Sam Lipsyte - Venus Drive

It’s a bittersweet story, I guess. I wish I could remember more of it. She used to shoot too much cocaine and jerk around in her chair. It sounds bad, but if you’d been there it just might have charmed you somehow.

It charmed me. I even made some art of my own when I was with her. I took all the beat bags I’d copped — corn starch, baby powder — and glued them to some Belgian linen. “The Decline of Quality Control,” I called it. The dealer’s dealer dismissed it outright. He said it was an “insufficient interrogation of authenticity.” I said I wasn’t about to waste the real stuff. The point is, I shouldn’t have bothered with that idiot. I had ideas in those days. I had hair.

It was Carla who started calling them that, Lonely Larrys, the ones who stay on the line. We used to share smokes on break. She’s not around much these days. Maybe she’s on a different shift. Maybe something better came along. That would be a shame.

The guy that hired me, he gave me this look when he gave me the job.

“You’re hired,” he said, “but it seems like a waste of a fine college education.”

These days there’s a conspiracy against the overqualified. I told him I was a painter, in the manner of Courbet, Corvette. He seemed appeased.

Tonight, everyone is telling me to go to hell. One guy I call wants my name, my real name.

“Saltine,” I say. “Leonard Saltine.”

He’s going to report me to the bureau of something or other, make a phone call to vent about a phone call. I guess these are the vengeful types. They don’t believe in market research. They are enemies of progress. They want to go back to that dark time when America didn’t care what kind of donut you liked.

“Saltine?” he says. “Bullshit.”

“My name is nobody,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I read that book, too,” he says. “Well, I’ve got two eyes, pal.”

“What book?” I say.

Later, I’m a few screens in with a lady from Duluth. Cough drops. Mentholated. Do they soothe? Do they soothe you to the poor, to the fair, to the good?

“These are dumb questions,” the lady says.

“I didn’t write them, Ma’am. I’m just doing my job.”

I savor the saying of Ma’am. We never got to say it growing up in my town. People would take you for crazy, a peeper, or trying to burn them on school chocolate. Now when I say Ma’am I belong to a great tapestry of Ma’am-sayers stretched across the republic. We’re just doing our job.

I get another guy, Wyoming, I think, one question to go. A country number comes over the line, a song about a jet pilot chasing Jesus through the sky, his heart on target lock. I ask Wyoming to rate the service at his local self-serve salad bar.

“Fair-to-good,” he says.

“I need you to pick one, sir.”

“How’s about good, then? Good’s better for you, right?”

“It’s all the same to me.”

“You pick,” the man says.

“Okay,” I say, “how about good?”

“Good’s good.”

Frank’s up over me, doing his fink looks at my screen.

“Lose him,” says Frank.

“It’s complete,” I say.

“It’s compromised. You fed him a response.”

“Don’t do this to me,” I say.

“Take a break,” says Frank.

“Fuck you, Fink,” I say.

I guess Frank has been briefed in the latest management techniques, because instead of hauling off on me, he smiles, rubs my neck.

“Okay, fuck me,” he says softly. “Fuck me, and take a break.”

The smoke room, it’s just a stock room with no stock. It’s concrete with a window in it. You can see the high floors of a brokerage house across the way. The brokers work late in their cubes, ties down, cuffs rolled, lips quickening against their headset mikes. We are all cold-callers now.

It’s kind of dark in here but I can see her, Carla, her knees up on the heater. She’s got these wide pretty shins gone to stubble. There’s something about that. There’s something about everything. Take her hair, tucked inside her sweater. We could be home somewhere, her legs, her shins, up in my lap. Those stiff little shoots.

We wouldn’t have to tell each other about our days. It would be the same day.

“Hey,” I say. “Got a cigarette?”

“No,” says Carla. “Got any completes?”

“You?”

“No. But I got this one Larry, I couldn’t tell if he was putting me on. Said he used to be a lion tamer. Used to stick his head in lion mouths. He said they always doped the cats, but still, you never knew when, well…”

“I never get a Larry that good,” I say, lay my hand on her shin. I stroke down with the grain.

“This is a very troubling development,” says Carla.

“I love your shins, you know,” I say.

“No, I didn’t know that. I wish I didn’t know that. Now I have to wear pants to work. Don’t ever follow me in here again.”

I clock out early, turn my headset in, flip Frank a secret double bird on the way out the door. I call my friend Gary from the street. He’s got a futon for me nights I need it, nights I sleep.

“This is Gary,” says Gary’s answering machine.

“Gary,” I say, “this is me.”

Down at Cups, the lookout hooks my arm.

“Big man, get me a bag of D, will you? I can’t leave my post.”

Maybe it’s the way he says post that sways me. Now I’m part of an operation, a cause.

They call it Cups because you walk down a hallway of tile shards and wait for paper Dixies to come down on box twine. There’s a kid I know from somewhere waiting ahead of me, but neither of us speaks. What is there to say?

I put money in the cup marked “D” and watch it shimmy up into the dark. It comes back down with one bag in it. Lookout’s out of luck, I guess.

He’s waiting out on the stoop for me.

“Well?” he says.

“Talk to your man,” I say. “He screwed me. I paid for two and he only gave me one.”

“Give them to me,” he says.

“What them?” I say.

“Them is two bags. I gave you twenty bucks.”

“Ten,” I say.

Cups, it appears, also maintains a radical management style. The lookout puts a pistol to my neck and walks me back up through the door.

“Now,” he says, “Why don’t you say that again?”

“Oh, forget it,” I say, “just kill me.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Just kill you?” says the lookout. “You make it sound like nothing. What, you coming back? You got roundtrip? Frequent flyer?”

He hits me with the pistol, takes my wallet, leaves me the bag.

“It’s good tonight,” he says.

Justice has always been swift, and just, at Cups.

When I get to Gary’s the girl from the gargoyle building opens the door.

“What are you doing here?” I say.

The girl lets me in, brings gauze for the dent in my head.

“I’m staying here for a few days,” she says. “Gary’s out of town, his aunt, his somebody, died.”

“What happened to your place?”

“Couldn’t make rent.”

The girl and I sit in Gary’s kitchen. She’s got spoons, water, powders, works. It’s like your only cozy memory falling out of the sky for you. I tie her off and hit her clean, the way I always could. She has veins like little tadpoles darting under her skin but I still know which way they’re going. Me, I’ve got this hole in my arm like a great, dark lake. I just have to squirt the stuff in. The girl starts jerking in her chair. I clinch her down around the knees.

“Listen,” I say. “I talked to this guy tonight. He was a lion tamer. Stuck his head in lion mouths.”

“I could never do that,” she says. “I could never tempt fate that way.”

The girl twitches hard, almost out of her seat.