“Won’t do!” called the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England. “Won’t do at all!”
He noticed that Peasley wore some odd plastic muffs on his ears and probably had not heard him.
“Hello there!” he called, moving past the gate and onto the lawn. Peasley rounded a tree, headed straightaway at the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England. Could Peasley be driving with his eyes shut? The idiot looked lost in reverie. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England stood motionless. His old bones, his rotted legs felt staked to the earth. What he would not give now for Hal, his old Boer War mount. Not a kingdom, though. Too late for that.
“Peasley! Peasley!”
One could not say his life flashed before his eyes. His life had been too long. The lawn mower was too slow, and clunky. He saw things, though, toys from his boyhood, tin lancers and hussars and cuirassiers, the gilt-edged pages of his beloved adventure books. He saw the nibs of examination pens, and the body of the girl who would become the woman who would become his wife, in moonlight. He saw himself and others in uniform, on parade, on maneuvers, and later on pallets, gurneys. He saw veldtgrass and Sudanese dirt and trench mud drying on his boots. He saw his mother in her maid’s kit, and his father, far off in a sun-buzzed meadow, a quail gun in the crook of his arm. He saw the garish pink-and-green sleeve of Never Mind the Bollocks, his own palsied hand pawing at the precious vinyl inside.
It had been too bloody long, this life, everything hinging on one decision made when he was just a youngish fool with too many ribbons, too much fringe.
“Won’t do,” said the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England, and fell to his ruined knees. Peasley, eyes shut, recollecting a childhood fishing trip he had taken with his maternal grandfather, a German who had helped develop mustard gas for the kaiser, drove down upon the Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England, the blades beneath the mower’s carriage whirling like, that’s it, scythes.
NATE’S PAIN IS NOW
Nobody wanted my woe. Nobody craved my disease. The smack, the crack, the punch-outs and lockdowns, all those gun-to-my-temple whimpers about my dead mother and scabby cat — nobody cared anymore. The world had worthier victims. Slavers pimped out war orphans in hovels hung with rat-chewed velveteen. Babies starved on the desert floor.
Once, my gigs at the big-box bookshops teemed with the angry and ex-decadent, the loading-bay anarchists and hackers on parole, the meth mules, psych majors.
Goth girls, coke ghosted, rehabbed at twelve and stripping sober, begged for my sagas of degradation, epiphany. They pressed in with their inks, their dyes, their labial metals and scarified montes, cheered their favorite passages, the famous ones, where I ate some sadistic dealer’s turd on a Portuguese sweet roll for the promise of a bindle, or broke into a funeral parlor and slit a corpse open for the formaldehyde. My fans would stomp and holler for my sorrows, my sins, sway in stony reverence as I mapped my steps back to sanity (the stint on a garbage truck, the first clean screw), or whatever semblance of sanity was possible in a world gone berserk with misery, plague, affinity marketing.
I had what some guy at a New Paltz book café called arc. You can’t teach arc, he told me. Nobody’s born with it, either. I stood for something. My finger lingered on the somehow still-flickering pulse.
I had a good run. Bang the Dope Slowly and its follow-up, I Shoot Horse, Don’t I?, sold big. I bought a loft, married Diana, the lovely Diana, who’d stood by in the darkness, my “research” years. My old man, the feckless prick, even he broke down and vowed his love. But as a lady at a coffee bar in Phoenix put it, what goes up can’t stay up indefinitely because what’s under it, supporting it, anyway?
There are wise women in Arizona.
* * *
It was here in New York City that I first noticed signs of my decline. Standing at the lectern under those harsh chain store kliegs, regaling the crowd with the particulars of a scam I used to run on Alzheimer’s patients from a clinic near my squat, I heard a voice spear down from the balcony.
“Enough already!”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I said enough,” said the man. He leaned past the rail, a fattish fellow with lovely corn-blond hair. “So you almost died and hurt a lot of people along the way. You got your medal. Go home.”
It was true about the medal. I’d recently won an award for creative nonfiction from a major credit card company.
“Maybe some others here want me to finish,” I said, hearing my voice strain now against some sissified collapse.
“Freaking sheep,” said the man.
“Leave him be!” called a voice. It sounded like Nate, my protégé. He’d been a homeless gay punk. Now he was my homeless gay punk protégé. Other voices rose to join him. My minions were protecting me. How humiliating. I felt like that bullied boy I’d described in Spoon for the Misbegotten, the one who ran home to weep and quaff his mother’s cooking sherry — not that my mother ever cooked, let alone with sherry.
“Yeah, back off. He’s been through a lot.”
“He’s fragile!”
“He’s a fraud!” called the man, who I saw now wore heavy coveralls splotched darkly in places with what could have been berry juice, or blood.
“He’s our friend!” somebody said.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can take care of myself.”
There were murmurs now, mutters, maybe.
“We’ve got your back!”
“We’re here for you, and we…” somebody trailed off.
“Don’t you get it?” said the man in coveralls. “This guy betrayed his friends and family, he’s contributed untold thousands to the drug economy, which has probably helped get others hooked, and now he blabs about it for cash. And don’t start in about his philosophy. It’s half-baked nonsense. He teaches us nothing. You really need this guy to tell you capitalism poisons our bodies and corrupts our souls? Are you that dim you can’t figure it out for yourselves?”
Nobody spoke. I was sensing a strange mood in the crowd tonight, a balkiness I had never encountered. They were maybe beginning to be done with me.
“I think you’re the dim one,” I said.
“Weak meat,” boomed my butcher.
* * *
It was a slow, luxuriant slide, like a dollop of half-fried mayonnaise slinking down the lean, freckled back of a teen. The teen’s name was Freida, she’d designed one of my websites, but those ecstasies were over. Diana had departed. Nate had disappeared. Only my father’s faxes sustained me:
Dear Disappointment,
Not dead yet? Keep at it, kid. You had all those sad suckers fooled, but not me. How long did you think it would last? The money, the women, the talks at the Y? The Y is for some vigorous cardio and steaming your nuts free of deadly nut toxins, not for listening to some junkie freak moan about his generation. Don’t you know there’s real suffering in the world? Slavers pimp out war orphans in hovels hung with rat-chewed velveteen. I saw it on the news! Didn’t you learn anything when I was promoted to vice president of sales in district seven and then got fired with everyone else the next day? When life knocks you down, don’t bother getting up. Because life will punish you for getting up. Life will bite your eyes out.
Call Me,
Your Progenitor
P.S. Dinner?
I’d pace my loft, smoke Egyptian cigarettes, drink vodka cocktails, snort any pill I could crush. Such binges once primed me for another recovery, another memoir, but I couldn’t feel the magic anymore, that rush of becoming. All was murk and a sort of moister, muddier murk. Out my window was traffic, suffering, euphoria, pretzel carts. Inside was the petty spiral. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fat dude, his wonderful hair.