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Despite the many hours I’d spent admiring college catalogs from Tucson, Seattle, and Boulder, I experienced a failure of nerve in the end. I’d made a visit to a fancy Catholic college in St. Paul, where the Mercedes and BMWs of rich suburban kids gleamed in the dormitory parking lots, and was instantly transfixed by the limestone buildings honey-colored in the afternoon light, the ivied walls of the football stadium, coeds strolling with books in their arms across the fastidious lawns. I’d never seen so many girls in one place. The whole scene was like the previously missing, wide-angle prelude shot to the porno film I’d been writing, directing, and starring in every time I thought of what my college years would be. Even deeper in my reptilian brain I sensed a chance to learn how to be rich by living in proximity to rich kids, the old dream not yet dead. Here I could finally begin the process of reinventing myself as a man of debonair tastes and urbane manners, a prairie sophisticate with a fancy car. I learned that through a University of St. Thomas scholarship fund I stood to earn $3,500 per year for my high school GPA, class rank, and ACT score. This seemed a phenomenal sum, the equivalent of nearly six months of work at the mom-and-pop bakery where I was then making $3.80 an hour. If the sight of pretty girls and shiny cars had been the initial seduction, the promise of free cash clinched the deal. I didn’t for a moment acknowledge the fact that I was merely getting a discount on a very expensive product. Nor did I bother to imagine, given that my parents were in no position to help, where I’d come up with the remainder of the $15,000 per year I’d be charged for tuition, room, and board.
Needless to say, I was not the prototypical Tommy. I drove a 1970 Ford pickup of a pale green hue that earned it the nickname Phlegm. I arrived with $2,000 in savings from my job at the bakery, which bought me six heady weeks of Coors Light party balls and Mexican ditch weed. Over the next few years I borrowed exorbitantly while working all sorts of stupid jobs: painting houses, unloading package trailers at a UPS hub, frying donuts for a little shop in the suburbs. It was the same work I’d performed since I was 15, and I came to loathe the stupefying repetition of it, eight at night till three in the morning, five days a week, the clicking handle of the donut dropper, the pox-like burns on my hands from the splash of fryer oil. The way I smelled like a jelly-filled bismarck even after I’d showered.
I dropped out for lack of cash, worked three jobs, returned to school for a couple of years, dropped out broke again. When the friends I’d met as a freshman graduated to begin their careers in corporate finance and accounting, and my girlfriend left for a magazine job in New York, I mostly sat around drinking wine alone in the afternoons. I was as confused as I’d ever been, which is saying something. I’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars — much of it borrowed, some of it earned by my own labor, some of it a gift from my grandfather — into a journalism education, but my scholarship had been revoked when I didn’t finish my degree in four years. Internships at the Fargo Forum and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine had left me sour on the strictures of deadline hackery and service-mag pap. I didn’t want to be a cops and courts reporter; I didn’t want to be a mutual-fund guru, a blue-chip stock watcher. I wanted to be a novelist. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the first thing about writing a novel, and it was clear that even if I started tomorrow I’d be a long time in earning a dime from writing novels. I did what many before me have done in such circumstances: I became a bartender. This offered all the intellectual stimulation you’d imagine, which is to say none. The pleasures were other. I met party people. I drank on the job.
One night my telephone rang. It was the old man, of all people. He’d tracked down my home number. I never did learn how. The number was unconnected with my name, since I was living with my girlfriend’s gay uncle Charlie, who’d offered to put me up rent-free so I’d have time to write the great American novel, in compensation for which he merely asked that he appear, lightly fictionalized but still identifiable, as a demon lover with a giant cock in my great American novel. I’d overcome the residual homophobia of my Catholic boyhood by then, thanks in no small part to Charlie, whom I’m very happy to describe for posterity as one of the most generous people I’ve ever known, as well as a demon lover with an enormous and stunningly beautiful cock.
lmao
In practical terms, his example — the first such of my life — made me reluctant to pursue my sexual attractions with any gusto, which prevented my college years from becoming the sexual smorgasbord they were for a lot of my contemporaries. I had seen a man’s face contorted by lust unconsummated — I’m talking up close and personal — and it was not a pretty sight. A smoldering passivity became my style, and a tendency toward long-term serial monogamy with women who made the first move. Which, when I thought about it later, may have been a blessing, considering the kind of woman with whom this involved me, typically horny and radiant with self-confidence, the kind of woman you want to remain a friend even after you split.
I promptly cashed the check and booked a plane ticket to Amsterdam for the holidays. Out of the country for the first time in my life, loose on the Continent with a Eurail pass, I spent every dime of that dirty money as frivolously as I could — champagne in Paris, dope in Amsterdam, ephemeral pleasures of one sort or another from London to Venice — shadowed the whole time by a mixture of exhilaration and shame, that familiar cocktail of emotion in all my dealings with the old man, almost from the beginning: the exhilaration of having got away with something, the shame of having let him off the hook for one more gift of cash.
He had at last made of me an American hustler, just not the kind he’d hoped.
That summer, home for a funeral, I drove to his house and knocked on his door.
Old buddy, he said when he answered. I can’t believe it’s you.
Believe it, I said.
Why don’t you come in? he said.
I don’t want to come in, I said. You know why I’m here.
All right, he said, trying to remain friendly. How about we go have a drink downtown. My checkbook is at the bank. I’ll pick it up on the way.
How about I meet you at the bank, I said. We can skip the drink.
Ten minutes later I had a check in my hand for $1,000.
I never saw him again.
jesus
It wasn’t clear, when Jeff and Terri announced that they had built a koi pond, whether they had known that Ruth had been so long suffering for one. The two couples were sitting in Jeff and Terri’s living room on a stiff modern sofa that lacked arms. They never stayed at Jeff and Terri’s long enough to relax, mostly because it was horrible sitting there. Terri worked on visual culture and talked a lot about “clean lines” and the “provenance” of this or that object — a planter, a frame. There were other rooms in the house, rooms that were habitable or looked to be in passing, but Terri always shepherded guests to this room, which she repainted every two years a different shade of neutral. The current color was Butter Cookie, a name whose associations did not at all capture the feeling of being in the room. Ruth preferred it to Oklahoma Wheat, which had been insincere, but was looking forward to Lemon Sorbet, which promised to be cleaner, more open to the future.
“Lemon Sorbet is the color of the year,” Terri said, and Ruth imagined Terri fingering the paint strips, holding them up to the window, examining them against her skin, licking them in surreptitious delight.
Jeff and Ken and Terri taught in the same department; that’s how they all knew one another. Ruth had recently acquired a real estate license but she didn’t define herself by her work.
lol
“It happened again,” Ken said. “The koi.” If only he had left for work on time, he thought, he would not be responsible, he would not have met the depths of his own impotent inaction so early in the day.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked, her tone flinty. Ken, fundamentally a soft man, deflated under the accusation. He seemed to be leaking mass. If he stood there all day, by dinnertime he would be a thin man. It was his poor posture, of course, that accounted for this. Ruth knew that.
“If only you wanted a bird sanctuary instead of a koi pond,” he said. “Then everything would be perfect.”
lmao
“How much?” I said.
“A hundred dollars,” he said.
“For what?” I said.
“You know,” he said, but neither of us did.
Sometimes sex is a thing we do for those in need out of compassion, or for ourselves, out of curiosity. I unbuttoned another button. The lawyer, who in all this time had not stopped handling himself, took a step back and collided with the sink. I pulled one bra cup down and lifted out a single breast. The executive shuddered. It was finished.
This was a problem I had faced before. In college I babysat for a philosophy professor named Talia who had adopted a little girl from China. She needed a regular babysitter because most weekends her dog traveled to compete in obstacle courses against other dogs. The dog was an excellent competitor and the dining room was filled with trophies and ribbons and medals. When I graduated Talia gave me a $100 gift card to the local liquor store. I went in alone and asked the first person I saw to show me a $100 bottle of white wine. The person suggested a nice Chablis, but at the register it rang up for $20. I lowered my voice to explain to the cashier that there had been a mistake.
“She wants the $100 bottle!” the cashier yelled across the store.
That night I drank the whole bottle myself and had no hangover the following morning, because that’s what you’re paying for with a $100 bottle. One thing I learned from that experience that I hadn’t known before was that there is a $100 version of everything, even Chablis, which I had only associated with church ladies and Tennessee, because I once heard about it in a country song.
Carla, who knew this story, proposed that I use the lawyer’s money to buy another nice wine, but I wanted to feel like I was growing.
lmao
It was hard to make out the lines by candlelight. I held her hand close to my face and touched the inside of her palm. She giggled. Carla has always been ticklish. Once I saw her kick a Korean lady in the face during a pedicure. She didn’t mean to do it, but when the lady started scrubbing the sole her leg jerked out and she made contact. The Korean lady was a real professional. She wiped off her glasses and finished the job. We never showed our feet in that nail salon again.