Hank Moody with Jonathan Grotenstein
GOD HATES US ALL
To Mom, for taking me to work.
1
DAPHNE LOVED SPEED.
Not in the traditional sense: she rarely pushed her weathered Honda Civic past third gear. The race for Daphne lay in the corridors of her mind, long and labyrinthine, and the girl needed her get-up-and-go. Cocaine, when she could afford it; ephedrine-powered nasal decongestants when she couldn’t. But she was never happier than the couple of times I’d seen her receive a shipment of Simpamina, which was apparently Italian for “seventy-two straight hours of sex, rock and roll, and menial household chores completed with manic gusto.” Followed immediately by four hours of paranoid delusions, violent arguments over meaningless nonissues, and, during our final week together, a pair of suicide attempts wrapped around assault with a deadly weapon.
I met Daphne when I returned to the U, a broke sophomore in need of a part-time job. My summer plans to bus tables for the snobs at the Hempstead Golf and Country Club had collapsed when I’d tried to drive a fully airborne golf cart through a plate-glass window. My passenger—a bridesmaid with Stevie Nicks hair who minutes earlier I’d been finger-fucking behind the Pro Shop—was late for her scheduled toast at the wedding on the other side of the window. The ensuing explosion of glass delivered a thrilling end to what had been, up until that point, a brilliantly executed shortcut across the bunkers on Hole 13, improvised with the help of a half-bottle of Stoli, an angry golf marshal in hot pursuit, and the bridesmaid’s reciprocating fingers down the front of my pants. We escaped mostly unscratched, thanks to vodka’s armorplating effects, and the talk of pressing charges turned out to be just that. But the job was history. I spent the rest of the summer as an unemployed thorn in my parents’ collective ass.
Back at school, I responded to an ad in the student paper: banquet catering. I began the interview with a heavily edited account of my country club experience, but at the urging of my interviewer—a twenty-something peroxide blonde punk rocker and weekend college radio DJ with a killer smile—I kept adding details until we were both rolling on the floor. I won both the job and an initiation into the strange and wonderful world of Daphne Robichaux, a crash course in alternative music, pharmaceuticals, and a lot of sex, with the occasional light bondage. I let her pierce my left ear and learned to play a few chords on the guitar. When I returned home for Christmas, I announced that I was dropping out of school to write music and shack up with my new soulmate. My mother wept and refused to talk to me for the rest of the break. My father just shrugged. “Save us some money, anyway,” he said.
Whether by miracle or cosmic joke, Daphne and I survived a seemingly endless cycle of dustups and were still together the following Thanksgiving. Neither of us wanted to spend it with family—mine was still sore at me, while Daphne claimed to be an orphan—so instead we planned a Long Weekend of Glorious Ingratitude: four days and three nights in Niagara Falls, where we planned to make a point of never using the word “thanks,” preferably while doing a lot of fucking in the tackiest honeymoon suite we could afford.
We packed the Civic and backed out of her snowy drive-way, Daphne nearly guiding the car into the mailman. He sneered at us as he handed her a small white box with an Italian postmark.
“Thank you,” she blurted at the mailman. He gave her the finger and walked away.
“I’d just like to point out,” I said, looking at the shitty Timex my father hilariously called my inheritance, “that it took you under thirty seconds to violate our only rule for the weekend.”
“You’re driving,” she said, already scampering over me. In the time it took me to get behind the wheel and pull the car into the street, she’d ripped through several layers of tape, cardboard, Bubble Wrap, and child-proofing to liberate a handful of the Italians. Her eyes lit up as they traced the pill’s familiar contours: one half painted a sinister black, the other half transparent to reveal the timed-release payload of tiny orange and white spansules. “A salut,” she toasted, swallowing one dry.
An hour later we pulled into an abandoned drive-in movie theater near Seneca Falls. She’d already removed her pants and unzipped mine. I barely had time to shut off the ignition before she climbed over the console, sprung my cock from my fly, and pulled her panties aside far enough to take me in. She slid slowly down to the point where our pelvises met.
That was the end of the slow—from then on we were moving to Simpamina time. Using one hand to buffer her head against the Civic’s low ceiling, I reached down with the other to recline my chair. The seat flopped backward with a bang, its momentum combining with the physics generated by our energetic coupling to start the car rolling backward down a gentle slope. I hadn’t thought to secure the emergency brake.
Daphne’s eyes widened with emotion. Fear? Arousal? Both? I was experiencing mostly panic as my body slid backward with the car, making it impossible to reach the brake pedal with my foot. Grabbing the passenger seat, I pulled myself through an incline situp toward the hand brake, wrapped my fingers around the handle, and jerked hard. We slid another few anxious feet down the icy grass before crashing into a metal post, one of the drive-in’s speakers.
Daphne bowed her head and laughed and quickly rediscovered her earlier rhythm. We finished quickly and exited the car to inspect the damage to the bumper, which proved minor. She popped another pill and we were back on the road.
Two hours later, we checked into the Royal Camelot Inn, sold by the availability of the honeymoon suite and the “I came-a-lot at the Camelot” T-shirts on sale in the lobby. We cracked open the complimentary bottle of pink champagne, broke in the Jacuzzi tub, and managed one more ferocious screw in the heart-shaped bed before I collapsed into a dreamless sleep. I awoke eight hours later to find Daphne cleaning the tub, having commandeered a spray disinfectant during her sleepless exploration of the hotel and its surrounding area. She’d already planned our day: a visit to a winery just across the Canadian border.
The region was too cold for traditional winemaking, our tour guide explained—the grapes froze on the vine before they were ready to be harvested. Driven by ingenuity and the desire for drink, the locals had developed a timeand labor-intensive process that squeezed just a few drops out of each icy fruit, the result a thick and sweet concoction called “Ice-wine.”
Which we never got to try. While we’d taken the tour as a way to exploit Canada’s more kid-friendly drinking age—Daphne was a wise old twenty-two, but I still had a year and a half to go before my twenty-first birthday—Daphne pulled me into a restroom as our group moved into the tasting room.
Our sexual odyssey, however, was taking its toll, specifically on my manhood: the chafing made Daphne’s soft and wet feel like an electric power sander. I told her so when, on our return to the parking lot, she unzipped my pants, seemingly intent on giving me head.
“Whatever,” she said, jerking the zipper closed. She began to walk toward the area’s main event—the roaring Falls—then picked up her speed to a light jog. Soon it was a full-on sprint.
Maybe she wasn’t going to hurl herself over the side, I thought as I sprinted after her, ignoring all kinds of pain as my jeans gave my sore groin a good working over. But she sure looked hellbent on trying. As she neared the edge, I literally leapt for her ankles and pulled her to the ground.
“What the fuck, Daphne?”
My chivalry was rewarded with a flurry of punches to the face and chest. I shielded my face and bucked her off me. I waved at a few gawkers who were pointing in our direction. “We’re all right,” I yelled. “She’s got a medical condition.”