Apathy and Other Small Victories Read online

  “Eww.”

  “What, you don’t like semen?” Sikes said, challenging me again.

  “All right, you want to do this the easy way?” Brooks broke in. “Come on down to the station.”

  “Am I being arrested?”

  “No, we’re just going to ask you a few questions.”

  “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “That depends.”

  The trick is to be like Robinson Crusoe. Wherever you find yourself shipwrecked you build a temporary home out of palm leaves and sticks. You use hollowed out coconuts for lemonade glasses or to make string bikinis that you will never ever wear. You use sand and water. You make mud for no reason. Whatever’s lying around, you use it. But the trick is you build everything so flimsy that it has to fall apart. And when it does it looks like an accident, like unfortunate circumstances, or bad luck or timing. And that’s your way out. Then you go get shipwrecked somewhere else and start building again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Why these are the tricks, I do not know.

  * * *

  I would’ve gotten out long before Marlene was murdered if it hadn’t been for Gwen. I couldn’t just walk away after knowing Gwen. Literally. I was incapacitated. Sometimes for days at a time. But it was more than that. Gwen was what hysterics think of marijuana. She led to crack and giving handjobs for a dollar on the street. Or their moral equivalents at least.

  I fought my way out of her ghetto—I got thrown out actually—but I was stuck there just long enough that I fell right into a bigger, much worse pile of shit when I left. I suppose I could blame myself for how it turned out, but I’ve never been comfortable with that sort of thing.

  It was before I’d started stealing saltshakers. I’d just gotten into town so I didn’t know anything yet. I was alone in a trendy bar that had overpriced drinks and a doorman who’d called me “Boss” when he asked for my ID, then said, “Thanks guy” when he gave it back. I had the hiccups pretty bad. I had to keep my sentences short so people wouldn’t think I was epileptic. This made everything I said sound very wise.

  “Hi, I’m Gwendolyn,” she said, standing beside me at the bar. She had a round face and straight hair down to her square shoulders. I had been drinking scotch to impress any strangers who might have been watching me, and I was so drunk I could only see geometry.

  “Hello Gwendolyn,” I said in the quiet time between hiccups.

  “Please, call me Gwen. Only my grandmother calls me Gwendolyn.”

  Then why the fuck did you introduce yourself as Gwendolyn, I wanted to ask, but that was way too many words in a row.

  “Yeah,” I said instead.

  Gwen worked at a big insurance company where she made important decisions. She was very decisive, but she would’ve liked the opportunity to be even more so.

  “It’s hard sometimes because things can be so structured, and it feels like seniority gets rewarded over how much work you actually put in. I don’t want to disrupt the dynamic of the team—we all work so well together—but then I don’t want to get pigeonholed and wind up stuck in the same position two years from now either.”

  “Labels are terrible things,” I said.

  “That’s so true.”

  We were connecting.

  Then we were on the front steps of her apartment and she was bashing the inside of my mouth with her tongue. My dental work was crumbling like the moon does in movies when it’s the end of the world.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” she said, and pulled back. Before I could agree she was mauling me again.

  “Mmm, I don’t know,” and she pressed the side of her head against mine like we were about to Greco-Roman wrestle.

  “I also don’t know,” I said, but then both of her hands were on the back of my head and she was stuffing me in her mouth like that little Japanese guy who eats all the hot dogs. It is a strange sensation, being devoured.

  “This could be trouble,” she said.

  She was right. If not for her brute strength propping me up I would’ve gone headfirst down the concrete steps and broken my beautiful face on the sidewalk. Then she had me pinned up against the wall. It felt glorious to lean. Far, far below me, the ground spun.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” she said.

  “There are no good ideas anymore,” I said, and then a hiccup rocked my entire body and rolled my head like I’d been shot. “Just be happy we thought of something.”

  I think it’s a line from an old John Cusack movie. If it’s not then it should be.

  I shouldn’t have said it. That’s obvious now, and it probably was then too. But I really didn’t have a choice. I needed to either lie down or throw up, and to do one or probably both on her front steps would have been tacky. And I had to go to the bathroom. And I really had nothing else to do that night anyway. In my scotch-soaked estimation, spending the night with a deceptively powerful stranger didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I had already mistakenly kneed her in the crotch when we first started making out, so I knew she wasn’t a man. That seemed like enough of an endorsement. And I’d always wanted to play a John Cusack role. For a line or two at least.

  One line was all she needed. She kicked the door open and flung me inside. I fell over something and broke my ankle, but the alcohol made the swelling seem funny.

  And that was it for me. My already tattered memory was done. Thank you and good night.

  When I woke up the next morning the room reeked of latex and chlorine.

  Oops.

  My ankle wasn’t broken but it hurt real bad, and so did my head. My whole body hurt really, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t remember getting hit by a truck or beaten with a lead pipe.

  She had to go to work but she said she’d give me a ride home.

  “Where did you say you worked again?” she said after we’d ridden in silence for a long, long minute.

  “I just moved here. I don’t have a job yet,” I said.

  The already awkward scene turned full-blown excruciating. Her face went red as she focused on the road and kept her hands in a rigid 10-and-2 grip on the wheel, and I turned on the radio to keep from opening the door and throwing myself out of the car. At twenty-five maybe, but she was already going thirty and still accelerating. I would’ve gotten all messed up.

  A commercial said the circus was coming to town, so to ease the shame and the silence I pretended to be afraid of clowns. Everybody’s afraid of clowns, so I thought maybe that could be something intimate between us that we could share forever, like the drunken sex I didn’t remember from the night before. I of course wasn’t afraid of clowns, but I figured she had some story about getting kidnapped at a circus or sodomized at a rodeo or something. Anything. And sure enough, a rodeo clown had fucked her in the ass when she was seven years old. Actually it was more like, “I’ve always been afraid of Ronald McDonald. I think it’s all the makeup.” It was harrowing in its own way.

  My story was about how they had big shoes and noses but drove such little cars.

  “It’s more a fear of incongruity than clowns I suppose.”

  The conversation was riveting.

  “Right up here’s good,” I said.

  We were fourteen blocks from my apartment but I had nothing left. The inanity and the awkwardness was just too much to bear.

  “Hey thanks for the ride.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “I gave you my number, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But she was waiting for something else. The silence that followed was unmistakably uncomfortable, almost crippling. She was waiting for some kind of decision, some explanation. Or at least a hint.

  I looked at her and tried to think of what I could possibly say next. Her eyelashes were stubby and not long enough to curl. This made her eyes look bigger than they actually were. She did have a round face, but she really wasn’t as sharply geometrical as she’d seemed the night before. I could see why I’d thought so though. And still my head was empty.

  Her right hand twitche
d on the steering wheel and I had the panicked thought that she might try to put the car in PARK, SO I grabbed the door handle and jumped the fuck out. “Thanks again,” I said, leaning in before I slammed the door. And I waved to her as I went up the steps of an apartment building that was not my own.

  She pulled away slowly, and as she drove off I threw up all over someone’s front door.

  I have always been vaguely and uselessly talented. I can hop on one foot longer than anyone I have ever met. For the period from 1983 to 1991 I can name every player and their position just by looking at the picture on the front of their baseball card. I can do cartwheels even though I’ve had no formal gymnastic training. I can touch my tongue to the tip of my nose and lick my nostrils. I can hug myself so tightly that from behind it looks like someone is slow dancing with me. I did it at my senior prom and when I inched my hands down my back to grab my own ass the assistant principal said he’d send me home if I didn’t stop “being weird.” No one ever had to teach me how to drive a stick shift. Somehow I just knew. My fourth-grade teacher said I had the finest penmanship she’d ever seen from a boy. She urged me to take up calligraphy, but I did not. Still, the beatings on the playground were savage. I can whistle, I can juggle, and if I’m drunk enough I can and will wrap both my legs behind my head and play my ass like bongos. I would have dominated the Renaissance. But I was born much later, so instead I was sitting in Doug’s dentist chair sketching deaf Marlene.

  I’d started bringing a bag whenever I went in for an appointment. Magazines, music, pornography, a sketchbook, a journal, some snacks. It was like the bag my mother used to bring to church for me when I was little, full of toys and distractions so I wouldn’t start crying and interrupt mass and piss off the priest. Because if I did, he’d tell God to make us die in a car crash on the way home.

  “Can’t we just wear our seat belts?”

  “Seat belts are no match for God,” said my mother.

  I played with my GI Joe figures and learned how to be quiet and afraid.

  Marlene stood by the window with her hands on her hips, her jaw set like a Roman emperor. I had her lift her chin so the light caught her badly dyed hair and made it shimmer like wet, dirty straw. She was a fascinating subject. I could’ve spent hours on her straw hair alone. It was much more than a bad perm I realized. It looked like a vitamin deficiency. Maybe she was using the wrong shampoo.

  After a half hour I was done. I signed my name, perfectly legible but with an elaborate renaissance flourish, and handed her the portrait.

  Voilà.

  “HEY! THAT’S NOT ME!” she shouted.

  I’d drawn her head huge, a caricature with horse teeth and Alfred E. Newman ears and pockmarked dimples on her basketball-sized cheeks. Her eyes were bulging and had two X’s instead of pupils, like she was drunk or had just been hit over the head with a mallet, and her tongue was hanging out. Her tiny body was squeezed into a string bikini, her legs crossed at the ankles, and she was sitting on a pile of garbage. Squiggly stench lines rose all around her like shitty apparitions. Her hair looked nice though. My art was not true but I was a good person, and kind.

  Asshole! Why didn’t you draw me right? she signed.

  Yes, I signed. My vocabulary was not big.

  Why?

  I am genius.

  You’re an asshole!

  GENIUS!! I signed again.

  To say genius in sign language you hold your thumb and fore-finger like you’re measuring an inch on each hand, then you put one against your forehead and hold the other about six inches away and jiggle both slightly for emphasis. The way I did it I looked like I was having a migraine seizure on a cable car during a catastrophic earthquake. My whole body shook and my inch-measuring hands flailed and slammed against my forehead and flew around like I was in a rapture or getting riddled with bullets. Sign language is very dramatic. It’s like being in a silent movie. Sometimes you have to overact and look ridiculous just to get your point across.

  Why didn’t you draw me good, weirdo? She was laughing at my genius.

  Because you stink.

  “I’M NOT STINK!” she shouted. And I don’t have big ears!

  No. You have a tiny head.

  Shut up! she signed, but she still took the picture.

  On the ride downtown the two detectives explained that while I was certainly entitled to have a lawyer present during my questioning, it would be easier on everyone and much quicker if I waived my right to counsel. If I hadn’t done anything wrong I really wouldn’t need a lawyer, would I? And since I didn’t seem like the kind of guy who had his own attorney on retainer that would be a few hundred dollars I’d have to shell out just to get someone to sit there and hold my hand. Did I really need someone to hold my hand while I talked to the big bad detectives? Maybe I needed someone to hold my dick for me while I pissed too. And maybe they knew a few guys in lockup who’d be happy to do it for me. How about that?

  I could have a lawyer provided for me of course, but that would take time, and those lawyers were young and overworked and they weren’t any good anyway. Why would I want to make things difficult for everybody? Life was hard enough without intentionally making it harder on yourself, wasn’t it?

  To anyone who’d ever watched cop shows on TV the insinuation was obvious. I knew what they were suggesting. So I decided to forgo legal representation, just as I decided to forgo being sodomized with a splintered baton in a backroom of the station later that night.

  They left me sitting alone in a small room with a long table. I was on one side, three empty chairs were on the other. There was a tinted rectangular window by the door and the light overhead was a few shades brighter than it should have been. This was where they would break me.

  I had decided to mostly tell the truth. I had almost nothing to hide. Not about Marlene being dead anyway. But I still didn’t know what was going on and what part they thought I had in it, and I didn’t want to give away too much before I did. They didn’t know that I didn’t know anything, and I was hoping to use that to my advantage. The only thing I had going for me was my ignorance. This was the story of my life.

  Chapter 2

  The next time I saw Gwen after throwing up on that stranger’s door, it was a little awkward.

  We had to go through the usual small talk motions of getting to know each other after the fact, and I learned many interesting things about her, like how she loved to talk about her job and always ended her laugh with a “hah hah, hmmm” sigh before moving on to the next topic, which was usually her job. I also learned that she had a slightly crooked nose that she’d busted playing rugby in college. It was just a little off, but in a way that once you noticed made her face immediately more interesting and less attractive.

  She didn’t learn anything about me, but she got the chance to ask all the basic questions she figured she should’ve asked before sleeping with me in the first place. I was subtly evasive and vague and made mediocre jokes and changed the subject back to harmless neutral topics like herself. That’s all anyone really wants to talk about anyway.

  She didn’t want answers. She just wanted to ask for them. Nobody really likes definitions in those situations, even if they pretend or think that they do. In the long term everyone traffics in foregone conclusions, and in the short term they just get drunk. This is the way it has always been. Some half-assed ambiguity masquerading as mystery is all anybody’s really looking for. That’s why transvestites are always in such a good mood.

  And there we were, two transvestites in our platinum wigs and heels, sitting in a bar, stirring our drinks, stumbling through the drag show that is life. We talked about how cold it was getting.

  “Unseasonably so,” I said between hiccups.

  Again, we were connecting.

  Later, back at her apartment, I found out why I was so destroyed after our last night together.

  I have never been overly aggressive or forceful with women. I’m not that guy who throws her on the kitchen tab
le and rips open her blouse, popping all the buttons and ruining a perfectly good shirt. Or who fucks her up against the wall in a dark alley behind some Dumpster. I never wanted to be Mickey Rourke. I don’t think he did either. It takes a willful suspension of absurdity to be that kind of man, to maintain that five o’clock shadow, to buy that leather jacket, to put all that shit in your hair, to keep that toothpick in your mouth when all you really want to do is spit it out and buy a pack of grape Bubblicious and go watch cartoons.

  Still, when it comes to sex there’s always been the tacit understanding, or the pretense of the tacit understanding at least, that I’m in charge. That even if I’m not the guy in the back alley behind the Dumpster, I’m at least some guy. A guy at least.

  Not with Gwen. She manhandled me.

  It was always a blur of pain and fear and domination. I remembered it, and could only deal with it afterwards, as a collection of warped Polaroids stapled to the inside of my head:

  Me flat on my back, my arms splayed out like I was being crucified, my legs kicking helplessly with her on top leaning over, crushing my biceps with her hands and screaming in my face.

  Me on top of her, my back arched, my mouth wide open, my head almost snapping off at the neck because she was pulling my hair, while her other hand palmed my side with almost hydraulic pressure, collapsing my lung and squashing my spleen.

  Me behind her but backed into the ornate wooden headboard of her bed, frantically trying to push her away as she slammed me against the wall with her ass.

  Me on my back again, both my arms pinned above my head, her one hand vise-gripping both my wrists, her other hand flat on my chest, her fingers popping my ribs like bubble wrap.

  Whatever position we were in, I was the one getting fucked. At first I tried exerting myself, gently, but firm enough to let her know that I could take over any time I wanted to. But then I felt the raw power, the machine-like force and resistance. It was unyielding. I would’ve had to push full out and strain with everything I had to overpower her, and even then I wasn’t sure that I could. I didn’t want to find out that I couldn’t.