I picked up my father’s latest fax. Maybe a few hours in the vicinity of his rot could put me back on track. Also, I could teach him about the Internet. I caught a bus across the river.
* * *
My father was semiretired, a freelance consultant. He drove around begging alms from men and women he’d once commanded. He got by, as many widowers do, on peanut butter and hate.
“Any booze around here?” I said.
“Why don’t you drink a pint of lye and get it over with?” my father said. “Why don’t you have yourself a nice little lye-and-hantavirus smoothie? That’ll fix you up good, you piece of shit.”
My father flung himself across the table, flapped his hand in my face. It’s true he never hit me. A father need not hit. His coughs, his smirks, are blows. Even a father’s embrace confers a kind of violence. Or so I once pronounced on public radio.
“This meat loaf is terrible,” I said now. “Worse than Mom used to make.”
“It’s supposed to be terrible,” said my father. “This isn’t meant to be a pleasant experience. This is an intervention.”
“An intervention? Where is everybody?”
“Who everybody? It’s just me. Nobody else cares whether you live or die. And I’m on the fence.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Intervene.”
“I just did.”
“You did?”
“Just then.”
“Oh.”
“So, what’s the plan, Bigtime? I figure you’re almost out of money. Welcome back. Maybe you could land some menial job, night janitor, say, but who’s going to hire you, especially with your background as a self-aggrandizing scumrag.”
“Bag?”
“Rag. Is how we said it.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks for the intervention.”
“Anytime.”
* * *
I rode back to the city, spotted this damaged-looking beauty a few seats away. The damage wasn’t just the tortoiseshell tattooed over the entirety of her shaved skull, or the stern tortoise head glaring out from between her eyes. The damage, in fact, was everything not the tortoise, not the tattoo.
“I know who you are,” she said.
“That makes one of us,” I said.
“You mattered to me once.”
“What happened?”
“You mattered to me less and less. Can you introduce me to Nate?”
“Forget Nate,” I said. “You’ve had struggles, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Lay them on me, sister.”
The tortoise woman told me her story. She’d been a ward of the state, a runaway, a medievalist, a personal anal sex trainer, a robot rock chanteuse, a junior Olympic sprinter, the estranged wife of an ex — French legionnaire. Her story had heart havoc and threat, but no self-annihilation. She’d been stymied but always summoned the nerve to perdure. She was the opposite of me. I resented her and wanted to serve her. I wanted the world to pledge itself to her example.
“My God,” I said.
“You have one?”
“Please,” I said. “Let me write your story.”
I pictured us together in my loft, me with spiral-bound pads and designer pencils worn to their nubs by her inspirational tale. Critics would applaud my decision to invest my talent in this inked slut’s plight. My fans would swoon at the way I’d reached out to another wounded human. I’d get off drugs and drink for good, raise chickens upstate, produce some independent cinema.
“No way,” she said. “You’re a slimy, evil sellout hack.”
“Sure, but will you consider it?”
The bus pulled into Port Authority. The tortoise woman slipped away.
* * *
Diana lived in a building near the river. Somebody buzzed me up. A man stood in the doorway, shirtless, bleeding, words freshly carved into his chest. PEEPS PLEEZER, the gashes read.
“Nate.”
“Diana’s not here,” said Nate. “Do you want to come in? You look like hell.”
“Hell is where I’m crashing these days, Nate. But what about you? You’re the mutilated interlocutor here.”
“I’m purging my defects via ritual.”
“Is that why you’re poking my wife?”
“I don’t poke her. We’ve got something more evolved than that. Besides, you know I’m gay.”
“You used to be homeless, too. Written any more bad versions of my books?”
“I no longer cite you as an influence.”
“I can live with that.”
“I’m having a hard time believing you can live with anything.”
“Nate abandoned and betrayed me,” I said.
“I’m right here,” said Nate.
“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to God. God is my witness. Tell Diana I forgive her.”
“Tell her yourself,” said Nate. “I’m reading downtown tonight.”
“Where?”
“It’s listed in most free weeklies. Diana will be there.”
“Are you inviting me?”
“I’m sharing public information. Free weekly information.”
* * *
I walked along the river for a while, wove through the queer skaters, the club kids, the breeding units with their remote-controlled strollers. I hated them, the gays, the straights. The races. The genders and ages. None of them loved me. I was feeling that forlorn hum. Maybe another memoir was burbling up.
Home, I called Jenkins, my agent.
“Nate stole my style,” I told him. “My wife.”
“Your agent, too,” said Jenkins.
“I feel the forlorn hum coming on,” I said. “It’s going to be the best book yet. I’ve really suffered this time.”
“It’s over.”
“What do you mean it’s over?”
“It’s Nate’s time.”
* * *
The bookstore was packed with Nate’s people. They’d been my people once. I knew their faces, their fears. The tortoise woman was there in something skimpy, predatory. She was maybe pretending one of us was invisible.
Nate vaulted to the lectern in parachute pants, a fluorescent dickey. The crowd cheered as he picked a scab near his nipple, flicked it.
“‘I was a homeless gay punk,’” Nate began. “‘I was a self-hating sick fuck, too. I beat up gay people. I set homeless people on fire. Maybe it was because of my uncle, Pete. We lived in Levittown, and when I was nine…’” Nate read on. I noticed Diana leaning against the remainder table, her eyes rolled up under her Greek fisherman’s cap, her hand frig-deep in her jeans. Behind her were stacks of my last book, going for a dollar a pop.
“‘Every time I looked up into the dirty night sky,’” Nate read now, “‘I thought of each star as one more glittering taunt I had to endure—’”
“This guy’s got nothing!” I shouted. “This isn’t suffering!”
Benches scraped the hardwood. Nate’s people whispered, strained to look.
“He was a homeless gay punk!” somebody called.
“He set homeless people on fire!” I said.
“It’s more complicated than that,” said another. “He was a self-confessed self-hating sick fuck!”
“But gay!” somebody shouted.
“The two are not related!”
“In a sense they are, but only in a metaphorical sense!”
“He’s not metaphorically gay,” said a woman in the back.
“Leave Nate be,” called the tortoise woman.
“He’s poking my wife,” I said. “And I have no idea why he qualifies as punk.”
“I don’t poke her,” said Nate.
“He doesn’t,” said Diana. “I only need to hear his voice to come.”
“Don’t you get it?” I said. “There are babies turning tricks on velveteen!”