Sam Lipsyte - The Fun Parts

“Enough already!”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I said enough,” said the man. He leaned past the rail, a fattish fellow with lovely corn-blond hair. “So you almost died and hurt a lot of people along the way. You got your medal. Go home.”

It was true about the medal. I’d recently won an award for creative nonfiction from a major credit card company.

“Maybe some others here want me to finish,” I said, hearing my voice strain now against some sissified collapse.

“Freaking sheep,” said the man.

“Leave him be!” called a voice. It sounded like Nate, my protégé. He’d been a homeless gay punk. Now he was my homeless gay punk protégé. Other voices rose to join him. My minions were protecting me. How humiliating. I felt like that bullied boy I’d described in Spoon for the Misbegotten , the one who ran home to weep and quaff his mother’s cooking sherry — not that my mother ever cooked, let alone with sherry.

“Yeah, back off. He’s been through a lot.”

“He’s fragile!”

“He’s a fraud!” called the man, who I saw now wore heavy coveralls splotched darkly in places with what could have been berry juice, or blood.

“He’s our friend!” somebody said.

“Thanks,” I said. “But I can take care of myself.”

There were murmurs now, mutters, maybe.

“We’ve got your back!”

“We’re here for you, and we…” somebody trailed off.

“Don’t you get it?” said the man in coveralls. “This guy betrayed his friends and family, he’s contributed untold thousands to the drug economy, which has probably helped get others hooked, and now he blabs about it for cash. And don’t start in about his philosophy. It’s half-baked nonsense. He teaches us nothing. You really need this guy to tell you capitalism poisons our bodies and corrupts our souls? Are you that dim you can’t figure it out for yourselves?”

Nobody spoke. I was sensing a strange mood in the crowd tonight, a balkiness I had never encountered. They were maybe beginning to be done with me.

“I think you’re the dim one,” I said.

“Weak meat,” boomed my butcher.

* * *

It was a slow, luxuriant slide, like a dollop of half-fried mayonnaise slinking down the lean, freckled back of a teen. The teen’s name was Freida, she’d designed one of my websites, but those ecstasies were over. Diana had departed. Nate had disappeared. Only my father’s faxes sustained me:

Dear Disappointment,

Not dead yet? Keep at it, kid. You had all those sad suckers fooled, but not me. How long did you think it would last? The money, the women, the talks at the Y? The Y is for some vigorous cardio and steaming your nuts free of deadly nut toxins, not for listening to some junkie freak moan about his generation. Don’t you know there’s real suffering in the world? Slavers pimp out war orphans in hovels hung with rat-chewed velveteen. I saw it on the news! Didn’t you learn anything when I was promoted to vice president of sales in district seven and then got fired with everyone else the next day? When life knocks you down, don’t bother getting up. Because life will punish you for getting up. Life will bite your eyes out.

Call Me,

Your Progenitor

P.S. Dinner?

I’d pace my loft, smoke Egyptian cigarettes, drink vodka cocktails, snort any pill I could crush. Such binges once primed me for another recovery, another memoir, but I couldn’t feel the magic anymore, that rush of becoming. All was murk and a sort of moister, muddier murk. Out my window was traffic, suffering, euphoria, pretzel carts. Inside was the petty spiral. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fat dude, his wonderful hair.

I picked up my father’s latest fax. Maybe a few hours in the vicinity of his rot could put me back on track. Also, I could teach him about the Internet. I caught a bus across the river.

* * *

My father was semiretired, a freelance consultant. He drove around begging alms from men and women he’d once commanded. He got by, as many widowers do, on peanut butter and hate.

“Any booze around here?” I said.

“Why don’t you drink a pint of lye and get it over with?” my father said. “Why don’t you have yourself a nice little lye-and-hantavirus smoothie? That’ll fix you up good, you piece of shit.”

My father flung himself across the table, flapped his hand in my face. It’s true he never hit me. A father need not hit. His coughs, his smirks, are blows. Even a father’s embrace confers a kind of violence. Or so I once pronounced on public radio.

“This meat loaf is terrible,” I said now. “Worse than Mom used to make.”

“It’s supposed to be terrible,” said my father. “This isn’t meant to be a pleasant experience. This is an intervention.”

“An intervention? Where is everybody?”

“Who everybody? It’s just me. Nobody else cares whether you live or die. And I’m on the fence.”

“Okay,” I told him. “Intervene.”

“I just did.”

“You did?”

“Just then.”

“Oh.”

“So, what’s the plan, Bigtime? I figure you’re almost out of money. Welcome back. Maybe you could land some menial job, night janitor, say, but who’s going to hire you, especially with your background as a self-aggrandizing scumrag.”

“Bag?”

“Rag. Is how we said it.”

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks for the intervention.”

“Anytime.”

* * *

I rode back to the city, spotted this damaged-looking beauty a few seats away. The damage wasn’t just the tortoiseshell tattooed over the entirety of her shaved skull, or the stern tortoise head glaring out from between her eyes. The damage, in fact, was everything not the tortoise, not the tattoo.

“I know who you are,” she said.

“That makes one of us,” I said.

“You mattered to me once.”

“What happened?”

“You mattered to me less and less. Can you introduce me to Nate?”

“Forget Nate,” I said. “You’ve had struggles, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Lay them on me, sister.”

The tortoise woman told me her story. She’d been a ward of the state, a runaway, a medievalist, a personal anal sex trainer, a robot rock chanteuse, a junior Olympic sprinter, the estranged wife of an ex — French legionnaire. Her story had heart havoc and threat, but no self-annihilation. She’d been stymied but always summoned the nerve to perdure. She was the opposite of me. I resented her and wanted to serve her. I wanted the world to pledge itself to her example.

“My God,” I said.

“You have one?”

“Please,” I said. “Let me write your story.”

I pictured us together in my loft, me with spiral-bound pads and designer pencils worn to their nubs by her inspirational tale. Critics would applaud my decision to invest my talent in this inked slut’s plight. My fans would swoon at the way I’d reached out to another wounded human. I’d get off drugs and drink for good, raise chickens upstate, produce some independent cinema.

“No way,” she said. “You’re a slimy, evil sellout hack.”

“Sure, but will you consider it?”

The bus pulled into Port Authority. The tortoise woman slipped away.

* * *

Diana lived in a building near the river. Somebody buzzed me up. A man stood in the doorway, shirtless, bleeding, words freshly carved into his chest. PEEPS PLEEZER, the gashes read.

“Nate.”

“Diana’s not here,” said Nate. “Do you want to come in? You look like hell.”

“Hell is where I’m crashing these days, Nate. But what about you? You’re the mutilated interlocutor here.”

“I’m purging my defects via ritual.”

“Is that why you’re poking my wife?”