JOHN. JOHN. JOHN. THIS GUY CAN’T HEAR A FRIGGIN THING.
AUGUST 11, 2022
Phil, thanks a lot for inviting me down here. Means a lot to me. You’ve been taking great care of Stevie, he’s a great kid and he deserves it. I’m glad I can buy you a beer and say I appreciate it.
Thanks Tito. It’s not always easy but I love the kid, I do.
I’m sure it’s not easy. The kid’s got an edge. Especially lately, Christ. I don’t see him for three months, then he’s as friendly as could be, then I blink and the kid’s running outta my Memorial Day cookout like Usain Bolt. Since then I barely see him, any time I do he’s tougher than nails. One of the times he was grey, I don’t know what’s going on. Mary tells me he made you put that wallpaper up? Same color as the paint, no less. Making his grandparents wallpaper a perfectly good room for him. Christ.
That was all Mary. She put that up. She’s inside, I’m outside.
Well, that makes sense, the amount of trinkets you got in that house. I said, Phil just had to get a poster of hummingbirds kissing on the wall, huh? Phil grunted. Come on, I’m bustin your balls, relax. I thought that’s all you guys did down here.
Hey guy, let me get four Budweisers here. Thank you. How longs this guy been here?
God, John? Twenty years, probably.
Jeez, looks like two hundred. I bet if I asked for a Long Island iced tea, he’d be clueless. I love that, I really do. Keep it simple. Some of the shit Mel orders, I’m hiding my face. Sending these bartenders to friggin Guantanamo. Stevie’s the same way but with sandwiches, I’ve never seen anything like it. Asking the guy what region the tomatoes came from. At the Hibachi restaurant no less. Kid ordered a sandwich at the Hibachi restaurant and asked about the tomatoes. Like, what?
Hey, thanks. Tito passed the beers out to Phil and his two friends. Joe, you’re all quiet down there, bub. Everything good? Ugh, Joe said. The whole thing’s rotten.
This Legion, Tito asked. Joe said nothing. This town? This state? This country? Boy, have a few more drinks, will ya? You guys are tighter than a bug’s asshole. What’s your name, pal? That’s Mike. Mike, you good, bub? Alright, real stoic guys, I get it. I better shut my mouth, I’m yapping like a bird I guess.
They drank their beers and watched the eighteen inch TV above the bar. A hunter was stalking a deer in a cold forest, somewhere in America. Ten point buck, Mike said. Shoot it, Joe said. The hunter crept closer, the deer easily in range. You got it in your sights, shoot it.
This fucker really looks like Elmer Fudd, don’t he, Tito said. One of them shushed him.
The hunter whispered to the camera. He’s so close I can smell him. Just trying to get a good look here. He leveled the gun, took another step, leveled it again. SHOOT THE FUCKING THING.
This guy’s point blank, I think his vision’s shot, Tito said. Shhhh.
Almost there, the hunter said. SHOOT IT, GODDAMNIT. SHOOT IT. The hunter leveled his rifle a final time, and the show cut to commercial with the sound of the gun.
Jesus fucking Christ. This is just bullshit. The shit they put on TV.
This is what you assholes get for watching hunting, Phil said. Every year they try to get me to go. Five AM, sitting in a plywood coffin. Christ.
I’m with ya, Phil, Tito said. Not for me. I think I’d break a tree stand, fall right through the bottom. Besides, I don’t know if I could do it. Watching those dumb beautiful bastards licking a salt lick, then just BAM! That’s tough for me. I can barely sleep at night knowing I ripped all those crabs apart, I can’t imagine if I made a deer scream in agony. Fuck.
You get used to it, Mike said. Yeah, but is that a good thing? Maybe you were a gregarious type guy before all the hunting. Hey, guy, let me get another? Four more, please. They all tipped their heads. Hey, coming from you guys, that means a lot.
They got the next ones and cracked them open. This guy lets you do that? What a guy. John, I love this guy. Half the fun is cracking it open, ya know? Hate someone else opening my beer. Nanny state bullcrap.
Someone changed the channel, but none of them reacted. Hey, what? Don’t you wanna know what happened? He got it or he didn’t, Joe said. Very zen, very zen, Tito said. They sank into silence again. Tito sipped his beer, looked at the grain of the wood of the bar. The silence felt good, when you settled into it.
Tito, I invited you down here for a reason. I gotta tell you something. OK? I caught Chet in Stevie’s room the other day. Doing what? He was rummaging around in the drawers. Where was Stevie? He was in the city for the day. Does Stevie know? I haven’t told him. He’s the type to have a security camera in his room, but if he knows, he hasn’t let on.
What a friggin weasel my son is, Christ almighty. I’m gonna read him the riot act. I appreciate you letting me know, Phil. I’m on a daily rollercoaster with this kid, I really am. Every day he impresses me with how smart or stupid he is. You never know what’s coming, he’s all over the place. You know I got the kid an internship, down at the dealership? Yut. I get the kid a plum internship and he fucks it up, right away. They wanted to make him a plaque, Phil. A plaque of infamy, cause of the shit he was typing. You ever hear of Brazzers? Phil shook his head. Good, good. You’re better off that way, it’s not worth knowing, that’s all you need to know. Anyway, they almost make him this plaque, every time I walked in the breakroom people would start laughing. I talk to the kid, get him straightened out, he ends up doing some really great work. Makes the best spreadsheet any of us have ever seen. I start getting good feelings, thinking maybe we’re going places. Then last week he goes to submit his timecard, for the final week of his internship no less, and for country the friggin dope puts ‘Prefer Not to Disclose’. His dickhead supervisor didn’t notice and approved it. Ah, it was pandemonium. It went all the way up the chain of command. People were really talking, IRS, tax fraud, outlandish crap. Whole offices of businessmen in Tokyo were sweating through their clothes. I asked the kid, what, you hit the wrong button? He goes, I’m going off the grid, kid. I coulda killed him. He’s never going anywhere. He’s like a quarterback who throws a great touchdown once in a while and you think he’s finally putting it all together. Very next play, throws it straight to the linebacker, like he’s got money on the game. I think I’ll just expect nothing and maybe I’ll be surprised someday.
He’s no worse than the rest of them, Phil said. A little worse than Stevie, but the same as everyone else. God, they all drive me nuts.
Hey John? Yep, Tito said. I don’t even gotta say my order, this guy is a saint. I love it here. Hey Phil, thanks again. Now, what should I do about this snooping around business? I wanna lay into Chet, but I don’t want to put Stevie in a bad spot.
I dunno. He looked guilty as sin, but I can’t imagine what he’d be doing in there. They’re basically brothers, aren’t they? Yeah, Tito said. I thought so.
*
Stevie looked through his desk drawers a dozen times, pushing receipts, supplements, and constellations of coins back and forth. He looked in his dresser, under his bed, behind all the furniture. He peered into the vents and stuck his hand in as far as it would go. The furry bodies of the spiders did not bother him, the stakes were existential. It didn’t matter what anyone else would think, it mattered principally to him.
He checked the other bedrooms, the bathrooms, the closets. Under the sinks, downstairs, through the kitchen cabinets. Out on the back deck, inside the grill, under the back deck, where the skeletons of lawn chairs laid dead. An hour passed, then another. Forever wasn’t too long to spend. It was sacred to him, it had given him salvation. It did what no one else could, not his grandparents, not his girlfriends, not his cousins.
He doubled back to his room, then to the other bedrooms and bathrooms. In Mary’s vanity, in the nightstands, behind the toilets. Inside all the pillowcases, in the toilet tank, in the attic. He floated from room to room forever until the Silverado finally pulled into the driveway, almost swiping the mailbox. The search would have to be suspended again, for the third straight day. Hope was fading. They were most likely gone. His secret had been discovered, and his grandparents were too modest to confront him. They would never say a word. Instead, they’d make their own secrets, hide things from him where he could never find them.
Before Phil got out of the truck, Stevie expelled some of the terror from his body.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
*
Emma clung to him but Chet was looking out, away from her, towards the other end of the room. Baby, look at me. Why I am always the big spoon? I’m so walled off over here.
I told you, Chet said. I just like being the little spoon. Support me baby.
I know, I know, it’s cute. Sometimes it’s annoying but it is cute. She rubbed his back with her nails. God, you are so hot, Chet. You make me feel so alive. Can you eat me out? I love the way you do it. I’ll do whatever you want once I come. Whatever you want.
The kid’s been a pussy monster since day one, but I can’t tonight. I’m intermittent fasting. What? Intermittent fasting, it’s like when you only eat in a certain window of time. OK? So right now, it’s outside my window. It’s like, what, 7:30? Yeah, I closed my window at 6.
But, it’s like – Chet, it’s not like you’re actually eating something, it’s just like, an expression.
Yeah, but Hubermans says if you even think about eating, it stimulates your stomach to excrete acid – so it ruins the whole thing.
OK, can you lick me down there. Sorry, makes me think of ice cream. Oh my god.
Babe, stop. I’m serious. Don’t fucking look at me like that. My mind keeps going to food, I can’t do it. 12 PM tomorrow, I’m eating that pussy like a Subway footlong, on god. Straight GAGGING on that clit.
You are so fucking lame sometimes, Chet. I hate you. She rolled towards the wall theatrically and took the blanket with her.
I’m sorry, Chet said, but there wasn’t any sorriness in his voice and he didn’t feel sorry either. He thought about asking to smash instead but his heart wasn’t into it. The computer was there, the tombstone of history, the obelisk of the future. Its guts were etched with his hopes and dreams.
He slunk over and caressed the keys and the screen lit up and smiled. He was just as addicted as he accused Timmy of being. It was okay to admit when you were in the mood he was in. He was more honest than most people. Than some people. He saw things they didn’t. The pattern of history written visible against the blank spaces. It was all very interesting, even when it wasn’t. People led their little lives and they had no idea about the power coursing through him. They had no idea how alive he really was. He had to put this power into something special, he just didn’t know what yet. He knew it would come, but sometimes it felt tough, or unlikely.
He listened to Going Dudley after he detoxed from the pens and it was obvious he’d gone too dudley. The six flavors of death was like a carton of pistachio mint cotton candy lemon chocolate chip green tea ice cream. Six strong voices just shouting against each other. It was a ratking of impulse, too tangled to make coherent.
He didn’t know where he was going. Life was hard, without the pens. Reality felt too close to the surface. He got the sensation that it was all slipping away, it was receding from him, and nothing could be done, there was nothing anyone can do. They pumped you full of whatever it was at the factory and you bloomed like a flower. Then the petals wilted slowly. It made him want to do everything while he did nothing.
He checked Stevie’s pages again. It was all he could think about. It’d been three months since he was first poisoned by the indica blunt, a month since their aborted truce, and three days since he’d searched Stevie’s room, looking for opposition research. The goldmine drawer held many strange and curious things, but he wasn’t sure what they meant yet. Notes scribbled in Stevie’s hieroglyphic handwriting, dates written and circled. A pillbottle of Advil, but the pills weren’t Advil. He didn’t know what they were.
He poured one out onto his palm and looked at it again. PROSCAR was stamped in capital letters on one side. He searched that on Google and scrolled through the results.
Kid, what? For an enlarged prostate? Kid’s going too hard with the assplay? Damnnnnnnnn, kid. Stevie Teamsters going DUDLEY on that prostate. Hitting that shit like a speed bag, going Tyson kid. Let’s hope it’s the Teamsters, damnnnn.
Chet, come back. I miss you.
Not now, baby. In a few minutes. I’m plotting, kid.