→ Chapter 1
IF YOU’RE GOING TO READ THIS, DON’T BOTHER.
After a couple pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece.
Save yourself.
There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.
→ Chapter 2
IT’S DARK AND STARTING TO RAIN when I get to the church, and Nico’s waiting for somebody to unlock the side door, hugging herself in the cold.
“Hold on to these for me,” she says and hands me a warm fistful of silk.
“Just for a couple hours,” she says. “I don’t have any pockets.” She’s wearing a jacket made of some fake orange suede with a bright orange fur collar. The skirt of her flower-print dress shows hanging out. No pantyhose. She climbs up the steps to the church door, her feet careful and turned sideways in black spike heels.
What she hands me is warm and damp.
→ Chapter 3
ANYMORE, WHEN I GO TO VISIT MY MOM, I don’t even pretend to be myself.
Hell, I don’t even pretend to know myself very well.
Not anymore.
My mom, it’s like her sole occupation at this point is losing weight. What’s left of her is so thin, she has to be a puppet. Some kind of special effect. There’s just not enough of her yellow skin left to fit a real person inside. Her thin puppet arms hover around on the blankets, always picking at bits of lint. Her shrunken head will collapse around the drinking straw in her mouth. When I used to come as myself, as Victor, her son Victor Mancini, none of those visits lasted ten minutes before she’d ring for the nurse and tell me she was just too tired.
→ Chapter 4
THE MOMENT DENNY BENDS OVER, his wig falls off and lands in the mud and horse poop and about two hundred Japanese tourists giggle and crowd forward to get his shaved head on videotape.
I go, “Sorry,” and go to pick up the wig. It’s not very white anymore, and it smells bad since, for sure, about a million dogs and chickens take a leak here every day.
Since he’s bent over, his cravat hangs in his face, blinding him. “Dude,” Denny says, “tell me what’s happening.”
Here I am, the backbone of early colonial America.
The stupid shit we do for money.
→ Chapter 5
WHATEVER LIGHTING THE PHOTOGRAPHER USED was harsh and made bad shadows on the cement-block wall behind them. Just a painted wall in somebody’s basement. The monkey looked tired and patchy with mange. The guy was in lousy shape, pale with rolls around his middle, but there he was, relaxed and bent over with his hands braced against his knees and his poochy gut hanging down, his face looking back over his shoulder at the camera, smiling away.
“Beatific” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.
What the little boy first loved about pornography wasn’t the sex part. It wasn’t the pictures of beautiful people dorking each other, their heads thrown back, making those fake orgasm faces. Not at first. He’d found all those pictures on the Internet even before he knew what sex was. They had the Internet in every library. They had it at all the schools.
→ Chapter 6
THE NEXT TIME I GO VISIT MY MOM I’m still Fred Hastings, her old public defender, and she keeps me yakking all afternoon. Until I tell her I’m still not married, and she says that’s a shame. Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
The next visit, I’m still Fred but married and with three children. That’s better, but three children . . . Three is too many. People should stop at two, she says.
The next visit, I have two.
Every visit there’s less and less of her under the blanket.
In another way, there’s less and less of Victor Mancini sitting in the chair next to her bed.
→ Chapter 7
AFTER THE WAITER’S GONE, I fork up half my sirloin steak and go to cram it all in my mouth, and Denny says, “Dude.” He says, “Don’t do it, here.”
The people all around us, eating in their dressy clothes. With the candles and the crystal. With all the extra specialty forks. Nobody suspects a thing.
My lips crack, trying to get around the chunk of steak, the meat salty and juicy with fat and crushed pepper. My tongue pulls back to make more room, and the drool in my mouth wells up. Hot juice and drool slop out on my chin.
People who say red meat will kill you, they don’t know the half of it.
→ Chapter 8
EVA FOLLOWS ME DOWN THE HALLWAY with her pockets full of roast turkey. There’s chewed-up Salisbury steak in her shoes. Her face, the powdery crushed velvet mess of her skin, is a hundred wrinkles that all run into her mouth, and she wheels along after me, saying, “You. Don’t you run away from me.”
Her hands woven with lumpy veins, she wheels herself along. Hunched in her wheelchair, pregnant with her own huge swollen spleen, she keeps after me, saying, “You hurt me.”
Saying, “You can’t deny it.”
Wearing a bib the color of food, she says, “You hurt me, and I’m telling Mother.”
Where they have my mom, she has to wear a bracelet. Not a jewelry kind of bracelet, it’s a strip of thick plastic that’s heat-sealed around her wrist so she can never take it off. You can’t cut it. You can’t melt it apart with a cigarette. People have tried all these ways to get out.
→ Chapter 9
IT WAS ONE AFTERNOON when our stupid little boy and his foster mother were in a shopping mall that they heard the announcement. This was summer, and they were shopping for back to school, the year he was going to be in fifth grade. The year you had to wear shirts with stripes to really fit in. This was years and years ago. This was only his first foster mother.
Up-and-down stripes, he was telling her when they heard it.
The announcement:
“Would Dr. Paul Ward,” the voice told everybody, “please meet your wife in the cosmetics department of Woolworth’s.”
→ Chapter 10
WHERE I LIVE NOW, IN MY MOM’S OLD HOUSE, I sort through my mom’s papers, her college report cards, her deeds, statements, accounts. Court transcripts. Her diary, still locked. Her entire life.
The next week, I’m Mr. Benning, who defended her on the little charge of kidnapping after the school bus incident. The week after, I’m public defender Thomas Welton, who plea-bargained her sentence down to six months after she was charged with assaulting the animals in the zoo. After him, I’m the American civil liberties attorney who went to bat with her on the malicious mischief charge stemming from the disturbance at the ballet.
There’s an opposite to deja vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.
→ Chapter 11
THIS IS ME TALKING TO DENNY, locking him in the stocks again, this time for having a stamp on the back of his hand from some nightclub, and I say, “Dude.”
I say, “It’s so weird.”
Denny’s got both hands in place for me to lock them. He’s got his shirt tucked in tight. He knows to bend his knees a little to take the stress off his back. He remembers to visit the restroom before he gets locked up. Our Denny’s turned into a regular expert at getting punished. In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill.
It is in most jobs.
→ Chapter 12
IN THE PHONE BOOK, there’s more and more red ink. More and more restaurants are crossed out in red felt-tipped pen. These are all places where I almost died. Italian. Mexican. Chinese places. For real, every night I have fewer options for where to eat out if I want to make any money. If I want to trick anybody into loving me.
The question is always: So what do you feel like choking on tonight?
There’s French food. Mayan food. East Indian.
→ Chapter 13
BECAUSE OF THE HEAT, Denny strips off his coat, then his sweater. Without undoing the buttons, even the cuffs or the collar one, he pulls his shirt off over his head, inside out, so now his head and hands are bagged in red plaid flannel. The T-shirt underneath works up around his armpits while he’s fighting the shirt off his head, and his bare stomach looks rashy and caved-in. Some long twisted hairs sprout around his little dot nipples. His nipples look cracked and sore.
“Dude,” Denny says, still struggling inside his shirt. “Too many layers. Why’s it got to be so hot in here?”
Because it’s a kind of a hospital. It’s a constant care residence.
→ Chapter 14
LEANING HER HEAD BACK, her little black brain, Paige Marshall points up into the vaulted beige ceiling. “There used to be angels,” she says. “The story is they were incredibly beautiful, with blue feathery wings and real gilded halos.”
The old woman leads me to the big chapel at St. Anthony’s, big and empty since it used to be a convent. One whole wall is a window of stained glass in a hundred different colors of gold. The other wall is just a big wood crucifix. Between the two is Paige Marshall in her white lab coat, golden in the light, under the black brain of her hair. She’s wearing her black glasses and looking up. All of her black and gold.
→ Chapter 15
IF YOU’RE EVER IN A BIG HOTEL LOBBY, and they start to play “The Blue Danube Waltz,” get the hell out. Don’t think. Run.
Anymore, nothing is straightforward.
If you’re ever in a hospital and they page Nurse Flamingo to the cancer ward, do not go anywhere near there. There is no Nurse Flamingo. If they page Dr. Blaze, there is no such person.
In a big hotel, that waltz means they need to evacuate the building.
In most hospitals, Nurse Flamingo means a fire. Dr. Blaze means a fire. Dr. Green means a suicide. Dr. Blue means somebody stopped breathing.
This is stuff the Mommy told the stupid little boy as they sat in traffic. This is how far back she was going nuts.
→ Chapter 16
THE NEXT PATIENT IS A FEMALE, about twenty-nine years old, with a mole high on the inside of her thigh that doesn’t look right. It’s hard to tell in this light, but it looks too big, asymmetrical, with shades of blue and brown. The edges are irregular. The skin around it abraded.
I ask her if she’s been scratching it.
And is there any history of skin cancer in her family?
Sitting next to me with his yellow legal pad on the table in front of him, Denny’s holding one end of a cork over his cigarette
lighter, turning the cork until the end is burned black, and Denny says, “Dude, for serious.” He says, “You’ve got some weird hostility tonight. Did you act out?”
He says, “You always hate the whole world after you get laid.”
→ Chapter 17
AT ST. ANTHONY’S, THE FRONT DESK GIRL yawns behind her hand, and when I ask if maybe she wants to go get a cup of coffee, then she looks at me sideways and says, “Not with you.”
And really, I’m not hitting on her. I’ll watch her desk long enough for her to go get some coffee. This isn’t a come-on.
Really.
I say, “Your eyes look tired.”
All she does all day is sign a few people in and out. She watches the video monitor that shows the insides of St. Anthony’s, each corridor, the dayroom, the dining room, the garden, the screen switching from one to the next every ten seconds. The screen grainy, black-and-white. On the monitor, the dining room shows for ten seconds, empty with all the chairs upside down on each table, their chrome legs in the air. A long corridor appears for the next ten seconds with somebody heaped on a bench against one wall.
→ Chapter 18
MY NEXT VISIT, MY MOM’S THINNER, if that’s possible. Her neck looks as small around as my wrist, the yellow skin sunk into deep hollows between her cords and throat. Her face doesn’t hide the skull inside. She rolls her head to one side so she can see me in the doorway, and some kind of gray jelly is caked in the corners of each eye.
The blankets are slack and tented empty between the two peaks of her hipbones. The only other landmarks you can recognize are her knees.
She twines one terrible arm through the chrome bed rail, terrible and thin as a chicken foot reaching toward me, and she swallows. Her jaws work with effort, her lips webbed with spit, and then she says it, reaching out, she says it.
→ Chapter 19
BLACK-AND-WHITE CHICKENS STAGGER around Colonial Dunsboro, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled.
There’s an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it’s made visible.
It’s not that my brains are going to fare much better. Just look at my mom.
Dr. Paige Marshall should see them all struggle along. Not that she’d understand.
→ Chapter 20
THE MOMMY’S THREE-O’CLOCK APPOINTMENT would show up clutching a yellow bath towel, and around his finger would be the blank groove where there should be a wedding ring. The second the door was locked, he’d try and give her the cash. He’d start to take off his pants. His name was Jones, he’d tell her. His first name Mister.
Guys here to see her for the first time were all the same. She’d tell him, pay me after. Don’t be in such a rush. Keep all your clothes on. There’s no hurry.
She’d tell him the appointment book was full of Mr. Joneses, Mr. Smiths, John Does, and Bob Whites, so he’d better come up with a better alias. She’d tell him to lie down on the couch. Close the blinds. Dim the lights.
→ Chapter 21
THAT FIRST NIGHT, DENNY’S OUTSIDE THE FRONT DOOR holding something wrapped in a pink baby blanket. This is all through the peephole in my mom’s door: Denny in his giant plaid coat, Denny cradling some baby to his chest, his nose bulging, his eyes bulging, everything bulging because of the peephole lens. Everything distorted. His hands clutching the bundle are white with the effort.
And Denny yells, “Open up, dude!”
And I open the door as far as the burglar chain will go. I go, “What you got there?”
And Denny tucks the blanket around his little bundle and says, “What’s it look like?”
→ Chapter 22
DR. PAIGE MARSHALL STRETCHES A STRING of something white tight between her two gloved hands. She stands over a deflated old woman in a recliner chair, and Dr. Marshall says, “Mrs. Wintower? I need you to open your mouth as wide as you can.”
Latex gloves, the yellow way they make your hands look, this is just how cadaver skin looks. The medical cadavers from first-year anatomy with their shaved heads and pubic hair. The little stubble of the hairs. The skin could be chicken skin, cheap stewing chicken, turning yellow and dimpled with follicles. Feathers or hair, it’s all just keratin. The muscles of the human thigh look the same as dark-meat turkey. During first-year anatomy, you can’t look at chicken or turkey and not be eating a cadaver.
→ Chapter 23
ANYTIME SOMEBODY IN A NEW CAR offered them a ride, the Mommy told the driver, “No.” They’d stand at the side of the road and watch the new Cadillac or the Buick or Toyota disappear, and the Mommy would say, “The smell of a new car is the smell of death.”
This was the third or fourth time she came back to claim him.
The glue and resin smell in new cars is formaldehyde, she’d tell him, the same thing they use to preserve dead bodies. It’s in new houses and new furniture. It’s called off-gassing. You can inhale formaldehyde from new clothes. After you inhale enough, expect stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea.
→ Chapter 24
RECORDING TO PAIGE MARSHALL, my mom came from Italy already pregnant with me. This was the year after somebody had broken into a church in northern Italy. This is all in my mom’s diary.
According to Paige Marshall.
My mom had gambled on some new kind of fertility treatment. She was almost forty. She wasn’t married, she didn’t want a husband, but somebody had promised her a miracle.
This same somebody, they knew somebody who’d stolen a shoe box from under the bed of a priest. In that shoe box was the last earthly remains of a man. Somebody famous.
It was his foreskin.
→ Chapter 25
IT WAS MALICIOUS ENDANGERMENT THIS TIME or reckless abandonment or criminal neglect. There were so many laws the little boy couldn’t keep them straight.
It was third-degree harassment or second-degree disregard, first-degree disdain or second-degree nuisance, and it got so the stupid kid was terrified to do anything except what everybody else did. Anything new or different or original was probably against the law.
Anything risky or exciting would land you in jail.
That’s why everybody was so eager to talk to the Mommy.
→ Chapter 26
THE HALF-MOON LOOKS UP AT US, reflected in a silver pie tin of beer.
Denny and me kneel in somebody’s backyard, and Denny kicks away the snails and slugs with little kicks of his index finger. Denny lifts the pie tin, full to the brim, bringing his reflection and his real face closer and closer until his fake lips meet his own lips.
Denny drinks about half the beer and says, “This is how they drink beer in Europe, dude.”
Out of slug traps?
“No, dude,” Denny says. He hands me the pie tin and says, “Flat and warm.”
→ Chapter 27
HOW TONIGHT’S SUPPOSED TO WORK is I hide in the bedroom closet while the girl’s taking a shower. Then when she comes out all shiny with sweat, the air steamy and fogged with hair spray and perfume, she comes out naked except for a lacy bathrobe. Then I jump out with some pantyhose stretched over my face and wearing sunglasses. I throw her on the bed. I put a knife to her throat. Then I rape her.
Simple as that. The shame spiral continues.
Just keep asking yourself: “What would Jesus NOT do?”
Only I can’t rape her on the bed, she says, the spread is pale pink silk and will spot. And not on the floor because the carpet hurts her skin. We agreed on the floor, but on a towel. Not a good guest towel, she said. She told me she’d leave a ratty towel on the dresser, and I’d need to spread it on the floor ahead of time so as not to break the mood.
→ Chapter 28
IN THE SUMMER OF 1642 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a teenage boy was accused of buggering a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. This is real history on the books. In accordance with the Biblical laws of Leviticus, after the boy confessed he was forced to watch each animal being slaughtered. Then he was killed and his body heaped with the dead animals and buried in an unmarked pit.
This was before there were sexaholic talk therapy meetings.
This teenager, writing his fourth step must’ve been a whole barnyard tell-all.
I ask, “Any questions?”
The fourth-graders just look at me. A girl in the second row says, “What’s buggering?”
I say, ask your teacher.
→ Chapter 29
AFTER DENNY’S MOVED IN, I find a block of salt-and-pepper granite in the fridge. Denny lugs home chunks of basalt, his hands stained red with iron oxide. He wraps his pink baby blanket around black granite cobbles and smooth washed river rocks and slabs of sparkling mica quartzite and brings them home on the bus.
→ Chapter 30
THE MOMMY AND THE STUPID LITTLE SHIT-HEEL KID, they stopped at a zoo one time. This zoo was so famous it was surrounded by acres of parking lot. This was in some city you can drive to, where a line of kids and moms were waiting to get inside with their money.
→ Chapter 31
DENNY’S ALREADY SITTING RINGSIDE in the dark, sketching on the yellow pad in his lap, three and a half empty beer bottles on the table next to him. He doesn’t look up at the dancer, a brunette with straight black hair, on her hands and knees. She snaps her head from side to side to whip the stage with her hair, her hair looking purple in the red light. With her hands, she smooths the hair back off her face and crawls to the edge of the stage.
→ Chapter 32
WHEN A TOW TRUCK FROM THE AUTO CLUB gets here, the front desk girl needs to go out to meet it, so I tell her, sure, I’ll watch her desk.
For serious, but when the bus dropped me off at St. Anthony’s today I noticed two of her tires were flat. Both rear wheels are resting right on the rims, I told her, and forced myself to make eye contact the whole time.
→ Chapter 33
WEDNESDAYS MEAN NICO.
Fridays mean Tanya.
Sundays mean Leeza, and I catch her in the parking lot at the community center. Two doors down from the sexaholics meeting, we waste some sperm in a janitor’s closet with a mop next to us, left standing in a bucket of gray water. There’s cases of toilet tissue for Leeza to lean over, and I’m splitting her ass so hard that with my every drive, she head-butts a shelf of folded rags. I’m licking the sweat off her back for a nicotine buzz.
→ Chapter 34
WITHOUT INSURANCE OR EVEN A DRIVER’S LICENSE, I call a cab to come jump-start my mom’s old car. On the radio, they talk about where to find traffic, a two-car accident on the bypass, a stalled tractor-trailer on the airport freeway. After I fill the gas tank, I just find an accident and get in line. Just to feel like I’m part of something.
→ Chapter 35
FAST-FORWARDING THROUGH THE MESSAGES on my mom’s answering machine, there’s the same soft voice, hushed and understanding, saying, “Condition is deteriorating . . .” Saying, “Critical. . .” Saying, “Mother ...” Saying, “Intervene ...”
→ Chapter 36
SO SATURDAY MEANS VISITING MY MOM.
In the lobby of St. Anthony’s, talking to the front desk girl, I tell her I’m Victor Mancini and I’m here to see my mom, Ida Mancini.
I say, “Unless, I mean, unless she’s dead.”
→ Chapter 37
URSULA STOPS TO CATCH HER BREATH and looks up at me. She shakes the fingers of her one hand and squeezes the wrist with her other hand and says, “If you were a churn, we’d have butter a half hour ago.”
I go, sorry.
She spits in her hand and makes a fist around my dog and says, “This sure isn’t like you.”
→ Chapter 38
HOW TO MAKE AN EAR CANDLE is you take a piece of regular paper and roll it into a thin tube. There’s no real miracle to it. Still, you have to start with the stuff you already know.
→ Chapter 39
IT’S DARK AND STARTING TO RAIN when I get to the church, and Nico’s waiting for me in the parking lot. She’s struggling around inside her coat, and for a moment one sleeve hangs empty, then she snakes her arm back inside it. Nico reaches her fingers inside the cuff of her other sleeve and pulls out something lacy and white.
→ Chapter 40
SOMEWHERE NORTH-NORTHEAST ABOVE LOS ANGELES, I was getting sore, so I asked Tracy if she’d let up for a minute. This is another lifetime ago.
With a big hank of white spit looped between my knob and her lower lip, her whole face hot and flushed from choking, still holding my sore dog in her fist, Tracy settles back on her heels and says how in the Kama Sutra, it tells you to make your lips really red by wiping them with sweat from the testicles of a white stallion.
“For real,” she says.
→ Chapter 41
THE FRONT DESK GIRL DOESN’T WANT ANY COFFEE.
She doesn’t want to go check on her car in the parking lot.
She says, “If anything happens to my car, I’ll know who to blame.”
And I tell her, shhhhhhhhh.
I tell her I hear something important, a gas leak or a baby crying somewhere.
It’s my mom’s voice, muffled and tired, coming over the intercom speaker from some unknown room.
→ Chapter 42
HOW IT SHOWED UP ON THE NEWS last night was just me shouting, waving my arms in front of the camera, with Denny a little ways behind me, working to set a rock in a wall, and Beth just a little behind him, hammering a boulder into dust, trying to carve a statue.
→ Chapter 43
FOR MY NEXT MIRACLE, I BUY PUDDING. This is chocolate pudding, vanilla and pistachio pudding, butterscotch pudding, all of it loaded with fat and sugar and preservatives and sealed inside little plastic tubs. You just peel off the paper top and spoon it up.
Preservatives is what she needs. The more preservatives, I figure, the better.
→ Chapter 44
MY MOTHER’S DEAD. My mom’s dead, and Paige Marshall is a lunatic.
Everything she told me she made up. Including the idea that I’m, oh I can’t even say it: Him. Including that she loves me.
→ Chapter 45
THE MINUTE BEFORE I LEFT ST. ANTHONY’S for the last time, the minute before I was out the door and running, Paige tried to explain.
→ Chapter 46
IN MOST TWELVE-STEP RECOVERY PROGRAMS, the fourth step makes you write a complete and relentless story of your life as an addict. Every lame, suck-ass moment of your life, you have to get a notebook and write it down. A complete inventory of your crimes. That way it’s always in your head. Then you have to fix it all. This goes for alcoholics, drug abusers, and overeaters as well as sex addicts.
→ Chapter 47
ONE MORNING THE SCHOOL BUS PULLED UP TO THE CURB, and while his foster mother stood waving, the stupid little boy got on. He was the only passenger, and the bus blew past the school at sixty miles per hour. The bus driver was the Mommy.
This was the last time that she came back to claim him.
→ Chapter 48
IN ANOTHER MINUTE, THE ARMS COME AROUND ME from behind. Some police detective is hugging me tight, double-fisting me under the rib cage, breathing into my ear, “Breathe! Breathe, damn it!”
→ Chapter 49
MOBBED AROUND DENNY’S CASTLE are a thousand people I can’t remember, but who will never forget me.
It’s almost midnight. Stinking and orphaned and unemployed and unloved, I pick my way through the crowd until I get to Denny, standing in the middle, and I say, “Dude.”
And Denny goes, “Dude.” Watching the mob of people holding rocks.
He says, “You should definitely not be here right now.”
