Brett and Leslie: Chapter Two
The Lawn Knife
So my navel is full of sweat on this fine summer day, but not in a sexy way. I'm kind of a tall girl, but, conveniently for these lazy @ssholes, the lawn is so tall, I have disappeared. Out of sight, out of beer—I bet they’re drinking it all. Slugs!
Hungry like the wolf but not a proper pack animal, I have been sent to sally all alone against City Hall, or rather to appease them by trimming the savannah that has appeared in The House’s patch of yard. Rusty kitchen knife in hand, scissors tucked into my Army shorts waistband, next to my generic Walkman, which contains a stretched-out cassette tape playing a 90s country band, singing,
“The streets of where I’m from
Are paved with hearts instead of gold"
Kind of gross, but that's what wailed through my head as the sweat ran down my back, smelling like diesel fuel on hot cement—catastrophically hung over.
Funny, as much as I wished I could remember every day of my life, I have no recollection of why I thought I needed to get so drunk the night before that I was sweating grease—whilst I can remember the exact color of the stained wood handle of the kitchen knife I chose to cut the lawn.
The pattern of the bloom of rust on its blade. Weird, tiny serrated teeth. It had been in the kitchen drawer for who knows how many decades, maybe cutting up horseradish for ham back when this part of town was still farmland.
I wonder where you are now, Knife? We had some times, all right. Part of me wanted nothing more than to stab you straight through Leslie's hairy neck.
He and Brett were relaxing noisily in the living room, into which they had dragged a number of derelict mattresses, couches, and televisions to form a sort of Ingrès harem of sweaty American boys. They lounged, as usual, watching the afternoon cartoons while starting in on my beer.
Well, Brett probably paid for some of it, and Leslie added a communal aspect by acting as fetcher.
This was how Leslie justified his existence: Paul the Asshole had a skateboard he never used, except to drag it around as a prop. The only time I ever saw Paul climb aboard, he fell down within seconds and spent weeks demanding free intoxicants from everyone because of "his pain." Most of Paul’s pain flowed outward, as his existence was spent meditating upon innovative ways to monetise straining to look pitiful. That might be why his rutabaga face always looked like he was taking a dump.
So he didn't notice, much less complain, when we commandeered his “ride” as Leslie's Huberwagon.
This was another deal I can't believe I tolerated, much less Brett.
Simple enough: Back in May, Brett miraculously scored a tipped job, as a bellhop at a fancy hotel, and suddenly he thought he was a sugar daddy.
I guess he could be charming when he wanted to, which is tragic; Leslie had him convinced that the only way to be cool was to be a c*nt to everyone. This didn't stop Leslie from envy-tripping Brett into paying his rent for him. In turn, Brett and I paid for cases of Huber, and Leslie went to fetch them.
Huber was a local p&ss lager, before the days of microbrews; it tasted like all the other pale yellow cr§p, but it was only available in Dane County, till the aughts, when it was bought out by some fat, suckered tentacle of a corporate person.
But once upon a time that p&ss was special in Madison, thanks to their case deal: If you saved five complete cases of empties and brought them back to the store, you got a whole new case of 24 beers, absolutely free of charge. This was Earth-friendly long before mandatory recycling, and free beer was a more effective incentive than the current régime of threats and fees. You couldn’t STOP us from recycling.
ANYWAY, Leslie’s entire job in life was to balance those five used cases on Paul's stupid skateboard and roll towards the beer store. He lived mostly at the expense of Brett, but at least Brett was getting whatever… weird satisfaction out of… whatever weird shit he saw in the guy.
All I got was a blister from Knife. And in the dripping heat of that laborious afternoon, as I heard the idle Leslie screeching with laughter at his afternoon cartoons, even over my music, I wanted to drink all the beer I had worked for, and the mighty grasses felt my rage.
SAW SAW SAW SAW SAW!
They couldn’t even come out and see if I had fainted yet?
HACK HACK HACK HACK!
If I had a computer I could just… make computer music, fuck you guys.
I loved to play music, though.
Fucking D!CK GIRLS. ASS C&NTS. JERKS! I AM TIRED, etc.
HACKHACK
It was maddeningly slow going, but at least I didn’t need to liberate the whole yard, thank the gods. I would have lain me down on my bed of dandelions and waited for them to drag me to the county oubliette.
Instead, I had only to reclaim a sufficient swath so our weenie, snitching, curtain-twitching neighbors could walk by without our bubonic-plague fleas jumping on board.
HACKHACKHACKHACK
HACK... HACK... ... Hack... ugh… h… hac…
I should have been flat on my back. It surprises me, how many extra levels of backup power a mammalian system can hide. If I continue this story long enough you’ll start to wonder if it’s possible to kill me.
You can’t call up the backup tanks on demand, though, which is annoying—sometimes system control decides it’s safer to pass out—but I’m still alive to forget it.
I was about ready to give up after my beer gave out, though; I was reduced to going in and out for glasses of our reddish tap water, and both wrists felt like they belonged to an 80-year-old hooker. But I continued, and continued, and then I screamed in terror…
"Hu-WAHGHH!" I said—compounding my fear a half-second later when I realized my stupid screaming might draw attention to myself, and the THING I just found.
I ducked down into the mercifully deep grasses, one hand over my stupid mouth and the other snatching up the offending plant to cache it under my sweaty carcass.
“W-way to scare the shit out of yourself, Lucy,” I said, peeling my eyes open and peering at the contraband.
Sure enough, its distinctive green outline shimmered in my shaking hands: My bushwhacking had uncovered a marijuana plant.
Hey, don’t laugh. Pot was absurdly illegal in those days, to the point where it could get you more time than violent crimes. Buried deep in the thicket of our untrimmed lawn, there lurked God knows what level of felony for any and all of us. It was a bulky drug and they charged by weight. Like a salad bar in hell. And growing it?! Holy shit. My dehydrated ethanolic blood slurped menacingly through my veins; I could hear it stick and unstick as my blood pressure shot up past fight or flight to panic.
Judas f#ck a pigdog... If one of these wigger idiots is trying to become a pimp daddy grower with my name on the lease, I’m gonna...
I mushed my forehead into my fists and tried to… “chillax, man.”?! Oh my god, I can hear Paul saying to “chillax, man,” in my own goddamn head. I closed my eyes and saw black and pulsing red, the sun burning out the voices.
OK, OK, so it was only one skinny, lanky plant. It didn't look like anyone had been near it since the grass got over a foot high, much less snuck out to tend it. There would have been a trail. The pot plant was a foot shorter than the tufts of regular grass, so they had protected it from the curtain-twitchers, but that seemed more like dumb luck than a plan. And I found it right next to where we used to put out the garbage before the grass got too high. So… likely, it was the spawn of somebody's shake and seed that they'd thrown away, and the seed happened to be... fertile?
That didn't sound right. Did Paul-tier commercial weed even have fertile seeds? And Paul didn't throw out any of his seeds or shake anyway. That sad sponger used my olive oil and pasta to try to cook them up—I had caught him at it. So who in h@ll?...?
As I was spinning, a bovine grunt behind me made me jump again, and I fumbled to turn off my Walkman.
Jesus H. Christ... it was F#CKING TONY.
Speaking of pimps!
The little douchebag was coming up the sidewalk now; I could see his blue-black Sicilian head bobbing over the trough I had so laboriously carved in the foliage. He had a couple of his decomposing friends with him. Like Leslie, he always had to have an entourage, but unlike Leslie he had a rotating cast.
So he was at least somewhat more gregarious than Leslie, but so what? Tony was at once hard-edged and spoiled, and he didn’t even know about music—he wore band T-shirts like a costume. He probably couldn’t read his own shirt.
Tony was only seventeen, but he talked to everyone like he was some kind of mob boss—OK, so his dad had actually been born in Piana degli Albanese, but it wasn’t 1973 anymore, and we sure were not in Chicago anymore, much less Palermo. Who the f@ck did he think he was, walking up to our door—like he’d just gone out for smokes?! He had actually tried to hit me up for his security deposit! All those girl holes in the walls and he thought HE should… MOTHERF@CKER.
He and his pet cretins were laughing at something, no doubt stupid. They ignored me as I scythed at the communal lawn like his serf. Tony seemed to be holding court; they were all trying to get near him, jostling as they paused before my door, laughing mostly at his words, waiting for him to speak with mouths agape like baby birds. I looked over my shoulder as they bottlenecked casually through, saying more stupid things with their idiot faces, unbearable human mouth noises; I blinked in disgust and suddenly Tony had turned around and was staring straight back at me.
He smirked under his floppy bangs—those were considered a fashion accessory— stark against an opaque face, the white marble flesh of a shut-in. He wore a backwards baseball cap and an oversize T-shirt screen-printed with Looney Tunes cartoon characters who were making fake gang signs with their hands.
His friends were all dressed alike, with mall-punk plaid, spikes, and baggy shorts on their stupid thick legs, but instead of punk rock or hip-hop they probably listened to hippie noodle music or something even more sinister.
It was rare to see Tony outside in the sunlight, or to see him at all; before we kicked him out, you only knew he was in the house because you could hear his girlfriend crying, or you caught a glimpse of the room through the door as his friends, who were as numerous as they were unpleasant, went in and out.
I didn’t know where Tony’s rent money came from, either; probably his family, I figured. Like Paul, Tony acted like a rich kid who didn’t have to work, desperately trying to act tough. But with Tony, there was something else to it. Something—for lack of a better word—genuine. Paul was hapless. Leslie came on a bit menacing but also pathetic. Tony threw people like they were a shotput.
Tony barely nodded to me, as though he still lived here and this was completely f&cking normal, then put his hand on the small of a dawdling proto-Juggalo’s back and guided him into my f@cking house. He didn't look nearly long enough to notice how many sharp objects I clutched. That little farm knife was covered in more imaginary blood than a wooden sword at a Ren faire full of ex-couples.
As he disappeared, I finally noticed the obvious: He was also wearing a KILT.
I spend way too much of my fantasy life on murdering these sorts of people.
When Paul the Asshole proposed him as our roommate, we thought Tony was a semi-gothy metalhead seventeen-year-old from the Italian part of the Chicago ’burbs.
And that was all true, technically. The way Chairman Mao was a Napoleon fanboy with daddy issues.
In retrospect, the abject worship with which that thirty-something man treated this teenage thug-monkey makes me wish I had burned them all alive. Well, I exaggerate for comic effect; you have to make it clear that you’re doing that these days, as nobody seems to have any idea how to parse sarcasm, double entendres, or any other depressingly simple form of clowning. But it should have embarrassed Paul. Buuuut it didn’t, because… well, take a wild guess as to whether that root vegetable on legs was profiting behind everyone’s back?
Imagine the look on my face when I learned why Paul lobbied so hard for this shmuck. I’ll give you a few beats to guess what the quid to the pro quo turned out to be.
After Tony’s little shit-ducklings had all filed in through my door, I went on a feral tear, grunting into the grass. Stalk after tough stalk of woody grasses fell under the wonder drugs of adrenaline and murder, murder, murder...
I flashed back on Tony’s parties, which invariably ended with me coming home from work to clean up piles of cups, vomit, and the occasional near-dead frat girl. Violent little punk, I should take this f£ckin’ knife and f£ckin’…
We all had some anger issues.
But getting mad and ventilating people was one thing. For someone whose only attempts to seem intellectual all used the phrase “police state,” on the other hand, Tony didn’t seem at all nervous about having bottomless-cup parties in our house. When rent came around, the genius deliberately charged underage kids money for booze, in large enough quantities to turn them into problems in the living room—and it would have been corpses in there if I hadn’t cleaned up his mess. Multiple times.
There’s gonna be a way more fun kinda death if he doesn’t get the f£ck out of there before I lose my sh§t… He wasn’t even legal to buy the booze himself! The prison cell the little sh#t was carving for himself wasn’t for himself; it was for me.
Well, at least he paid the rent. That reminds me, I have to shake Paul down before the pr&ck eats $200 worth of Gumby’s pizza…I saw red again, and the whole merry-go-round took another trip, tooting ears and everything.
Eventually, the adrenaline carried me past the end of the row I was carving out: I wasn’t done, but I was done for today!—some rage-bladder in my brainham burst under the excess of bile, and I ran straight into the house.
I turned right and stared dumbly into the cool of the living room, panting.
"Heyyy," Brett said.
He sounded friendly, probably because I looked crazy. They had been so peaceful, a moment ago. Leslie gloried in watching as many of the televisions as he could thump into functioning, while surreptitiously masturbating, as usual; meanwhile Brett tried to ignore the TVs by puttering at one of his art projects.
His oeuvre generally consisted of hacking up Leslie's porn magazines and mutating them into resentful-looking “art collages,” a habit which had already precipiated several fistfights.
Me, I was fit to knock their two heads together like coconuts. I mean… Leslie probably stole those rags from a frat party to begin with, but… art collages? Pfft. That's what guys called it back then when they thought they were artists but they were too lazy to learn to draw, so they passed their time cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them to paper in whatever arrangement the drugs told them was meaningful. If they weren't artists, they at least thought they were cool.
Brett, though, seemed reasonably devoid of delusions of grandeur. He never tried to tell us “Uuhhh, I’m forging a nex voice by deconstructing consumerist culture,” even though he saved up and bought art magazines that said shit like that. He would proudly but shyly show his designs to Julie and Johnnie, like a kid showing his Y-camp art project to his divorcé dad.
Julie and Johnnie? Right, J and J were this cool-hot-cute couple of punk rockers from the 70s who got to be photographers when they grew up; we all wanted to be them. They were so in love, nobody ever said one of their names without saying the other—even after Julie’s premature death in the 2010s.
Shit, I should check on Johnnie. I’m an asshole.
By this point in the story, I hadn’t even met J and J yet. They were legends. But they were hardly haughty ones; years later they wound up asking me to their farmstead, among other kindnessness. They bought it in a feral state. It maybe got farmed for 100 years between the Ice Age and the Industrial Age; it was days from any reservation. The couple hadn’t entirely reclaimed it from the weeds and the possums yet, so we only had the run of a certain part of the massive farmhouse. It felt like rummaging around in someone’s brain, but only the conscious parts.
Julie had already decorated it to look like the interior of the world’s most luxurious coffin. She cut up the beautiful vegetables they grew, too, the old-fashioned way like my grandma, before that was ironic or cool or a fossilized statement, either.
God, Lucy, shut up. The nostalgia. You know nostalgia is sick! Every word I say… it’s not LIKE a knife in my heart, because I can feel it, with the nerves outside my brain, as a blade searing through the meat. Like when Paul gave me that jailhouse tattoo. Most of my friends are dead.
Anyway… Back then, J and J would come over from Manitowoc every once in a while to do photographer stuff in the capital, and they would check on the boys. Weirdly, I got the impression J and J were motivated by something like a parental impulse. Other than J and J, Brett and Leslie seemed to have no parents at all.
Then again, probably none of us seemed to. You left the house as soon as you could and you didn't look back. You were afraid. It was another impossible dilemma, as it was also impossible to face this new world without adult guidance, but we all thought our particular parents were worse than not having parents at all.
Coulda been wrong, coulda been right. All those movies about happy gangs of feral children saving the town made it seem normal. If you were in your parents’ house after you were old enough to vote, much less drink, there’s a 99.5 percent chance you were Italian. There was always a barn or a church you could rent, if worse came to worst. They were losing their old occupations anyway.
Anyway, Brett showing his "art" to the pros from Manitowoc seemed less like pretentiousness and more like a lost kid begging for a hug. His obsession was… pure is almost the word. Non-synthetic. The only images that interested him were soft porn, and the only aesthetic that grabbed him could be slotted as "Ed Gein" (the second-most-famous Wisconsinite serial killer, and third-most-famous Wisconsinite in history, after Chris Farley and… J and J?).
The project represented Leslie’s second, involuntary contribution to the house: Brett wasn’t interested in ruining anyone’s porn except Leslie’s.
Granted, I hid mine a lot better—porn was on paper then, so this was more complicated than you think—and nobody wanted to touch anything belonging to Paul or Yollie, much less THAT.
But I think Brett’s choice of victim had several, deep roots. After his work was done, not even Leslie would use the images for… anything pleasant.
It began as resentful doodling, the maestro blocking out Tia Bella's every other tooth and covering her knockers with fishnet couture in ink.
But as the auteur spread his oily wings, the models lost limbs and gained eyes, were sliced through the abdomen like hams, defenestrated and decapitated. In the interest of using the whole buffalo, their disembodied legs began to reappear as the rays of alien suns: thighs joined at the center, bent knees spiralling out into a fleshy swastika.
At the center, Brett would place a mouth, angled to look like a vagina dentata; or for variety perhaps a dead kitten, a bloodshot eye, or a gout of blood.
These murder-suns had appeared in every collage he made lately. His recent favorite wasn't porn at all, which would leave Johnnie visibly relieved; the sun was made from a kick-line of dancers in an advertisement for some fancy cruise, before cruise lines were synonymous with salmonella.
Brett didn't like their flamenco sandals. So he cut off the dancers’ feet below the ankles and replaced the toes with teeth, carefully chosen from a thousand commercial grins to make all the feet on the sun look uniform, glued in place with loving care. The landscape below this blazing star was even more inspired: The hills were alive and made of lacy boobs, cut from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, with more teeth glued in atop the nipples. They had tiny, funny feet, clipped from photos Brett took of my guinea pig, and they were gaining ground on a quartet of gore-slick dryads, birthed from an underwear ad whose models were as flat-chested as Brett.
The girls’ legs had already been devoured by a brace of giant muskellunge clipped from a fishing magazine; I imagined them crawling away from the hills of Hollywood, Brett leading them like a pied piper to Palm Springs. But these hills, like Jell-o molds with fangs, were about to fight the muskies for their remains.
My educated guess is, Brett’s mom might have been psycho.
Leslie’s mom? Who f&ckin’ knows… I can imagine his parents being the kind of ding-dongs who can’t pay their bills but still find a way to spoil their precious little sh*t. Then again, if I had a kid like him, I would have locked him in the basement with a spit hood, so it’s 50-50.
"What are you STARING at, Lucy?"
"Mhht?"
I suddenly remembered I was standing there panting. Four of the ten televisions stacked upon our altar of been cases flickered; two made noise, and Leslie smirked glassy-eyed at all of it—although the longer I stood there, the more amused glances he flicked my way.
I wiped sweat from the back of my stupid neck, slowly remembering how annoyed I was. "Uh.. it's... So—What was that I just saw?! Was that Tony who walked through here? Or am I seeing shit from heat exhaustion because you lazy’—”
"La, la, the melodrama," Brett said. "Yeah, it was Tony." He grinned. "You gonna fight him?"
"I might have to. That girl's mom was here the other day.”
“What girl?”
I stared at him. “The one whose as& shape is now forensic evidence on our upstairs wall?”
“Huh?” he persisted.
I mimicked the girl’s distinctive, cawing shriek she made whenever she was airborne.
“Uh-OOOOOhhhh! Yeah. Duh.” He shook his head violently and stabbed his finger hatefully at his temple, whipping his hair side to side in self-loathing.
I didn’t feel helpful: “Yeah, stupid. So, the mom says next time she’ll come here with their whole family, unless we can convince her that F@cking Tony lives somewhere else."
"How is that myyy problem?" Leslie piped up, whining. "Calm down, have a beer."
"Oh, so you want to be part of a brawl? And/or a domestic battery investigation? She’s underage, on top of the holes in our wall."
"So's he."
"Unlike you.”
Brett interrupted by finally answering my question: "Yeah, so you are co-WRECKED, Lucille: Tony breeeeeezed on past us like we’re serfs…”
“…jinx…”
“…an’ he went upstairs, in the flesh, and halfway up I yelled at him, you’d be proud of me, and he said—what did he say, Leslie?”
“He said Lucy’s a lezzie. Ha ha!"
I rolled my eyes, willing my skin not to flush. But I could have ripped off Leslie’s head and shat down his neck: Leslie was referencing Fucking Fritz. Or (goddamn it) Elvis-Fritz.
Because believe it or not, Leslie wasn't the sleaziest rockabilly weasel in town.
That honor went to Fritz, in his role as the local Elvis impersonator. Not that I ever heard of Fritz having an Elvis-impersonator gig, although he did get business cards made; and yet, generous artist that he was, he plied his pomaded vocation all day every day, whether anybody wanted it or not.
One long weekend, after days of drinking with a bunch of crusties on the nude beach down the Wisconsin River, Fritz talked me into accepting a ride back to town on his motorcycle. I hate those things. There was an accident when I was a kid, but also, duh. Even as drunk as I was, I was terrified, since he was even drunker; if my Army shorts were shorter, I’d have lost the skin off my knees.
And once I survived, we stopped really being pals: He seemed to think that by climbing aboard his suicide cycle I had metaphysically signed a compact to let him climb aboard me—a gymnastic feat which he attempted while I was still running in small circles on our driveway, trying to let off the fear from the motorcycle ride, unaware that being pestered into something I didn’t want had put me on the hook for something else I didn’t want.
I hadn’t even gone bare at the nude beach, so I didn’t know where he got his ideas from, especially since he smelled exactly like that cat litter box he never changed at the apartment he shared with the oldest punk rocker in Madison.
Anyway, the point of my story is what Fritz yelled when stomped off, peeved: "I should have known you were a dyke! AND a k*ke.”
Why do stupid people think things are true because they rhyme? Or alliterate?
“That would be interesting news for my Catholic grandmother,” I said.
“Whatever, Lucy. Lucy the Lezzie! Ha ha ha ha! Lucy the Lezzie! Good one, King! Kerr-annngg!”
And that's what Fritz called me ever after. Lucy the Lezzie. Loudly. Well, unless he was busy spreading the rumour that I was a male rabbi. Well, till he died. A death so predictable I refuse to type out how he went. But it wouldn’t be the last time someone stopped speaking to me over a gift I didn’t want.
I never know what people mean by their bullsh#t until it’s too late.
“Anyway,” Brett was saying, tapping sagely on his lip, “I deeeeeew seem to recall Tony’s pimple-jaw flappin’away there for a minute. I thiiiiiiink he said he had to check and make sure he had all his stuff.”
“All his…? I don’t even want to know.” Amongst the questions I did not want answered: how many underaged corpses were stuffed under the floorboards? Tony was a psycho; that, I knew. Seventeen and already as hopeless as Leslie.
Yet both of them were less irredeemable than Paul.
After the little shit paid his first month’s rent, Paul finally let on that one of Tony’s demands before he moved in was that he should get the room that was the biggest and best, by far. And he demanded it for the same price as the other rooms. It was immense, with a walk-in closet that was itself as big as the other bedrooms. Situated upstairs, with two sets of windows overlooking the street and the entry, it had the only useful view in the house.
I mean, somebody was going to get it—but we had planned to put two paying people in there. He wanted it all for no extra cost, paying the same rent per month as the rest of us?! This was a CLEARLY psycho thing to demand. Where do I buy that kind of gall? And even crazier for Paul to grant, behind everyone else’s back.
It took another six months for Paul to confess that Tony did, akshully, offer a concession in exchange: A monthly stipend of free weed. For Paul.
Where Tony got the weed from, we didn’t want to know, but I don’t think we ever believed he was paying full price.
Paul’s way of apologising to the rest of us was, after we kicked Tony out, he surreptitiously moved his stuff into the big room the night before Brett and Leslie were going to move in.
Nobody was having it. Not twice. Well, not at first. Why should he pay half the price for double the space just because he snuck that deal in for Tony? It made no sense for him to have a suite while two guys shared a closet.
But he refused to leave, dramatically using Yollie’s bondage gear to chain himself to the radiator; even the guinea pig could have torn up those “handcuffs,” but once again, nobody wanted to touch him.
So Brett and Leslie got crammed into a shit room off the root cellar, and we ended up tracking down Paul’s dad each month to get the extra $200 that big room was worth. Which Goober—our more quietly scumbag roommate, whose huge dog was too interested in Chumpy for my comfort—thoroughly enjoyed doing.
Unlike Paul, Goober was an honest scumbag: sullenly affable, sporadically violent, stupid, intoxicated, and prone to bad decisions, such as living in The House, but he had a streak of honor.
When Goober went to get the rest of Paul’s rent each month, the rest of us tagged along and made an outing of it; Goob was a man of few words, but there was something about threatening a banker with a shameful son for cash that brought out the sketch comic in him. And I’m not going to pretend that posing as his shaggy little backup gang was anything but entertaining. Next month, I noted, I ought to bring Knife.
When Paul retaliated by spreading his disgusting bedstuffs into the practice room so he and Yollie “wouldn’t be so cramped” living in their actual giant ensuite of a room, however, the Goober Toll was exposed as a barely-half-satisfying solution. Goober wound up in prison six months later anyway, for performing an unwanted orchidectomy on an unruly customer at his bar security job; maybe he should have scalped Paul, instead. We might have been able to cover for him. But that’s re-rolling the dice in hindsight.
All this BS of Paul’s doing was bad enough. But the mere thought of his little protégé/pitcher Tony strolling back up our block, whistling past me while I sweated, WALTZIN’ ON IN!—like a dog giving a casual, biweekly sprinkle of piss to the least important patch on the frontier of his fiefdom… steam must have tooted out my ears. The next world war is churning down the tracks as I write, and I’m STILL annoyed.
I peered upstairs querulously.
“Oh, he’s not gonna be up there. Hee hee. He already left. Went out the back. Out Smacky’s porch.”
Brett said it so casually… but it made a chill go up my spine. Like a vampire had come and left a snarky calling card.
I closed my tired eyes for an instant. I had forgot there even WAS a porch back there. There wasn’t enough clear space in Smacky’s room, between the skyscrapers of painterly crap, for him to change his underwear, much less do bullwhip tricks; kids, don’t ever have a painter for a roommate, even if he barely paints.
“Hello? Hello? Earth to Lezzie. Earth to Lezzie.”
“Huh?” I said. I looked up, and Brett and Leslie were both staring at me; Has the sun gone down in the sky? Did I kill someone/s?
“Forget it. There are more important things: I need beer,” Leslie was whining.
“Since when are your DTs my problem? Ask Lucy,” said Brett.
“How is he MY problem? He’s your boyfriend. Go do an exchange!”
Leslie pounced on the schism: “Since you need it as bad as I do, losers, it is your problem, stop lying. We only have two empty cases, so don’t look at me.”
“I don’t get paid till Taco Tooooooesday,” said Brett.
“OK, OK,” I said. “If I buy, Leslie, will you fly?”
“No. That’s not the deal!” Leslie whined, miscalibrated antennae sensing a hint of injustice coming his way.
It has always astonished me, how hard people will work to avoid any kind of work.
“I only got three beers from the case I bought yesterday!”
Leslie grinned. “Who's counting? —Ha ha, rhetorical question! You’re too drunk to count. So drink faster. What else are you going to do about it?”
“Oh, have you been taking mob lessons from Tony?”
“There’s only one fridge, and we all know about the hiding-the-beers-in-the-crisper-door trick.”
“I’m trapped in hell with raccoons,” I hissed. I looked to Brett, but he was pretending to be struck by a great artistic insight about the starlet whose teeth he was coloring black. I would have preferred that he black out Leslie’s teeth.
This story would be a lot more charming if you couldn’t hear what’s in my head, wouldn’t it?
On TV, this scene would be beautifully nostalgic: 90s punk-rock clothes, posing in a maplewood farmhouse from the 1800s, at this point gone only halfway to seed, unless you counted the pot seeds growing out of the massive front lawn. Irreplaceable but free posters hung crooked on the walls, next to a thousand puncture holes from our roommate Goober’s ninja stars. Marks from Smacky the Clown’s bullwhip, mystery stains from Goober’s dog, and a nostalgic yellow-sepia varnish from all of our cigarettes. The height of a Wisconsin summer blazed outside, brief and precious, cool blue and hot yellow.
Only losers like Brett and Leslie would hide in the dark with hangovers and miss the whole thing. But even they could not escape the cheerful tendrils of the sun that crept in around the edges of the black-light posters taped over the windows.
The house was like my lawn knife, with naïve but sturdy architecture. High ceilings, a warren of bedrooms, framed by fine-grained maple floors and trim cut from local trees that were here before this was the United States, or even Wisconsin. Those big closets built all around the upstairs bedrooms, for insulation from the winter wind, like a subconscious mind, or a guilty conscience.
Then you add the Star-Trek cockpit of televisions stacked on beer cases in the living room, and the drums set up in the back room—where civilised people would put a dinner table—astride a rolling sea of guitar cables, amps, and instruments rising like an archipelago—and Paul and Yollie’s loft bed wedged in up top like a lookout post. Paul’s personal crap still squatted the biggest bedroom, where he kept his own TV, VCR, stereo, and stashes of snacks and probably weed, like a squirrel, but he liked people to hear them f#cking.
Yeah; it would make fine, golden-smeary nostalgia if you only threw in those clips; Paul’s glorious triumphs as a manipulative slacker, commemorated with the beer that soaked my visual memory like Vaseline on a camera lens. Cute.
Life would be fine, if that’s all the information you got about it: The camera’s view, the words we say out loud. Vive the face, mug the camera, death to the novel, death to the mind…
In a high lady’s voice, like in Monty Python, Brett was trilling: “You guys are my bestest, bestest friends!”
No wonder people want to trade all the old arts in for a 1000-hour TV series. On a screen, you can drink human emotion like pure champagne, and you are the mind of God, or at least safe: the only truth is You, the holy I/me alone in a plot in a dark room, watching us mortals make mistakes. Yours is the only Id or reason in this world that deserves to count.
We're breeding a world of psychos.
But alas, you are stuck with me now, to quote another Wisconsinite quoting somebody else a long time ago. And the avocado 1970s kitchen appliances are nowhere near as vivid in my memory as are my elaborate fantasies of choking the shit out of Paul and Leslie.
Leslie’s thrifted rockabilly shirts probably had some cool design details. But do you think I can see them as clearly as I can see his eyes bug out and his neck turn purple?—A single drop of sweat falling from the peak of his greasy coiff, as my hands crunch bone and his warrantee expires? I remember them as clearly as I recall the smirk on his face when it was he who grabbed the last beer.
I can only recall the anger—I can’t recall a single sane reason why I put up with this situation. Much less Brett. Unless Brett’s smirking, pained acceptance had something to do with his bitter hostility towards the sexy girls in Leslie’s dirty magazines.
The two of them had a bunch of speech oddities in common; I never figured out whether it was a micro-dialect of Wisconsinese from Manitowoc, or one of those secret special languages that couples invent for themselves. Most of it involved bodily functions, drugs, or crime.
For example, neither of them ever said “porn”—they said “porno.” It took them half an hour to spit it out, pooornoooh. Leslie snickered when he said it—almost a giggle: “Pooooooooooor-no-ho-hew.”
Meanwhile Brett said it with a worm-lipped, angry smile. His lemon puss recalled again the Lacoste ladies of the 80s who lost it over dirty words, who were the ones running their tongues over the letters…
Was Brett thinking about Leslie crawling on those teenage girls?
Leslie’s dirty sweat, so thick and bacterial it made rivers of brown on his grey, clammy skin as he weakly mounted, heart hammering like an alcoholic rabbit, sullying those smug paper damsels …
I guess I understand where prudishness comes from after all. It’s amazing if there’s any genetic propensity left for good taste. I cannot grasp what Brett saw in him, nor what Sylvia saw in Paul… but then again, the fact that I was sexually repulsed by them didn’t mean I hadn’t bought their horseshit in other ways.
I wonder if Leslie is dead.
I wonder why I let people treat me this way.
I think I thought, shameful as it is to admit, that Leslie really wanted to make music.
JESUS. I was, am I suppose I still am, exasperatingly naïve; in my defense, I can’t imagine how anybody can leave their house without flattering humanity a bit.
Since I am always the wrong age to be a fictional protagonist, however, I no longer read as naïve, or as any of what I thought were my own character traits; I am halfway through life, or more, and therefore sly and stuffy, because I must be so: the unfair winner who will never understand.
Wait, what was my prize?
Thanks to math, people born at the dawn of the Pill will be always outside the glass, but for the new main character to look good, with their claim to be both innocent and wise, they need us to succumb to our fate, and quiet, please, so we can hear the chorus of clichés, the merry miseries of our moribund modern “literature”: the one thing that can fake the appearance of quality is addiction, as in adult nerds reading Harry Potter for victory porn.
They’ve made you a junkie for easy wins and simple answers. It’s easy to hook people; it’s good to feel that one is qualified to judge. That the narrator at the centre of the cosmos is most impressed with you, at least in your current form: You’re perfect as you are!
Thus they even get you addicted to your own fleeting youth.
What a cruel thing to do.
But this story’s logic devours its own raison d’être: aren’t coming-of-age stories supposed to help you… come of age?
But now, the lame, old stock villains in the cast are only there to remind you of the reward you get for growing up: You become the butt of the joke.
So how do you think of yourself when you’re no longer human? I guess you write a retro novel…
JESUS!—it’s hard to talk about Brett without being distracted.
If not by Leslie, then by my own navel. And by my motivations for trying to open a window on another spot in time. Sorry.
OK: Now that I think about it, Brett was handsome. At least when he wasn’t thinking about Leslie, refusing to shower, rolling his big brown eyes like a cow...
Damn, I don't think any of us ever noticed quite how strange Brett’s attachment was to that waste of air. Brett never had sex with anyone, that I know of, never tried, and lived vicariously through Leslie’s interference with underage—
You know what, I give up. It's not my fault you kept hiding behind Leslie, dude. I'm just going to tell the story, as it came at all of us, or what I remember of it... Is there a reason why life has to be so sad?…
So Le Brett was tall and lanky, and he always looked embarrassed to be standing wherever he happened to be standing.
But whoever hired him as a bellhop in that grand hotel thought he could schmooze. He started out wearing plain thrift-store shirts, when he wasn’t wearing his monkey suit at the hotel, but after the band clattered through our first gig, he bought some women's fishnets to turn into a shirt, and… I don’t think he ever washed that thing. Wore it every day for a while. I guess he thought it was too ephemeral to hold in the grime.
How are any of us still alive?
The shirt did look great next to my cherry-red neckless bass guitar. Brett borrowed it for the band, which seemed fine at the time; I quit playing it when a prior roommate left his drum kit in lieu of back rent. I found out that I liked playing the drums so much that I didn’t mind if it made me the stupid one in the band. In the 90s, girls were always the bass player anyway, for reasons I barely understood, so I vaguely perceived it was good to throw ’em a curveball.
Alas, if you want to throw ’em a curveball, you need an ’em to appear, for which you need a working crew in the first place. I didn’t understand yet how hard it was to herd bandmates into more basic, non-curveball activities. Like either writing a song or letting me write one. I mean, it works if your Leslie is hardworking and talented, but, uh… if he’s more prone to showing up to practice with staples in his skull than with a killer hook, it’s a grave disappointment.
Staples? Oh, we’re getting there.
In the end, as you have guessed, Nigel was correct: I fetched the beer. In fact, since he followed me to the beer store like a headful of lice following a child to school, he whined until I bought two cases, since we could each carry one. He always won, for the same reason my guinea pig, Chumpy, always defeated me: They might not have been the two brightest creatures in the house, but while I was at work, they had all those hours to plot against me.
Now that I think about it, this describes Paul, as well. But I say that without affection. Chumpy paid his way by being cute, and he made a good heated scarf. These primate males were common rats with no use to anyone.
But at least we all had enough Huber, for the moment… Man, that was a hell of a month. It’s complicated enough without all this rambling about the passage of time; I’ll try to stick to the story. But time has gotten so strange… I can’t feel sure if anyone will understand anything about the past anymore.
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