Sam Lipsyte - The Fun Parts

“I don’t poke her. We’ve got something more evolved than that. Besides, you know I’m gay.”

“You used to be homeless, too. Written any more bad versions of my books?”

“I no longer cite you as an influence.”

“I can live with that.”

“I’m having a hard time believing you can live with anything.”

“Nate abandoned and betrayed me,” I said.

“I’m right here,” said Nate.

“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to God. God is my witness. Tell Diana I forgive her.”

“Tell her yourself,” said Nate. “I’m reading downtown tonight.”

“Where?”

“It’s listed in most free weeklies. Diana will be there.”

“Are you inviting me?”

“I’m sharing public information. Free weekly information.”

* * *

I walked along the river for a while, wove through the queer skaters, the club kids, the breeding units with their remote-controlled strollers. I hated them, the gays, the straights. The races. The genders and ages. None of them loved me. I was feeling that forlorn hum. Maybe another memoir was burbling up.

Home, I called Jenkins, my agent.

“Nate stole my style,” I told him. “My wife.”

“Your agent, too,” said Jenkins.

“I feel the forlorn hum coming on,” I said. “It’s going to be the best book yet. I’ve really suffered this time.”

“It’s over.”

“What do you mean it’s over?”

“It’s Nate’s time.”

* * *

The bookstore was packed with Nate’s people. They’d been my people once. I knew their faces, their fears. The tortoise woman was there in something skimpy, predatory. She was maybe pretending one of us was invisible.

Nate vaulted to the lectern in parachute pants, a fluorescent dickey. The crowd cheered as he picked a scab near his nipple, flicked it.

“‘I was a homeless gay punk,’” Nate began. “‘I was a self-hating sick fuck, too. I beat up gay people. I set homeless people on fire. Maybe it was because of my uncle, Pete. We lived in Levittown, and when I was nine…’” Nate read on. I noticed Diana leaning against the remainder table, her eyes rolled up under her Greek fisherman’s cap, her hand frig-deep in her jeans. Behind her were stacks of my last book, going for a dollar a pop.

“‘Every time I looked up into the dirty night sky,’” Nate read now, “‘I thought of each star as one more glittering taunt I had to endure—’”

“This guy’s got nothing!” I shouted. “This isn’t suffering!”

Benches scraped the hardwood. Nate’s people whispered, strained to look.

“He was a homeless gay punk!” somebody called.

“He set homeless people on fire!” I said.

“It’s more complicated than that,” said another. “He was a self-confessed self-hating sick fuck!”

“But gay!” somebody shouted.

“The two are not related!”

“In a sense they are, but only in a metaphorical sense!”

“He’s not metaphorically gay,” said a woman in the back.

“Leave Nate be,” called the tortoise woman.

“He’s poking my wife,” I said. “And I have no idea why he qualifies as punk.”

“I don’t poke her,” said Nate.

“He doesn’t,” said Diana. “I only need to hear his voice to come.”

“Don’t you get it?” I said. “There are babies turning tricks on velveteen!”

“Those babies are homeless punks, too!” somebody shouted. “Nate speaks for all of us!”

“Damn straight!”

“Nate’s got arc!”

Now I felt them, the great arms bunching me up, the wisps of soft hair grazing my cheek. Next thing, I’m out on the sidewalk, staring up at that face, the one I’d never shaken from my dreams. He flashed an enormous steak knife.

“Why?” I said.

“Nate’s pain is now,” said the man in coveralls.

“But I have more I need to say.”

“That couldn’t possibly be true.”

“Who are you to decide?”

“I’m the guy.”

“What guy?”

“That guy. The guy out there. The guy with the pulse. When you put your finger on the pulse, it’s my pulse. It’s my heart. I’m the guy with the heart.”

“What are those stains?” I said, pointed at his coveralls.

“That’s the blood of my heart. And other hearts. Various hearts. Also, I had some berries for lunch.”

“You should tell your story. Write a memoir. If you let me live, I’d be happy to help.”

“I respect the genre too much,” said the man, and took some practice swipes with his knife.

This world would end. The brink beckoned. A bright guy might as well pick a date. Gunderson had. A revolution in consciousness, the peaceful dismantling of mankind’s cruel machinery was, according to Gunderson’s interpretation of an interpretation of a pre-Columbian codex, a half decade away. But that was merely one unfolding. Alternate finales included fire, flooding, pox, nukes. Homo sapiens had a few years to choose. Was that time enough? For Gunderson it was time enough for another book, some lecture tours, a cable deal. Time enough to sample all the yearning young hippie tang in questing creation.

Maybe too much time. A guy could unravel.

Gunderson hadn’t picked the date out of his favorite Alpacan hat. His zero hour was the culmination of a Mixtec prophecy. These bejeweled dudes had played their proto-basketball to the death, strolled the zocalo in the skins of foes. Probably they’d known something. Gunderson didn’t know much about them, really, but who cared? That their glyphs foretold an imminent global shift was sufficient for Ramón, the shaman mentor Gunderson had been visiting these last several winters. That’s all the convincing Gunderson needed. They’d suffered some false ends already, but you could always cite a misreading, push back the date.

Besides, nobody claimed the earth would crack open, just that something huge was on tap, and if we didn’t evolve our asses quick, it would be bad huge. A reasonable message, if vague. Surprising how many preferred not to hear it. These were maybe the same folk who figured crop circles for teen pranks, the fools who called him fool. Look around, he said, to gatherings in the many hundreds, to patchouli kids and home chemists and mind hikers, to, in short, all the non-fools, the excellent few willing to be deranged by their knowing.

“Look around,” he’d say, perched in loose lotus in a patron’s sunken living room, and his followers would, as though exemplars of encroaching gnarlitude did ghoulish waltzes in the very room. “Look at the world, what’s going on in the world. Oppression, repression, depression, the Middle This, the Western That, everything melting, burning, sick. It’s no coincidence. It’s prophecy, and prophecy is no joke, no matter what some cool shill for the corporations might tell you. Trust me, I used to be one of those shills. Until I got my head handed to me on a plate. Or, to be honest, in a bowl. A bowl full of the foulest soup you ever tasted. Vision gumbo. Best gift I ever got. Just a few years, people. We’ve got just a few years to find the better path. Or we are guaranteed one of the utmost, outmost shittiness.”

Once, one of the girls who invariably stalked him home from these gigs, a Gospel of Thomas fan named Nellie, now his current sintern, while getting positively gnostic on his fun parts with ballerina slippers she’d happened to have in her bag, asked Gunderson if he ever looked out on the crowd, thought, “Suckers.”

“Never,” said Gunderson.

“Never?” Nellie asked, her silk insteps rubbing him toward some murked glimpse of the Demiurge.

“You don’t get it,” said Gunderson, apant. “This is no con.”