Flatscreen Read online

“Be a doll and shake around a bit.”

  Beth looked at the stereo, gave a sour face.

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “You could at least put on something I could dance to.”

  “This is dance music. You just got to feel that swing, baby.”

  Beth had no rhythm, but she tried. Stood on my mom’s coffee table, shook her hips, tossed her hair, shoved her breasts in our faces. Kahn handed me a couple pills I could tell weren’t Oxy.

  “Pop these.”

  Done.

  “What were those?”

  “The big V.”

  “Valium?”

  “Viagra. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

  He said, “Give the kid a dance, would ya?” and Beth straddled me so my face was level with her crotch.

  Kahn watched. Got the sense from the way he met my eyes that Beth was a proxy for Kahn. That this was acting. That Kahn would have humped me himself, if I’d let him. I didn’t mind. Part of me wanted to embrace his broken body, lick his wounds, let his roaming hands handle my maiden skin, touch me in the tender places, the sections serially ignored. I wanted to feel loved like that, and for him to feel loved. Like an older tainted lover you only want to fuck metaphorically, out of respect, partly out of pity.

  Beth leaned over, brushed her chin against my shoulder. Big round nipples, pink, dry. Vintage-porn-style heavy knockers, the nipples like weights on some ticktock pendulum making me dizzy with rhythmic sway. Beth cupped her D cups, cooed, aimed them at my open mouth. Nipple rubbed against my stubble.

  “Are you, like, his son or something?”

  Ran a hand up my shirt, fingered my chest hair.

  “Just a friend.”

  “So are you friends with Jennifer or something?”

  “Not really.”

  “She’s a cool girl.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This guy pays me more than anyone.”

  Kahn rubbed the top of his exposed cock with his palm, hard and fast, like he was sanding some wood (Wood and Nail, Klauset Films, 1991).

  “I don’t even always have to fuck him,” Beth whispered. “I think he’s just lonely. Gives me free drugs too.”

  “I thought you were a stripper?”

  “Whatever gets me high.”

  “Me too.”

  Beth stuck a hand down my pants.

  “You don’t…”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, removed her hand. “Maybe we can just be friends.”

  “I don’t need saving, if that’s what you’re into.”

  “Maybe I’m the one who needs saving.”

  “I’m certified in CPR. I used to be a lifeguard.”

  “I’m a good cook.”

  “I don’t date clients.”

  “Good girl,” Kahn said. “Now would you be so kind as to make your way toward me, darling.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Sucked up the last line of Oxy, said, “I’ll trade you some coke for Oxy?”

  “Just take a few,” Kahn said, handed me the bottle.

  Beth got on her knees, etc. Kahn closed his eyes.

  “I should go.”

  Beth tried to say something, but her mouth was full.

  “What?”

  Removed Kahn’s penis from her mouth.

  “Don’t stop,” Kahn said.

  “I’ll tell Jennifer you say hi,” Beth said, absentmindedly rolled Kahn’s foreskin up over the head.

  “You’re not circumcised?”

  “Barbaric ritual.”

  “But you’re a Jew.”

  “When it’s convenient.”

  “I keep telling him to get it snipped. It would look so much nicer.”

  “There’s only one rabbi I let touch my dick, and he died in ’78.”

  “They’re called mohels, guys who do the circumcision.”

  “That’s Hebrew for sadist.”

  Beth played with his foreskin, folding it back and forth as his penis became flaccid.

  “My hot dog’s getting soggy.”

  “That’s because it’s not kosher,” I said. No laughs. Beth resumed the BJ.

  When I got outside, it was snowing.

  fifteen

  Hearing:

  • When I was ten, my parents took me to a specialist to get my hearing tested. Worried I was going deaf because I never paid attention to anything anyone said. Doctor took me into a dark room, gave me headphones. I listened to a series of beeps, raised one finger each time I heard one. Other tests too. Results were suspiciously conclusive. Nothing wrong with my hearing whatsoever.

  sixteen

  Things get blurry. Remember leaving Kahn’s, hobbling out the door into the flurry like an old hobo looking for a shelter he knows is just around the corner, if only he can find it (The Last DeMille of New Haven, Sunshine Entertainment, 1961). Pictured Dad flicking on his fireplace with a remote control. Mom on a plane, sitting next to some fatty, scrunched low in her seat to become invisible, buying ten magazines, not reading any. Benjy’s eyes that studied me in a way I was afraid to study myself: pale skin, pubey head-curls, inflated gut, brown stains on my teeth. Alison Ghee, somewhere in this town, head spinning like mine, body tilting, reaching. Jeremy Shaw wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, just make it stop. His dad in that basement, smelling the body long after it’s gone, long after he’s left the basement.

  Stumbled through the street, still bathrobed, trying to contain the Viagra-induced erection that had begun to emerge in my pants. Thought about high school, how I stood off to the side, watched the others dance that particular American dance, steps learned from TV, eighties movies. Bad boys, good girls, wrong side of tracks, part-time job, hand up shirt, beneath bleachers, pierced ear, kissing in rain. Played my own role beautifully. So beautifully I forgot it was a role. Got high in the corner, woods, car. Showed up to class with bloodshot eyes, not caring who knew. They all knew, didn’t care. Not even my parents. Not even myself. I had headphones on. Always wore headphones.

  Walked to the high school, just to see what it looked like as the first snow fell. Field was mine if I wanted it. Fans cheered, clock ticked down. Dad waved from the stands. Stepped back in the pocket, couldn’t find an open receiver, took to the open field, twisting and tumbling past the opposing defense. Danced beneath goalposts.

  I lay down in the end zone, watched the snow hover and slowly fall, particles clinging to my body like dust accumulating on a flatscreen. Shut my eyes.

  There was a woman—Beth Cahill’s body, my mother’s face—removing a bathrobe, kneeling beside me, gently kissing my neck. You are a stripper but you are also my mother. I cannot have sex with you. I am not your mother, she said. Face morphed into Mrs. Sacks’s. Took off the robe, stuck her hand down my pants. You are not my mother, but you are still a mother. Actually, I am your mother, she said, and I realized it was Sheila Glent-Kahn. I was sucking milk from her nipple. Then she got on top, slowly rode me. I thought you were a lesbian, and she said, I am nothing but a figment of your thoughts. Alison was sucking my toe, singing a nursery rhyme about blackbirds. I was her mother. Then I heard Jennifer Estes speak softly. Not just thought I heard, knew I heard. “I know him,” she said. “My mother said she’d take him,” and I thought, I have so many mothers, I was inside them all, heart beating slower than theirs, in counterpoint, steady, until they cut that cord, we became separate songs. Felt myself lifted in the air, Sheila still on top of me, her sweat dripping, soaking my chest, football crowd cheering us on. When I woke up, I was on a strange couch.

  seventeen

  Places My Father Might Have Gone During Those Missing Months from 1975 to 1976:

  • Florida orange grove where he worked the fields, ripe as the oranges themselves, smiling, making nighttime love to young Cubana girl, Linda, large-eyed, soft-spoken, dressed in thin calico cotton, perfumed by the same fruit she diligently picks.

  • Hitchhiking across America, soundtracked by Paul Simon,
slim as a vegan hippie, sexually prowling, perhaps contemplating an adventure in homosexuality.

  • Los Angeles with his almost movie-star looks. He was an extra in four films, once got a speaking role. “Loaf of bread,” his only line, no agent, no bleach-toothed Tennessee transplant waitress to give him the time of day, no talent for speaking, just staring into the distance with angry eyebrows.

  eighteen

  The couch was old; duct tape covered a couple holes. Recognized the room, couldn’t place it. Wooden yellow bookshelf, some children’s books, Bible, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, two medical texts. On the floor: Sony PlayStation, games, DVDs. TV also Sony, not a flatscreen, but a nice one, LCD, high-def compatible, built-in DVD, VCR, couple years old at most. Above it hung a wooden cross.

  Spanish came from the next room. Roused myself and entered. Jennifer Estes and Dan’s maid drank coffee at a kitchen table. Jennifer in an EMT jumpsuit. Dan’s maid in a maid outfit, not the sexy French kind, but what actual maids wear: oversized tee shirt, undersized spandex, sneakers. Felt like someone was sticking kabob skewers through one ear, pulling them out the other.

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You’re an idiot,” Jennifer said.

  “I know.”

  Dan’s maid poured coffee. Smell made me nauseous. Last thing I remembered was Jennifer’s soft touch against my body.

  “Did you and me?”

  Jennifer smacked me.

  “Do you remember anything?”

  “No. Was I good?”

  “What? No, we didn’t … we didn’t do that. Far from it. You were on the field when the game started. Passed out in the end zone.”

  “What?”

  “I work the games as an EMT. You’re lucky my mom was there. They were going to arrest you. They let her take you into her custody after I made sure you weren’t going to die.”

  “What the fuck?”

  Dan’s maid was leaning against the stove, shoulders hunched, checking me out.

  “Ropa vieja,” the woman—who was also Jennifer’s mother—said.

  Jennifer looked puzzled.

  “Inside joke,” I said, lifted my coffee off the table, put it back down. Hands shaky—afraid I might spill. But I liked the feeling of steam in my face. Instead of lifting, thought it would be easier to lean my head over the coffee. When I tried I lost my balance, fell off the chair, onto the floor. Throat hurt. Overcome by an overwhelming desire to brush my teeth.

  “Easy there,” Jennifer said, too late.

  “What was I doing on the field?”

  “You tell us, Casanova. It looked like you were making sweet love to the air.”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t have a…”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “The Viagra.”

  “What Viagra?”

  “Kahn’s Viagra.”

  “Who’s Kahn?”

  “The guy who gave me the Viagra.”

  “You’re too young for Viagra,” Mrs. Estes said.

  “I know. I thought it was Valium.”

  “That’s not good for you, either,” Mrs. Estes said.

  “From the way you slept, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d taken some of that as well. The marching band didn’t even wake you up,” Jennifer said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, still on the floor. Wanted to lay my head down, leave it there for years, drift into dreams, listen to the two of them speak Spanish, understanding nothing but rhythm of mother/daughter patter. Jennifer would come home pregnant one day. They’d be happy, not sad; freaked out, but happy. House would fill with cribs, toys, slight smells of vomit, urine. Jennifer’s body would grow round; she’d look good; she’d be a nurse, a mother. These things would come to define her. When she came home at night she’d be tired, but would feel that definition, same way we feel our arms and legs, same way she would have felt that baby growing inside her. Maybe she had a guy there. TV would suck them in. Fall asleep on the couch. In the morning an alarm would go off. I’d still be there, a fixture on the kitchen floor, never leaving, just listening.

  “I have to go to work,” Mrs. Estes said.

  “Isn’t it Thanksgiving?”

  “Someone has to make the turkey. You think that woman knows how to use an oven?”

  Mrs. Estes put on her coat.

  “Goodbye,” I said. “You are my savior.”

  “Get up off the floor. I’ll show you a savior,” she said, exited.

  “What time is it anyway?” I asked Jennifer.

  “Little after one.”

  “How am I going to get home?”

  “Bus?”

  “Can’t afford it.”

  Opened my wallet to prove the point. All manner of things fell out, none of them money. Picked ripped receipts and old concert tickets from the floor.

  “Guess I’ll drive you. You live by the Orchard, right?”

  “We moved.”

  Hoping that would explain everything, how I ended up at this station—bathrobed, strung out, Viagra-fied.

  “I hope that explains my current behavior.”

  “Why would it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You seemed pretty fucked up before you moved.”

  “That’s true.”

  “That was a weird message you sent me.”

  “I know.”

  “I felt bad for you.”

  “Do you still? I’m trying to get my shit together.”

  Rolled her eyes.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Yeah.”

  Drove home. Snow had dissolved, dampened the leftover leaves. Everything almost brown.

  “What’s the deal with Alison Ghee?” I said.

  “She’s a ghost.”

  “I know. She told me.”

  “That’s because you’re a ghost too,” Jennifer said.

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” I said.

  When we got to my condo, I said, “Thank you.”

  She didn’t say anything, not “Don’t mention it,” or “No sweat,” or “You’re welcome,” or “Call me when you clean up your act and we can culminate our twenties together, tangled in the dainty web of adult romance.”

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” I said.

  “Please take care of yourself,” she said.

  Decided to show my gratitude by baking Jennifer a pie. All we had were frozen blueberries, but I made do, thawing in the sink, working my hands through the dough, kneading out a nuanced, lightly sugared crust that would soften at her bite, spread gooey love to her taste buds.

  Benjy showed up, asked why I wasn’t dressed, went to wait downstairs. Clicked his cell shut when I got in the car. Wore the same agitated, nose-scrunched expression I’d seen a couple nights ago when we’d gone to get ice cream.

  “Erin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s she?”

  “Thanksgiving.”

  “I got that. I mean, literally, where?”

  “Our old house.”

  “You invite her to Dad’s?”

  Wondered if Benjy needed Dad to approve of his life even though he didn’t approve of Dad’s.

  No answer from Benjy.

  “Can we drop off this pie?”

  “No. We’re late.”

  Looked out the window, tapped my feet. Benjy groaned. Pie in the backseat cooled while another man sidled up to Jennifer at home, warmed her. But Benjy was in worse shape than I was. He too needed pie.

  “Dude,” I said. “Big brother.”

  Tried to hang an arm around his slim shoulders, comfort him. Or at least to share misery, be companions in the drama of our fucked fam. But all I did was knock his hand from the wheel, causing the car to briefly swerve into oncoming traffic before Benjy instinctively fixed the situation, reeled us back from the precipice of death as he always did: with hard-won accuracy, ill humor, and lingering anger at his little bro.

  “I was just…” I said.

  Benjy said, “You were what?”


  Must have been how he’d felt all these years when I’d rejected his futile affections, turned a deaf ear on the warmth beneath his cold concerns. Because truth is he could understand my predicament about as much as I understood his. We’d grown jaded in the same house, under the same rules, betrayed by the same slutty dad. But our insides were opposites, DNA mysteriously unmatched, problems unexplainable. Our discordant fraternity got to the root of the real human problem: the inability to express headspace content to one another, emerge empathetic, alleviated.

  Not sure what upset him so—the fact of our immigration into Elm Condos? It was deeper than that. Maybe related to some Erin experience I didn’t understand, some force within the nature of relationships, and particularly his, that I would never understand, even if Benjy explained it in detail, shed public tears, recounted with stunning verisimilitude the exact words, gestures, and feelings they’d exchanged.

  Then Benjy surprised me.

  “You got any pot?”

  “Since when do you smoke pot?”

  “I don’t. But these things can be pretty unbearable sober.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you that for years.”

  “You were right,” he said, like an admission of lifelong failure to attack the problem correctly. As if now he suddenly saw that we were the same, hopeless. That the only solution was to get high, giggle. Only solution: give up. Wanted to shout no, beg him to take it back, to restore confidence to the one person in my life who’d ever done anything right, the one person who gave me hope about myself, gave me someone to aspire to in my own way—less dickish than Benjy, but equally amour-skilled, equally esteemed in society’s eyes (our mother’s eyes, our father’s eyes). Felt like pleading, “I’m the one that’s wrong, I’m the fuckup in this family, no room for you, no space for two sniffling whiners—you keep rocking, let your momentum carry you over this spiky hurdle clear to the other side!”

  Benjy looked at the clock, back at the road.

  “We’re late.”

  Stopped at Exxon to pee. Stood in line five minutes, got impatient, trekked back to the car with coffee.

  “Not quite weed,” I said. “But caffeine is still a drug.”

  A few minutes later, out of nowhere, Benjy asked if I’d ever fucked a woman.