Flatscreen Read online

  “Hi,” I said, walked down to the basement.

  Dan’s basement bedroom was different from mine. Five times as big, filled with toys: 60-inch Pioneer PureVision HD plasma, surround sound, walls of DVDs, CDs, stereo equipment, old-school arcade games, pinball, Ping-Pong, air hockey; all that shit.

  Dan sat on his bed, shirtless in oversized B-ball shorts, bong ripping, relaxed as always. He wasn’t tense like other dealers. Born rich, felt untouchable the same way teenagers think they’re immortal because they’ve yet to feel death’s first twitches. I’d only begun to feel the twitches myself. Maybe, because of the newness of these sensations—chronic throat-tickle, morning chest-tightness, unmitigated afternoon headaches, occasional numbness in left big toe, rib pressure after walking more than a block, smoker’s black mucus, hairy ears, penile post-ejaculation pain, shoulder soreness, bony-butt-despite-chubby-gut-so-sitting-for-long-periods-sucks syndrome, etc.—they felt entirely overwhelming. They say you start dying on the day you’re born, but I think it’s later than that. I think it happens when all the other kids are at college and the toxins in the air have nowhere to replicate but your body.

  Dan was watching Dazed and Confused. I sat on the recliner, let the film evoke false nostalgia for a high school experience I hadn’t had but pretended to remember having. Dan passed me the bong.

  “This is new,” I said. “Indoor?”

  “Yeah. Captain Crunch. You taste that hint of blackberry?”

  Dan was a marijuana connoisseur, like a wine taster, holding the smoke in his mouth, moving it through his teeth to extract the subtle flavorings, finally exhaling through his nose like a cartoon rhino.

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “How much you interested in?”

  “Quarter.”

  Dan tossed me a Ziploc.

  “Word.”

  Handed over two fifties, the remains of my Daddy Guilt Fund stash. I was like the housewives—living off alimony, cooking alone in stainless steel solitude. Not for long. This was my last hundred, though I was planning to sell half to Kahn, earn a little profit. Beyond that, hadn’t considered.

  “Saw Jennifer Estes at temple.”

  “She’s not Jewish.”

  “She parks the cars.”

  “Fuckin’ A. That’s what I love about these high school girls: I get older, they stay the same age.”

  He was quoting from the movie we were presently watching.

  “She’s only a year younger than me.”

  “Hot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “True.”

  Dan had no interest in girls—strange for a dealer. Always thought they dealt so they could hook up with stoner chicks.

  “Why do you sell weed?”

  “Beats working.”

  “Can’t you just get money from your dad? That’s what I do.”

  “There’s no dignity there. What I do is important, man. I perform a service. I contribute to society. I’m great for the economy—all I do is spend money.”

  Walking out I could hear Dan’s dad in the golf room, “Mickelson on the tee…” Wanted to walk in, politely clap; myself, a willing spectator of imagined reality, binoculars in hand, watching that drive fly.

  As I was going up the stairs, someone else was coming down. At first I thought it was Wife Three, but this girl had face-obscuring, slanted bangs, pale/pimpled skin, and a slim frame drowned in wannabe-black-man bagginess. She pushed the hair from her eyes. Alison Ghee. Jeremy Shaw’s girlfriend, the one whose infidelity had supposedly led to his suicide. Another of Dan’s customers. Must have been legions of us: numb-seekers, still in town.

  Alison walked slowly, like it was hard to stay balanced with a body that weighed so little. Thought she hadn’t even noticed me, but after I stepped aside so we wouldn’t collide, she turned her neck, looked back, pointed her eyes right into mine, smiled, closed-mouthed. Imagined our lives moved in perpendicular lines as we wandered Quinosset, passing just once on these carpeted stairs. By the time I realized I should smile back, she’d made it to the bottom, disappeared into Dan’s room.

  Top of the stairs: looked out the window at the backyard pool. Black tarp over it was covered in leaves. Easy to spread my arms, fall through the tarp, drop to concrete. Eight feet isn’t enough, though.

  Wife Three was on the phone.

  “I’m sick of it,” she said. “It’s like I’m married to Tiger fucking Woods.”

  fourteen

  American Dream:

  • Seen all my fantasies enacted in movies, brought to their inevitable conclusions, upended by credits.

  • Never seen a movie about a fuckup kid becoming a star chef, loved, in love, reuniting his divorced parents. That movie doesn’t exist because it’s a stupid idea for a movie.

  • If it did exist, it would be cheesy, romantic, mostly bullshit with a few good jokes and close-ups of food.

  • Or an indie, end all boo-hoo tragic, hero corrupted by wealth and fame, alienating those who supported him, ultimately returned to loneliness.

  • Maybe my problem is foresight.

  • Then there’s the dream where Jennifer is a mermaid. I’m an eel, the sea our home. Her life-buoy breasts float un-clammed, as yet unclaimed.

  • Real dream is everyone’s dream, just as unlikely: intact fam, all mushy, love-struck, looking at photos, recalling old warmth, birthing new warmth, fresh bread from the kitchen odorizing everything with promise.

  fifteen

  Alison Ghee was waiting for me, leaned up against the black gates that separated the Dan Clan from Quinosset’s manicured claws. She puffed a cigarette undramatically: deep, quick inhales, incessant ashing. What I mean is she didn’t look cool: no knock-kneed sexy feigned innocence, or lips-of-lust cigarette-as-phallus ring-blowing. I looked less cool than Alison. I was wearing sweatpants.

  “How’d you beat me out here? Didn’t you just go inside?”

  “I’m everywhere. I’m a ghost.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’ve been standing there spacing out for like fifteen minutes.”

  “I have?”

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Walked up Faber Street, then left on Wilson toward the north side. Houses were older, less ugly, equally expensive. Halloween decorations already up: hanging rubber skeletons strung from second-story verandas, crudely carved pumpkins staring through windows like judging shut-ins.

  “Where are we going?”

  Said it because I was stoned, wanted to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Not because I cared where we were going.

  “Not that I care. I just go with the flow … that kinda guy. Just a flow-goer. That’s me. Eli.”

  Sensed I was about to start talking stupidly, so I shut up.

  A few minutes later, Alison said, “You’re funny.”

  Tried to make a funny face.

  “Now you just look retarded.”

  We arrived.

  Door in the ground led directly to the basement. Knew about these doors, the girls who used them. They were the sassy lovers who didn’t love me. Snuck out at night, walked alone in lamplight, cut through yards, arrived at entrances, let themselves in, let themselves be entered. Most people called these girls sluts.

  Maybe the problem was basements. Me, Dan, Alison, Jeremy, cut off from sunlight, subterranean suffocating. Damp floors when it rains. Ugly boom boom of a broken clothes-dryer. We were humans, not worms. Needed clean air, overheard birdcalls, windows.

  “I live in a basement too,” I said. “We’re bottom-dwellers, I guess. Maybe that’s why we’re such losers.”

  “We’re losers?”

  “Buried alive.”

  “Speak for yourself. And who said I live here, anyway?”

  “Do you live here?”

  “Yeah.”

  No pics of Jeremy, no shrines. I’d expected a mausoleum: framed diary entries, cut-up yearbook photos collaged on cardboard, obituaries, rosary-strung crosses. Wanted the room to feel like mourning, to w
ear its sadness on its paint-chipped walls.

  Clothes on the floor and on the bed. Computer, empty beers, couple old paperbacks. Open guitar case next to the bed.

  “You play?”

  “It’s Jeremy’s.”

  Could picture it: Jeremy: ignored troubadour, gentle songsmith. Quinosset bard unheard beneath the din of SUV engines, MP3s, electric toothbrushes; sensitive Jeremy complete with archived, estate-approved suicide recordings. We could listen, cry, put them on Myspace, make a posthumous documentary, hold candlelight acoustic vigils.

  “He couldn’t play it. But he wanted to. I think. He bought it.”

  Something I would do.

  “I’m teaching myself,” Alison said, picked up the guitar, strummed a chord, a riff, feigned smashing it, put it back in the case, took off her boots, her pants, her striped cotton panties.

  Her skin was thin like rice noodle. Didn’t know stuff like this happened in real life. She covered her breasts with her arms, said, “I’m shy,” called up a playlist.

  “Girls who take their pants off aren’t usually shy.”

  Sounded suave. Something I’d say in my head, not out loud.

  “Have sex with me?” she said, as if I needed convincing. “It’ll feel good.”

  Music was right, thus wrong. An anthem of our adolescence, slow-building, violin-accompanied, electro-accented. Singer’s mumble swelled into full-voice falsetto. It was the song from a movie about lost teenagers doing drugs in basements, fucking (Starfucked, Panther Socks Entertainment, 2000). From the scene in which the downward-spiraling heroine, after shooting heroin, asks a creepy random to violate her, to help her escape the pain of grief.

  Alison faced the wall on her knees. I was expected to make an entrance. Needn’t be a grand entrance. Licked her shoulders, kissed her back. Alison moaned, or fake-moaned, or maybe just coughed. Remembered the herpes rumor. Held her hips, moved in for a closer look. It was dark, and I didn’t have much to compare this with.

  “Are you sniffing my butt?”

  “Isn’t that why they call it doggy-style?” I said, though I didn’t feel like being funny anymore.

  Thinking about Jeremy: blue face, rotting corpse, wood of his coffin eaten by termites, small shards of wood falling into his eye sockets. Wanted something to remind me of life. Wanted to hold Alison’s face against my own, bodies musical, melding, warm breath on my neck, soft kisses against my stubbly chin. Something that wouldn’t be sad.

  Also, didn’t want herpes. Or to spend the next month worrying about possibly having herpes.

  “I was just wondering, um… I know it’s a weird thing to ask … but … um… Do you have…?”

  “I don’t have a condom,” she said.

  Forgot about herpes. Forgot about sadness. Forgot about pretty much everything, including Alison. Thought about Jennifer Estes. Forgot about her too. Alison kept turning her head to look at me. Unreadable eyes. Expression could have been bliss or boredom, compassion or contrition. She’d look at me then look away.

  Stroked her hair with my hand. Hairspray-stiff, smelled like girl. Felt fake, also intentional. Counted the notches on her spine, wondered about untreated scoliosis, measured her width on a single hand.

  Moments later I was thinking about baseball. Alison reached back, squeezed my balls, dug a press-on nail into my thigh. Etc.

  “Stay in me for a minute.”

  Her knees buckled. Fell flat on the bed. I lay on top, spread. Her arms were shorter than mine. Held my wrists with her hands.

  “It’s been a minute,” she said.

  sixteen

  Sexual Experiences:

  • Sixth grade, Brandon Langley’s basement birthday (another basement!), spin the bottle. Raina Baum (no tongue), Abigail Anslem (tongue), Tova McCarthy (Irish Jew! My tongue, not hers).

  • Eighth grade, Matt Lappin’s house. First time I touched a vagina. Also first time I got stoned. I was radiating fierce love. Shelly Peters took my hand, guided me into Matt’s room, guided me under her cutoff denim skirt.

  • Ninth through eleventh grade, celibate (not by choice). J. Lo, AOL chat rooms, etc.

  • Between eleventh and twelfth grade, summer camp, boathouse. Hand job. I was a counselor in training. She was a counselor, well trained.

  • Twelfth grade, top level of Papa Gino’s/Filene’s Basement parking garage, Eva White, Sam Arnold’s minivan, attempted loss of virginity. Performance anxiety.

  • Twelfth grade, April, my bedroom, actual loss of virginity. Eva White again.

  • Twelfth grade, April through May. More sex. Eva. Multiple positions (two).

  • Present day, Alison Ghee’s basement, Alison Ghee. Sex. Doggy-style. (See above.)

  seventeen

  The 55 bus was like Alison: sad-smelling, spit-shined, a bumpy ride. Took me close to the Glent-Kahn–Aldridge’s renovated Victorian. Seymour was temporarily residing in the pool house. “Just until the papers go through,” he’d said on the phone. Didn’t ring the bell. Instead came through the garden as per Kahn’s instructions.

  I’d hoped for a chance to see Sheila again. She’d been on my mind since Whole Foods. But better this way. What would I have said? “I’ve come to sell your ex-husband a small quantity of a Class D substance. Would you be so kind as to hold me against your chest until I can feel the beating of your heart against my own, thus reconfirming my belief in the existence of the human soul”?

  Plus, there was the possibility that Erin, not Sheila, would have answered the door. Surely Benjy had spilled the beans, whispered in the soft light of dusk that his brother was a fuckup, killing himself slowly, immobile, moving only in minuscule steps toward eternity. She would have looked at me with an expression that said, “We get to enjoy grown-up things like dry cleaning and group social life, while you, poor boy, are locked away in paralyzed infancy by your drugs, your inadequate hygiene, and your idle, treacherous heart.”

  Knocked on the door of the pool house as I entered. Kahn reclined in a La-Z-Boy, eyes closed, head bopping to horns and upright bass. Kahn rhythmically tapped the coffee table in response to my arrival, as if we were part of the jam session, riffing off each other.

  “Seymour,” I said.

  “Charlie Mingus,” he replied, eyes still closed.

  Small room, sparsely decorated. Wood and Nail poster hung on the wall. Dinged-up Golden Globe in the corner. Half-drunk bottle of scotch, vase of dead flowers on the coffee table, 40-inch Sony Bravia LCD. Only pieces of furniture were the bed, the La-Z-Boy, and Kahn’s wheelchair. Opted for the wheelchair, immediately rolled backward, knocking over the vase, spilling water on the floor. Kahn opened his eyes.

  “Send me dead flowers by the mail,” he half-said, half-sang.

  “Mick Jagger.”

  “Very good. Now clean that fucking water up.”

  Got a towel from the bathroom. Kahn refilled his giant crystal goblet.

  “I see you started the party without me,” I said.

  “Kid, I started this party before you were born. This is the tail end, my friend. The dawn is coming soon. Twilight is a sad and beautiful time. I once held a woman in my arms the way the moon holds light, refracting her image for the world to enjoy. Now I can’t get a job. Now the drugs have no colors, only inertia. The women wear sunglasses to cover their eyes. You see what I’m getting at? The ghost of a party.”

  Was it true I’d missed the party? I’d heard a professor on NPR’s On Point talking decline of the empire. Romans and Greeks had their fun, look what happened. This was it for us: reality TV, virtual reality, planes into buildings.

  “So what now?”

  “Now you roll us a joint, of course.”

  Rolled the illest joint I could manage. Kahn handed me my own giant crystal goblet.

  “Listen to this,” he said, like I had another option.

  “Chaos. That’s what that sound is. Fire and sandpaper, harsh breath, an old cargo train. Mingus understood. Listen to those notes. We’re just toys of the go
ds. We’re all toys.”

  His speaking voice—like last time—was mannered, modulated, a performed monologue, as if always onstage, his last great act, modern-day King Lear (BBC, 1983) amid his crumbling castle. I was his remaining audience. He wanted to convince me, seduce me the way he knew how to seduce, by projecting his thunder-low baritone over the music; with the inherent jazz in his slow-heavy grin, his incongruously frantic hand gestures, the mock-lyric toughness of his carefully prepared script.

  “What now is we sit still and let them have their way with us. What now is enjoying the calm that comes with epistemological impotence. Grabbing each other by the lapels, staring into each other’s eyes. You up for it?”

  “You’re buying my mother’s house,” I said. “That’s not sitting still.”

  “I couldn’t not buy it if I tried.”

  “Yes, you could. Just don’t sign the papers.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “We’re going to have to move to a condo or something.”

  “If I didn’t buy it, someone else would.”

  “There haven’t been any offers.”

  The music swirled, turned, simmered into piano-only plunking with occasional human groans. Sipped scotch, single malt, not too peaty, notes of clove. I was used to cheap beer, store-brand vodka.

  “This is good stuff.”

  “We’re sitting in a pool house.”

  “I don’t think the weather’s right for sitting by the pool.”

  “Don’t you understand? My ex-wife is a carpet-muncher. She treats me like an invalid. Always has … even before this.”

  Kahn lifted his left leg with his arms, dropped it like a weight on an unsuspecting ant.

  “She seems like a lovely woman,” I replied, stoned out of my gourd, dreaming of Sheila’s Pilates-hardened abs.

  “I used to live in the house. Not this house, but it was still a house.”

  “My brother’s boning your daughter.”

  “At least someone’s fucking someone.”

  “I just got laid.”

  “What do you want? A cookie?”