“Funny thing is,” she says, “Jeremy’s the only one that’s hung in there!” Her laugh sounds like a metal rake on asphalt. “I almost hate him for being so wonderful to me!”
“That’s because you’re an ass, Janine. Period!” I can’t help but yell at her. Her negativity is just too much.
“An ass? An ass, Bobby?” She wipes her eyes with her fingertips. “What do you know about anything?”
“I know that some of us need to just get over it.”
“Over it?” she asks. “You were never under it, sweetheart. You never even got near it.” She pauses for a moment, then. “Dammit, Bobby! I. . I prayed to that man for guidance.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t—”
“In high school, I prayed to Dad to help me. To save me from myself. All I ever got back was, ‘Janine, go help your mother.’ Which was hilarious, since my ‘mother’ at that time was Huong Hiêú. She was twenty-two!”
“So he was a jerk sometimes,” I say, quashing the impulse to yell out, Order up! our joke about the fact that Dad ordered Huong Hiêú from a catalog.
“A jerk?” she mocks loudly. “Dad made Huong Hiêú tutor me in wifedom, Bobby. She had me stroke the veggies before stir-frying them, then whipped me with kitchenware if I complained.” She glares at me. “A jerk, Bobby?”
Order up! is also what Dad would yell to Huong Hiêú when he was hungry.
“Okay, okay.” I hold up my hand up to stop her. “Gotcha. Bad word choice. But how could I not get it, Janine? Where do you think I was? We lived in the same house.”
“I have no idea where you were,” she says. “The only time I ever saw you cry was when he tried to turn off your ABC Afterschool Special.”
At the other end of the bar, Danny hangs up both phones — cell in right ear, pay phone in left — and bolts back over. He asks what’s going on, and then he and Janine have another moment where they gaze into each other’s eyes and, as always, share some exclusive understanding. Woe. I look to the television.
A few minutes later, Danny admits that Dad bought him a hooker when he was in high school. Janine gasps and Danny swears it’s true, explaining that it happened after he lost at state, junior year. He says Dad told him his cock was too big for his jock, and then dragged him down to some Asian joint on Nolensville Road. Janine’s face gets long and slick and pouty, and she says, Oh, Danny, I’m sorry, because she’s the one person who’s never seen any of the nine million shows where Coming of Age is something a man can share with his son.
“Yeah, it was terrible, sort of,” he says. “But maybe not — I don’t know. Anyway, the point is that it was a onetime deal. Dad never counted on how much it would cost!”
At this, the three of us laugh until we can’t breathe. I finally yell out, “Order up!” and we fall into hysteria, remembering Dad’s international calls to Huong Hiêú’s mail-order bride company, demanding a refund of his six thousand USD.
“The best part was that the company didn’t understand his Vietnamese!” Janine exclaims.
“He stomped around like an infant, spewing babble,” Danny howls. “Trying to reclaim authority over the country that made him impotent!”
Now this is real-deal joy.
Minutes later, Danny catches his breath. “What about you, pal?” he asks me. “Gotta girlfriend?”
Part of me wants to make up a tale about being cheated on, or a dead lover or something. Instead, I just try to keep smiling. “No. Not really.”
I couldn’t do much at the service, save mutter a few words about Dad being a cross between Mike Brady and the Great Santini. Nobody listened. At the national military cemetery north of town, the lawn and gravestones are so precise, so wonderfully green and white. We were surrounded by soldiers and guns. A flag was folded like a paper football and passed our way. (Who ended up with it? Betsy?) As I spoke, looking out at the teethlike rows of Union and Confederate and Other, the 4,131 Unknowns, Danny fingered his BlackBerry. Janine slunk away for a cig.
Throughout the service I pictured soap-opera funerals. How the distraught launch themselves about the grave, beating their fists on the coffin, their tears streaking its glassy, lacquered wood. At one point I even looked for the controversial former lover, in sunglasses on the fringe of the cemetery, ducking behind weathered stone arches at the gate. But none of that happened, which was disappointing. In fact, the absence of my own tears made me feel so guilty I considered seeking out another funeral altogether — until “Ashes to ashes.” At that point I was hit with loss. Indeed, a sense of loss, for a moment, as those lines spilled over Dad and into the cool earth below.
IT took a while to really get it down pat. You don’t just start off perfectly fucking a television. You start off, of course, masturbating in front of it. Everyone does. And it’s good. Really good. And then things progress, and you get the idea. You get up off the couch, walk over, grapple the sides of the console and start humping at the unit, which is of course silly. (Surely, you look like a happy dumb dog forcing its instinctual hips into nothing.) Only, it’s not as good as it should be. So you practice and prod, and grumble and bumble, and then buy a bigger television; surround sound; recordable, full-throttle digital satellite; movie subscriptions, On Demand, etc. Then you purchase a hypo-allergenic latex “Pocket Snatch”—which sort of works, as you squeeze into it with one hand, the other caressing the console of the boob tube, the remote in immediate vicinity.
But really, that sort of doesn’t work either. It’s too mechanical. What works completely, you discover, after years of disappointment, is when you plant the head of a life-sized, gel-enhanced sex goddess (kind of like an X-rated CPR dummy with the most realistic pubic hair you ever dreamed of, plus a surprisingly tight synthetic anus) under a smaller television set which has been leaned back against the wall at a forty-five-degree angle — and then mount the protruding body while gazing into the eyes of the screen.
This works because you can then watch a skin flick, or celebrity game show, or nightly news or family drama or awards ceremony or women’s tennis match or soap opera or beer commercial or reality show, or whatever. . a rerun, a premiere. . and you can literally take it into your arms and fuck the guts out of it. Or make love. Or cuddle. Or caress. Or confess, or cry. Whichever you prefer.
What’s transcendent is that it fucks you, confesses to you, accepts you, admires you, fantasizes with you, evolves with you, shares with you, adjusts with you, understands you. Loves you back. Unconditionally, unconditionally, unconditionally.
Until they come up with a woman who has a console for a head, I fear that’s the best I can do to give love.
WHEN Janine goes outside to smoke, Danny starts confessing. “I can’t stop multitasking, Bobby. I can’t control, and it’s getting worse and worse and. . I’m worried that Beth is going to leave me.”
His liquor-laced whispers convey such helplessness; it’s as if he doesn’t understand himself. He notes that, as I’ve seen, he must replace his urine with fluid intake the instant he evacuates — as if he never over-internalized Dad’s demands to dominate both offense and defense, “both sides of the goddamn ball.” Danny says that for whatever reason, he can’t make a bowel movement without brushing his teeth — as if Dad never criticized his ROTC and Reserve commitment, or, hell, even his war, as being “not nearly tight enough.” He swallows hard, says, “Bobby? For chrissakes, Bobby, I can’t even make love to Beth unless I’ve got one eye on the Wall Street Journal”—as if Dad didn’t call him a faggot after he was promoted to regional vice president with B of A.