half-cocked by this hour, hoisting rum-punched plastic Coke bottles. Wyatt was grinning. He always was.

  “If she’s lucky,” I said.

  “Maybe if he puts on some weight,” Claire said. “Benny, why don’t you join a gym, hon? Muscle up for my obsolescence?”

  I was a scrawny seventeen, shoulderless, sporting the wispy premonition of an oncoming goatee. My hair was a mop of floppy bangs, Bic-singed at the tips. Claire struck me as someone who had never been young, who from birth had been fading from unknown, prenatal glory. Wyatt himself must have been pushing forty. I didn’t know how he’d landed in these suburbs, far from home, a lifer like Claire: partnerless, all but partied out.

  Madonna swooped over, swept me off my feet. He pulled me onto his imaginary dance floor, roped me with an air lasso, spun me, dipped me like a lessoned bride. For a moment I felt weightless, safe in Wyatt’s ropy arms. Then I saw her.

  My first impression was that Kendra looked like a doll. Her face seemed sculpted, porcelain pale, with large glassy eyes and perfect pink circles painted over her cheeks. Matte black hair hung nearly to her waist in a puff of voluminous waves. The hair probably accounted for a third of her weight. She was skinny, barely a body, just accumulated clothing on a stingy set of bones.

  At seventeen we all craved D cups, skin we could sink in to take refuge from our own unmanly selves. Kendra had a different appeal. She reminded me of the chicks on MTV who thrashed among the boys, snarling jaw-clenched from the throat. Her outfit added to the image: steel-toe boots; jeans with holes in the knees; some kind of gothic, lacy bodice, a costume perhaps forged with sewing machine from an older sister’s lingerie. Kendra had the expression down too, that punky sideways stare: pupils tipped to corners, mouth ambiguously pursed.

  Her parents, on the other hand, were dressed in clothes too hot for June, and too formal for Norm’s: woolen evening wear, the remnants of a cross-continental journey, possibly by steamboat. They looked like the peasants on the covers of the Russian novels I’d been skimming for English.

  “Hello?” her father sang out in a basso-Balkan growl. “Is anybody working in here?”

  It occurred to me that I was still in Wyatt’s dippy embrace. He rubbed my nipple through my shirt and made a kissy face. The kitchen staff was in hysterics. Kendra looked at me and winked.

  “Wyatt,” I whispered.

  “I don’t answer to that name.”

  “Madonna, fine.”

  “Sing it to me tender, Daddy,” Wyatt said, and kept on rubbing.

  “Customers,” I said.

  She took timid bites of pancakes, a couple sips of soda. Pushed fork around plate, rolling it in syrup and then licking the tines. Her parents were animated, upset, ravenous. Her father waved his arms, stuffed a sandwich in his mouth, exclaimed something in another language. He was crying. “We’ll get through this,” her father kept saying. “It will all be okay.”

  Kendra excused herself from the table. She walked right past me on the way to the bathroom, slipped something in my pocket, and pecked me quick against the cheek. She smelled like maple syrup and a scent I couldn’t place, cleaning products maybe, the faint whiff of chemical lemon.

  The note said: “Leave twenty-five dollars in my locker and I won’t tell anyone at school that you’re a faggot. Kisses, Kendra.”

  Sam lived in one of the beastly mansions—built by my uncle Marion—that were uglying our town. The mansions were arranged in ovular cul-de-sacs, like linemen in huddle, lording over their lawns. The style was some kind of pseudo-Roman abomination, columned and pillared, moon white in the moonlight.

  Inside, there were all the sleazy signifiers: hot tub, steam room, ten-headed shower.
Sam’s house had a fully stocked bar. His dad had run off with a supermarket magnate six months prior. The magnate was older, with a bleached mustache in blond relief against her upper lip. Sam’s mom mostly stayed upstairs, her authority stripped, her hair in curlers. I didn’t yet understand that adults could be drunks in a different way than kids could; that instead of pounding beer and taking shots they sipped vodka toward sleep, cried out to no one for the lives before their lives.

  My own parents were slightly older, of a different generation of Jews—ex-hippies who’d smoked themselves silly in the sixties and now preferred a half glass of red, nothing more. They looked down on parents like Sam’s, the tacky and tastelessly rich. The work ethic—it was suggested—had been weaned out of our people. We’d grown soft in luxury, aspiring Wasps toasting Bud Lights to full assimilation, while the Chinese and Indians filled our old Harvard spots. I wasn’t doing much to preserve the old ways. I forged on, beer by beer, brain cell by brain cell, junior college bound.

  In Sam’s garage we drank from the ransacked bar and grew weed—a weakling of a plant that turned out to be male and unharvestable but looked good in Polaroids. We were drinking club soda mixed with melon liqueur. We were down to the dregs of the bar.

  “A cool girl, you say?” Sam said.

  Our school had a shortage of cool girls. Cool girls were girls who smoked pot and dug guitar fuzz, would skip class to take shrooms, craved indiscriminate cock. We only had one. She was Roland’s older sister and wanted nothing to do with us.

  “Fo shizzle,” I said.

  Roland just nodded. He was jaded, over everything. He’d been fucking a Canadian cousin since age twelve. Roland was good-looking and good at hockey, and people wondered why he hung out with the rest of us.

  “Damn, yo,” Alex said. “I’m gonna get up in that bitch.” Alex was our wussiest and tried the hardest to sound tough. He wore wire-frame glasses and jeans that hung below his butt.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Sam said. He was the skeptic son of a wrecked marriage, kind of a dick.

  The garage door opened to the street. We sat in lawn chairs, studied the drip of spring rain like we were in a diorama looking out. Across the cul-de-sac, lights lit empty rooms. Alex fell asleep, snored. His head hung limply, chin to chest. Sam sipped, surveyed. Roland spat. Some CD hummed: a chortling bass, the low rumble of tom drums. In the distance I heard thunder, way off to the west.

  “Well, shit,” Alex said, roused.

  Roland lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the rest of us.

  “Bring it,” Sam said. “Bring the motherfucking thunder.”

  “Damn, bitches,” Alex said. “What time is it?” He looked at his wrist but wasn’t wearing a watch.

  “Almost midnight,” Roland said.

  Alex was walking to his car when it looked like lightning struck him. He was down on the ground, shaking and twitching. It took a moment for the rest of us to realize we should run over. Alex’s eyes rolled up into his head. Only the whites were visible. He looked like a hooked fish flopping in the bottom of a boat.

  “Call an ambulance,” I said. I’d meant to scream it, but the words had come out whispered. No one did anything. We didn’t have cell phones.

  “I don’t want the cops here,” Sam said. “What about the weed plant?”

  Alex lay shaking, making gurgles and groans. His tongue slipped in and out of his mouth.

  “Dude,” I said, and pointed. “He’s dying.”

  “It’s fine,” Sam said. “This has happened before.”

  Sam and Alex had known each other longest. Sam knew things about Alex that the rest of us didn’t. “Give it a minute,” Sam said. “He’ll be fine.”

  We stood there getting wet. Sam checked his watch.

  “What is it?” I said. “What’s happening?”

  “A seizure,” Sam said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to do something with the tongue?” I said.

  Roland knelt down and held Alex’s wrist, steadied his head. After a second, Alex stopped shaking. His eyes rolled back around. Roland and I pulled him up so he was standing. Alex was wobbly. We tried to help, but he pushed us off. His glasses were caved in at the middle, falling off one ear.

  “Damn, bitchass,” Alex said, and pushed me. “You better not tell anyone about this, Ben. You and your big fucking mouth.”

  The lights were on when I got home, but only my sister was up. She was in her room with the door closed, the soft strum of girl folk seeping out through the crack. Trish had recently returned from freshman year of college, ten pounds overweight and in a state of psychological distress. She’d woken one morning to her boyfriend’s boning moans from the other side of the room and an offer from her roommate to loosen up and join the party. Now she spent her days here: eating ice cream, holding forth to my mother on the failings of my gender. I felt like talking, like telling someone about Alex just to prove it had happened. But Trish wanted privacy, wanted nothing to do with me.

  I walked through each room extinguishing lights. The lit rooms looked almost like museum displays, each impeccably vacuumed, no signs of lived life. They felt foreign in their emptiness, a world outside the world of day. Upstairs, I could see that Trish was online.

  I typed, “Hey.”

  She typed, “What?”

  I typed, “Nothing.”

  Kendra was the reason for the band. Sam had spied her practicing after school in the empty art room. The way he told it, she had one leg balletically propped on the windowsill. She leaned into sunlight, pushed the music from her tiny center. The sun came through her skin. In that light, Sam said, she’d looked almost translucent. “Like a lizard,” Sam said. The fact that clarinet was the wrong kind of instrument was completely beside the point. The point was to get her in Sam’s garage.

  It was my job to approach her. I tapped her on the shoulder. She stared into her locker. There was a mirror inside there.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Kendra didn’t turn. She could see me in the mirror; I could see the left half of her face, powdered white, lashes stiff with mascara.

  “You got my money?” Her face—or at least the left side of it—did not betray a sense of levity.

  “Fuck your money. I ain’t paying.” I flashed the flirtiest smile I could muster. All around us was the zip and whiz of high school halls, lockers banging in the background.

  “I guess I’ll have to break your kneecaps then.”

  “I’m Ben,” I said.

  “Well, Ben, you seem like a nice guy. I’d hate to see you crippled.”

  “I’ll take my chances. You play clarinet?”

  I pointed to the case inside her locker.

  “I’m Hungarian,” she said. “Of course I play the clarinet.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Then she was in Sam’s garage, wearing what looked to be a bandanna tied around her tiny breasts. She fiddled with her reed, dumped spit on the cement floor. We stared.

  Eventually, Sam started a drumbeat, the only one he knew. Roland’s bass sounded in like a series of low moans, barely rhythmic, but bracing in their volume. I plucked an arbitrary chord. Alex’s keys produced a lion’s roar—the coolest sound effect on his old toy Yamaha.

  “What key are we in?” Kendra asked.

  “Key?” I said.

  Roland shook his head, gave the bass a bit of slappity. Sam smashed at his cymbals. I noodled high up on the neck. Alex nudged a few notes from the white keys.

  “We’re just jamming,” I said. “Just some freestyle experimental shit.”

  “It’s shit all right,” Kendra said. She blew into her instrument. Out came something that sounded like music.

  “Fo shiz,” Alex said.

  “I told you,” Sam said.

  Roland nodded in approval.

  “She’s Hungarian,” I said.

  There was one song we could do, an old sixties sing-along, four chords and a chorus. I was singer by default, the only one who knew the
words. It wasn’t singing exactly. More like a mix of talk and scream with but the merest hint of melody. We turned the mic down low and let the music drown me out. I was okay with that. When we got to the bridge Kendra came in for a solo. The other instruments went quiet. Her clarinet was tense and trebly, flouncing up and down the scale. Dusk was coming on. The wind picked up, poured into the garage, carrying smells of cut grass and distant grilling. Kendra kept going, another eight bars. Her eyes were closed. Her body hardly moved. Just long thin fingers fingering, pinkies lifted, index tapping out the meter, thumb continuously curling. She was a virtuoso, or had maybe just taken lessons.

  “Earth to Daddy,” Wyatt called, hands cupped around his mouth. I’d been spacing out, writing lyrics on a napkin. The song was about Kendra, but I’d veiled her as a meerkat. I’d been watching lots of nature shows while stoned. In the song, we were lovers in captivity, trying to fuck our way to freedom. I’d managed to rhyme zookeeper with Grim Reaper. I couldn’t wait to show the band.

  “Work is calling, Big Daddy. No more poetry—time to wipe some tables. Dinner rush is almost here.”

  We were getting to the end of June. School was over. The heat brought out hibernators, folks emerging from cave-homes for oversized sundaes. I was constantly mopping the sticky floors, wiping tables, washing bucket loads of glassware. My fingers were wrinkly, suds-softened. I smelled like milk and Windex.

  “Yes, boss,” I said, and crumbled the paper. Wyatt wasn’t gonna let me off that easy.

  “Hand it over, Big Daddy, let lil’ ole Madonna get a look.”

  He grabbed at the napkin, managed to rip off a corner.

  “Never,” I said, and stuffed the rest in my mouth and chewed. Claire sidled up to us, placed an arm on Wyatt’s shoulder. I spit the chewed napkin in the garbage.

  “What tastes so bad, Benny?” Claire asked. “That fruit plate in the kitchen? Because I think Ernesto left it out overnight. I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”

  “My, my, it’s the bitter taste of young love,” Wyatt explained. He puckered up and made smooch sounds. “Bless his beating little heart.”