Brett and Leslie, Chapter Six:
Band fight!
The day after I puked on the Pickle, we were really, REALLY hung over. Trash-can lids banging together, end of the universe, red light flashing in time with your heartbeat behind your eyelids, somehow getting withdrawals while you’re still drunk, HUNG, OVER.
Whoever brewed or hydrogenated that fake Jäger should be brought before The Hague.
We stayed where we awoke for hours, sprawled on our harem of couches, hoarding the last cans of whatever that shit was, hair of the dog to keep ourselves from vomiting—all still furious with one another.
I was the first to make nice, but not because I felt nice: I was too tired to keep up all the bullish£t snorts and dances people do to show each other we’re mad. I remember that tired, gnawing feeling I had often around this time in my life, although it was strongest when I was 19.
I felt that I was an egg without a yolk—like I had been sent out on the beat with no gas in my tank. My emotions, my energy, had been siphoned out and replaced by endless nausea.
At the same time, I had so much vital élan, it’s a shame. The energy I had was so intense, and the world around me felt so dead-ended and grey, and the human race seemed so intolerant of any brighter shade of color—as annoying as they are, the utter hypocrites, they are dangerously easy to annoy!—the only thing I could do with it was to tear myself into strips, like a meat dress full of flypaper.
It sounds like that’s how lots of people feel when they’re young. And then we feel nostalgic about it when we’re older, although different people have different nostalgia: If your early life was wealthy and happy you miss the good things you had. The rest of us miss the feeling that good things were possible.
I only recently figured out what the real problem was—or at least the solution, but maybe they’re the same thing, for me anyway:
I had refused to accept my fate.
I mean, I still refuse, but I’m working on it.
Instead of making plans, I dreamed of science-fictionally slipping into different timelines. I thought maybe any day now, a person who wasn’t already rich and connected could get a grant to write a book or make an album, same way they handed out free time to shitheads whose hobby was babies. Or heroin. Or Paul. I kept thinking about what could have been if other girls liked me, or my family was rich, or if I could act normal and schmooze.
As if there were a way I could make any of that real! Most of these silly wishes didn’t last long, as I wasn’t quite too stupid to eventually see around my delusions—but once I saw, I kept feeling around the next blind corner, relentlessly probing for another deus ex machina, because I didn’t see anything around me of which I could take hold. Half my brain was wasted on these boring, pleasant parallel worlds that were impossible, this stupid program running in the background, wasting life. I know it’s a cheesy Alcoholics Anonymous saying, but it’s true: I’d have saved myself a lot of tooth enamel if I worried more about the sh*t I COULD change.
Play the cards you are dealt.
I’ve always believed that, but somehow the belief got stuck on this weed: Life doesn’t seem fair. Remember, that was my amulet from my dad, the advice he had in every situation. “Life ain’t fair, kid,” and I chewed on that for decades. OK. But what IS fair? Nobody deserves anything.
You get it? Nobody deserves anything, not even meeeeeeeeee!
You hear how childish it sounds? “I deserve better!” Says who? Have you read any history? Very fine people, on all sides, but somebody decided they deserved an iron maiden, gas chamber, oubliette, biological warfare, nukes. They cried and cried. “Big deal,” said the universe. You haven’t been deprived; the lucky person has been spoiled till they stink like rotten milk.
So why does it still feel like you’ve been deprived?
You want to try to fix it, but that usually makes things worse. The last few years, in the bleak new century, I’ve been truncheoned by other people’s big ideas so many times, I’m scared to get any ideas at all.
Life is terrible, but very, very beautiful.
Beauty is the only thing the gods think you deserve.
Not the cheesy beauty of a perfect face. In a mental-ward shower, the mysterious spray of blood on the wall has an appealing, eccentric symmetry. Death’s pale horse is mighty fine.
Are the gods correct? Is dew on a bier our sole just reward?
It doesn’t matter. They’re the gods. Being wrong amuses them; I don’t know if I can blame them. If they’re doomed to always get their way, the only entertaining challenge is to see how disgusting they can be.
If you’re doomed to be a mortal, the only thing you can count on is tragedy. Master the horror and the beauty, and one day that feeling of weakness in your chest, the missing yolk, begins to fill again, like epoxy in a crack.
You might still get a stomachache. It could crack open again. Earthquakes.
You’re a voice actor in Hell. Your vacation is a trip to Hell’s Circus; it’s one of those educational programs. You wish they’d picked a different script for today—you curse your luck.
But do you want to be the guy who pays full price for a ticket, then refuses to enjoy the show?
If you don’t savor your life for what it is, the world will go on and you might get a laugh despite yourself, but that will twist the regret in the end like a knife. The blade is already in your chest, tough guy. You want to wiggle it around? These are the cards you were dealt, these so far are the plays you have made. You can learn from them but probably not, and you certainly can’t change them. You can only be smarter in the next round.
I drank a lot of vodka, hoping it was yolk.
But until you’re standing resigned inside your own time, you won’t be steady on your feet. You’ll have a hangover from something or other, every day you wake.
Most things about drinking are a horror movie. But hitting your thumb with a hammer is a great distraction if your leg is crushed. So everyone does their own math. (It’s hardly ever worth it, but it’s hard to count when you’re drunk.)
One of the things I liked about drinking was the pain of a hangover: When you’re young it makes pain seem meaningful, it makes everything funny.
That morning—once I got bored of making nice, which only took as long as it took Leslie to steal the last of my cereal from the cupboard—that strange pain convinced me that it would be fun to try to change Leslie’s fake name to Joe.
It only took five minutes to rouse him to a squeak-scream.
“Stop calling me Joe! I need to be called… Leslie... I… am a LEGEND!”
“At the Dane County Sheriff’s office? Possibly.”
“Shut up. It’s more English. You know? Like Billy Childish.”
“He’s not Welsh?”
“What?”
He sat up, repeated his signature move—I called it “the buzzard”: he jutted his chin out, slouched, and then did a theatrical hair-smooth. I realized he did this every time he said anything.
“It’s my rock and roll power,” he concluded. I all of a sudden felt like I was on drugs. We didn’t need the televisions. We had a surrealist cartoon in the flesh, picking his nose in someone else’s used work shirt, an extra from Ren and Stimpy mooching on my couch. I was never sure where Joe-Nigel-Leslie got his small amounts of money, but it was more likely that it came from a magical realm than from any kind of work.
“If you want to be Billy Childish, maybe work on your guitar playing,” I grunted.
“Hey!” Joe-Leslie squeaked. “I’m a fuckin’ genius at the guitar.”
“You need to practice to be a genius, don’t you?” Brett said.
Leslie whirled on him. “Fuck you, Melissa, you’re just the bass player. What do you know? Genius comes from deep inside, not from practicing like some kind of poseur. Or reading like a… Jesus, what are you always reading for all the time over there, Lucy? Your parents own Johnsonville Brats? Reading up for your debutante’s ball?”
I strangled a laugh. None of these guys had ever been without an HBO or a VCR to entertain them before they left their parents’ houses. But I was the snob, with my 50-cent Kingsley Amis paperbacks… I decided to ignore him till my head stopped pounding. My eyes scurried over my damn book—yes, exactly like they had tiny feet—comprehending nothing. Then I was distracted by, unusually, Brett, who was maiming Linda Evangelista with his blunted Sharpie. It was pretty good.
Suddenly, Leslie kicked the altar of Huber cases. The televisions wobbled, but not alarmingly, as no one was alarmed. We were too hung over. The rattling of glass tubes died down fast. Leslie stuck out his lip in frustration. “Can you guys fix this stupid television? I want to watch Batman!” he shouted. He sounded simultaneously like a dying junkie and a child in need of a kick.
“Well, then be quiet and don’t stand in front of the televisions,” said Brett. “We can almost watch Batman if you’d £ucking sit down. The signal is better on the lake side.”
“BULLSH!T!! We deserve better televisions! We’re the best surf-punk band in Madison!” Leslie said.
Nobody answered; we stared at our TVs, most from the 70s and 80s, though more recently, the neighbors’ Dumpsters. (We considered their putting out the trash to be a veiled gesture of giving us presents.) Our favorites were the massy, glass-bellied monsters that would have cost most people a month’s salary in the 80s, so families that made lots bought them to show off. There was one little black-and-white TV, like a worker-bee mom might get for the kitchen when you have some extra money, so she doesn’t have to watch Dad’s cowboy shit. In Madison, there were both kinds of people. There were also medium-sized televisions, a 1950s model that we left unplugged because it might catch fire, and a couple that had the tube smashed in and blackened, as they had been used to house campfires… I think those came from Leslie’s crack venture to Broadway-Simpson.
“...You know, I think I will call you Nigel,” I said calmly, as though he weren’t screaming like a toddler. “I’m going to call you it ironically though, because it’s… it’s a girl’s name. It says so in the Bible. Dumbass.” I stood up and started fiddling with the aluminium foil we had stuck to the rabbit ears on the best television. I have no idea whether putting foil on your bunny ears actually improved your reception, but everyone tried it.
“This is why I find you unattractive, Jody.”
“Thank God.”
“You know, in England they’re more sophisticated. Men have women’s names all the time.”
“Like Billy?”
“Like … Brett! Jesus, Brett already has a girl’s name. Are you a WASP, Brett? Are your parents from England, you wanker? Wasn’t the girl in that one book called Brett?”
Brett’s eyes widened for a moment—“Quit saying my name,” he muttered—then went back down, and his chin rose. “I highly doubt you’ve read the actual book, so I assume you got that from a porno. Fisting With Fitzgerald, maybe.”
“That was a great movie,” said Nigel-Joe-Leslie.
“I think Brett was a man’s name, anyway,” I offered. “Fitzgerald named that character Brett to underline her boyishness.”
“What she means,” Brett said, blinking coquettishly at Nigel-etc., “is you’re very feminine.”
“You are, you WASP.”
“I’m not a WASP, and neither was Fitzgerald—listen to his last name, you wall-eyed putz,” Brett said quietly. “You know…” He stared at the wall with his mouth open for a moment. “Weiiiiird…I don’t know if I’ve even ever met a real live WASP, actually. But you always see them on the television. Are they real?”
“They ARE on television, they must be real.”
“Yeah, right. Maybe there are some in the university, wearing, you know, preppy collars.” He grinned. “Or maaaaaaybe they’re a government conspiracy. Like John Hughes movies and UFOs. WASP doesn’t mean White Anglo-Saxon-Protestant, it means While America Sleeps… Poop!”
He dissolved into giggles. I couldn’t help laughing. “You are so hung over!”
“No, you are!”
“Dude, did Paul finally start sharing his stash?” Nigel added.
“No, I’m just SO HUNG OVER…” Brett fell over giggling again. He put his fingers on his temples and swirled his eyes like he was the bad guy in the Batman cartoon, hypnotising us. “I can feel this paranoid part of my mind that’s like, wanting to get off the leash, and the hangover is letting it loose…”
He started laughing so hard he could barely talk. “I mean, have you ever seen evidence that all these TV people are real? I know everyone in Manitowoc is German or French or Native Americ—”
“Native American? Don’t be SENSITIVE, Brett,” said Leslie.
“I’m being accurate,” Brett said quietly. His smile was fake as he plastered a hank of sweaty hair up on his forehead, away from his eyes; that moment is crystal in my memory: the poisonous, embarrassed smile, the nervous lock-plaster.
He had pretty eyes with long lashes. He fluttered them at Leslie again. Ironically. He wore an ironic moustache a decade before ironic moustaches were fashionable—two decades before people forgot they were ironic, and once again shuffled into the belief that looking like Rollie Fingers without the talent was cool. The cycle of fashion. Brett wore it like his face grew quills. I don’t know if he ever meant anything he ever did.
“You want me to say Indian? Manitowoc is I think literally on the opposite side of the plaaaaa-n-et from India. You can’t get any farther than that without going to the moon.” Brett would argue about anything with Leslie—except things that mattered in their little world, like what they were going to do next. It was his way of saving some dignity. “Do you even know where India is?”
“Do you even know you’re a f*ggot?”
Brett sighed and tossed back his bangs. “Fine, Indian. French and German and Indian.”
“Yeah, that’s like my hometown too,” I blathered, as though anyone cared about my hometown, “except for when there was that war and they dumped a bunch of people from someplace hot… that seemed kinda mean… you shoulda seen their faces in December…” I trailed off. It still felt like Brett was going to punch Leslie.
Nothing to do but drink! I scrabbled around for an oilcan; didn’t take long. I choked theatrically on a gout of licorice poison, decided it was worse than living with my hangover, and tried to recall the thread of the conversation, waving my hands at them like a high school band teacher. “Thank god it’s summer now. Do I know any TV people? Why are we talking about the government census, Brett?”
“Because Lezzzzzzlie wants us to call him a girl.”
“Oh, right. So I think that one student we have at work is a WASP. He thinks I have a thing for him because I was staring at his mouth—he’s so smug about it, every time he sees me now, but I was hung over and I thought I was staring at the wall; I don’t think he’s had a bath in his entire college career. I’d almost rather fuck you, Leslie.”
“Too bad for you, because I would rather fuck a Huber bottle.”
“We’d have to take you to the emergency room with a bottle on your dick,” Brett said. “The nurse would be like, why are you fucking that beer bottle?”
“You’re taking this way too literally,” Leslie growled.
“And you’d be like, ’Cause I’m a pedophile and my other option was this charred husk of twenty-one…” He dissolved into giggles, hair flopping. “No offense, Lucy.” I wasn’t sure whether he meant that. He still seemed coiled.
“That’s assuming his dick is big enough to get stuck in a Huber bottle. He might not even feel it,” I helped, nervously. No one reacted. “What a stupid bunch of shits we are,” I muttered, under my breath but loud enough for them to hear. “The point is, LESLIE, you’re a pretentious dick and… well, that’s the point. This hangover is YOUR fault. Ugh. I can’t believe you thought I was going to… BEAU-re-gard…” A wave of nausea pitched me side to side. “You fuckin’ girl,” I squeaked.
I stomped to the kitchen with my whole body pitched uncontrollably to the left, not quite tracking. It was really a hangover. When I came back, I clutched my trusty, rusty old lawn knife.
“So, are you girls going to finish this, or do I have to?”
“Do what? Murder him? Count me in.”
“You know what I’m talking about, Leslie. The notice from the cops.” I was about one potassium ion away from puking, but I figured if I got overheated enough to finally hork, I’d feel better.
“Ah, they’re not going to do anything to us. They’re bluffing. It’s just the lawn.”
“The City of Madison is bluffing us? What, for fun? You lazy piece of shit.”
“I told you,” Leslie said, “you should have bought some kind of push mower before it came to this.”
They both started snickering, and I didn’t appreciate the callback. Fortunately, my face was already red thanks to the herbal nuclear waste, and speaking of which, needs must: “Fine.” I grabbed the oil can and force-swallowed what was left of our booze. Black-licorice dragon bile dribbled down my chin.
“Hey! Fuck you! What am I supposed to drink now?”
“Drink your own piss, Leslie. It probably has drugs in it.”
Brett laughed at my joke and Leslie gave him the finger.
“You wish. You BOTH wish! You would EAGERLY drink my piss, if it had drugs in it. Ehhhhh heh heh heh heh heh,” he whinnied, hysterical.
“Depends on the drugs.” I clapped my fake Walkman set on my head and put the first tape I could find in the player so I couldn’t hear anything else he said. That was enough Leslie for the day, at least till I could get correctly drunk.
“What am I going to drink?,” he wailed. Maybe there was more. My Humpers tape cut him off like a guillotine. That felt nice.
Next: Chapter Seven: The Lady on Our Lawn
Previously…
Chapter One: At Home in Hotel Hell