It Feels So Good When I Stop Joe Pernice

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October 1996

“I HAVE CANCER from working with boat glue. Lung cancer,” James said, as if telling me he liked toast. Wheat toast. Just like that, thoughts of my troubles with Jocelyn receded.

“Jesus Christ, James, are you shitting me?” I asked, flicking my smoke to the sandy pavement, inches from the outer reaches of his yellow lawn. I thought, That’s it. I’m quitting.

“I wish I was, my friend. I wish I was.” He soothed his temples with the tips of his fingers.

“That’s horrible. Does my sister know?”

“I haven’t figured out how I’m going to tell her.”

“Fuck me.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I should have taken better care of myself when I was young.”

“But you’re only thirty-eight, for chrissake.”

I was thirteen years younger than James, but he could have easily pounded the living shit out of me. He was six feet two and looked like an off-brand version of the guy on the Brawny paper towel package. When he was on the upside of a sneeze, his lungs swelled like those of a whale preparing to dive. He fixed boats for a living. His arms were strung with an overkill of lean muscle. It was embarrassing.

“Yeah, well, anyway, I should have taken better care of myself. Take my advice”—he motioned with his chin toward the smoldering butt. A Century 21 For Sale sign squeaked in the breeze—“I always thought I’d have more time, you know? Now they tell me I’ll be lucky to make forty.” He leaned, defeated, against the equally terminal baby-blue Chevy Suburban with boat in tow. Both vehicles were still registered in my sister’s name.

“What are you telling me here? I mean, are you like ...?” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. He touched my shoulder, and it moved me that he, in his condition, was trying to comfort me.

“Am I what, dying?”

I nodded.

He inhaled deeply for strength. “Nah, I’m just fucking with you.” He picked up my smoke and resuscitated it. “Come on. Give me a hand covering this prick.”

I didn’t need the mind-fuck, but I did need a place to stay; somewhere I wouldn’t have to answer a lot of questions while I got my shit in a pile. If I had to be around someone, James was better than most. He’d rather fake cancer for a laugh than pick your brain.

“Get on the starboard side,” he barked.

“Which side is that?”

“The one opposite me.” A good chunk of his bust stuck out above the trailer-mounted boat. He unfolded a plastic tarp. “Hey, you hear the one about the faggot ensign that got busted down to seaman?”

“Yes.”

“He got caught swabbing a rear admiral’s poop deck. Get it?”

I nodded. With my smoke still burning in the crotch of his fingers, my sister’s soon-to-be ex-husband pointed at me and said, “Seriously, the best advice I can give you is this: Die at the curb.”

“Isn’t that a Wesley Snipes movie?”

“If it isn’t, it should be.” He draped the tarp over the Switchcraft, showing as much respect for it as a living soldier would for a dead comrade. A sharp gust blew in from Opal Cove and passed through my hair, making me feel bald. James held down the billowing blue plastic. “Trust me,” he said. “If you’re walking alone along Tre mont Street at two in the morning, and a car pulls up, and some dirtbag tells you to get in or he’s going to shoot, well, fuck that noise. Tell him to shoot. If he had a gun, he would have been wagging it in your face already.”

“Hmm,” I said, trying to prompt the least passionate response from him. I wanted for us to finish covering the boat and for him to be on his way. I held a wily corner while he laced a nylon cord through aluminum eyelets that had been dulled by oxidation.

James and my sister Pamela were splitting custody of their only kid, an eighteen-month-old named Roy. I had already seen Roy make the same determined face James was making just then as we winterized the boat he had deluded himself into thinking he could afford.

“And if by some friggin’ miracle he does have a gun, you’re better off dying at the curb.” James stopped lacing and pointed an X-Acto knife at me. “Because you know that fucker has something worse in mind for you.” He looked into the middle distance and thought on it. “Some sick Viet Cong shit like breaking a glass rod in your cock or stuffing a yard of barbed wire up your ass.” He made an upwardly thrusting motion with his hairy, balled-up hand. The place where his wedding band had been for six years was still lighter than the rest of him. I had hardly been in direct sunlight in the three days since Jocelyn and I got married.

“You want to be found like that, naked, stuffed in a fifty-gallon chemical drum in a storage shed in Revere? How do you think that would go over with Carl and Lucy?”

“Not so good.”

“Not so good? They’d be friggin’ crushed. Your mother would slit her own throat to kill the pain. And Carl? Well, shit, he’d let her.”

Since those were my parents he was talking about, I started to gather up a comeback, but I just didn’t have the energy to get into it with him.

James and I were never exactly friends. He was generally a decent guy. He’d jump in the icy river without thinking and save the drowning truck driver. But, fuck me, if you didn’t agree with him when it came to what was what, he’d go on one of his correction trips and figuratively step on your throat until you declared yourself saved.

I guess I can understand on one level why Pamela was attracted to James. Older guy. Independent. Something to say—right or wrong—about everything. Physically imposing. Good father specimen. All Pamela wanted to be was a mother. She said so a number of times; said so with surety and—what seemed to me to be—a lack of ebullience. It was as if she’d said, “You know what? I want to take a cruise.” I’m not sure why, but it was embarrassing for me to hear her talk about wanting to be a mother. I told her there were plenty of better things she could do with her life than be just a mother.

Pamela had barely enough gas in the tank to get through two years at Massasoitt Community College. Since the time she was twenty, she worked as an administrative assistant for the Town of Mashpee. Before she got mixed up with James, she dated electricians or guys who drove snowplows for the town. She was four years older than me, and for most of my life she looked out for me. When I got accepted to a “real” college, I started trying to treat her like I was the older one.

I faked a loud shiver, hoping it would jar James onto a topic with less spice. It was late October on Cape Cod, and I was underdressed. A shiver was easy to come by.

As he executed the moves of a complex, nautically themed knot, James said, “That’s my real advice to you. Die. At. Thee. Curb.”

I started longingly squeezing one of the boat’s white vinyl headrests. As it slowly sprang back to its full size, I replayed one of the many dry-run breakups between Jocelyn and me.

I had gone down to New York to visit her for the weekend. Sunday was Father’s Day. The holiday was like a giant elephant turd in the room. Even dead, her old man was remarkably good at being a tyrant. She never got the chance to tell him off the way she had no problem telling me off.

We finally scraped ourselves from bed late on Saturday afternoon. We took the F train from Brooklyn uptown to Second Avenue and had lunch at B&H Dairy. A giant fan drove a vortex of warm air into the room, overwhelming the tiny space. Our napkins kept flying off the counter. The meal started out tenderly enough. We were debating which salad was better, whitefish or tuna. Before Jocelyn was able to convince me that tuna was where it’s at, she ditched the argument altogether. She said she was just as big a hypocritical asshole as me for eating what was once another living thing. I brought up corn, and wasn’t that a living thing? She said she didn’t feel great about killing anything—plant or animal—for food. I told her to give me a fucking break. Things got meaner and more personal very quickly.

Just because all sorts of shit happens all the time in New York doesn’t mean people don’t like seeing it when it does. A couple fighting in a restaurant is almost as entertaining as a medical emergency or a fire.

I kept telling Jocelyn to keep her voice down. She told me to grow up. She said people in “adult” relationships yell, and sometimes the yelling takes place in public. I told her to lighten up for once. She slammed some money on the counter and told me to go fuck myself. I told her I’d do just that. She was wearing a white German Air Force tank top and a denim miniskirt with no stockings. As she got up to leave, I could hear the back of her thighs peel off the revolving vinyl seat like a Colorform separating from its glossed cardboard tableau. I finished my bowl of mushroom barley soup, trolling for comradeship in the droopy faces of two old guys speaking Polish.

I mumbled all the way to Port Authority and caught the next bus back to Amherst. I renewed my often-broken vow to remain broken up. When I got home there were eight messages on my machine from Jocelyn. They ran the gamut, from viciously accusatory to weepy and contrite. She even went as far as confessing to having “hooked up” with a coworker named Geoff; he pronounced it “Joff.” She said it was after the Freedy Johnston gig at Fez. Geoff told her he knew she was spoken for, but he could let himself fall in love with her, no problem. Just say the word. I knew she was probably lying, but I couldn’t help imagining the worst. In her final good-bye, she begged me to make the shrinking remainder of my life remarkable because I deserved no less. She asked me not to call her because I had to let her get beyond me.

The fuck I did.

I caught the next bus back to Port Authority and showed up exhausted and crazy at her apartment in Park Slope. She was a beautiful mess. She’d just dyed her hair the bloodiest red she’d worn to date. She looked like a Breathless-era Jean Seberg with a mortal head wound. She asked me what I was doing there. I said I wanted to tell her in person that I knew it wouldn’t make her happy, but if it did, she and Geoff could fuck each other deep into their twilight years. She slapped my face. My glasses came to rest beneath a small red stepladder used for holding potted plants. She broke down. She threw herself into my arms and begged me not to cut her loose. She said she could be good. Just give her a chance. I told her she was good. I am? You’re the greatest. No, you are. I rubbed the back of her neck, twisting the fine under-hairs into forgetful knots. Within two minutes, we were fantastically make-up-fucking each other back into our ever-deepening mess.

I COULD SEE by the discomfort on James’s face that he could see the discomfort on my own face.

“I sure as fuck don’t want to live here anymore,” he said. “But you’re welcome to crash until the place sells.”

I started to feel guilty for thinking he was anything but bighearted.

Seagulls passing overhead blitzed the partially covered boat. James reached up to strangle any one of them floating high above the spindly treetops. “Friggin’ sky rats.” He wiped the bird shit with the sleeve of his Dress Gordon flannel shirt. “So, Pamela tells me you and Jocelyn got hitched Friday, and you’re already splitting up?”

“Pretty messed up, huh?”

He pulled firmly on the nylon cord to test the integrity of his knot. “I don’t know. Marriage and divorce are two of the best things a man can do for himself.”

IT WAS DARK by seven o’clock. Two months earlier East Falmouth had been a madhouse of vacationers who couldn’t afford to buy or rent farther out on the island. Now the town was nearly deserted.

Before heading back to his furnished separation pad in Orleans, James slipped out and bought me a case of Miller High Lifes, a pack of Marlboro reds, and an orange lighter.

“You can’t smoke ’em if you can’t friggin’ light ’em, right?”

“Thanks, man, but I don’t think I have enough cash to cover all this.”

“Eh, don’t sweat it. It’s not like I gave you one of my livers.” He swung the case of beer to me like we were members of the bucket brigade. “Welcome aboard.”

I SAT ON the screen porch in the crisp autumn night and watched a few random lights reflected on Opal Cove just beyond a row of ranch houses and summer cottages opposite my sister’s.

When I’d bolted from our honeymoon suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I left a note on the floor where Jocelyn would see it. It said, “I’m sorry.”

I drained a beer and swallowed back a belch. From outer space they can shoot a pimple on a nomad’s bag while he’s taking a leak in the desert. Hiding out on Cape Cod did not exactly qualify me for “off the grid” status. If Jocelyn wanted to find me, she could.

I lit the next smoke with the end of the last one, then extinguished the butt in the backwash at the bottom of a bottle. I could hear a single boat motor shrinking in volume as its propeller chewed the water’s epidermis, pushing both boat and contents in the direction of Gay Head.

I drank another beer, and was about to go inside for the night, when I caught sight of a shadowy form moving up the street. It appeared to be hugging its midsection as if it were privately suffering from indigestion or a knife wound. I wasn’t overwhelmingly compelled to involve myself in anyone else’s trauma, but if whoever-the-fuck- it-was died while I was hiding inside, well, shit, what kind of person would that make me? I’d stay put until it passed out of my airspace. After that, it was someone else’s problem.

When the body entered the circle of streetlight adjacent to my sister’s driveway, I could tell it was a woman. Her Kelly green track jacket and purple Doc Martens hummed. She stopped momentarily and straightened up when she spotted me watching her from the porch. She slipped back into the darkness, and when she emerged, she was coming up the walkway, straight for me. I was more surprised than anything. I mean, if something happened—unless she had a gun or something—I felt pretty confident that I could take her. I tightened my grip on an empty bottle just in case.

She came up to the bottom step. I made her to be in her mid-thirties. She had a round face, capped by a grown-out black China-doll bob. Her steamy breath left her in truncated puffs. Both legs of her jeans were wet up to just below the knee, as if she’d been standing on the beach long after the tide had begun to roll in.

Her voice was raspy, like Brenda Vaccaro’s. “Who are you?” she asked.

I could tell she wasn’t straddling the peak of Mount Shitfaced, but she was either on her way up or at the corresponding point coming down the other side. I was actually slightly amused. “Who am I?”

“Mmm.”

“Who are you?”

She nodded, like that was a reasonable answer. “Marie.” She pointed in the direction she’d been moving. “From there.”

I looked at the blemished blackness into which she was headed. “That’s nice.”

“It was.” She pointed at me. “You got another one of those?”

“Of what, beer? Smoke?”

“Both.”

“Sure,” I said begrudgingly. As a drinker and a smoker, I knew the code: If your supply is visible—which sadly mine was—you always share when asked. I loosened my grip on the empty bottle and handed her a full one. I didn’t think she was going to pound it on the spot. I watched the beer pass from one receptacle to another, restricted only by gravity and the unfortunate narrowness of the bottle’s opening.

She swapped the cold, empty bottle for a cigarette.

“You need a light?”

“Mmm.” She cupped the flame and leaned into it. The backs of her hands were a multicolored filigree of tattoo ink. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

And then she split.

My eyes followed the glowing orange tip down the street until it was too small to see. Welcome to Cape Cod, I thought.

I ARRANGED MY makeshift bed on the barren living room floor, which was covered with a sandy, mange-afflicted gold shag rug. I chose a spot close to a small color television perched on a milk crate that James had set up in the early days of his own separation. I covered myself with a moving blanket and hunkered down.

I couldn’t sleep, so I started jerking a disinterested dick towards a distant conclusion. I flipped through the wank bank, finally stopping at a love scene starring me and a Bay State Games bronze-medalist pole-vaulter who was in the same Major British Writers study group as me. I couldn’t remember if her name was Catherine or Kathleen, but she went by Cat or Kat, so it didn’t matter. Jocelyn kept crashing the vignette no matter how hard I tried to write her out of it. And then I stopped trying.

Jocelyn was sitting across from me in an empty bar in Hadley. A torrential downpour was in full swing. It was close to midnight. Our relationship was new. We weren’t even on farting terms yet. We planned on walking through the muddy cornfields beyond the back parking lot, but we never made it. “I’m Your Puppet” was playing on the jukebox. Jocelyn was singing along out of tune. She filled her cheeks with Wild Turkey and motioned for my mouth to meet hers in the middle. When she kissed me, she let some of the booze drain into me.

As I was coming, it felt almost as good as the real thing. But it had a lonely finish, like a nonalcoholic beer.

IN THE WINTER OF 1994, I graduated from UMass after four and a half years with a BA in English. I did pretty average; a lot worse than I might have done if I had given the tiniest of fucks about school. I decided to dick around until the summer and not think about my limited prospects, my withering University Health Insurance, and the looming crush of student loan repayment. I picked up three shifts waiting tables at a mediocre Italian restaurant in Amherst called Esposito’s. I ended up working there for almost two years.

Richie could be charming as all hell, whether he was sober or not. Being decent-looking didn’t hurt. He was decidedly closer to a Dennis than a Randy Quaid. He’d been a waiter at Esposito’s for a couple of years when I got there. I shadowed him my first week. I liked him right of the bat. We both played guitar and were into a lot of t.same music. Neither of us gave a fuck if it was Doris Day or the Frogs. If it was good music, it was good music. On my first night we made tentative plans to do some four-track recording together. He said he had written a ton of songs and already had the best band name: the Young Accuser. He said he’d gotten it from a newspaper article he read about Michael Jackson. All he needed was a band.

“No shit,” Richie said as he showed me how to fold a napkin into a swan. “I’ve read more books than any professor I ever had.” I never would have made a statement remotely as bold. I knew my education was held together by large fugues and obvious holes. “I’d go toe-to-toe with any of them and win.” Such braggadocio made Richie rub as many people (men) the wrong way as it did (women) the right. I sensed almost immediately that his whole “I couldn’t conform to the bullshit academic mold” claptrap was mostly a smoke screen because he couldn’t hack it. It was one of his flaws that made him approachable to me.

The owner-chef at Esposito’s was a prick named Lello, whose entire personality can be extrapolated from the following: (1) he loved cocaine even more than he appeared to love himself; (2) literally minutes into my first shift, a black waitress named Suzanne called him on his racist, sexist shit and stormed out. The restaurant was going to be packed because it was Valentine’s Day weekend. Lello was so furious he nearly blew a testicle. He ordered the entire staff into the kitchen, grabbed the biggest, blackest iron skillet off the rack, and screamed, “From now on, whoever calls this pan something other than Suzanne can get right the fuck out.”

I felt like a real shit for not having the backbone to tell him to fuck himself on the spot. I dusted off the “I really need the money” excuse and fell for it. In the end, when I finally did quit Esposito’s, I merely stopped showing up. In the men’s room there’s a urinal named Kenneth. The one next to that is named after me.

At the end of the night, after Richie and I performed our setup duties for the next day, we sat at the enormous black marble bar, each drinking an allotted half-priced domestic draft beer. I was still blowing smoke here and there about how much I’d like to tell this Lello character to jam his job up his fat ass.

Richie made it easy for me to stay weak and still come off like I had principles. “You can’t quit. If you do, the wop wins.” He ordered two neat shots of Jack Daniel’s from the bartender, Rita. Her arms were as hairy as any man’s.

I pretended to be watching the pour. “Wow,” I said, “those are really something.”

“Rita knows how to fix a healthy drink.” He slid a ten across the bar.

Rita winked. “If these won’t get the taste of come out of your mouth, I don’t know what will.” She slid Richie two fives change. He stuffed one of the fives into her tip snifter. We toasted my survival of the first night, then slammed our Jacks. I could feel my esophagus beginning to molt.

“Yeah,” Richie said, “you can’t quit after one night. Give it a week.”

With quiet contempt, I searched the dining room for Lello. He was showing a veteran waiter the “real” right way to do something.

Rita wiped the bar in front of us with her Cain and Abel arms, then disappeared back into the kitchen.

“Man,” I whispered, “what’s up with her arms?”

“Arms, nothing.” Richie leaned over the bar to make sure Rita wasn’t kneeling down just out of sight. “I swear to God, her bush is so big and dense. It’s like she’s wearing gorilla panties.”

I cracked up.

“It’s like an enormous crown of black broccoli. No, shit, some topiary guy should shape that thing into some low-income fucking housing.” Richie rattled off another few hilarious suggestions for what should be done with Rita’s pubic hair. He was killing me.

Rita’s head appeared through a window in the swinging kitchen doors.

“Chill,” Richie said. “She’d be bummed if she heard us.”

“Really?”

Rita started restocking the beer fridge. She poked her head over the bar. She could sense something was up. “What the fuck did you do?”

Richie smiled like a guilty schoolboy whose tracks were pretty well covered. “What are you talking about?”

“Exactly,” she accused. “With that grin on your face? You must have done something.”

“You’re paranoid is what you are.”

“You’d better steer clear of this one,” she said to me.

“Just do your job,” Richie barked.

Rita flipped him off, then refilled our drinks when the coast was clear.

A few of the frazzled waitstaff were reorganizing the dining room at high speed. Patti Smith’s “Frederick” was coming over the sound system. A chubby, middle-aged waiter named Dennis was fitting a matchbook under the leg of a table with polio.

Richie called over to him. “Hey, Menace. You know the band Anal Cunt?”

“Sounds yummy,” Dennis said, camping it up for us. He had nico-tinted, thinning blond hair and acne scars on his temples.

Richie and Dennis were friends. They were big basketball fans and used to go watch UMass games together before the team got good and tickets scarce. I hated basketball. Too much contact with other people’s sweat.

“They have a tune called ‘Pepe, the Gay Waiter.’ I think you might like it.”

“Tape it for me.” Dennis meant it. Richie meant it when he said he would. Dennis pushed on the table to gauge whether it had been cured.

“You think Camby’s gonna go pro?” Richie asked.

“I would. Why risk millions for a degree from UMass? What if Dr. J had stayed and blown a knee or something?”

“Bet you’ve blown a few knees in your day, huh, Menace?”

Dennis chortled, then moved to the next table, also checking it for wobbliness. It was after midnight, just about that time when restaurant people want to get the fuck home, get the fuck drunk, get the fuck fucked, or any combination of the three. Richie took a stolen langos tino from his breast pocket and popped into his mouth.

“Yeah, you can’t quit yet,” he said. “Stick around. Make a little scratch and rob that fat fuck blind.” He spit out a speck of shellfish, which I could still feel minutes after I’d wiped it from my cheek. “You know anyone who needs to rent a room?”

A MONTH LATER Richie and I were sharing the second-floor apartment in a melting Victorian on Amity Street. A few more years of student tenants, and the whole house would need to be gutted or demolished.

When I moved in, my room smelled like a Habitrail cage. The windowsills were coated with a gritty plaque that made my nails black. The light fixture on the ceiling was full of roasted bugs. There was a poster of three shapely women in bathing suits—their six breasts abreast to form the Budweiser symbol—tacked up, alarmingly, at a height corresponding to that of an average man’s crotch. I removed the poster—carefully—revealing a series of steel-toed-boot holes. When I asked Richie if he knew what it was all about, he said the previous tenant, Gary, was trying to hide the booze-inspired damage so that he wouldn’t lose his security deposit. Richie suggested I put the poster back up when it was time for me to move out.

Gary also left behind a twin mattress because it had been there when he moved in. Perfectly acceptable shit-pit protocol: New Guy inherits Old Guy’s cast-offs, milks them for use, and leaves them behind for Next Guy. I removed the gray fitted sheet. The mattress fabric was stained so extensively, it looked like a batik tapestry hippie girls hang on their dorm walls. I flipped it over, and it wasn’t as bad. That was the side I slept on.

The bathroom was a dewy terrarium of unplanned growth, and Richie’s room looked like the inside of a fourth-hand customized van he wasn’t planning on selling anytime soon.

We hung out mostly in the kitchen because it was more spacious than the other rooms combined. It was connected to the rest of the apartment by a dark, lumpy hallway the length of a landing strip at an international airport. My rent was two-fifty plus utilities. I couldn’t see myself being able to afford it for too long.

The property manager was a guy named Arn who had lived in Amherst most of his fifty-odd years. Arn was marginally sexier than Ernest Borgnine. His family had come over from the Ukraine when he was a kid, but he still spoke with a heavy accent. He lived alone in the casket-sized apartment someone with a flare for architectural discontinuity had added to the first floor.

“Let’s see if Geppetto wants a hit,” Richie said. We were standing on the failing back porch, getting clobbered by purple-haired bong hits. Richie yelled down to the garage where Arn was working on fuck-knows-what. (He definitely wasn’t milling new crown molding.) A circular saw went mute. Arn’s bloodshot nose—followed by the rest of his bloodshot face—appeared in the garage doorway. Richie hoisted an imaginary broomstick-thick joint to his mouth and took a greedy toke. He knew how to make it look delicious because he meant it. The Arn man almost always cameth.

We got high as pipers. The kind of stoned where you think you might puke. It was a good thing I was standing, because an all-weather patio chair that had looked so inviting minutes before was starting to resemble a wolf trap.

“ ‘You’ is a real ball-breaking bitch,” Richie said.

“Wha?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed the music at all until Richie pointed to the floor. After that it came at me like lasers in stereo. From the apartment below ours, Bono Vox bellowed that he couldn’t live with you or without you. It was a tough spot to be in. And though Bono tried to sound like a man in control of the situation, it was obvious that “You” held all the cards.

“ ‘You’ should make up her goddamn mind.”

“What if ‘You’ is a dude?” I asked. “All rock stars like a cock every now and then.”

“Then ‘You’ should make up his goddamn mind.”

“It’s definitely a broad,” Arn said, death-row serious. Those were the first words he’d offered up voluntarily, maybe ever. Richie and I weed-laughed. Arn failed to see the humor in any of it. He tried to scratch an itch deep in the geometric center of his head. Richie started imitating him. My chest burned from laughing and coughing. Arn finally left us there when it was clear we weren’t about to stop laughing. He descended the stairs like a deep-fried Slinky toy. Richie kept imitating him after he was gone, rubbing the roof of his mouth maniacally while making increasingly more retarded-looking faces. I begged him to quit it, but he wouldn’t.

I WOKE UP on my stomach, using my foot to either feel the rug next to me for Jocelyn or defend myself from her. I must have been moving frantically in my sleep because I burned the knuckles on a couple of my toes. I was trying to decide whether or not I should sit up and investigate them when I heard a very un-Brooklyn, all-natural cracking noise. I rolled onto my side. A large maple tree filled most of the picture window, naked in the wind like the Statue of Liberty stripped of her green clothes and skin.

Fuck New York.

I wondered if it was possible to avoid it for the rest of my life. A guy can say with some degree of certainty while passing through What’s-his-nuts, Montana, on a bus, that, God willing, he’ll never be back that way. But for him to make that claim about New York City—even if he doesn’t have a wife there—is hubristic.

I picked at the wound where the carpet had separated from the baseboard. For the time being at least, I wasn’t going anywhere near New York. I had done my part by prying open the lioness’s mouth. There was no way I was going to stick my fucking head in. I rolled onto my back and gave in to my growing hunger for a cigarette.

The TV was still cooking from the night before. I jacked the volume from zero to full with an unbridled, upward flick of the toe. A long, distorted trumpet blast from an elephant spanked the bare walls of the empty living room.

“Nooooo,” I pleaded with the TV. I turned the volume down before the set could explode. My eye was caught by a visually pleasing, grainy 1960s nature documentary. The auteur was clearly a fan of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. Some elephants were dancing and laughing as they sprayed muddy water over one another’s wrinkled hulls. An orchestra of piccolos, trombones, xylophones, and tym pani swelled to a crescendo as a calf wading shoulder-deep in the slop vanished beneath celebratory salvos. I was transfixed, like a toddler at his first puppet show.

In the next scene an alpha male gibbon was about to join his face to the private parts of the monkey of his choice. This was no ordinary prelude to a kiss. The alpha strode in super slow-mo toward his mark. She stood on her haunches, her business end swollen and red like an Italian cherry pepper. The alpha puckered up, advancing with a brutal authority not witnessed on film since Bogie first kissed Bacall. Just before the moment of impact, the editor cut to a shot of a chimpanzee called Henry the Eighth tenderizing a piece of fruit by firing it down at a rock from high up in a tree.

“C’mon, Henry. C’mon, old boy,” the overdubbed narrator cheered.

An overdubbed chimp’s voice squealed in response. The chemistry between man and beast was so convincing, I could imagine them perched on the same limb or BBC soundstage.

“I am not an animal,” I said. I had another smoke, then dozed back to sleep.

When I woke for the second time, my breath smelled like a bum’s pants. I got up and headed for the can. I felt hungover, but I was just decompressing from the bender of having deserted my wife.

At least Pamela and James don’t seem to hate each other anymore, I thought. By mistake, I opened the closet next to the bathroom. It was empty except for some universally bluish gray floor lint and a coat hanger with a paper-covered fuselage.

Everything in the bathroom—the toilet, tub, tiles and sink—was a faded pink and well past its prime. Five grand in improvements might have made them fifteen on resale. Pamela said getting rid of the place and moving on with her life as soon as possible were her top priorities. She and Roy moved into a newish two-bedroom condo in Plymouth. She wanted to be closer to our parents, which seemed like a terrible idea to me.

I owned no property to speak of. I had reluctantly moved from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Brooklyn to live with Jocelyn two weeks before we eloped. All I brought with me was a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar and a soft maroon suitcase. The only remotely durable good Jocelyn and I owned together was a Mini Shop-Vac we’d bought from the Astor Place Kmart. I waited until we got to the front of the line before I gave her my half of the cash. Jocelyn took the money, and it felt like my arm went with it. She handed the checkout girl her Visa, and it came back bloody: our domestic hymen officially torn to shreds.

The pink paint on the bathroom walls was many shades brighter where a mirrored medicine cabinet had hung. It was a relief not to have to look at myself. I started to feel like a genuine gaping asshole, picturing Jocelyn levitating along Twenty-third Street back to our honeymoon suite, gripping a six-pack and some takeout: She swings the heavy, fireproof door open. I don’t tango naked out of the bathroom with a fresh rubber in my teeth. I don’t glide back from the ice machine with a bottle of champagne rising from the bucket like an emerald swan. Just as my getaway train lurches away from the platform, Jocelyn reads my note and falls off the bone like piping-hot Peking duck.

I gathered some foul-tasting saliva to the front of my mouth, spat into the sink, and examined it for blood. During some of our breakups, I had seen Jocelyn do things like bite herself on the back of the hand while crying, pull out keepsake-sized tethers of hair, and defenestrate objects of varying worth from her fifth-floor apartment. I feared this time I might have killed her.

It’s not your fucking fault. If she kills herself over this, she’s got bigger fucking problems than your leaving her. My conviction was wobbly, like I was the sounding board for a happened-upon old acquaintance who knew I knew he knew he’d always been half a prick in my book. But the dubious logic of my self-directed pep talk seemed to possess the power of temporary exoneration. And although I had neither studied nor pretended to have studied any Zen philosophy, I decided in that bathroom to begin living in the moment.

I looked deeply “into” the place where the medicine cabinet had been and chanted, “Medi-cine cabi-net. Medi-cine cabi-net.”

I opened both taps and let the water run from tan to clear, per James’s instructions. I started to wonder how much your average medicine cabinet goes for. Thirty bucks? Forty? Thirty bucks seemed reasonable for a medicine cabinet. I traced its absence many times. I passed my hand through its void. “Medi-cine cabi-net.” I started to wonder who got custody of the medicine cabinet that had once been there. And did they fight over it? The possibility of Pamela and James going to war over a thirty-dollar medicine cabinet made me feel like I had regained consciousness on the concourse of a dead midwestern shopping mall.

Fuck the fucking Buddhists.

I peeked under the sink for a razor left behind in the move. A shave might change my world completely. I ran the shower, giving the water time to get clean and hot. I weighed the chances of Jocelyn and me someday being friends. It was un-fucking-likely. She and I were strictly scorched earthlings. If we didn’t get back together this time, I was sure I’d never see her again. I stepped into the shower and brushed my teeth with my finger.

“Motherfuck.” I clawed what was left of the soap from the soap-dish. It was like a dry sliver of Romano cheese. A small window in the shower wall promised to open on the backyard. When I tried to unlock it, the fixture broke free from the water-rotten sash and bounced around the tub.

“Are you kidding me?”

I tapped into the reserve strength in my legs to raise the paint-sealed window. I stuck my head out the window into the brisk sunlight, half expecting the guillotine’s blade to finish me off.

On the far side of the clothes-dryer vent, against the toolshed, leaned the forlorn Huffy Sweet Thunder bicycle Pamela had gotten for her tenth birthday. I sized it up, encouraged by the legend of the great George Jones piloting a ride-on lawn mower miles into town to score booze. George Jones is a genius, and I am not. It was only fitting that I should have to pedal a child’s dilapidated toy.

I got out of the shower and began drying myself with my dirty underwear, the only piece of clothing I could spare. When the pitiful trunks could drink no more, I swung them over the curtain rod. If I was going to be there for any length of time, me and Sweet Thunder were going to have to make a run into town for supplies.

AS I STEPPED OUT into the backyard, I could feel the pores in my face tighten. I took the half bag of cashews from a pocket of my denim jacket. When these nuts were growing on the tree in Iran or Turkey or wherever the fuck it was, did they ever imagine this is how they’d end up? I lifted the bag to my mouth and chugged. The dormant back lawn was as tough as an equestrian brush. The sound of it abrading the soles of my shoes was plangent accompaniment to the crunching in my head.

I grabbed Sweet Thunder by a handle grip, leaned it toward the ground, and surveyed the damage. Every visible inch of chrome and the pink-and-white color scheme was freckled with rust. The quilted pink vinyl seat was split at the rear, and when I banged it with my hand to see if it was sound, it coughed crumbs of brittle foam. The tires still held some air, but their painted whitewalls were gray and weakened by craquelure. I gave the bike a good hard shake. Nothing fell off, so I fell on.

My knees banged against my elbows as I pedaled away from the safety of the house’s gravitational pull. The rusted chain moaned like a dolphin tortured to within an inch of its life. The whole machine—myself included—was so shaky, the rear wheel threatened to overtake the front.

I stopped at the junction where Opal Cove Road, my sister’s residential street, intersected Plymouth Street, the town’s main thoroughfare. During the summer, traffic on Plymouth Street slowed to a crawl. But in the off-season, laid-off house painters, handymen, and half-in-the-bag drywall hangers could do fifty-plus and almost never kill anyone. I turned up my collar and started left toward town.

There was a Great Atlantic Job Lot supply store a couple miles down the road. They sold everything from heavy-duty steel HVAC couplings coated with neoprene to boxes of counterfeit Cocoa Puffs cereal.

I was as aerodynamic as a pug-nosed city bus. I must have looked like a lunatic, my body absorbing the tiny bicycle as we moved forward with just enough momentum to remain upright. A cop driving in the opposite direction toasted my effort with a Dunkin’ Donuts medium coffee.

“Fucking great.”

I crested a mild incline. As I coasted down the long far side, I opened my mouth and let the nippy headwind inflate my lungs and do some of my breathing for me. My hands and face were freezing, but my torso was damp with sweat. It was like having to take a spectacular piss while dying of thirst.

To my right, the beach was peaceful and empty, except for the odd bundled-up elderly couple and driftwood-gnawing dog. The late-October sun was still bright enough to soften the color of the water that had already begun to sour toward a winter gray. On my left, marine equipment suppliers, bait-and-tackle shops, scuba outfitters, and rickety, lucrative clam shacks were shut down until Memorial Day. I battled the wind and followed the shoreline for the rest of the trip, past sand-blown beach parking lots with gates locked and signs that read Closed for Season. In the distance on the left, I could see Great Atlantic Job Lot’s giant yellow sign. I bargained with my clamoring respiratory system: You get this bike to that sign, then we smoke.

WHEN I MET Jocelyn I knew within minutes I was going to either marry her or completely destroy my life trying. It never occurred to me that both things could happen.

On the morning that kicked off the era known as Mein Jocelyn Kampf, I woke to the smell of perfectly good coffee ruined with hazelnut. As I passed the bathroom, I could hear Richie in the shower, singing Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick.” I had a good idea what constituted a successful night in his mind, and he must have had one because he was singing and retching, instead of just the latter.

“Hey, cunt-lip, make sure you rinse the tub,” I said, a wishful thought at best even if he could have heard me. “I don’t want your bum chum’s crabby pubes sticking to my feet.” Like most guy friends who live together, Richie and I could sling it pretty raw at home. We meant only about a quarter of it. If what we said in the privacy of our own home was overheard on the outside, we’d be tried as hate criminals.

I stopped short in the kitchen doorway. An attractive woman I’d never seen before was sitting at our rusty chrome-and-Formica table.

“Sorry about that. I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

“So gay bashing’s okay only if the right people hear it?”

Here we go, I thought. If I had known her, I would have said, Yes, it’s okay. If she had known me, she would have known I was just fucking around.

“We always talk that way to each other. It was just a joke.”

“I’m kidding,” she said. “I’m kidding.” She slapped her knee. “Touchy, aren’t we?”

I liked her instantly.

“Thanks. Just what I need bright and early.”

She seemed proud of herself for messing with my head so successfully. She tried to untangle a fuck-knot in her hair. I made sure my T-shirt was covering the fly of my boxers as I passed her on my way to the sink. The dish-water in the grubby Rubbermaid tub was greasy and orange from a Bolognese sauce Lello had plagiarized from a larger talent. I fished out a spoon and a pink mug encircled by a bracelet of cartoon bunnies going down on each other. I tested the shower-weakened stream for warmth and squeezed onto the sponge enough Palmolive to wash a car. I peeked over my shoulder at her. An unlit smoke swung from her bottom lip.

“Can I bum one of those?”

She tapped the top of the pack against the instep of her hand. A low-pitched clang signaled the end of Richie’s shower. She lit two cigarettes and fixed one in the ashtray so its filter pointed to the empty seat across from her. A bottle of Wild Turkey that had been half-empty the previous evening was now completely empty. I poured myself what was left of the coffee and took a seat.

“So you’re the roommate,” she said.

“So I’m the roommate.”

She said her name was Josie—or at least that was the name she went by because she hated her real name.

“How bad can it be?”

“Pretty bad.”

Richie screamed through the last line of the song three times until he got it just right. Then he started coughing violently.

“Yup, he’s a real trip, all right,” I said with an astonishment-veneered pride.

“Oh, I’m discovering that pretty quick.”

A portable turntable hi-fi unit from the seventies sat on a filing cabinet next to the table. A record was still spinning from the night before. I yanked the cord from the wall socket and stopped the record with the fat of my fist.

“Do you know this record?” I picked up the jacket to Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left.

“I didn’t until last night. This morning, technically.” She touched her face nervously, aware she’d revealed too much.

“What did you think of it? Pretty great, no?”

“Oh, my God, yes. I can’t believe I’d never heard of him.”

“Nobody has. They never will because the music business is fucked.” Everything I knew about how fucked up the music business was came from a story about Fugazi I’d skimmed in Magnet.

“Suicide, right?”

“Pills,” I said.

“That’s how I’d do it.”

“Depends on the pills. Imagine trying to overdose on speed.” I’d taken speed exactly zero times, but I was talking like speed and me were old adversaries.

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t do drugs.”

Smooth move, Ex-Lax.

“Can I have a look at that?” she asked. I handed her the record jacket. There was a hickey close to her elbow. She touched each title as she read it. “‘River Man.’ That song is so spooky. We listened to it like fifty times in a row.”

“I know, right? The way the strings start out so legato.” I let the word legato hang out there to lure her into asking me if I was musician. She didn’t bite.

“Totally spooky,” she said. Then she did something horrible. She started to scat to her tone-deafened interpretation of the melody to “River Man.” It was chilling in its unqualified and grotesque sincerity. And it went on too long. She finally grabbed her hair in frustration, as if the song she couldn’t get out of her head were “Dancing on the Ceiling” or anything by Mike and the Mechanics.

Richie breezed into the kitchen, still buttoning up his Esposito’s embroidered white oxford. He growled like a he-man when he saw Josie. He pulled her to her feet by her belt buckle and kissed her hard before she could protest. Then she was all his.

“Mmmmmmm,” they moaned in unison, like they were eating from the neck of the same caribou. While they kissed, Richie’s hands moved up the back of her bare thighs and disappeared in the leg openings of her cut-off shorts. He grabbed two handfuls of ass and lifted her off her feet. She locked her legs around him. The whole scene was fucking gross. I tilted my chair back like a bored chain-smoking sixth-grader.

“Should I leave?”

They peeled apart like the halves of a developing Polaroid photo about to reveal the image of two infatuated people fucking.

“I’m the one who has to leave,” Richie said, all lovey- dovey, still staring into Josie’s eyes. I thought he was going to call her Poopsie or Snuggle Buns. “The wop’s got a hair across his ass for me because two of my tables sent their braciole back last night.”

“Stupid braciole,” Josie said like a disappointed kindergartner.

Richie snorted and stared menacingly at her. “But I’ll see you later,” he said, and went for her belt again. She tried to elude him with some over-the-top dance steps. She was an all-too-willing participant in the embarrassing theater of it.

“Unhand me, you brute. I’ll cry rape.” She swatted the air with Five Leaves Left. “Back! Back!” she said like a lion trainer.

Richie got serious. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s an original Hannibal Records release you’re holding there.”

Josie came down. “Sorry.” She surrendered the jacket.

Richie looked it over, at first for damage, then simply to admire it and the larger idea of Nick Drake. “Man, to play like that, the guy must have made a deal with the devil.”

“It’s like he was superhuman or something,” Josie said.

Richie was stunned, like he’d just answered his door-bell to find Ed McMahon standing there with a giant cardboard check. “You know this record?”

“What, are you kidding?” Josie asked.

“No. Nobody knows Nick Drake.” He turned to me. “Is this fucking cool or what? I finally meet a hot girl who has halfway decent taste in music.”

Josie got up and ran to the bathroom. She slammed the door, and the towel rack fell to the floor.

Richie was confused. “What the fuck?”

“Dude,” I whispered, “she said you guys were listening to Nick Drake all night.”

Richie’s face showed a different kind of concern. Either very small missing pieces of the night before were coming back to him or very large ones were not.

“Did you fuck her?” He didn’t answer. He made the slow, strategizing walk to the bathroom door. I took a cigarette from Josie’s pack and lit it.

“Is everything okay in there?” Richie asked. No answer. “Josie?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You don’t sound fine.”

“Well, I am.” She flushed the toilet.

Richie waited until it died down. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” The faucet went on, then off. “You should just go to work.”

“I don’t want to leave you like this.”

“Go. I’m okay.”

“You sure?” No answer. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Yes.”

“Well, only if you’re sure.”

“I am.”

“But you’ll come by the restaurant so I can see you before you head back?” Josie didn’t answer.

It sucked for me to witness the whole thing. Richie really was a good guy, but every so often an innocent got chewed up in his gears.

“Okay? You’ll swing by the restaurant before you go?”

“Sure,” Josie said.

Richie had probably been banking on some quick, pre-dinner-rush skull in the alley behind Esposito’s. Now, if Josie showed up at all, he’d have to hide in the walk-in freezer until she left.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you later. I hope you feel better.” He walked back to the kitchen at a noticeably fast clip. He swept his keys up off the table.

“What about her?” I whispered.

“Just wait here until her ride shows up, please?”

“Christ.” Richie dashed out the back door. I could feel the kitchen quieting down, like a placid body of water that had just finished swallowing a cruise ship. I polished off most of the smoke before Josie emerged from the bathroom. Here eyes were puffy, and her nose was pink. She took the seat across from me and started sobbing. I touched her shoulder on the place where her bra strap was digging into her skin.

Her girlfriend knocked on the screen door.

“It’s open,” I said.

Josie ran to her girlfriend and gave her a weepy hug. My future wife scowled at me from over Josie’s shoulder. “What the fuck did you do to her?” Jocelyn demanded, holding Josie up so she wouldn’t leak through the floor.

I LET SWEET THUNDER recover against a chain-link cage filled with empty propane tanks, and went inside the Great Atlantic Job Lot. A true connoisseur of food can take a bite of the house specialty and identify its ingredients. I took one whiff and detected PVC vinyl, rubber cement, mothballs, a hint of tarragon, mesquite wood charcoal, and Absorbine Junior muscle rub.

A wind-battered elderly woman wearing an airbrush-on-white Robert Goulet concert sweatshirt stood at the only activated register. A tablecloth-sized piece of heavy clear plastic hung by its four corners from the high ceiling and served as a catch basin for whatever was dripping down into it. A length of rubber surgical tubing punctured the amniotic bulge and shunted the liquid out of sight through the “Employees Only” door. I grabbed a shopping cart and got down to business.

“Hello,” I said to Goulet.

“Uh-huh.”

I negotiated the narrow aisles, finding in logical order a twelve-pack of white tube socks; a six-pack of no-name briefs; a seven-pack of no-name T-shirts; a camouflaged knit hunter’s hat and gloves; a gray polyester hooded sweatshirt; a tube of green Close-Up toothpaste with a free, extra-firm bristled toothbrush; a spool of “Jackson and Jackson” dental floss; a bar of Lux soap; and a beach towel that said “Fisherman’s Friend,” with a cartoon depicting a naked-from-the-waist-down fisherman getting a blow job underwater from a fugu. I also picked up two tires and tubes for Sweet Thunder; two tins of salted cashews; a box of toffee popcorn; a can of Wyler’s “Limited Edition” cola-flavored drink powder; a couple of bungee cords, just in case; and a large backpack to carry it all in. I offloaded the cart’s contents onto the conveyor.

“Cash or credit?”

“Credit.”

Goulet merely glanced at the items going by and punched in what seemed to be arbitrary prices.

“Ma’am? I was wondering. Can you recommend a decent restaurant nearby? Nothing fancy, just diner food; eggs, bacon.”

“Open or closed?”

“Open would be better.”

“The Crow’s Nest, up the road.”

“Thank you.” She charged me only a buck and a half for the toothpaste and brush. I was curious. “One other thing, if you don’t mind, ma’am. Do you know Opal Cove Road, just back a way?”

“I live on Tide Pool.”

“I don’t know it.”

“It’s one street over. Lived there my whole life.”

“So if anyone could answer my question, it would be you. How far is Opal Cove Road from where we are right now?”

“Six-tenths of a mile. On the nose.”

Get the fuck out of here. I had biked only slightly more than half a mile. I felt like I’d just failed a cardiologist-sanctioned all-day stress test.

My pathetic, defining possessions were having an orgy at the end of the moving conveyor. Goulet and I were the only people in the store. It didn’t matter. She fixed a fluorescent orange PAID sticker to each of the bicycle tires. Three days earlier, Jocelyn said she’d love me for the rest of my life if I let her.

“Do you sell medicine cabinets? The ones with mirrors for doors?”

“In kitchens and baths. Left at the commodes.”

“What do those go for?”

“Thirty-six ninety-nine or forty-two ninety-nine.”

“Do you have one that’s thirty dollars?”

Goulet shook her head.

“Okay. Ring me up one of the thirty-six ninety-nine jobs.”

A COUPLE OF days after the Richie and Josie incident, I saw Jocelyn buying a newspaper and cigarettes at Ozzie’s Tobacco Shop on Pleasant Street. She was wearing a pink tank top and olive-green painter’s pants. Her toenails matched her shirt. I stayed out of sight behind a divider of greeting cards. When she started for the register I came out of hiding and followed her. I was shaking. I didn’t know what I was going to say or what she’d think of me for living with Richie. That whole “The friend of the enemy of my friend is my enemy” thing can be powerful. I stood behind her in line. She turned when I coughed.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.

“Fine. You?”

I acted like a guy whose car is in the shop again. “Oh, you know.”

“I hear you,” she said. She asked Ozzie for a pack of Marlboro Lights. He put the smokes on the counter. “Oh, I’m sorry. I meant soft pack, not box. Thank you,” she said sweetly.

I went for it. “Isn’t it weird how you have to have the right kind of pack? I mean, are Marlboros in a soft pack better than Marlboros in a box?”

“Not better,” Jocelyn said. “Better for you.”

“Ah, so that’s it.”

“Keep it low. It’s an industry secret.”

“Huh. And to think all these years . . .”

“Same thing with Coke. A bottle’s better than a can.”

“Really?”

“Yup.” She pocketed her change and headed for the door.

I threw a twenty at Ozzie. “Coke or Pepsi?” I called after Jocelyn.

“Give me a break. Coke. Canada Dry or Schweppes?”

“Canada Dry, hands down. Canada or America?”

“Canada,” Jocelyn said. Ozzie didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

“Canada? You must be out of your mind,” I said. “Canada’s practically communist.”

“Oh, brother, you’re not one of those, are you?”

“I don’t think so. How do you tell?”

“You can never really tell, can you?”

“I can sometimes.”

“Well, lucky you.” She folded her paper under her arm. “Be good.” She stepped out onto the sidewalk.

“Hang on a second. Aren’t you going to have one of those smokes?”

“I plan on having all of them.” She was quick and she knew it. I loved both of those things about her.

“I meant now, while they’re still fresh.”

“I’m in a rush.”

“Come on. What are you going to say on your death-bed: I should have rushed around more?” Ozzie took his time with my change. “What’s one little smoke?” Jocelyn smiled. I watched her as she waited for me on the sidewalk. A dark blue station wagon parked in front of Ozzie’s appeared greenish, tinted by a dusting of pollen. By noon the air would be oppressively hot and humid. I knew the next thing I had to do was throw my good friend Richie under the bus.

“I still can’t believe what happened with my roommate and your friend.”

Jocelyn rubbed her irritated eyes. “He’s a real winner. A keeper.”

“I know. I feel bad about it.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I thought you’d think because I live with him that I—”

“I don’t.” She rubbed her eyes more vigorously.

“Are you okay?”

“Allergies.” She sounded like she just got whacked with a wicked cold.

“That sucks.”

“It does. I cannot wait to get the fuck out of here.”

“You going somewhere?”

“New York.”

“To visit?”

“To live.”

I felt a sting. “Cool,” I said. “When?”

“Middle of August.”

“That’s only a month away.”

“Less. Three weeks and some change.”

“You going for good?”

“Who knows?” Her eyes were red-raw. She tried blinking some relief into them. “People are going to think you made me cry.”

TWO NIGHTS LATER Jocelyn and I were sharing a smoke on the bench in front of the Amherst Post Office. I had less than a month to talk her out of moving.

“How could you even think of moving? You just met me.”

“Please. New York is crawling with guys singler than you.”

“That’s not even a real word.”

“Yes it is. So is wealthier. New York is crawling with men singler and wealthier than you.”

“I knew it. A gold digger.”

“That’s me: in it for the money. Like Gandhi.”

“All the guys in New York are junkies,” I said. “I read in the Times the other day—”

“The New York Times?”

“That every year, thousands of people get hep C just from riding the New York subway.”

“Oh, they do, do they? I mustn’t have read the paper that day.” She was entertained. She had a smile that even she couldn’t stop once it started. “What day was that?”

“And the promise of hep C is what they use to attract tourists.”

“I see.”

“Hep C and the possibility of getting spermed on by homeless guys.”

“Eww. Fun is fun, but now you’re just being sick.”

“Come on,” I said. “Tell me with a straight face that you didn’t think that was funny.”

“It wasn’t funny.”

“Bullshit. You’re laughing.”

“I’m laughing now, at the ridiculousness of this little . . . I don’t even know what to call it . . . this little dance.”

“Don’t change the subject. I know you thought it was funny.”

“Oh, so you can tell what I’m thinking?”

“Yes.”

“What am I thinking?”

I rubbed her temples. “You’re thinking, Moving to New York is a mistake. An el giganto mistake.”

She slapped my hands from her head. “Have you ever been to New York?”

“Come on. Have I ever been to New York.”

“When?”

“Recently.”

“Recently, my fucking ass.” She laughed. “You know dick about New York.”

“Hey, listen here, toilet mouth. I find your language patently offensive.”

“You should talk.”

“Yes, I should. And I will. If anyone knows New York, it’s me.”

The last time I’d been to New York City was on a high school trip. I fucking hated it, not because New York blew per se, but it really brought out the more sophisticated urban asshole in some of the suburban assholes I went to school with.

“Is that so?” Jocelyn asked. “Mr. Zagat’s. Mr. Hepatic. Mr. Homeless Spermer.”

At that moment I definitely wanted to partake in frequent and varied sex acts with her. But way more than that, I just wanted to be around her. It’s corny as fuck but true: If someone had told me I could freeze any minute and spend the rest of my life in it, I would have picked Jocelyn and me sitting on that bench in front of the Amherst Post Office. But who the fuck has the power to grant that kind of perpetual happiness? And if they did have it, why would they wield it on my behalf?

“I know there’s nothing for you in New York,” I said.

“And Amherst is what, the world capital of culture and opportunity?”

“It is.” I flung open my arms like Mary Tyler Moore at the end of the opening credits. “Everything you need—and I don’t mean some slick job or material shit, but the important stuff—is all right here.”

“Really? Like what kind of important stuff?”

“The important stuff. Hey, are you hungry? I’m fucking starving. Want to split a foo yung at Hunan the Barbarian’s?”

“You know what I think?” she asked. “I think you love distraction.”

“Did you say something?”

She was free with her hands. She punched me in the stomach.

“Someone help me, please!” I called out. She hit me again, but harder. “I’d puke right now, but I’m so hungry, there’s nothing in my stomach to puke.” I faked a retch.

“You love distraction. Maybe more than anybody I’ve ever met.”

“I told you I was different.”

“You might be.” She kissed me first. It took about five seconds before we were officially mashing in public. If I had been a mere witness to it, I would have hurled at our feet.

PAMELA’S SUBURBAN—with winterized boat still in tow—was parked in front of the house. I could see the back of James’s head behind the wheel. I coasted to a stop on the driver’s side. His window was open a crack, and he was talking on the phone, smoking. When he saw me, he rolled the window down to halfway, and smoke poured over the outside of it like water over a falls.

“Just the prick I want to see,” he said. “No, not you—my brother-in-law. You, Teddy, are the prick I never want to see.” James would probably always call me his brother-in-law, like he was divorcing only my sister and not me. “I’ll be there in a few. Yeah, we’re all set. Yes. Yes. Yes, Teddy,” he said, agitated. “No. No, I have two full rolls in my truck as we speak. No, twenty-fives. It’s plenty. Trust me. Because I’ve been doing this job since I was seventeen’s how I know.” He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at me in disbelief. “How about if it isn’t enough, I drive back to Orleans and get another roll and finish up alone?” The last proviso seemed to satisfy Teddy. James listened.

I sat there on the bike—on hold. I looked in the back of the Suburban to catch a glimpse of whatever kind of rolls James was sure would be enough for whatever job they were talking about. Roy was falling in and out of sleep, strapped into a car seat directly behind the front passenger seat. His head kept drooping forward, and he’d snap it upright, doze back to sleep, and so on.

“I just have to drop my kid off,” James said. “I don’t know, fifteen minutes.” Then he hung up. “Fuck me,” he said to the gods.

“What’s up?” I said.

“The fucking guy—” He stopped himself when he saw me and the bike. “How you holding up?”

“Eh, you know.”

“That’s a nice ride you got there. Reminds me of my buddy Dogshit.” James had a friend who actually answered to the name Dogshit. When Dogshit was a teenager he passed out at the wheel and cracked his two upper incisors. He never got them fixed, and they turned brown, like stubborn leaves that refused to fall. “You know Dogshit,” James said, pulling at the outer corners of his eyes because Dogshit’s mother was Korean.

I’d met him a few times. I called him David at first, and he looked at me like I had two heads, both filled with teeth more fucked up than his own.

“They busted him for DUI, and he wasn’t even driving. He was parked.” James found his recollection of the story entertaining. “He had to get back and forth to the boatyard on a friggin’ ten-speed. You know, with the handlebars?” He traced the outlines of ram’s horns. “Funny as all fuck, Dogshit pulling up all out of breath and he’s pissed off, bitching to himself.” James tapped his front tooth. “Nobody would give him a lift—I swear to Christ—just so we could watch him ride up in the mornings . . .” James trailed off, quieted by his own take on nostalgia. “He’s a good shit, though, Dogshit.”

“At least it’s exercise.” I pulled the front end of Sweet Thunder up into a stationary wheelie position. The tire knocked the driver’s-side mirror out of whack.

“Hey, easy, easy.” James readjusted the mirror. “Yo, what’s this coming up behind us?” I turned around a lot more conspicuously than I would have had I known he was talking about Marie and not an El Camino or a Har ley. She was wearing the same Kelly green track jacket. I was embarrassed because she had to think we were gawking at her. She turned her eyes to the ground. I spun back around and leaned forward with my forearms on the handlebars.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath, “I thought you were talking about a car.”

“Cars, women, whatever, they all like to be looked at.” James and I pretended not to notice her as she walked past the Suburban. She was carrying a brown paper bag large enough for a six-pack and maybe a fifth of something. She drew the package closer to her breast. “Weird,” I said when she was well out of earshot.

“You got that right.”

“No, she bummed a beer and a smoke off me the other night,” I whispered.

“Get the fuck out of here,” James said.

“I’m serious. I was sitting right there, and she was walking by, just like that.”

“No shit.”

I nodded.

“What did you guys talk about?”

“Nothing. She skulled the beer in like two seconds, and that was it.”

“Interesting,” said James. “You must have made some first impression.”

“Or she doesn’t remember.” I drank from my thumb. “Seems to me like she has a bit of a battle with a bottle, if you know what I’m talking about.”

“It’s fucking Cape Cod for chrissake,” James said. “I’d still like to throw a fuck into that.” I didn’t second that emotion. James shot a look at me. “What, you wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trust me, if you saw her in a bikini you’d know. Meat on her bones. Nice shitter. Tattoos everywhere. It’s hot.” He inhaled through his clenched teeth. “I’m into that Elvira thing. Not for anything serious, but a couple hours, no strings attached? Just tell me where to be.” James could talk a good game, but to be honest, I didn’t know how much of a follow-through guy he was. Then again, he must have followed through with enough of the wrong shit for my sister to want to divorce him. Pamela tried confiding in me when they were first having problems, but I told her I was too screwed up over Jocelyn to be of any use to her. After that, I’d ask her perfunctorily how things were going. She’d say “Same,” “Worse,” or “Better” if she said anything at all. “Okay,” I said to James. “If this woman asked you to go—right this minute—you would?”

“And you’d watch Roy?”

“Sure, whatever.”

James consulted his watch and smiled. “In a New York minute.”

“Not me. I couldn’t do that, especially now.”

“Well, it’s a mute point, isn’t it? I don’t see her coming back for you anyway.” He thought I was judging him when in fact I was judging myself.

“What I meant was, the less I know someone, the worse the whole thing is for me. You’re a free man—”

“Almost.”

“I don’t care who you fuck around with.” I really didn’t.

James understood. He handed me the Suburban’s glowing cigarette lighter as a peace offering. He let his sensitive side show. “Do you have trouble hoisting?”

“Fuck no.”

“Don’t get worked up. I’m just asking.” He ticked my potential impotence off his checklist. He wiggled his pinkie. “Do you have a tiny pecker?”

“Huh?”

“That’s not your fault, either. It’s not like you chose it. You get the dick you’re born with.” He went on to paraphrase from his rickety cosmology. “Look, you’re a decent guy from what I know of you. And you’re not the ugliest motherfucker out there. A little shaggy-looking, maybe, but chicks might mistake that for your style. So if you think you have to lay a bunch of groundwork before you can lay pipe, you’ve got to have some kind of dick issue. Or—and this is a tougher nut to crack”—he pointed the pinkie at me—“you think you have a dick issue.”

I watched Marie disappear. “I’m as average as the next guy.”

“Well, there you go.”

Roy let out a single cry, then smiled when he saw his old man’s big face looking back at him.

“Wook who woke up,” James said, his eyes wide with fake surprise. Adults—especially big, hairy men—talking like babies creeps me out. Roy was beaming.

“God, he looks so much like Pamela,” I said.

“Everybody says that. I don’t see it.”

“He looks like you, too. But he looks a lot like her.”

“He’s the spitting image of my old man,” James said. He was still admiring Roy when he shot me a look out of the corner of his eye. “Hey, I need to ask you a favor.”

“What is it?” I couldn’t imagine what someone in my position could do for anyone short of maybe elevate their head until the ambulance arrived.

“This big emergency repair’s getting towed in from P-town.” James checked his watch again. “Fuck, it’s probably there already. Some rich fruits who want it done yesterday and are willing to pay through the ass.” He let the concept of big-money-to-be-made spin in the air.

“And?”

“I was wondering if you could watch Roy for a few hours.”

Giving my undivided care and attention to a leaky need machine was among the least appealing of my options. “For real?”

“Honest to God.” He pulled a silver crucifix from under his shirt and kissed it.

“Can’t Pamela?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” He was reluctant to show his hand.

Roy and I were basically strangers to each other. “Wouldn’t he be better off with her?”

“Of course he would, but if I ask her, it’ll look like I can’t hold up my end of the bargain.” He hardened like a quick-set epoxy. “And I don’t want to give her any friggin’ reason not to let me have my time with him.”

“I don’t think she’d do something like that.”

“Oh, no?” He was dying for me to dare him.

“You know what? I don’t want to know.”

“No, you don’t. Believe me. There’s a lot of shit you wouldn’t think she’d do.” He lightened up when it dawned on him I wasn’t Dogshit. “Seriously, the kid’s a breeze. And what the fuck, it’s only for a couple hours.”

I looked at Roy. He was trying to convince a lime green Nerf football bigger than his face that it could fit in his mouth. When I didn’t jump at the chance to be his mother for the day, James pulled out the guilt gun.

“Plus, one hand washes the other, right?” He forced my eyes with his own toward the ranch house I was staying in free of charge. He was right about one hand washing the other, but I still thought he was a prick for saying it and cashing in so soon.

“Sure. I’ll take him for a while.”

“See, kid? I told you he’d do it.” James clapped his hands, then reached back and tickled Roy’s stomach. He laughed so hard he got the hiccups.

I WAS SITTING on the back porch in the cool early-September night. The phone was stretched as far as it would go through the back door. Jocelyn’s call was already over an hour and a half late. It was the fourth week into our long-distance relationship. I missed her a lot. When she’d called me from work earlier in the day, she still wasn’t sure if she’d be able to get away from New York for the weekend. I pressed her hard to come up to Amherst. She said she really wanted to, but she was trying to make a good impression at Redbook. She was told on the q.t. by her internship supervisor there that a junior associate editor position might be opening up in the next few months. I would have made the trip to see her, but it was back-to-school weekend, and Lello’s directive to the entire waitstaff had come down weeks earlier: Don’t even ask for the time off. Richie said he was going to put in for the weekend off anyway, just to fuck with Lello.

A couple guys were moving into the apartment below ours. One was named Bri, the other Kev. They hadn’t seen each other all summer. I could tell they were students, and this was their first off-campus place, because moving apartments is like putting your fucking life on trial. Bri and Kev sounded too happy.

“Kev, check out this sweet lamp I scored.” Bri couldn’t wait. He dug into a box right there in the driveway.

“Awesome,” Kev said. “ ‘My goodness, my Guinness.’ ”

The telephone finally rang.

“Hello.”

“How’s your hemorrhoid?” Richie asked.

“Fucking swell.”

“That’s great news, but it’s not why I called.”

“What the fuck do you want?”

“What’s the rush?”

“I’m expecting a call.”

Richie made the sound of a whip cracking.

“Nice,” I said. “What the fuck do you want?”

“I was just calling to tell you, asshole, that the Grifters and Shelby Foote are on Letterman tonight.”

“No shit?”

“Yes shit. But the wop says he’s going to seat people until the bitter fucking end. There’s no way I’ll be able to get to the Wacky Paki Packie before eleven.” (The liquor store around the corner from our place was called Ravi’s Package Store. Ravi himself once inquired of Jocelyn while she was buying smokes if she’d “care to accompany” him to see Pulp Fiction.)

“So you want me to go?”

“I know, it’s a ten-fucking-foot death march from our door, and you’ll only have two hours for your phone call instead of the usual, but can you help a buddy out?”

“Sorry, shit smear, I can’t promise anything.” (Translation: Consider it done.)

“Don’t be a dick hole.” (Translation: Thanks.)

The song “Unbelievable” by EMF rose through the porch floor. A body ascending the stairs divided the mothy yellow porch light. It was Kev. He saw that I was on the phone and stopped before completing the flight. I got rid of Richie. Kev was chubby, with a red crew cut and a freckled baby face. He was wearing flip-flops, green droopy basketball shorts, and a white UMASS CO-ED NAKED HOOPS shirt. He was probably about nineteen. Just looking at him made me feel ancient. We introduced ourselves. He seemed too pleased to meet me.

“We’re moving in downstairs.”

I had no desire to learn any more about him. “Oh, very cool.”

“Seems like an awesome old house.” He patted the clapboards like they were the hindquarters of a trusty steed.

“It’s not bad.”

Kev cut to the chase. “I don’t mean to be a mooch neighbor, but you think you could give us a hand for like—no kidding—two seconds?”

Fuck me, I thought. Another fucking favor. I should have hidden inside with the lights out, like I do on Halloween.

“We got this L-shaped sofa, and it would be awesome if we can get it in without taking it apart in the dark.”

“I’d help you out, man, but I’m expecting a call I can’t miss.”

“Two seconds, I swear. Then it’s nothing but social calls for the rest of the lease.” I said nothing. “Two seconds. Seriously. It would really save us a lot of time.”

“Okay,” I groaned. A comet tail of orange embers trailed my cigarette as it sailed over the porch railing.

“Thanks, bro. Seriously.” He slapped me on the arm.

“Let’s just do it.”

Bri was waiting for us in the back of a U-Haul trailer. He shined a flashlight in my face. “Howdy, neighbor,” he said.

Kev added a y to my name when he introduced us. I let it go. “He’s expecting a call, so let’s get this bad boy inside.” He suggested Bri push from the inside, he pull the heavy end, and I support the middle as it came off the trailer.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said, like J Mascis from his tune “Green Mind.” It went over their heads.

“And lift with your legs, bro.”

We were just getting into position when the phone rang. I was already three steps in the other direction when Kev or Brian said, “I think that’s your call.”

ON FRIDAY MORNING I took the ten-mile bus trip from Amherst to Northampton. I’d seen a fountain pen I wanted to buy for Jocelyn in an antique store on Market Street. The store smelled like the inside of a canvas bag my dead grandmother stored her retired shoes and hats in. The pen was a 1930s stainless-steel job. I figured if Jocelyn was going to work in the ink industry she ought to have a decent pen. The guy wanted fifty bucks for it. I entered the shop prepared. I’d strategically planted a hodgepodge of bills equaling forty-one dollars in my front pocket. It didn’t make a fuck of a bit of difference how much money I had.

“Oooh, I’m sorry, but that pen sold.” The guy looked like Richard Burton’s homelier older brother.

“You’re joking.”

“Oh, no. A Parker like that doesn’t stay put long in my shop.”

“Damn. It was going to be a gift.”

“What a shame. That would have been a lovely gift.” At first I thought he was trying to break my stones, but he wasn’t. He simply couldn’t contain his feelings when it came to things of quality. “You know, that was not the only lovely pen I have.” He laid out four others on the glass counter. Two of them were horrible. They looked like they were made out of what’s swept up after someone shatters a Fabergé egg.

I pointed at the other two. “The simpler ones are more her style.”

“Of course they are.” He moved the gaudy offenders out of the spotlight. He started to give me the rundown.

I interrupted him. “How much?”

“Okay, then, the black Waterman is seventy-five, and the turquoise Parker is one hundred twenty-five.”

“That’s a little more than I wanted to spend.”

“I see.”

“How much are the other ones?”

“Those would be a good deal more, wouldn’t they.” He didn’t even try to up-sell me. I picked up the Waterman and looked it over.

“This one is seventy-five?”

He nodded.

I removed the cap and touched the tip. “What do I have to do to put you behind the wheel of this pen?” I said like a southern used-car salesman.

“Nothing. A pen like this sells itself. It really does.”

“Seventy-five bucks, huh?”

“Plus tax.”

“Is there any wiggle room there?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Would you take less than seventy-five?”

“I’m sorry. It’s a consignment piece. I’m not authorized to go any lower.” He took off his reading glasses and let them hang from their chain. “I could contact the owner and ask if that’s his absolute lowest price.”

“That would be fantastic.”

“If he wasn’t in Europe on a buying trip. Can you wait until next week?”

“I can’t. It’s for my girlfriend. She’s only here for the weekend.”

“I see. I see.”

“Seventy-five dollars, huh?”

“Mmm.”

I stroked the glossy black Waterman. “It is a beautiful pen.”

“If I may?”He took the pen from me. “The giver of such a wonderful gift as this is never far from the heart of the receiver. I like to believe that words written with this lovely piece once bound two people together, just as they will again. That’s what beautiful things do.”

Give me a fucking break. “Do you take Visa?”

He smiled.

I took the bus back to Amherst and looked at the pen a few times along the way. Jocelyn was going to freak—in a good way—when I gave it to her. It was the most expensive gift I’d given to a girlfriend. I got off in Amherst Center and walked to Stop & Shop. I bought her a quart of fruit salad, some soymilk, and a few Golden Delicious apples that I lovingly shined to a glossy French finish. The day had already cost me close to a hundred dollars I didn’t have, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t wait to see her.

I went home, cranked the Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, and proceeded to scour the bathroom from top to bottom. The record started skipping during the final chorus of “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” I didn’t feel like walking to the kitchen, so I stomped on the floor a bunch of times until the stylus hopped over the album’s problem spot. I kneeled back down in front of the toilet, and resumed scrubbing. So help me God, there was a small, thin-stalked toadstool growing behind the porcelain base. It looked like the umbrella in a moldy mai tai. I picked it and saved it in a mug. Richie was crashing somewhere else for the weekend so that Jocelyn and I could be alone. I didn’t even ask him. I put the mug on his dresser with a note that said, “Two guesses where this came from?”

JOCELYN STEPPED OFF the bus like Princess Grace. She always looked good, but since she had moved to New York she’d hit a new stride. She was wearing a matching khaki skirt and blazer and a pair of chocolate brown suede gloves. Her hair had a postflight Amelia Ear-hart thing going on. Her eyes were the same shade as David Bowie’s green one. They looked happy and tired. I couldn’t believe that within minutes she’d be telling me I was the thing her life had always been missing. We kissed on the sidewalk. I stepped back and looked at her.

“Jesus, you look amazing.”

“So do you.”

“No, you really look mint.”

“Thanks.” She threw out a hip, supermodel style. “That’s what working for the big boys will do to you.”

I rubbed her shoulders. “Then I’m all for it.”

She stopped smiling. “Please, don’t hate me for what I’m about to tell you.”

My heart sunk. “What?”

“If I could have helped it, I would have.”

“What?”

“I have to do a few hours of work while I’m here.” She bit her lip. She looked like she was bracing herself for punishment.

“Jesus H. Christ, don’t do that to me. I thought it was something bad.”

She smiled. She liked that I was generous when it came to exploiting the entertainment value in my neuroses. “Something really bad? Like what, I want to break up with you?”

“No, that would be plain-old bad. I thought you meant really bad.” I collapsed onto a bench, taking her with me. She put her head on my shoulder. “Something really bad like, ‘Oh, by the way I have stage-six chlamydia.’ ”

“Eww.”

“I know. That would be really bad.”

“I haven’t been with anyone else since I last got tested, so I must have contracted it from you.”

“Well, I haven’t been with anyone else, either.” We continued with the tease, buzzing from the roundabout admissions that our monogamous relationship had so far survived the separation. “So who gave you chlamydia?”

“Miraculous Contraction?”

“I think not,” I said. “Why would God pick a half-Jew instead of a thoroughbred?”

“Good point.”

“Dirty toilet?”

“Highly unlikely,” she said. “I only go at home. And you know how anal I am about cleaning.”

“Anal?” I asked like she was offering. She elbowed me in the ribs. I thought some more. “You get hit with full-blown chlamydia, and I’m clean as a whistle? It just doesn’t add up.”

“How do you know you don’t have it? You could be an asymptomatic carrier.” She could joust with the best of me.

I took her face in my hands. “You”—I kissed her—“are”—I kissed her again—“a fucking genius.”

She turned and spoke to a nonexistent third party. “Finally, somebody notices.”

We picked up some Chinese food, went to my apartment, and fucked. I told her Richie was gone for the weekend. She put her clothes back on afterward, anyway. We then went into the living room and watched Richie’s copy of Lawrence of Arabia. I was a little nervous because who knew what he’d taped over. I had asked him in advance.

“Dude,” he said, “it was a brand-new tape when I taped it.” He wouldn’t fuck with me—not like that. But he might forget. I didn’t want Jocelyn and me to be sitting there watching Omar Sharif galloping off to Aqaba and all of a sudden the scene cuts to three enormous Sing Sing prison guards power-banging a tiny, restrained Asian woman begging for more, only harder.

Jocelyn ate her fruit salad for dessert. I ate an entire pint of double chocolate ice cream.

“Great movie,” I said, and killed the power on the VCR just as the end credits started rolling. Jocelyn agreed but didn’t feel like discussing it any further. She kissed me and told me to wait there on the couch. She disappeared into my bedroom. I could hear her unzipping her suitcase. “What’s going on in there?”

“It’s a surprise,” she said.

“I have one for you, too.”

“You do?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s sweet.”

“I hope you like it,” I said.

“I hope you do, too.” I squeegeed the inside of the ice cream container with my finger. “Okay,” she called. “You can come in now.”

She was standing in the middle of my cesspool room, wearing a cream-colored, spaghetti-strap nightie. She looked like a silk purse sticking out of a sow’s ass.

“Well?” she asked.

“Holy shit.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes.”

“Want to feel it? It’s nice on the skin.” She pulled the string hanging from the ceiling light. The room went navy blue. I slid my hands all over her. She was instantly into it. She pulled me down to the mattress.

“Wait,” I said, “I want to give you your present.”

“Uh-uh. Yours isn’t through yet.”

I knew that, unless a lightning bolt or his-and-her fatal heart attacks befell us, I’d be coming in, on, or near her within minutes. That’s the best kind of knowledge there is.

THE NEXT MORNING I woke to Jocelyn kissing my face. I rolled away because my breath stunk.

“Get back here,” she said.

“Let me go brush my teeth first. My mouth’s gross.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.”

“I kind of like it,” she said.

“That’s sick.” I streaked to the bathroom. When I got back, Jocelyn was sitting up in bed, admiring her pen.

“That was so nice of you. I love it.”

“I’m glad.” I slipped back in at the foot of the bed and started kissing my way up her legs.

“I should get you a nice pen.”

“I’m not really a nice-pen guy,” I said from under the sheet. I opened her legs. “I like Papermates. Blue ones, black ones, red ones, it doesn’t matter.”

She shifted to accommodate me. “So, what you’re saying is a pen is a pen is a pen?”

“Is a pen.”

“I see. What about a new journal? Something leather-bound?”

“Kinky,” I said. She squeezed my head between her thighs. I could hear the ocean. “I’m not a journal guy, either.”

“You’re not a journal guy?”

“Nope.”

“I don’t believe you. Everyone keeps some kind of journal.”

“Not me.” She sat up, taking her pussy with her.

“Well, what are all those?” She stripped the sheet off my head.

“What are what?”

“Those.”

My bedside table was a yellow towel draped over two milk crates stacked one on the other. The bottom crate was packed with identical black-and-white-marbled notebooks.

“Those are some of my notebooks from college.” Two of them actually were aborted journals.

“They sure look like journals.”

“They’re not.”

Jocelyn wasn’t sold. “Why do you keep your college notebooks? You don’t strike me as a ‘keep my old notebooks’ kind of guy.”

“I don’t know.”

“And they’re so close to your bed, I just figured they were your journals.”

“They keep my table from moving.”

“Curious,” she said.

“Is it?”

“A little bit.” I pulled her back down by the hips. “If you want, I can stop, and we can critique them together right now.”

“No, that’s okay. Finish what you’re doing. I’ll just go through your shit sometime when you’re out.”

“Fine. And I’ll go through all of your shit.”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?” She laughed once at her own joke, like a Joan Collins character getting serviced by a pool boy. She steered me by the head as I skimmed the surface of her deep end. She got into it. “I mean it,” she moaned. “You can read my journal, my diary, anything. I want us to know everything about each other.”

I got anxious. I thought, I don’t want to fucking read her journal, do I? Sure, I’m curious, but I don’t want her poking around through my stuff. I can move them into my closet the next time she goes to the can. Too obvious. She’ll notice they’re gone, and then she’ll never stop asking me questions. I can’t get rid of them until she goes back to New York. Fine. I won’t leave her alone long enough to do too much digging. That’s what I’ll do.

“Hey, Tiger,” she said. “Easy does it.”

I DIDN’T KNOW shit about taking care of kids.

“Don’t worry about it,” James said. “This is all you have to do: Push him up and down the street until he falls asleep. He should stay out cold for a couple hours.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“He will. And when he wakes up, feed him right the fuck away or he’ll go ballistic.” James held a stack of three identical Tupperware containers on top of a foil-covered baking pan. “There’s diced fruit in this one, and chopped chicken and carrots in this one. This one’s all Cheerios and Wheat Chex and shit.”

“What’s in the big pan?” James gave it to me. It was still warm.

“I don’t know. Pamela sent it for you.”

I removed the foil. Pamela was a good cook. The pan held a lasagna with a large divot taken out of it. “Weird,” I said. “She must have run out of noodles to make a whole one.”

“That’s my haulage fee,” James said.

I laughed. “Your haulage fee.”

James was in a rush. “Come on. I don’t have time to fuck around.”

“Fine.”

“So, feed him a bunch of this.” He handed me the Tupperware containers.

“How much?”

“I don’t know. Until he starts crying.”

“That seems kind of cruel.”

“Maybe, but it’s the only way to be sure he’s getting enough. He’ll definitely piss himself and probably shit. You’ll be able to tell because he makes ‘this’ face, and he’ll stink. You know how to change a kid?”

“Can’t it wait until you get back?”

“Don’t be an asshole.” He hung a mommy bag on my shoulder. “Everything’s in here. And when you do change him, make sure you put enough of that aloe oatmeal ointment on him. His ass is sensitive. So is his weld.”

“His weld?”

“Where your dick joins up with your bag.” James pinched at his weld. At least he didn’t pinch mine. “Suit him back up and you’re home free.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t fucking know. Let him run around until I get back.”

I asked James if it was cool if I swore in front of Roy.

“Don’t fuck around,” he said. “Your sister will have my nuts on a stick.” Pamela was a pretty easygoing person. But once you push her past her breaking point, you’d better head for the fucking hills.

ROY WAS NOT very good at walking. But he screamed whenever I picked him up and tried to help close the distance between him and the object of his capricious desire. In order to get him into the stroller, I tricked him into thinking the stroller was what he wanted. I lifted it by an umbrella-hook handle and dangled it like a SeaWorld herring in his line of sight.

“Roy? Look at this, Roy. Smooth,” I stroked the seat invitingly. I was a good deceiver. He fell for it. He locked on. “Come on, kid. Get in.” I set the stroller down on the driveway about ten feet from him, lit a cigarette, and killed some time watching him labor to get from A to B.

He was pretty cute. He was wearing green Wellington boots, baby Levi’s, a black longshoreman’s cap, and an Irish knit sweater under a miniature L.L. Bean tan hunter’s coat. His outfit was worth many times my own. When he finally reached the stroller, he screamed with a delight that was so sincere, I was actually kind of grateful to him. I hadn’t smiled and meant it since I got married.

JOCELYN AND I babysat for Roy one night after Christmas so that James and Pamela could go on a last-ditch date. We didn’t really do anything with regards to care-taking because Roy was asleep when we got there, and he stayed asleep the whole time. Jocelyn was in a good mood in spite of the holidays. We curled up on the couch and watched Masterpiece Theater: A Scandal in Bohemia. Jocelyn checked on Roy a few times and reported that he was just fine. She sank back into her dent on the couch. I could tell she liked playing house.

James and Pamela came home tipsy, laughing and hanging all over each other. It looked like they had a chance. James fixed us all a quick cinnamon schnapps nightcap before bed. “Here’s to burying last year,” he said.

“I’m all for that,” Pamela added.

“Here’s to the future,” Jocelyn said.

“It can’t come soon enough,” James said.

We all turned in for the night. Jocelyn and I made up the pullout couch in the TV room.

“I know I’ll make a good mother someday.”

She was waiting for me to say I’d make a good father. That wasn’t going to happen. But the night had been going along nicely. There was no reason to mess it up then. I did the best I could. “No doubt.”

She smiled.

TAKING CARE OF ROY behind Pamela’s back felt wrong for a lot of reasons. First of all, I definitely did not want to get caught. I knew if Pamela found out she’d rip both James and me new assholes. I figured there wasn’t much chance of her showing up out of the blue, though, because Plymouth was a good thirty miles from East Falmouth. And if James was supposed to be taking care of Roy, chances were good that Pamela was working or catching up on doing laundry or some other domestic shit. I also felt guilty for scheming with James of all people. It was like I’d signed on to be his star, blockbuster witness in the upcoming divorce proceedings. But I assuaged my guilt by noting that Roy, too, was my blood and he needed me. And wasn’t it as much James’s house as hers? I was also nervous something horrible would happen to Roy on my watch. I felt like Joel in Risky Business when he goes cruising in his old man’s Porsche without permission. If I accidentally drove Roy off the end of a pier, there’d be no gold-hearted hookers to raise the bread to fix him up without my sister knowing about it.

ROY WAS SLEEPING minutes after I’d tricked him into the stroller. I pushed him up and down the length of Opal Cove Road about a hundred times. I watched the ocean come and go in the gaps between houses—on my right in one direction, and on my left in the other. Taking care of a kid was easy enough so far. I started zoning out, thinking about Jocelyn crying.

I don’t know how long it took me to realize it was Roy who was whimpering. He had been taking the brunt of a growing wind, softening my way, like an icebreak er’s prow.

“Fuck me, kid. I’m sorry.” I crouched in front of him and cradled his cheeks. They felt like two packages of thawing ground beef. His eyes were watering, and his face twisted ugly as he teetered on the edge of crying. “No, no. It’s okay, Roy. I’ll take you back. Don’t cry.” I stretched the sleeves of his sweater until his hands disappeared. Then I breathed warmth into the wool tubes. I pivoted the stroller in the direction of my sister’s and added the sound of a racing car’s screeching tires to the maneuver. Roy giggled.

“Want to go zoom, Roy? Want to go zoom? Zoom-a-zooooooom!” I was baby-talking, and was prepared to continue doing so as long as it kept him from crying. I pushed the stroller with dangerous bursts of speed. Roy loved that so much that he bawled when I stopped to catch my breath. And then he wouldn’t stop crying, no matter how fast we went. I crouched back down in front of him so that we were face-to-face.

“Please, don’t cry,” I pleaded to his empathetic side. “Please, buddy.” He scratched my glasses off my face. He did it three times before I caught on to the game. He was a tough read because the things he wanted were so simple. I let him play with my glasses and walked back to my sister’s blind.

I had a headache. I sat on the front steps with a beer and a smoke. Roy was on the lawn, losing a wrestling match with his football. Watching him for the afternoon took it out of me, and apparently he was an easy kid. He brought the football to me.

“You know what’s really fucked up, kid? Getting married was my idea.” I booted the ball to the other side of the yard so he could chase it down. “I know. Hard to believe, right?”

James honked as he drove up. “How’s my sonny boy?” he called, rounding the Suburban’s long beak. Roy started to giggle and tried to stand up. “Everything go smooth? No problems?”

“No problems,” I said. James tossed Roy above his head and caught/swung him so that the kid’s path traced a J that skimmed the ground. They both laughed. It made me nervous watching Roy’s head jerk back on its pencil neck each time he reached the bottom of that J. I was ready for the ride to end.

“James, do you think—”

“Hang on. I have to piss like a friggin’ Clydesdale.” He set Roy—who clamored for more—down on the grass and blew by me, taking the porch three steps at a time. “You want to go get some clams?” he asked on the go. “My treat?” He sounded like a guy who’d just made a lot of money. “Big bowl of beef stew and a few pints of Guinness?” The toilet seat went up with such force, I could hear the chalky underside of the tank lid ring and grind against the tank’s unglazed coping. His piss stream broke the calm of the pond with a proud, throaty roar. “What do you say?” The raising of his diaphragm caused the pitch of his leak to momentarily modulate to a higher key.

I waited for him to finish before answering. “Maybe next time.” I took a pull off my beer. Roy was still wondering where the party went. “I’d kind of like to be alone.”

The toilet seat slammed down on the mug. James boomed back across the living room.

“I don’t fucking blame you.” Then, almost apologetically, “What do you think about watching the kid for me here and there?”

I WAS INTO MUSIC, so it was bound to come up at some point. When it did, Jocelyn told me, not every detail about it, but enough. There was a band from Boston called Fifi, and before Jocelyn and I met, she had a brief fling with the band’s front man, Roger Lyon III. Fifi never got famous—not like Third Eye Blind famous—but the cool kids knew who they were.

When I asked Jocelyn what had happened, meaning why it ended between her and Lyon III, she downplayed it and said there was “nothing there.” I asked her if there was nothing there for her or nothing there for him. She said for either of them, which was a load of crap. There had to be something there for one of them. People don’t feel the same amount of nothing for each other at the same time. She told me, well, that’s the way it was. After that, I took every opportunity to assassinate Roger Lyon III’s character.

I was eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal without any milk. I had Option open to the cover story on Roger Lyon III. “This guy’s a fucking ponce.” And he was, which made hating him a breeze. The two-page, fish-eye-lens photo elongated his already model-quality features. He towered over Sunset Boulevard in a shearling overcoat-and-hat ensemble that must have been rated for twenty degrees below zero. Jocelyn had her back to me. She was trying to light one of the gas burners. “I wonder if he still gets college girls wasted after shows,” I said.

Jocelyn didn’t answer.

“What do you think? Still getting college girls wasted?”

“He didn’t get me wasted. It was two Rolling Rocks.” She remembered the brand. “Give me your cig.”

“Hang on. Listen to this. And I quote: ‘I have tapes and tapes full of songs that are so much better than Genius IQ , but I’m not sure if I’m into the whole “releasing thing” anymore. I’m really into collecting opals.’ End quote. Collecting opals? What the fuck is that all about?”

Jocelyn plucked the smoke from my fingers and used it to light the burner. She was wearing the boxer-briefs I had taken off when we got into bed the night before. She did that a lot.

“Holy fuck, get a load of this Q-and-A.”

Jocelyn sighed.

“And I quote:

“ ‘OPTION: Where did the band name Fifi come from?

“‘ROGER LYON III: The poodle protagonist from Van der Vleet’s novella.

“‘O: Very cool.

“‘RLIII: Yeah.’

“What a fucking asshole. I bet he likes rape jokes.” Jocelyn finished my cigarette at the stove. She looked good in my underwear. The kettle rumbled above a blue flame, but was still minutes away from boiling. “I bet Van der Vleet doesn’t even exist. I went to college—”

“Sort of—”

“And I’ve never heard of fucking Van der Vleet. Have you? I bet that asshole made the—”

“Please. Enough. You have nothing to worry about. You’re the asshole I love.”

I WAS JUST wrapping up my morning shower when I heard a key opening the front door. “Yo, it’s me and Dogshit,” James hollered.

“Give me a minute,” I yelled. I could hear James giving Dogshit instructions as I got dressed.

“Where the fuck this medicine cabinet come from?”

I opened the bathroom door. A draft further chilled my wet feet. “You don’t have one, so . . . It’s for letting me crash.”

James appeared in the doorway. The medicine cabi net box hung from his hand like a Kleenex. “Fuck that. The listed price for this place does not include a medicine cabinet.” He meant it. “I can use this, though.”

“Whatever, man. It’s yours.” I put a sock on one foot while balancing on the other like a pelican. I could hear Dogshit revving the motor of a small electric tool.

“You want all three of these, Jimmy?” he asked.

“Yeah. And don’t lose the screws. They’re brass.”

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“Taking down the sconces. Look, you’re going to have to clear out of here for a few hours tomorrow. A real estate agent’s showing the place from noon to three.”

“No problem. I won’t be here.”

“And stuff all your shit in the back bedroom closet before you split.”

“Will do.”

“I don’t want them thinking this is a crack house.”

“They won’t.”

James let go of the medicine cabinet box and pressed down with both middle fingers on a door hinge pin that had risen nearly two inches out of position. It wouldn’t budge. It upset him. “You got a hammer out there, ’shit?” he yelled.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Whore,” James said. “Run out to the truck and get me one.”

“Eat me,” Dogshit said.

James bit his bottom lip and grunted as he tried again to pop the pin back into position. It finally snapped into place with a loud, metallic click. “Fuck you,” he said to the hinge. He swung the door back and forth a few times to bask in the beauty of a specimen in perfect working condition. “Why don’t you come to lunch with me and Dogshit?”

“Is it that late already?”

I SAT IN THE BACK, next to Roy’s empty baby seat. It was a given that Dogshit always rode shotgun. James controlled the radio. He went right for a local oldies station.

“What sconces?” Dogshit said like a gangster film thug who understands that he, if questioned by the cops, is to play dumb. His thick navy blue hooded sweatshirt was faded and covered with smears of hardened epoxy, fiberglass dust, and small wood slivers. He wore a pilly black-and-gold knit cap commemorating the Boston Bruins’ 1988 Stanley Cup run. “I never seen no sconces.”

“No shit,” James said. “I can get seventy-five bucks for those.”

“Minus my twenty percent,” Dogshit said.

“You can have twenty percent of this.” James lifted his crotch off the seat.

“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” Dogshit said, and slurped the air.

“Not as much as you.”

“Hold up,” Dogshit said. “This is a good tune.” Neither James nor I knew it. “You kidding me? It’s Mel Tormé.”

“That’s what I like about this station,” James said. “They’ll throw you a curveball. It’s not just ‘Respect’ and ‘Get Off My Fucking Cloud’ all day. The oldies stations ruined Aretha Franklin for me.” Dogshit shushed him. James turned it up. We all listened in silence.

I always thought of Mel Tormé as singing exclusively bouncy, shoo-bee-doo-bee-doo-wah numbers, but this one was doleful and so slow, it almost went backwards.

James pulled onto a winding wooded road that soon presented a decent ocean vista on our left. The road rose above sea level and briefly wound around a craggy outcropping of rock. I looked down at the water and counted three staggered white stripes of breaking waves. The ocean absorbed all of the sun’s component light except the bluest green, and melted seamlessly with the sky somewhere closer to England. My feet were still cold. I missed Jocelyn, even though she could suck the life out of me.

The song cross-faded into a commercial for East Falmouth’s only authorized dealer of Dittler Aquatic machined stainless steel crankshafts, camshafts, and valve lifters.

“I don’t buy it,” James said.

“Buy what?” Dogshit was already taking it personally.

“The whole thing.”

“What? You think Mel Tormé doesn’t mean it?”

“I think Mel Tormé means it. You can tell. He’s really putting his dick into the song. It’s the song itself.” They had cigarettes going, like French cafe intellectuals.

“What’s wrong with the song?” Dogshit asked.

“It’s supposed to be about love, right?”

“You think? The word love is in the fucking title.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Dogshit turned and high-fived me. James started over. “It’s about love, and how it lasts forever and all that shit. Well, maybe, but it’s not all fucking and flowers like the tune says. It’s a grind. It’s a second, low-paying job.” He reloaded. “Mel says he’d break his balls at work all day for the rest of his life just to be able to come home to what’s-her-face—”

“Monique.”

“Whatever. Maybe when you first start screwing you feel like that. But that shit goes. Get married and have a kid, Mel. We’ll see how fast you race home after work.” Our eyes met for an instant in the rearview mirror.

“Okay,” Dogshit said. “But did you ever think—and I don’t mean anything by it . . . I’m just saying . . . did you ever think that maybe what you and Pamela had wasn’t love?”

“Listen to Mr. Fucking Romance Novel here. I was there, asshole. And for what—two-plus years, maybe—it was love.”

“Fine.” Dogshit let it go.

I started thinking about getting Jocelyn pregnant. We were in Ray’s Pizza in SoHo—not for the actual conception, but when we found out. I was so anxious I couldn’t wait until we got back to Brooklyn for her to take the test. She didn’t want to do it in Ray’s Pizza, but I wore her down. She came out of the restroom looking too calm for it to be positive. I honestly thought I was off the hook until she formed a cross with her two index fingers. I made her say the words. Even then I didn’t believe her. Did I want her to go dig the stick out of the trash? You’re goddamn right I did. I grabbed her by the wrist when she got up. She told me to face the facts. I felt condemned to death. I said “Holy shit” about a hundred times. She told me to stop saying that. There was plenty of time to figure it out. Figure it out? What was there to figure out? The paisan behind the counter came over to our table and gave us free slices. Time to figure what out?

That night Jocelyn was especially worked up, which got me going. She said it was the hormones. She begged me to fuck her without protection. I went at her pretty hard. In my wildest, desperate dreams, I thought I might dislodge whatever it was clinging to the inside of her uterus. I resented her for getting us into this situation, though I was as much to blame, if not more. I made her come twice. I had to look away from her face or I wouldn’t have lasted as long as I did. I pulled out at the last second. Afterward, she mopped herself with my Teenage Fanclub T-shirt. I didn’t care. We fell asleep without talking.

The next morning she shook me awake. Her face was sapped of some color. She said she’d just miscarried. I sobered up. Was she sure? Definitely. Did she want me to call an ambulance? No, she just wanted to sleep. A drink of water? A cup of coffee? No, just sleep. Another blanket? Please, no more questions. She curled up like a fetal pig on the beige top sheet. I combed her scalp with my fingers. It looked like someone else’s scalp. The sharp edges of the Brooklyn street noise were rounded over some by the apartment walls. Jocelyn drifted off. I sat up in bed, chewing my nails. I didn’t exactly feel like I’d dodged a bullet. It was more like the bullet had passed through me without damaging any vital organs. The next time I might not be so lucky. I wondered how long I’d have to wait before I broke up with her.

“I’D JUST LIKE IT BETTER,” James said, “if the guy who wrote the song wasn’t trying to put one over me.”

“You know that’s Cole Porter you’re talking about? ”

“I don’t care if it’s Peter Fucking Frampton.”

I CAME IN through the back door. Richie was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the Valley Advocate.

“Dude,” he said, “guess who’s playing the Metro? ”

“GodheadSilo? ” I asked excitedly.

“Even better. Frampton.”

“Peter Frampton? Get the fuck out of here.”

“I’m not shitting you. Playing with Bowie must have given him the touring bug.”

“That is fucking awesome.”

We absolutely had to go. We were big fans. We had four-tracked an acoustic medley of “Baby, I Love Your Way” into ELO’s “It’s a Living Thing.” We were not being ironic. Richie and I both agreed that irony was for chumps, and that irony in music was the worst kind of irony. That was one of the things that bummed us out most about the Amherst music scene: every time you turned around there was a new band of little Ivy Leaguers with Cinderella or Quiet Riot tunes strategically placed in their über-intellectual math rock sets.

The first time we played an acoustic open mic night in town, Richie conjured his best Bill Hicks: “Nice fucking irony-on T-shirt,” he said to some dude wearing a new Kiss T-shirt. “There’s absolutely zero room for ironicomic relief in music. ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ motherfuckers. Come on and suck my ass. Fucking palate cleansers. Fucking melon balls. Fuck off.” He tapped the mic. “Is this thing on? ”

“Unfortunately,” someone in the lean audience said.

Richie carried on. “In case you never noticed—which you probably haven’t—this next tune is a great fucking song.” Then we broke into a cover of “Chevy Van” by Sammy Johns.

“Dude,” Richie said, “Frampton. I’m putting in tomorrow for the night off.”

“Same here.”

“Right the fuck on,” he said. We shook hands like Romans, grabbing each other’s forearm.

“When’s the gig?” I asked.

“Twenty-seventh. It’s a Thursday.”

I winced. “This month?”

“Yes, why?”

“I can’t go.”

“What do you mean, you can’t go?”

“I can’t go. That’s Jocelyn’s birthday.”

“So what?”

“So it’s her birthday. I mean, I’m going to have to hang out with her.”

“You make plans yet?”

“No, but—”

“So take her to Tanglewood for the weekend. There’s got to be a Marsalis or some shit like that playing.”

“She won’t go for that.”

“Make her go for it. Take her the next weekend, too. This is fucking Frampton.”

I thought about it. “There’s no way we’re ever going to get another chance to see him, is there?”

“It’s once in a lifetime.”

“Fine. Get me a ticket.”

I KNEW JOCELYN was going to shit a golden brick. We were standing on a footbridge in Prospect Park. The water was a turbid amusement-park green.

“I did something,” I said. “And I don’t want you to be upset about it.”

She looked worried. “Well, since you put it that way . . .”

I told her my plan.

She was hurt. “But that’s my birthday.”

“I know, but we can celebrate it early, or late, or both.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Why?” I asked like she was being childish.

She got a little pissy. “Because it isn’t, that’s why.”

I dismissed her by acting like I couldn’t relate to such a silly belief. “That’s just”—I shook my head—“Jesus, I don’t know.”

“It’s a real fucking shame if you can’t understand what’s so fucked up about making plans with your friend on your girlfriend’s birthday.”

I backpedaled. “Of course I can understand, I just don’t—”

“Don’t what? Give a shit?”

Two teenagers were crossing the bridge on skateboards. I was going to wait until they passed before continuing, but Jocelyn couldn’t wait: “You could have at least talked to me about it before making other plans.”

One kid nudged the other to make certain he wasn’t missing any of the fireworks. They stopped close by and pretended to be looking over the other side of the bridge.

“You didn’t even think to come and talk to me first. And I’m supposed to be your girlfriend.”

“And what would you have said if I had asked you?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I do. Believe me.”

“Don’t be a dick.”

I changed courses. “Look, this is once in a lifetime.”

“And what am I? What the fuck am I?”

“You are, too. But Frampton’s never coming around again. Ever. It’s a big deal.”

“And I’m not?”

“Of course, but—”

“But you’d rather see Peter Frampton with Richie.”

The skateboard kids were enjoying the show. They were cramping my style. “Can we talk about this at your place?”

“No. I want to talk about it now.”

I lowered my voice, but made up for the decrease in volume with a boost in intensity. “Fine. Let’s fucking talk about it right here. If you postponed my birthday celebration—which I don’t even fucking want, by the way—if you postponed my birthday because something like Frampton came up, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I wouldn’t. I just . . .” I trailed off.

“Are you finished?”

“For now.”

“Fine. First of all, you’re so full of shit about not having a problem with it. And secondly, I do have a problem with it. That alone should be enough of a reason for you.”

“I’m full of shit? Okay, when my birthday comes around, try me, and see what I say.”

“I don’t want to try you. I just wanted to spend my birthday with you. I don’t have parents or a sister calling me all the time to tell me how fucking great I am.”

“And that’s my fault?”

“No, but—”

“You make it sound like it is.”

“It’s your fault when you treat me like I’m someone you’re just fucking. I mean, you didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go.”

“To Frampton?”

“Yes, to Frampton.”

“And you’d go?”

“Not with you and Richie.”

“Why? It’s not like we have to stand with him.”

“Oh, yeah, right. What are you going to do, tell him to keep away from us?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a great idea. Then he’ll think I’m a royal fucking bitch.”

“Well, what’s he going to think when I go back and tell him to sell my ticket because I can’t go?”

She gave me a look like she genuinely hated me. “He’ll think whatever you tell him.”

“You know what? Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

“What isn’t?”

“This.”

DOGSHIT’S GIRLFRIEND, CARRIE, was a clinician’s assistant at an HMO in Cotuit. On Wednesdays she didn’t leave for work until half past one.

“Swing me by hers after lunch, Jimmy,” Dogshit said while shaking a bottle of hot sauce. “She said if she’s still there, she’ll give me a quick smoker.”

“What about work?” James had a mouth full of egg salad sandwich.

“What about it?” Dogshit pointed the hot sauce at me. “You have to take him home, right?”

“So.”

“So you’ll be going right by her place in both friggin’ directions. Zip-zip.”

“And how fucking long do you think it’s going to take for me to drop him off?”

“Long enough. Trust me. I got chowder backed up to here.” Dogshit touched an imaginary waterline on his forehead.

James stopped chewing. “Please. I’m trying to eat here. I don’t need to picture that.”

Dogshit laughed. “What can I say? I’ve been in dry-dock for a week.”

“Okay, so you pop in three seconds. Aren’t you going to have to pay her back?”

“Not this time. I gots me a credit.” Dogshit stuck out his fat tongue. It looked like an inverted seal hide curing in a cave of petrified guano. James took a bite of sandwich. “I swear to Christ, if you’re not waiting for me in the driveway, I’m going right by. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Don’t you worry. I’ll be the sleepy one with the shit-eating grin.”

“What the fuck else is new?”

Even Dogshit laughed.

CARRIE’S WHITE CHEVY Citation was parked in the driveway.

“Game on,” Dogshit said. He stuck his hand in his pants. “Do I need a whore’s bath first?” He raised the hand to James’s face. James swatted it away.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

We jettisoned Dogshit without coming to a complete stop. He flipped us the bird. I climbed into the front seat. James sighed. “At least someone’s getting laid,” He merged back onto Plymouth Street. He was flummoxed. “What I don’t understand is how can someone like Carrie, who’s so . . .”

“Normal?”

“And Dogshit’s so . . . whatever, man.”

“Someone for everyone, right?”

“At least for a little while.”

James turned on the radio. A station I.D. segued into “That’s How I Got to Memphis” by Tom T. Hall. I liked that song, but James groaned and turned the radio off without scanning for anything better. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about what I was saying earlier.” He could have been referencing any number of things.

“What are you talking about?”

“The stuff about the Mel Tormé tune.”

“Right.”

“I mean, Pamela’s your sister and everything. And just because she and me got shit-canned, well, that doesn’t mean, I don’t know. I just don’t want you to think I think she’s a total bitch. She can act like one—they all can—but she’s not one. You know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“It just didn’t work out with us. That’s all. And we’re better off for killing it when we did instead of hanging around watching it rot. You follow me?”

“I can tell you don’t hate each other.”

“Hate? Jesus Christ. She’s my only kid’s mother. I’ll always love her.” I could feel him looking over at me, but I didn’t face him. “And as far as Roy goes, shit. The little bastard runs me ragged, but I couldn’t imagine the life I’d have without him. Just because I bitch a lot doesn’t mean shit. The toughest thing about splitting up is not seeing Roy every day.”

“But you get him half the week?”

“It’s not enough. You think I like letting you watch him?” I was touched. It was like James had stripped out of his asshole suit right before my eyes. “I’d take a kid over a wife any day of the week,” he said. “It’s fucked up, I know. But having a kid changes you like that. You’ll see.”

“The fuck I will.”

“What? You think you’re never going to want a kid?”

“Never.”

“We’ll see. You’re still young.” He let it go at that.

“I got Jocelyn pregnant. That’s as close as I ever want to get.”

“She’s not still pregnant, is she? Is that why you got married?”

“God, no.” I told him the whole story.

“And she definitely didn’t want it?”

“She said she didn’t, but it was over so fast. Who knows if she would have changed her mind?”

“I did. I didn’t want Roy at first, either.”

“No?”

“Fuck no. But people change.” Hearing that made me feel worse. James was insane over Roy.

“Maybe I would have changed. I just know there’s no way I could have handled having a kid.”

James thought about it. “I guess if both people don’t want to have the kid, miscarriage is the way to go.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“It’s like having an abortion without having to have an abortion.”

I shuddered. “I can’t even imagine what going through that would have been like.”

“It’s a fucking nightmare. I’ve been through a couple of them.”

“A couple?”

“Well, one, really. The second time, so help me God, we were pulling into the clinic lot—right into the spot they reserve for you—and she tells me she made the whole thing up. Just like that. ‘I made the whole thing up.’ ”

“You’re kidding?”

“Oh, no. I’m dead serious.”

“Who was it?”

“Not your sister.”

That was good to know. “God, you must have been floored.”

“I didn’t make me feel too good.” He rolled his window down a crack. “After the first abortion I didn’t doubt her when she said she was pregnant again.”

“Same person? ”

“Correct.”

“Why’d she do it?”

“To get back at me.”

“For what?”

“For fucking around on her with your sister.” I knew Pamela and James’s relationship was the surviving line segment of a love triangle, but as I’d understood it, Pamela had been there first. “It’s was a shit maneuver, when you think about it,” James said. “Her pretending she was pregnant.”

THE BOURNE BRIDGE was ten miles away from East Falmouth. I wasn’t going to do anything stupid when I got there. I just wanted to stand on it and think and watch the canal slide out to sea. Maybe get whacked by an epiphany. You always hear stories like that. Some successful yet empty-hearted commodities broker decides to give it all up and sculpt full-time while witnessing the sun sinking beyond the Grand Canyon. If something like that happened to me, or if some angel-in-training came down to guide me, like in It’s a Wonderful Life, so be it.

When I was a kid, the suicide hotline signs posted at either end of the Bourne Bridge were sources of quality funning around for my family. My mother said my father and Pamela and I were bad for joking about desperate people, but she was saying it as much for herself. She always ended up laughing with us.

I was too hungry to bike the ten miles without eating first. I headed over to the Crow’s Nest and stuffed my face. The Crow’s Nest’s patron-attracting hook was that it had once been the galley of an actual ship. But that was about a hundred years ago. Since then there had been numerous sloppy additions and upgrades. There was nothing except a wall of telltale photos and the unusual narrowness of the main dining room to hint at its original gig.

The Nimitz was the biggest one-stop-shopping breakfast on the menu. I ordered a chocolate malted shake on the side, and drank it right from the stainless steel cup. My waitress could have been a contender for Ms. Off-Season East Falmouth. I closed my eyes, and hers became the tight-pored voice of a girl half her age.

“Makes you think you’ll never feel hungry again,” she said.

She was absolutely right. I watched her wipe down the counters while Roger Whittaker sang “Durham Town.” I pictured her and me getting an apartment together and living a life free from turbulence.

“Makes you think you’ll never feel hungry again,” I heard her say to a couple guys a few tables away. Turns out she had to say it. That was the Crow’s Nest’s slogan. It was printed on the back of her sweatshirt and others like it on sale at the register for $15.95. It figured she was pitching me. I know what it’s like serving people for money and not from the goodness of your own heart. She wrote, “Thanks a bunch, Jeanine,” and drew a smiley face at the bottom of my check. It was an insincere, tip-milking come-on.

I started thinking about a girl named Jeanine whom I’d had sex with a single, unhappy time. We were both sophomores at UMass. I was a much deeper shade of sexual green than she was.

I’d met UMass Jeanine a couple of times through our mutual friend Claire, but she was too hyper for me. And she had an overbite I just could not forgive. Claire was driving us back to Amherst after a long weekend in February. It was a rainy Presidents’ Day, and already dark by the time we left Boston. Claire was a small, jittery girl with short, noticeably thinning hair. She dressed like a child. She always wore corduroys that were maroon or yellow or aqua. She downshifted her Dodge Omni into the gear designed for snow and never deviated from it or the right lane. Her bony ass squirmed on a folded towel she sat on for lift.

Traffic, shitty visibility, and the fact that I am a horribly nervous passenger made the Mass Turnpike a white-knuckle migraine maker. Claire kept the heat cranked because the defroster was fucked. When I wasn’t obeying her short orders to wipe the windshield with a dedicated chamois, I was stabbing the phantom brake pedal on the passenger side. Claire stabbed the real brakes every time the spray plume from a passing truck drenched her windshield.

A George Michael EP cassette of five different mixes of the tune “I Want Your Sex” never left the tape player. When “Monogamy Mix” came around for the third time, I turned the power off. Claire was curt. She corrected me. She said it was her driving music. It relaxed her, okay?

For most of the drive I felt like I could be sick at any second. Not Jeanine. She said that since her bulimia was in remission, she refused to not see the positive in everything. I didn’t buy it. She reminded me of an overly bubbly suicide failure pretending to be over it.

I made a few comments about how a beer at the end of the drive was in order. Jeanine said she could really go for something with Midori in it. That was the extent of our flirting. I was wearing hemmed acid-wash jeans, a gray UMass sweatshirt, and white leather Reebok sneakers; in spite of all that, when we pulled up to her student apartment in Puffton Village, Jeanine asked me if I still wanted that beer.

We wound up on her Salvation Army sofa. One of the three seat cushions was gone; it broke the ice. We had to sit close. She read me her favorite passage from Sartre’s Nausea—where the main dude almost drops dead from merely seeing a bloated scrap of paper in a puddle. Then she started shampooing me—both of us fully clothed—with beer right there on the couch. She kept saying she’d do anything I wanted. Anything. That all I had to do was tell her what I wanted her to do. She started kissing my throat. She’d put on too much Anaïs Anaïs during her last trip to the can. I could taste it. I asked her if she had any protection. She said if she got pregnant she’d just kill it.

I GAVE Crow’s Nest Jeanine my standard 20 percent tip and left the restaurant. The sky was an electric-blue monochrome textile interrupted by Magritte-white crowns of cauliflower. It insisted I watch. I straddled Sweet Thunder in the lot and lit a smoke. I felt like getting laid.

“This is not a fucking pipe.”

I started thinking about how the French phrase for giving someone head translates back to English as “to make the pipe.” Jocelyn was fluent in both. I could be doing something as sexually arousing as spanking the bottom of a bunged-up toaster, and she’d poke her head in and ask, “Make the pipe?” If I took a rain check—which almost never happened—it was partly because there’d always be more where that came from. Jocelyn was of a different mind. She didn’t take enough things for granted.

I finished my smoke, went back into the Crow’s Nest, and jerked off into a urinal.

JOCELYN AND I woke from an afternoon nap and started fucking. She was on top of me. Her face always looked pained during sex. I didn’t think anything out of the ordinary was up until she stopped mid-sprint and started to cry.

“What is it?”

“This,” she said. “This.” She opened her arms, presenting the moment and beyond.

“What about it?” She brushed the hair away from her eyes to make sure I could see a deathlike inevitability in them. “One of these times really is going to be the last time.”

“Jesus Christ,” I sighed.

“Well, it’s true.”

“And guess what? We’re all going to die.”

She fell onto her side. “I know. We are.”

FROM WHEN I was about six until I started high school, my parents rented a house in the town of Dennis for two weeks most summers. When we were savvy enough to catch the pun, Pamela and I would crack up as my old man pointed out triumphantly upon approaching it, the sign that read Entering Dennis.

During one of the energy crisis summers—I must have been eight or nine—they had odd/even days. You could buy gasoline only on an odd day if your license plate ended in an odd number, and only on an even day if your plate ended in an even number. I don’t remember if our Mercury Monarch was odd or even, but it was our day. My old man made an adventure out of it. He got me up at five to beat the rush, and it worked. We lined up at the Arco station behind a short queue. My father nudged me. “We—you and I—are very smart people.” Arco had a sales promotion going back then. If you filled up, you got whichever free miniature Noah’s Ark animal they were giving away that week. It didn’t make sense to me, and I was only a kid. We were in the middle of an energy crunch. People were dying to overpay for gas. They didn’t need a biblical myth to bring in the punters.

I was sitting on the sofa-sized front seat, feasting on leaded gasoline fumes. My old man stuffed his change into a pocket of his new Bermuda shorts as he walked back to the car. He tossed a pack of Hostess Donut Gems and a plastic animal onto my lap through the open window.

“It’s a zebra,” he said. “Next week’s its mate.” I couldn’t care less. I’d just seen my dream purchase: A cluster of goatskin wineskins hung on an outdoor rack. Six dollars and ninety-five cents was a lot of cash.

“Well, it’s your money,” my old man said. When we got back to our rented cottage, my mother looked at the wineskin like it was still bloody. She told me to soak it in soapy water before I used it. After that, every drink tasted like Lemon Fresh Joy. It gave me headaches, so I stopped drinking out of it. I broached the subject of buying another one with my old man. This time he put his foot down.

SINCE OPENING IN 1949, Donnelly’s Outfitters had been just over the Bourne Bridge into Cape Cod. We always stopped there either at the beginning or end of our family vacations. It was a tradition.

Donnelly’s will have a wineskin.

The building was an army Quonset hut painted to look like a “Go west, young man” - era trading post. The anachronistic-by-design visage was accentuated by Precision Auto-Cad Fabricators, Inc., with which Donnelly’s shared a chain-link fence. When I was a kid coming here to ride the go-karts and rummage through the shelves packed with cool shit, it really seemed like the place was out in the sticks. Like the person who’d buy the bear trap from above the faux fireplace might actually get some local intended use out of it.

I pulled on the locked door. The lights were on inside, but I couldn’t see any people. The same sad man-sized mechanical flying fish hung on a wire fixed to an exposed ceiling rib. I knocked a few times. Nothing. I followed a mulch path around the side of the building to a side entrance. I could hear someone out back riding a go-kart. I followed the noise.

The lone go-kart darting around the track was piloted by the original Mr. Donnelly’s son, Mr. Donnelly Jr. He must have been in his seventies. He looked like a dehydrated version of his younger self. His decimated white comb-over stood up like a ragged flap of dead skin. His knees were in his armpits. He was wearing a snowflake-patterned red cardigan I know was from Lands’ End because I got the same one, but in blue, from my mother’s sister Dee two Christmases earlier. Seeing Mr. Donnelly Jr. in that sweater helped me to further rest my case; it was not a sweater worn by a guy my age. Sure, Kurt Cobain made cardigans cool again, but his were beat to shit. I had the good sense to leave the tags on Aunt Dee’s gift, that way I could get more fuck-off money from a used-clothes store in Amherst. Even so, I only got ten bucks for it. Dee lived way up in North Con-way, New Hampshire, and she’s dead now anyway, so no harm, no foul.

I moved through the chain-link corral that framed the crabgrass infield, the go-kart track, and a small prefab garage that looked new compared to everything else. The asphalt circuit was cracked and worn nearly silver. Skid marks pointed in unfathomable directions. The air smelled of salt, pine sap, and lawn mowers.

Mr. Donnelly Jr. sneered as he maneuvered the speeding go-kart through a tight chicane. He momentarily went up on two side wheels, then slammed down without even braking. The last time I’d driven a go-kart, I was in junior high, and it was around that very track. They didn’t seem at all dangerous to me back then.

Mr. Donnelly Jr. noticed me leaning against the fence. He eased off the gas, as if capitulating to the hard reality that his victory at Le Mans was a mathematical impossibility. He raised his be-with-you-in-a-second finger and pulled out of sight into the garage. The engine went quiet off camera. He walked toward me. I felt kind of bad because he looked like he’d been having a good time, and, really, how many good times does a guy his age have left?

“Didn’t think anyone was coming today.” He was tall and thin. His kneecaps knocked like ball-peen hammer-heads against the inside of his pants. His cheeks were bloodshot and stained with age spots. But it was a kind face. His hands looked kind, too, but you never know. They isolated a key on a large, crowded ring.

“Sorry to pull you away,” I said.

“That’s what we’re here for, right?” He was the type of benevolent guy who says “It shows to go you” or, if you’re a kid, pretends his thumb is your stolen nose. He looked out over the empty go-kart track. “I still love riding them, even after all this time.” He didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed by the fact that he wasn’t talking about golf or bowling.

“I don’t remember them going that fast.”

“They don’t usually. The one I was driving has no governor on the carburetor. Someone your size”—he looked me up and down—“could do thirty-five, forty easy. Give it a go? You don’t have to open it up all the way if you don’t want.”

“No, thanks.”

“Come on. Give it whirl.”

“Maybe another time, thanks.”

“Sure,” he said. “Another time.” I think he was slightly miffed because he got down to business without making any more small talk. He looked at me, then locked the gate behind him. As we walked back toward the store, I felt like I should offer something to fill the silence, like I owed him that much.

“I used to come here every summer with my family.”

“Cape’s a nice place.”

“I mean right here.” I pointed at the ground.

“Lots of people been through here.” He bent over and picked up a flattened cardboard coffee cup that had blown onto his property.

Okay, fuck it, I thought. I don’t want to talk, either.

Mr. Donnelly Jr. decided to forgive and forget: “Just down for a visit? Good time of year for it. All the loonies are gone.”

“Sort of. I’m staying with family in East Falmouth.”

“I like East Falmouth. East Falmouth, Falmouth, Barnstable—they’re more real.” He rubbed some salt of the earth between his thumb and fingers. “Real people. Know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“That’s good.” He laughed. “Because I don’t know if I know what I mean.” His teeth were neat, though not his own. We were friends again. He unlocked the side door and flung it open. The sleigh bells fixed to it chimed. The interior of the store—contents included—looked the same as it did when I was kid, only now I noticed an irrelevance that must have always been there. I overcame an urge to not go in.

“So, what is it I can do you for?”

I lied right to his face. “It’s kind of silly, but I bought one of those goatskin wineskins here about twenty years ago—” He snapped his fingers and made a beeline to the correct shelf. “This what you’re looking for?”

“That’s it exactly.” It came in a cellophane sleeve that was brittle and yellow around the edges. The staple that sealed the package was rusted. Mr. Donnelly Jr. took it from my hand and brought it up to the counter. We both knew my buying it was a forgone conclusion.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“How many of those little Jameson’s nips you got back there?”

“Let’s see. One, two, three, four. Four.”

“I’ll take all of them.”

It was a few days before Halloween. Mr. Donnelly Jr. looked at me like he’d just rung up my bag of apples, and I’d asked him to toss in a pack of razors.

I GOT BACK onto Route 28. People who had jobs were driving to their lunch spots. I stayed on the thin strip of right-unjustified pavement that separated the white line from a sand-and-scrub-brush shoulder. A couple times I had to stop to avoid veering off the road or into traffic. I wore the wineskin like a shoulder holster against my skin, concealed beneath my hooded sweatshirt and denim jacket.

I could see the Bourne Bridge in the distance. It was an arc of gray discipline rising from, then dipping back into, the mayhem of trees. It seemed out of place and was as arresting as the sudden appearance of a second, larger moon.

As I passed a dirt fire road on my right, the speed-trap cop parked in it gave me a choked-off blast of his siren. I stopped. He waved me over to his window. He was shaking his head like he was witnessing a weekend inventor about to test a prototype flying suit.

“What are you thinking?” he said. He was wearing a baseball type of cop hat and one of those black marksman’s sweaters with the leather rifle-butt shoulder patches. The visible portion of his close-cropped blond hair screamed honorable discharge. He looked like the young leader of a Mormon paramilitary group.

“Nothing.”

“Affirmative.” The admitted purposelessness of what I was up to did not improve his opinion of me. I was guilty as fuck of being stupid. He looked at the bike and the four-day growth on my face and clothes. If I had been wearing the wineskin outside my jacket he would have run my license.

My license. I felt a jolt of raw nerve panic. I was sure I’d left it on the writing table at the Gramercy Park Hotel. I folded my arms across my chest to flatten any suspicious bulges.

“Didn’t you read the signs? No Pedestrians includes bicycles.”

I turned on the respect, but not too heavy. “No, sir, I must have missed them.”

He was still seated too low and comfortably for me to go into full panic mode. He did some police work. “Where do you live?”

“Amherst.”

“Massachusetts?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m on vacation,” I said, careful not to sound flip.

“And you’re what, just out sightseeing?” I nodded. “On that bike?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where were you planning on going?”

“I thought I might make it to the bridge.”

“That bridge?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s not going to happen.” He grew six inches. “Where are you staying?”

“At my sister’s in East Falmouth. Opal Cove Road.”

“And you took Twenty-eight? The whole way?”

I nodded again. He sighed and opened his door without warning. He got out of the cruiser. Turns out he wasn’t much taller than me.

“I really didn’t know it was illegal,” I said.

“You haven’t been drinking, have you?”

“No.”

“Because it’s not warm out, and you’re sweating pretty good.”

“It’s a hard bike to ride. And I’m out of shape.”

He looked at the bike and then at me. Both things I said made sense to him. He walked to the rear of the cruiser, opened the trunk, and started shifting things. “There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts just up the road. I’m going to drop you off, and you’re going to figure out the rest from there.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t care how you get yourself back to East Falmouth. But what you’re not going to do is bike or walk or roller-skate or anything on Route Twenty-eight. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Because if I let you go, and you get picked up by someone else further up the road . . . you don’t want that.”

“I won’t.”

“Or if, God forbid, I pick you up again . . .”

“You won’t.”

“Good.” It took two normal tries, then a more serious one to close the Crown Vic’s trunk. “You’re going to have to sit in back. All my radar’s up front.” I got in the cage. The sound of him auto-locking the doors had an opposite effect on my sense of security. “Seat belt on,” he said.

As we were merging back onto 28, another cruiser pulled up and blocked our path. This cop was older. He looked like Boris Yeltsin. A large chief’s badge was painted in gold on his door.

“What he do?” asked Captain Kickass.

“Just biking in the wrong place. He didn’t know.”

“Biking?”

“That’s what I said to him.” They shared a quick laugh about it.

“He’s not Colombian, is he?”

My cop looked back at me, wordlessly passing along the question.

“Irish,” I said. “American Irish.”

“He’s Irish.”

“I’m looking for a Colombian—about his age—who likes to beat up on his pregnant wife. Knocked her to the floor and kicked her across the room.”

“Scumbag.”

“Real scumbag. This guy married?”

I leaned forward, right up against the cage and spoke directly to Captain Kickass. I wanted to eliminate the possibility of any miscommunication that might land me in the tank. “Separated, sir.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“She lives in New York.”

“You ever hit her?”

“I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”

“Nobody?”

“No, sir.”

“Never been in a fistfight? Not a single time?”

“Never, sir.”

He spent about a month looking through that cage, into my eyes. “Yeah, well I have.” He smiled. “Plenty of times.” Without lifting his foot off the brake, he shifted the cruiser into drive. It made a false start. “Let’s keep the bikes on the back roads.”

“I will, sir.”

“And if you see any Colombians . . .” He winked and peeled out of the dirt road. We stayed put until the rooster tail of dust settled.

The cop turned to me. “That’s not really true about never hitting anyone before, is it? ”

“It is.”

“Wow.”

THE COP HIT the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through before letting me out.

“You want anything? Guys on the force don’t pay.”

“No, thanks.”

The drive-through girl’s spiel came through the tiny speaker.

“Who’s that? Brenda? ” the cop asked into the menu board.

“Tommy? ” she answered.

“Ten-four.”

“No, it’s me, Georgette.”

“Chripesakes,” Tommy said. “You sound more like each other every day.”

“Looking like her, too,” Georgette said, not too pleased about it.

“Hey, hey, enough of that,” Tommy said. “You could do worse. A lot worse.”

“I don’t know about that,” Georgette said. She yelped when an offended hand—presumably Brenda’s—slapped a naked, fleshy part of her. “See what I have to put up with, Tom? ”

Brenda overrode her: “You mean see what I have to put up with? ”

“You could both do a lot worse,” Tommy said.

“We’ll see about that,” Georgette said. “Large with milk and two Sweet’N Lows? ”

Tommy turned to me. “You sure you don’t want anything? ”

“I’m sure.”

“That’ll do it. Large with milk and two Sweet’N Lows.” He drove around to the pickup window. Georgette had his coffee waiting. Her mother stood behind her. Both women were overweight and at different points of the same free fall. They saw me in the back.

“Who’s that? ” the daughter asked.

Tommy reached out for the coffee. “Nobody.”

“What he do? ” the mother asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why’s he in the back? ”

“Is he dangerous? ”

“No, he broke down. I’m just giving him a hand.”

Both women shifted their eyes to him. “That’s good of you, Tom,” the daughter said. “You guys”—she shook her head in admiration of all cops—“you’re always sticking your necks out for other people.”

“People who don’t even appreciate it,” the mother added. “Boy, Tom, I tell you, I sure do.”

“Me, too,” the daughter said.

“That’s nice to hear.” He started to dig some money out of his pants pocket. “It makes this job—”

The daughter waved him off. “No, no, no, no, Tom. I couldn’t charge you.”

Tommy stopped himself before completely saying the word but. It was one of the weakest “No, let me pay” protests I’d ever seen.

“It’s just a cup of coffee, Tom,” the mother chimed in. “What’s it, two cents to them? ” She said it as if the moneygrubbing Dunkin’ Donuts head honchos were just out of earshot.

“Not even,” the daughter added.

“You guys.” Tommy stopped digging for money. He turned to me. “Can you believe these two? ”

I couldn’t.

“Call it one of those what-do-you-call-its,” the mother said.

TOMMY LET ME off at a brown fiberglass picnic table next to the pay phone. Before he drove away, he asked me if I was sure I was feeling okay. He seemed like a decent guy for a cop.

I sat on the picnic table with my feet up on the bench. It was a beautiful day. The kind you expect it to be when you get the phone call notifying you that someone close to you has died unexpectedly. I lit a smoke, then took the wineskin out from under my coat. I took a healthy pull of Jameson’s.

“What the fuck am I going to do? ”

Georgette and her mother were eyeballing me through the plate glass. I turned my back to them. There was the Bourne Bridge, dizzying, spiritual, and off-limits. There’d be no epiphany on it for me today. I called James and asked him for a lift. He asked me how I ended up way the fuck up there. I told him I got lost.

IT WAS PISSING RAIN when I woke up. I was thinking about the woman who lost her shit and faked being pregnant after James cheated on her with my sister. I felt horrible. I decided to call Jocelyn’s answering machine and let her know that I didn’t walk out on her for someone else. I biked over to Spunt’s Gas and Grocery to use the pay phone. I didn’t even bother trying to stay dry.

“Can I have three of that in quarters? ” I interrupted the kid behind the counter. His head was the size of a large pomegranate. He couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work so that my change would include three dollars in quarters. I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I just hung back and let him struggle through it.

“I have to do it all over,” he said, frustrated and apologetic.

“It’s okay.” He gave me back my twenty, put the rest of the money in the register, and started over.

“You want gas? ” he asked for the second time.

I shook my head again. I started thinking about that film clip of the Vietnam War protester who doused himself and his baby daughter with gasoline on the Pentagon lawn. The cops managed to talk the guy into letting the baby go unharmed before he torched himself. I wondered if the whisked-away baby was found by the fiery fuse that yoked her to her father.

“Eleven dollars and nine cents.” The kid looked at me over his water-spotted glasses. I paid him again. The drops beating against the windows made the outside look like the inside of an aquarium.

I put my change in the plastic bag with my stuff. “Take it easy,” I said, and bolted out across the flooded parking lot into a phone booth.

Automobiles hydroplaned along Plymouth Street merely a few feet away. They shrieked by like bomber jets flying to and from a common objective. I lit a smoke and snaked through the curves of my conundrum. I wanted to talk to Jocelyn, but I didn’t want to talk to her. I told myself if she answered, I’d hang up. It was answering machine or nothing.

I bent down to pick up the cellophane from my cigarette pack. The corners of the phone booth floor were grouted with a cured bead of grime. It reminded me of the shitty places I’d lived, and all the shitty ones to come. Jocelyn was the cleanest person I’d ever met. I loved her towels. They were luxurious and always thirsty. She bought expensive microbrew shampoos from Sweden. She was twenty-four and she had tablecloths. She said she liked what she liked. God, I fucking envied her for knowing that.

“I’M A BIG FAN of circumcision,” Jocelyn said as she washed my back with a chunk of sea sponge harvested from someplace in the Indian Ocean.

“Lucky for me.” I held on to the towel bar at the back of her shower.

“It’s sleeker.”

Jocelyn’s father was Catholic, but technically, since her mother was Jewish, so was she. I grew up Catholic. My circumcision was motivated by who knows what. Vanity or a cutthroat, lose-the-deadweight mentality. The human appendix isn’t pulling its weight, either, but no one has it removed until it’s practically gangrenous.

“If you ever try to convert,” Jocelyn said, “a rabbi is going to have to sign off on the surgeon’s work. Could have left it too long.” She said it like she was talking about a haircut I could just pop in and have Lamont tidy up.

“Why would I ever convert? ”

“I don’t know. I’m just saying if you ever did.”

“Jesus Christ, can you imagine getting recircumcised at my age? ”

“People do it.”

“Fucking barbaric.”

“You’d think they’d have developed a nonsurgical method, you know, like a chemical peel or something.”

I saw an opportunity. I reached back and pulled her arms around me. I assumed the position like I was about to be frisked by a cop. She started soaping me up. Our minds headed down the same path but quickly veered in different directions.

“You know what? ” she asked.

“Mmm.”

“The word blowjob is a total misnomer.”

“Huh? ”

“Think about it. There isn’t a lot of blowing going on. That can be confusing when you’re just starting out.” She drifted as she continued working me up into a good lather. “He was almost six years older than me, so I was nervous enough as it was, you know? ”

“Who? ”

“Todd.”

“Right,” I said. “Todd.”

Todd was a numskull pizza jockey and Jocelyn’s first real boyfriend. She started working—as a toppings prep—and became sexually active when she was fourteen. When I was fourteen, I was still bumming occasional Pop Rocks money off my parents and dreaming of whisking Victoria Principal away with me on my personal spacecraft.

“I could feel him getting softer, so I kept blowing faster and faster. I didn’t know.” She huffed like she was in childbirth. “Then he pulled me really hard by the hair.” Jocelyn loosely grabbed a handful of my hair like my head was a bunch of carrots. “And I could feel him get hard again.” She tightened her grip.

“That really hurts.”

JOCELYN WAS a three-ringer, tops. If she didn’t pick before the fourth ring, she was either not picking up or not home. Her answering machine was set to kick in two rings after that.

I went over my script as my index finger swung like a divining rod drawn to the Brooklyn area code. I felt something like a serial dieter who flirts with failure by nibbling on the first frosting rose. I dialed the rest of her number. The receiver felt cold and oily against my ear. A recording dared me to deposit an additional $1.75 for the first three minutes. I choked the coin slot with quarters.

During the first three rings I was scared she’d pick up. After the fourth I was relieved. After the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth rings I was wondering what the fuck was going on. Probably dialed the wrong number. I did it all again more carefully. Same thing.

“What the fuck? ” No answering machine was a new development. I went over the possible explanations: (1) The machine had—after fuck knows how many years of functioning perfectly—finally broken down. (2a) The machine had become disconnected by accident. (2b) The machine had become disconnected on purpose.

I watched the last of the rain ooze down the length of the phone booth. With zero hesitation, I dialed Jocelyn’s work number. There was no answer at her extension. I was rerouted to the receptionist. I told her I was an old friend. She said Jocelyn was—if I could believe it—on her honeymoon.

“Really? Do you have any idea where she went? ”

“Somewhere warm. Other than that, she wouldn’t say.”

“You talked to her? ”

“Just this morning. Très mysterious. Très romantique.”

“How did she sound? ”

“How did she sound? She just got married, for goodness’ sake.”

I CALLED JOCELYN’S apartment again. This time I wanted her to answer. Nothing. I went back into Spunt’s and bought a postcard of the Bourne Bridge.

“We only have the other kind of stamps,” the kid said.

“Fine.”

“And you have to buy a book of them.”

“Whatever.” I took a pen from beside the register and went back to the counter where the coffeepots were. I addressed the postcard to Jocelyn. I chose the rest of my words carefully: “There’s no one else, by the way.” I dropped the postcard in the first mailbox I saw. I regretted it immediately because I felt like I was giving her the upper hand by being the first to crack. I mean, I knew that even if Jocelyn was under someone else, there was no way she was already over me.

RICHIE ANSWERED THE PHONE. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and mouthed, “Jocelyn again.” It was the third call in less than an hour. “No,” he said to her. “He’s still not back yet.” He listened. “I’ve got it written down right here.” He tapped a notepad on the kitchen table with the point of a pen. “As soon as he gets in. You got it.” He hung up and sighed, “Dude, not good, dude.”

“Fuck me.” I threw my head back and stared at the ceiling.

Richie got up and headed to the fridge. He liked being on the sidelines of other people’s dramas. It gave him a chance to offer a sympathetic beer. “Why don’t you just tell her you don’t want to break up for good, but you need some space to figure shit out? ”

“I did,” I said, exasperated.

“And? ”

I pointed to the phone. “She’s not fucking giving me space, obviously.”

“Well, fuck it. If she won’t give it to you, take it.” He traced the phone cord back to the wall and disconnected it from the jack. “Until further notice, this phone only makes outgoing calls.” To him it was that simple.

“I can’t do that to her.”

“Why? You’re already screening your calls, so what the fuck’s the difference? ” He was right. Just what I needed: more contradiction, guilt, and confusion. Richie wagged the end of the cord. “It’s no skin off my ass. I hate the telephone anyway.”

I buried my face in my hands. “Fuck,” I yelled. Kev or Bri in the downstairs apartment turned their stereo down. “I feel like a fucking asshole.”

“Why? ”

“Because she’s a good person. She’s a great person. If she wasn’t so intense . . .”

“No one’s saying she isn’t a good person. But you’re a good person, too.”

“I feel like a bleached shit.”

“You shouldn’t. Look, you guys had some amazing times, but the thing’s fatally flawed. Whose fault is that? Nobody’s fault.”

His words bounced right off me. “You know what’s really fucked up? I’m doing the exact shit she predicted I’d do all along.”

“How do you mean? ”

“Correction, not everything she predicted. I never cheated on her. Honest to God, I’d tell you if I did. But as far as me abandoning her—”

Richie cut me off. “Abandon? ” he asked incredulously. “Abandon’s what you do to babies and three-legged dogs.”

IT WAS ALMOST nine at night when I woke up. I was starving. I biked down to the Crow’s Nest. The autumn night air was seasoned with smoke from wood-burning stoves. It reminded me of playing street hockey as a kid with my friends. The bald tennis ball would grow more invisible as the evening wore on. We’d play until our mothers were nearly irate from unsuccessfully calling us to dinner. I loved it.

The restaurant was dead. They ran a dinner special anyway, perhaps out of pride. I stood just inside the doorway and read the board. Baked haddock, rice pilaf, and a cup of corn chowder. Seven ninety-five. As a rule, I steer clear of all meal specials. Once you work in a restaurant, you order differently. At Esposito’s, Lello ran specials when the outermost veal cutlet in the package was freezer-burned just beyond use.

The cook got up from a table when he saw I was staying for dinner. He took his coffee and smoke with him into the kitchen. He let out a series of increasingly productive coughs. My waiter was a little red fire hydrant. His forearms were smudged with illegible tattoos. He called me Captain.

I watched the cook preparing my chicken Parmesan over egg noodles through the food pickup window. I was hoping to catch him picking his nose or his teeth. At least that way I’d be sure.

A large oval dish nested in an insulating cloth napkin slid from the waiter’s hands onto my table like a foal from its mother’s birth canal.

“Makes me think I’ll never feel hungry again,” I said. He was no audience whatsoever. I poked at the food like I was examining a pet’s stool for an ingested coin. I had two beers with my meal, and nursed a healthy Jameson’s on the rocks afterward. I wasn’t eager to go back to the empty house.

“Anything else before we close up, Captain? ” He slid the bill under my drink coaster and waited for me to pay up.

“Would it be okay if I just sat here for a little bit? ” I showed him the remainder of my cocktail.

“For a little bit, sure.”

He went back by the register. I lit a smoke. Todd Rundgren came over the stereo, singing, “Hello It’s Me.” It fucking figured. I used to like Todd Rundgren a lot until he got contaminated. I started going out with Jennifer, my first serious girlfriend, in the fall of our senior year of high school. After we made out for the first time, she iced me down by saying she was years away from having sex. I told her I was willing to wait. Months later, on the fourteenth fairway of the Presidents Golf Course in Quincy, I managed to finger her through a tear in her jeans that was all the way down at her knee. I tried—with little success—to get into her pants via the conventional routes. And then I college-tried.

A couple of weekends later Jennifer visited her brother at the University of New Hampshire. I didn’t want her to go, but she said September was less than three months away. It was important that she get used to being at UNH. Plus, it was Spring Fling Weekend, and she’d always wanted to see Terence Trent D’Arby. I told her I would have skipped seeing London Calling-era Clash to be with her as much as possible. She said she’d never ask me to do something like that. It made me feel like shit. When she didn’t call me until the day after she got back home, I feared fall was coming a season early.

We were in the Bickford’s House of Pancakes in Brock-ton when she told me “something happened” between her and her brother’s roommate. She wouldn’t go into detail. She said it didn’t matter anyway because it had nothing to do with her not wanting to go out with me anymore. She was young. She wanted to date all kinds of people. I was crushed. I asked her to marry me. She tried breaking my fall by saying she wished we’d met when we were twenty-seven instead of seventeen. I would have forfeited the entire meddling decade.

She handed me a cassette she’d made especially for the occasion. It had one song on it: “Can We Still Be Friends” by Todd Rundgren. She said it summed up exactly what she wanted to say. I said there was no way we could still be friends. She thought that was too bad, but if that’s how I felt, there was nothing she could do about it.

It was after eleven p.m. Her brother, his girlfriend, and his roommate appeared in the Bickford’s foyer. The waitress tried to seat them, but they said they weren’t staying. Jennifer got up. She told me to please listen to the tape. She joined the other three. The roommate was a UNH crew Nazi. I’d never met the guy, but he wanted to kick my ass. He was still sneering at me as Jennifer and her brother led him out the door.

I listened to the Rundgren tune a bunch of times, parked in my parents’ driveway. I tried to read deep into the lyrics and twist their meaning so they’d support my hope of hopes that Jennifer would beg me to take her back. But what I heard was what I got. As far as Jennifer was concerned, I was the past. That night I cried myself to sleep. I woke up the next morning to my old man tapping on the driver’s-side window.

From then on, all of Todd Rundgren’s music was off-limits. That included bands he produced, such as the Psychedelic Furs and XTC. It was a shame, really. None of it was Todd Rundgren’s fault. It was almost time to start thinking about thinking about forgiving him.

I SAT ON Sweet Thunder in the Crow’s Nest lot and had a smoke. The stars looked like a spray of luminescent grapeshot. A station wagon full of rowdy high school kids pulled in from Plymouth Street. The car was covered in green and gold streamers and bar soap graffiti. The Sister Sledge tune “We Are Family” was punishing the speakers’ tiny woofers. The driver tried three times to do a doughnut. I moved well out his way.

A girl yelled out the window, “Nice bike, queer bait.” The car accelerated with youthful aggression onto Plymouth Street and disappeared into the darkness. If they all got killed it wouldn’t be because I wished it on them.

I biked along the beach. Two holdout fishermen were surf-casting from within the glow of a trash can of fire. The lures dangling from their rods were as big as a fish I’d have been proud to catch. I left the bike where it fell and walked toward the light like a dead man not quite sure if he’s ready for the afterlife. Regular people were home sleeping or watching the news. I coughed loudly as I got closer. The crashing waves made the beach sound like an airport.

I finally yelled, “Any luck yet? ” like I was about to traipse through a grizzly bear’s pantry. The colossus in the rubber hip waders and New England Patriots parka locked in on me. He gestured no a single time, then went back to fishing, like I wasn’t even there. The other fisherman did absolutely nothing to acknowledge me. He, too, might have been a lure set up to tempt a big one right onto the shore.

By my third and last cigarette, it became apparent that neither man nor mannequin was going to have any good luck. And I wish I had split on that note. But I stuck around just long enough to identify in me a kinship with these fisherman ghosts.

I started thinking about the bellboy who’d carried Jocelyn’s backpack into our honeymoon suite. He looked younger than me. I tipped him five bucks. He said he and his retirement savings thanked me. There wasn’t a single cunt hair of sarcasm in his voice.

I WOKE UP in my shoes and clothes. The morning sky was the color of a gray polyester shirt. I got up and kept the moving blanket thrown over my shoulders like I was Crazy Horse. Certifiably Crazy Horse.

James had had the environmentally unsound idea of turning a well-used kerosene lamp into a bird feeder. I stood at the kitchen sink window and polished off a box of toffee popcorn. I took a drink from the faucet. The water was so cold it hurt one of my molars. I hadn’t seen a dentist in years because I was afraid of what he’d have to do to fix me. I dug my knuckle hard into my jawbone to crimp the furious nerve.

The next-door neighbor’s woodpile taunted me from an open-faced shed painted to match the house. The only fireplace in my sister’s was boarded up. I considered pinching some wood and building a campfire in the backyard, but I knew James would blow a gasket.

I started thinking about an episode of The Beverly Hill-billies where Granny sets a fire—complete with kindling and logs—in the electric oven. It should have been funny, but it just made me sad. Like when I was in fifth grade, and me and a few other students were tapped to demonstrate to the new first-graders the proper way to use a urinal. When Sister Catherine John asked if I’d be willing to help them out, I felt very grown up. Seconds after I agreed, I wished I hadn’t. Before I could show him the right way to do it, little Timmy Homesick dropped his drawers, sat on the urinal, and took a shit in it.

That bird feeder worried me.

JOCELYN AND I were bored stiff, so we rode the ferry to Staten Island and back. That night she took me to a gourmet Peruvian restaurant in the Village that seats ten people. The food was pretty good, but way the fuck out there, and the portions were too small. I leaned across the table and whispered something about feeling guilty for eating some poor kid’s iguana. Usually a good line like that would have caused her to laugh her balls off.

The cab ride back to her place was a pretty quiet one. I put my hand on her thigh. She smiled, but stopped me from doing any impromptu spelunking. When we got home, we watched Cries and Whispers in bed as planned. Afterward she gave me an unsolicited, low-passion hand job. Then I asked her what she wanted me to do to her. She told me to let her go to sleep. I asked her if she still loved me, and she said yes. I had to work the dinner shift on Sunday, so I caught an early bus back to Amherst. Connecticut always was—and always will be—the state in my way. Somewhere between the pilonidal cyst that is Stamford and the perforated bowel that is New Haven, I felt something with my foot under the seat in front of me. I drew it closer. It was a royal blue three-ringed binder. It said Bank of New York in white. It belonged to one Viola Sporney. I flipped through it. It was full of pink Bank of New York forms executed by Viola. I couldn’t make any sense of them. The last page was white. On it was a handwritten to-do list:

1. Monday: Research D and MacC props. Get OK from O’Banyon.

2. Tuesday: Check financials for L.D. Get OK from O’Banyon.

3. Wednesday: Start Jogging.

I phoned Jocelyn when I got home and read her the to-do list. No, she didn’t think it was that depressing.

I WENT TO SEE a shrink once at UMass. He said me being on Prozac was the right move. As soon as I heard that, I turned him off for three reasons: (1) I didn’t want to risk anyone finding out. (2) You’d practically have to throttle your dick to death before you could come (a non-issue). (3) Prozac made Del Shannon kill himself.

I backpedaled and told the shrink that maybe I’d exaggerated some of my story, and that just talking about it had me feeling better. A lot better. He didn’t buy it, but what was he going to do, force-feed me antidepressants? It wasn’t like I was opening veins or making bombs in my dorm room.

I finished the semester, landing squarely on academic probation. I went home to my childhood twin bed in suburban Boston. I got my old summer job back, packing orders in an office-supply warehouse in East Bridge-water. Del Shannon’s tormented voiced lifted my spirits during rush-hour traffic jams on Route 24. I had always thought of Del Shannon as being right down there with Pat Boone. Why? Because I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. The part where Del wonders where she will stay, his little runaway? And the chorus of “I Go to Pieces” ? Fuck me. They’re still hard to listen to.

The small-headed kid at Spunt’s pointed at me from behind the counter. “Hey, look, it’s Pay Phone.” It was better than being called Dogshit.

“Hey.” I grabbed a special three-for-the-price-of-two pack of Winstons. I speed-read the J-cards of the cassette tapes that filled a lazy Susan. There was no Del Shannon.

“You don’t need a job, do you? ” the kid asked. He was twirling a point-of-purchase pinwheel sticking out of a bouquet of them.

“No, but thanks, anyway.”

“I do. If I didn’t have a job, I’d be nobody.”

When I got back to the house, James was waiting there to pass Roy off on me. He already had him strapped into the stroller.

“I didn’t think you were going to show,” James said.

“That’s funny, because I knew you would.”

“ I T ’S SAD WHEN anyone dies, Roy.” I pushed the stroller along our usual route. One of the small, bone-jarring wheels was seized up. “Even bad people.” Opal Cove Road was a dead-end street. Number 97 was the last house on the left. It was a weather-beaten ranch identical to my sister’s. It didn’t appear to be in worse shape than any of the other houses left unattended for seven of the year’s harshest months. All of the window shades were drawn. The front lawn was sand and twigs. There was a wet case of empty Bud Light cans at the end of the driveway. I looked around, then scooped it up. I jammed the case into the stroller’s mesh undercompartment. I had never returned cans that were not of my own—or my party’s own—emptying. But twenty-four cans was a buck twenty. Smokes were two-fifty a pack. I’d come a long way, baby.

A few days later, when I took care of Roy again, there was another case of empties and a beat-up Subaru wagon in the driveway of 97 Opal Cove Road.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, kid.”

I heard the unmistakable sound of a dog’s collar jangling at charging speed. A muscular Doberman rounded the corner of the house and stopped at a safe sizing-up distance. He growled like a wood chipper. Raw egg white saliva swung from his fangs. I moved slightly, and so did he. Roy and I were pinned.

“Go home!” I ordered. “Go home!” The dog did not obey.

“Tinker, no! ” someone screamed. “Tinker, no! ”

I located the source of the voice. Marie was standing on the back porch of 97 Opal Cove Road. She started banging a large metal watering jug with a gardening shovel. “Is this your fucking dog? ” I yelled.

“No, Tinker! No, Tinker! ”

Roy started to freak. He tried desperately to squirm his restrained body higher up the stroller’s seat. The Doberman lunged at his feet and clamped onto his pant leg. I wrested Roy free. Tinker pulled back empty-mouthed. He was not fucking around. If I didn’t do something, he was going to eat Roy.

“Tinker! ” Marie screamed.

“It’s okay, Roy,” I lied. “Go home! ” I screamed at Tinker. I lifted Roy—stroller and all—onto the hood of the Subaru.

Tinker attacked me before I could follow Roy to relative safety. The savage was locked onto my left desert boot at the Achilles tendon. He started whipping his head back and forth like a well-hooked tarpon. I sledgeham mered my fist wildly at his mouth. I was pounding the piss out of my own foot in the process. Tinker was trying to snap my ankle’s neck. I didn’t feel any of it. Roy was screaming.

“Off, Tinker! ” Marie ordered. I heard a series of low-pitched, hollow gonks as she beat the dog’s upholstered rib cage with the watering can. She brought it down so hard on his head my boot came off. Tinker yelped and retreated through the hedges that separated two yards.

“He has my fucking shoe.” I was shaking.

“The baby!” Marie screamed. Roy was facing us, crying as the stroller rolled backward in slow motion toward the edge of the hood. I grabbed the exposed calf of his fat drumstick. Marie took hold of the stroller and lowered it to the driveway. Roy screamed louder.

“Oh, God, no,” she said. “He’s hurt.” She raised his pant leg. His skin was a bloody mess.

“Oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck-oh-fuck. Fuck me, Roy! Oh, fuck, no! ”

“Calm down! ” Marie took off her sweatshirt and used it to dab his leg. She was wearing a white tanktop. She had a detail from the Apocalpyse Now movie poster tattooed on her biceps.

I was close to crying. “He’s just a baby. He’s just a fucking baby.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. I think it’s your blood.”

My hands were covered in it. I looked away. I saw my desert boot lying like a mountaineering accident at the edge of the driveway. “Are you sure? ”

“I’m pretty sure.”

I WAS AWAKENED in the early hours of the morning by the sound of someone tapping their keys on the pressed-steel storm door.

“Who the fuck? ” I said, like my old man trying to eat a single hot supper in peace. I got up and slid on my pants. The tight, quiet ache in my punctured heel spiked and burned as my foot passed through my pant leg. The tapping on the door grew more desperate. I flipped the porch light on and opened the door.

Marie was standing there with no coat on. I knew drunk when I saw it.

“Please help me,” she slurred.

“Are you hurt? ”

She dismissed me. “No, no, no. I just need sleep.” She reminded me of Judy Garland leaning into Steve Allen—or whoever the fuck it was—on TV. She tried to push me aside and enter the house. I held firm.

“No, no, no, no, no, come on. Don’t do that.”

“Just right there.” She pointed to the living room floor behind me. She crouched below my tollbooth arm and attempted to squeeze between me and the doorframe. I pinched her off.

“I’m sorry. You can’t.”

She raised her face close to mine. Her breath was a vodka aerosol. “I saved your baby.”

“I know, and I appreciate it. But you have to go home.”

“But I saved it. The baby. Let me see him.” She tried to get by me again.

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he? ”

“At his mother’s.”

“Then let’s go get him.”

“We can’t get him.”

“Why not? ” She wasn’t the worst kind of drunk, but a bad-enough one: she wanted to be reasoned with.

“He’s a baby. He’s asleep.”

“Fuck you, then. Thanks.” She said something I couldn’t understand. Her upper and lower halves raced each other back to her car, which was still running and nearly perpendicular to the sidewalk. She had only a few hundred yards to drive, and it was so early in the morning, the only person she could hurt was herself.

“Fuck it,” she hollered, then threw up on the hood.

I watched her for a few seconds trying to mop the hood of the car with her sleeve. “Fuck it,” I said. I grabbed a T-shirt and went after her.

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