Sam Lipsyte - The Fun Parts

I stood there, stared at him.

“That was it?” said my father. “Come on, take a shot. Sock it to me. Haymaker express.”

I cocked my fist, studied the salt bristles in his chin.

“Lay me out, baby,” said my father. “Onetime offer. Put the old fuck on the deck. Don’t be a damn pansy! I’m leaving your dying hag of a mother!”

I turned hard, took a few steps, and threw a huge hook at the garage door. We both heard my hand bones crack. I slid to the pavement, squealed.

“Oh, Christ,” said my father. “No good deed.”

He clutched me up and rolled me into the car, drove us to the hospital.

* * *

It was true about no good deed, or even bad deed, same as it was true about fathers and how they forget to love you, but it’s more that they’ve forgotten everything.

Maybe it’s just a classic American condition.

None of it mattered now. The lookout’s eyes filled with this silvery hate and he gathered up the collar of my shirt and commenced what people who have never been punched, people like me, call fisticuffs. He threw hard, perfect crosses, and my legs fell away and the blows did not cease. I could feel them, not feel them, their smash and wreck, the splintering of bone, feel my blood, this warm, barbaric blood, so rich and parasitical, pour out my nose and sluice out my mouth and down my throat and choke me with the shock of something terrible and unendingly foreseen.

When he was done, the kid leered down at me.

“Had enough?” he said.

“Yes,” I lied.

Folks say I have one of those faces. Not just folks, either. People say it. You have one of those faces, they say, a person can tell what you are feeling. Mostly what I’m feeling is that I’ve just farted, but I nod anyway, twitch up my eyes, my mouth, all earnest and merciful. It’s called Joy Is Here (So Don’t Be Such a Prune-Hearted Prick) , or at least that’s what I call it. If you know how to work your face, you can make people think you feel anything you want, and with that power you can feel up anything you want.

Example: this chick, Roanoke, I meet at the Rover. She’s kind of dykey, the way I like them, has her own darts for the dartboard.

I buy her a beer.

“You’re kind of dykey,” I say.

“Thanks,” she says, in the tone of her generation.

Roanoke rolls the dart in her hand. I glance off, swivel back with Harmless Fool / No Strings Attached / Penis as Pure Novelty , which sounds easy but requires most of the human face’s approximately seventy-three thousand muscles.

Next thing we’re back in her efficiency and Roanoke’s moaning with her hand on her mouth. She’s worried we won’t hear the door if the girlfriend comes home. We do hear the door, but that’s not the problem. The problem is efficiency. The apartment is laid out perfectly for dykes to discover they’ve betrayed each other and their way of life. A curtain around the bed might help.

I give Roanoke one more look before I leave her to the business of ducking creamers, ramekins. I call it Remember, the World Is Not Broken, Even If Your Crockery Is .

* * *

Folks, people, like to ask what you would do in a moment of great moral confusion. Would you save that burning portrait of Hitler painted by Rembrandt? Who cares? The serious question is what are you doing right now. Do you have time for another drink?

My friend, or, rather, anti-friend, Ajay disagrees.

“You’re an idiot,” says Ajay.

“Go back to fucking Mumbai,” I tell him. “Or whatever the fuck it’s called now.”

“Mumbai,” says Ajay. “And I was born here.”

“In the Rover?”

It’s not a bad place to be born. Every third beer is a buyback.

I don’t bother pulling a face. They never work on Ajay, not even I Know My Racism Amuses You, but It’s Still Racism, so I Win , and anyway it gets tiresome manipulating my universe. It’s nice to give those millions of tiny face muscles a break. Ajay goes up to the bar, and I keep my eyes peeled for dart dykes. When he comes back, I tell him all about Roanoke.

“You really are a fucking idiot. Go home to your wife.”

* * *

I go home to my wife. She’s sitting up at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, like she saw it in a movie about a wife sitting up for her shitty husband. She clicks her wedding ring against the side of the mug, which is my mug, a mug she gave me that reads WORLD’S SHITTIEST HUSBAND.

I tell her everything, but I can hardly hear my words because I’m focused on the nearly Dutch wonder forming on my face— Most Radiant Penitence. It’s a fairly simple purse-and-squint combo, but unless performed by an old master like myself, it risks smirk.

“Motherfucker,” my wife says, in the tone of an earlier generation. “Do you love her?”

“Not her,” I say. “Maybe the one who caught us.”

“I want to save our marriage,” says my wife. “Do you want to save our marriage?”

“Yes,” I say. “Just not right now.”

“Get out.”

* * *

I’ve got my prepacked get-out bag and I’m standing in the nursery doorway watching my sleeping son sleep. His face is smooth and milky in the moonlight, and there’s really no name for it, his face, not yet, except maybe I’m Sleeping . Some people might consider this expression beautiful, but it scares the crap out of me. You need more than I’m Sleeping to navigate all the evil in this world. Me gone, who’s going to teach my boy The Strange Thing Is It’s Nobody’s Fault , or Believe I Jammed the Printer All You Want, We’ve Still Got to Order Toner ? Folks? People? My wife? I drop my get-out bag on the nursery floor, curl up next to the crib. There’s the moon through the window, that Moon Man with his masterful Moon Man look: We Are All Schmucks, but I Control the Tides . If he had a coffee mug, it would read “World’s Shittiest Moon.” But he doesn’t have a coffee mug. I get that now.

Oldcorn was a shot-putter from the hippie days. He was my hero for a while. I was a shot-putter from the long-after-the-hippie-days-were-gone days. It was called the Reagan era, but I learned that only later.

We studied the Oldcorn Way with Coach Monroe. Oldcorn torque, Oldcorn spin.

“Finish like this,” said Coach Monroe. “Do not fall out of the circle. Your mark means nothing if you fall out of the circle. It’s a foul. Do it enough times, you foul out. Like you were never even here.”

We all nodded, me and Merk and Fred Powler, the police chief’s son. We were the fattest, strongest boys in our school. We had nothing to do, nowhere to be. There’s not a lot of call for our type until the weather gets cold.

“It’s all a question of character,” said Coach Monroe. “And fun. Fun’s important.”

We did wind sprints, stadium steps, pushed weights in the weight room. We’d sit out on the hill above the circle, roll shots in our hands. They were heavy things, seamed and bright, dusted with lime.

Coach Monroe sat with us, lotus-style, our guru. He gobbed down the ridge. He talked about Oldcorn, adjusted his balls. He had moods, tales to tell.

“Oldcorn dislocated his shoulder hundreds of times,” he said. “It would pop out and he’d just pop it back in, step up for his next put.

“Oldcorn once said to me, ‘Everything dies in the middle.’ The put dies in the middle. Remember that. You can start hard and finish hard, but what did you do in the middle? Did you lapse? Was there a lapse? Did you think about Mindy Richter on the gymnastics team? Did you think about Mindy Richter hanging off those rings, her snapperhole all open and stinky-sweet? The put dies. End of story. Oldcorn got more cooze than you could keep between magazine covers under your bed next to your crusty sock. But do you know what he was thinking in the middle of his spin? Accelerate! Accelerate!