Brett and Leslie: Chapter 16

Maternity

Looking back, that little Hades where we lived had the strangest sort of… politics? Sometimes I miss having roommates, communes of Young Ones, and the way they stop you from crawling up inside your own asshole to die like a poisoned snail… till I remember how they inevitably lead to hallucinating with fever, spending the night in jail, being awakened by so-and-so’s well-armed and displeased creditor, or drinking one’s morning coffee in what is slowly revealed to be not merely a couch, but also a puddle of urine.

As the weeks passed in The House, the golden time of my 21st year was ending. The sun set faster every day, Chumpy the guinea pig found me for warmth at night, and the hell of Wisconsin’s winter insinuated itself smugly on the August breeze… but the real reason Leslie was turning into such a bitch was because I still hadn’t found a second job.

With only Brett left for mooching-off—and Brett being the person whose life’s work Leslie had not long ago burned to cinders—this more than halved Leslie’s standard of living, which Leslie found incredibly unfair.

So he turned to his darker vices. Oh, ye gods.

One day, I was out trying to cut the lawn with Knife again, smelling old beer rising from my pores, talking post-adolescent drool to myself about life in general. If only I could figure out how people get a real job.... Even if you have a college degree, you need social magic to get a job in an office. “Just lie,” they tell me… Lie how? Nobody who knows is going to share with the competition. Not that you would want a 9-5 job, right?…I didn’t know why it would be so bad; people who had one said they hated it, but mostly I needed to think it was bad so that I wouldn’t feel so awful about not knowing how to get one.

I have had one good job in the intervening years, but the reason I got it is funny: They couldn’t find a social creature who was intellectually capable of filling the position. That’s the only way to get around the tyranny of the bullsh@tter. Even if they’re baaaaaarely able to do it, that’s good enough, they smugly waltz in front of you; it’s been DEI for social animals since the beginning of time.

There are no good answers. There are no good answers. I was still ten years from learning Sanskrit. Thirty years from catching typhus and becoming a Buddhist. And yet due to some instinct for pulling myself slowly from the mud, I felt like an ingrate: For my grandma, the fridge had been a miracle. The whole modern world was full of marvels—we should feel lucky not to be medieval serfs.

Except… what was so great about it? I mean, aside from feeling, if not safe from not always having enough money to eat properly, but insulated from instances of widespread famine? Before the Internet, you were in danger of asking yourself dumb questions like this. Hanging the laundry, cutting the lawn with a knife—your brain has plenty of time. At least I wasn’t thinking about underage children, like Leslie, but I found myself counting my blessings in reverse.

I mean, yeah, there’s the fridge. OK, that’s one. Lawnmowers, har har.

Cars, maybe? Pretty cool—but who could afford one?—you couldn't, unless you already had one, so you could be a pizza driver. But at least in 20 years or so, we would have ones that fly.

Medicine? I had the constitution of a horse, so what was that doing for me? Not that modern medicine would have helped me had I been sickly. Obamacare might be technically fascism, but… it might have been nice. I didn’t have health insurance and didn’t think I ever would.

Kids these days will tell me with a straight face—because they read an article—that they’re the first generation in the history of the world to make less money than their parents. But the same &@!§ articles have been repeated since they first appeared in the mid-90s—the headlines cut and pasted, maybe even using the same stock photos. (And I imagine THOSE headlines were ripped off from 500 AD.)

Then they lump me in with their hated “Boomers.” Jesus. The problem with actual oppression is, you don’t get pity points or a leg up or credit in the straight world or on the Internet: It’s just oppression, which means it sucks, and it’s unfair, with no reward, forever.

Modern sanitation? I lived in filth anyway, thanks to these pigs.

Birth control? I guess that was good for a few years in the 70s, but then marriage got weird, and kind of quit happening.

Blech—blisters, grass smell, the beginning scents of autumn—there were no good solutions to life. No matter when you were born. Not till they invented immortality, and God knows what kind of new problems that sh@t would bring.

Friendship? Paul had originally brought the household together; our friendship had preceded the House. But he had broken, ruined my only treat for the year and shrugged about it, smirking like a child.

Art? Maybe someday Leslie could memorize enough of the terrible lyrics he made up to call them punk songs…

Well, then we’d need a decent vocal amp, but nobody was about to pony up the cash till Leslie could get through an entire song without shouting for everyone to stop while he thought. He would wave a single finger in the air like he was hailing a cab, that reptilian head waggling, shouting “No no no! You guys played that part wrong! Now you made me forget the words. Go back to ‘I’m gonna get you, I’m gonna get that little ass, and you ain’t having no fun.’”

Love? For the life of me, I couldn’t see what Brett saw in Leslie.

There was something profoundly wrong with their minds, or at least with Leslie’s mind, and he seemed to have a hypnotic sway over Brett, some kind of attraction, which Leslie mined for obedience. But after the fire, it was breaking down. In a way I couldn’t put a finger on—I couldn’t even tell you why I suspected it—maybe because he shifted his weight back from every conversation the moment Leslie entered, one hand running nervously up and down his lanky body, the other lodged in a back jeans pocket or picking his nose—I knew that Brett was violated daily.

His new collages grew more disturbing, markered over with fractals and eerie facial expressions and blood. There were a lot of them. Whenever he wasn’t at work or drunk, the marker scratched inexorably, like the pendulum of time, back and forth over the pink balloon flesh, Brett’s unwashed form hunched in an arc over the sofa, wearing an incongruously nice collared shirt, nursing a beer, chewing a lip as Leslie slouched and whined at him from the other bed-couch, chin jutting helplessly.

Leslie would wag that stupid finger in the air, sometimes resorting to yelling “Heeeeeyyyyy, Brett!” several times in succession as he repeated the same dumb idea for improving this or that about their daily routine, calling himself a genius. Brett only rolled his eyes. But Leslie’s endless whining seemed to sink in—or at least to depress him. Brett grew more quiet week by week.

As for me, god, that fucking lawn—I can still remember all the shapes of it. I closed my eyes and grunted my way along the sunstruck hellpath of my ridiculously primitive task, imposed on me by an increasingly complex society—one with so many levers of power that there was one lying around that, when grabbed, could make your neighbor cut their lawn with scissors—fitting myself in sideways, singing along with my headphones.

At least I didn’t find any more pot plants. After the drug raid, it would have given me a stroke. The only other live pot plant I’d ever seen was in my old college friends’ closet, under a flickering fake sun lamp; they had gotten the male and female plants confused, though, so that initiative never came to much. Probably not a mistake Tony made! They were more straitlaced types, English and Computer Sci students dabbling in weed (straitlaced is relative), and at this moment it occurred to me how much I missed them.

They were still around, but since I had moved to this house on the edge of Lake Monona, I had seen them less and less often. There was nobody I knew who drank at the neighborhood bar, the one with the stamped-tin ceiling, and sharing a bar was how you ran across people then—or you carefully made plans. There were no cell phones for commoners yet, in the grey in-between world of the 1990s, and the house phone we all shared was the opposite of private communication.

The House hadn’t seemed that far from civilization when Paul and I planned to get a crew and make a punk house. In fact, with the practice space in the dining room, it had seemed like a place where my old friend Bert—“old” meaning we met when I was 17; Christ, but time is strange when you’re young—who played guitar beautifully, and I, could have a real band.

But Bert was scared off by the cast of characters that Paul brought on. Paul was always trying hard to forget that he had grown up with a swimming pool (in-ground, not above-ground!); and instead of resisting, I fell into the house’s orbit like a guinea pig sucked into a black hole of police dogs.

The house seemed to move further from the center of town each day. Usually walks seem to take less time the more often you do them, but I could swear it was taking longer and longer to get to Joe’s Dogs each time I toddled down the isthmus—not just subjectively, not just in my head, but really longer, as though the house were crawling, with a nasty, slimy stealth, slowly further from sanity and the community of man.

It had a life of its own, a strange and increasingly malevolent life. I enjoyed it as entertainment, but there was something about it that was horrible, sinister, even in the sun of June. It soaked up the criminals’ bad blood as they trickled through. Tony, throwing that girl at the wall, getting his drugs from god knew what kind of murderers. Paul, scamming for welfare and driving Sylvia to swallow pills. The way Goober looked at me had made me ill. I was glad he was gone—with his own fridge and freezer on the back porch, the way he disappeared in paranoia after the cop raid; he was blond with red skin, but his hair looked brown because he almost never washed, and he seemed to be an outright idiot. I couldn’t recall where Paul had dug him up, but his presence on the back porch had reduced our rent by $25 a month each. Anything to have a practice space, I’d thought at the time. But it was a practice space that no one wanted to set foot in besides the Incognito Mosquitoes and Paul’s terrible noise band, the Gumption Inklings.

There was nothing that seemed quite so horror-story criminal, however, as Leslie’s… love life?

When I finished with the monthly lawn-trim, I was more than ready for a beer: My hangover was still making noise, but since I didn’t have to work—unfortunately—I was eligible to fix it with a beer. It was like a Replacements song, except the Replacements didn’t have to work, at least not in a dishroom.

Iwent to the refrigerator and pulled out a Huber and drank half of it down. Suddenly, out of nowhere, it was verging on another “why I drink” beer.

“Oh, god, why do people even bother with other people?” I muttered, with churlish good cheer. A sunbeam danced across the floor and didn’t hurt my eyes. The afternoon was almost working its way up to hot, but I enjoyed the sweat.

“Aw, she looks happy,” said Brett.

“She’ll be chasing that dragon for the rest of the day,” said Leslie. “I, on the other hand, will be in Milwaukee.”

“Congratulations,” said Brett.

“Hittin’ the big time,” I said.

“What are you doing in Milwaukee?” said Brett.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Leslie smirked.

“You’re not going to see Katie, are you?”

“Aw, Brett’s in looo-ove. Brett’s in love with Katie! I wasn’t gonna see her but now maybe I think I will.”

“Katie wouldn’t want to see you. Anyway, she’s 21, she’s too old for you.”

“Ah, she looks younger.”

“Can I come with?”

“I dunno, maybe.”

Early that evening Leslie dematerialized, alone as promised, which was odd; he was usually terrified to go anywhere without Brett along to listen to his pontifications, which usually revolved around which bands were acceptable, and how you should do your hair. But he had gotten a phone call of some sort, and went off abruptly, presumably to Milwaukee. But he returned not much later, with what appeared to be a high school girl.

He seemed to have promised her beer—he peered grandly into the communal fridge, making sweeping gestures at the girl. She was clean-cut with a new Ramones T-shirt, though it was tiny even for her unfinished, vulnerable body. She wore even tinier denim short-shorts—not cutoffs, but neatly hemmed. She was wearing carefully applied purple eyeliner and baby pink lipgloss. Brett looked at her in horror.

Finding the fridge exactly as empty as he had left it, Leslie grew immediately enraged with me—I had apparently been appointed his full-on breadwinner at some point today—but I was too nervous about the child in our house to have much patience. “Go trade in those cases if you want beer for your date r@pe,” I snapped. “I don’t get paid till Friday. I need to keep the $30 I have left till then for… for frivolous things like food. And my own booze. And not being a s@x offender.”

“You’re just jealous because she’s young and beautiful and you’re too old for me.”

“I’m twenty-one!”

“Yeah, you’re a hag all right,” he snickered. “Life is sad.”

“Oh god, is she even legal?” Brett shuddered.

“In a lot of places, yeah. And times. She’s sixteen. A year older than a quinceanera!”

“You’re a true man of culture.”

“Five foot two and ninety-six pounds of pure meat!”

“Jesus, she probably hasn’t even reached her adult height....”

I had been drinking heavily since seventeen myself—the legal drinking age had been raised to 21 already, but nobody checked IDs at the doors of bars; in Madison, that would have put half the bars out of business—but I had developed a protective hide of hair dye and bad clothing. This girl was dressed to tease nice high school boys who would gift her with longing looks. For Leslie, her outfit was an airline landing strip.

“You are SO jealous,” he gloated.

“You’re thirty years old, Leslie!”

“I prefer to call myself twenty-five D. Or F? I don’t know, I’m much better at being cool than I am at math.”

“You sound exactly like my grandmother.”

“Whatever. Watch as I work my magic.”

“Is that what they’re calling statutory r@pe now?”

The girl was perched on a couch-bed in the living room, looking over our pile of broken furniture and fixtures and biting our nails.

“That’s from the drug raid,” Leslie bragged.

She looked a bit like Bart had, that time I talked him into coming over to play music, I realized. The moment Bert had arrived, Paul suddenly decided the Gumption Inklings were scheduled to practice first, for three hours, all of which was spent smoking pot and telling me that no, they weren’t fucking finished, and they were a real band so fuck you.  While Bart waited, sitting there in his preppy plaid shirt (his parents probably had a tenth of the money Paul’s had), a bunch of Goober’s crusty punk and redneck hippie friends had pestered him endlessly for change.

Bart had only wanted to play his guitar loud. And all this girl wanted was her first beer. Now she had Leslie standing over her, greasy, sweaty, and skeletal, grinning, the chin pointing like a creature escaped from a Grand Guignol.

He sat next to her and stroked her leg. She alternately leered back at Leslie and stared up at me and Brett with egg-sized, ambivalent eyes. Maybe I looked cool and punk rock to the girl, but I was also her only possible source of protection. The egg eyes flipped between begging for acceptance and begging for help. I felt ashamed of the impulse to pretend I hadn’t seen a thing and head for the bar with the tin-stamped roof. It was cool and serene. Who had signed me up to be someone’s mother today? (And where the f@ck was the girl’s mother?)

Leslie was saying to the girl: “Now, Jennifer, I told you, Lucy’s real cool. She’s going to go get us some beer, aren’t you, Lucy?”

I stared at him angrily for a moment, then reflected.

Actually… I realized suddenly that alcohol was probably the only solution. She wasn’t going to let us save her. Or maybe we were as bad as Paul. Brett looked at me like he was reading my mind.

“Don’t r@pe anyone till we get back, Leslie. Statutory or other.”