Sam Lipsyte - Venus Drive

Ferdie’s buried under the trees of France.

“Blow a kiss, Paula,” we whisper. But Paula runs her finger on the brush bone, lays it on the bureau top. The Allegheny stars are out over us, maybe the dipper, the bear, or all the god men Uncle Joey showed me in his star book, stuck there bawling in their sky robes.

We are night rollers rolling by the bakery, the butcher shop, down our block and down the Hill. We are rollers rolling past the houses like the Blitzstein house, where Rachel is so pinned-hair pretty, not a Chersky anymore, maybe with a locket on her collar, tearing tissue for the Temple Jews.

We roll by Mona’s house, and Alvin’s with the Chinese lights. “Alvin! Alvin!” we cry, but he must be busy burning up his mother’s kitchen — liberty or death. When Alvin is mayor he’ll emancipate Mona to swim in the no-pee pool.

We are rollers in the river town. We very much wish we could skate the black waters here. We roll on off state corners instead. Here are all the downtown buildings pointing steelish into the night. This must be where Mr. Vance will make his Federal Liquor Board case. Poor Daddy will have to join up for usefulness and maybe get a bullet in his neck. He’ll be tippy in a brim hat in the sky. The Old Lady will die of holy silver sadness. Uncle Joey will marry in with Paula. He will tell us the truth about his copper money clip, the college scores. What about Mother, though? Who will bring her dinner after, after?

“Go, go, go,” I tell Mona. It’s a basement door propped open at the bottom of a stairwell. It’s a dim, white light.

“Go, go,” I tell Mona, but I go first, sideways, skatewise, down the stairs.

This dirty tile river was made for secret rollers. We are rolling down it, shushing ourselves as everything gets dirtier, dimmer, us wishing our wheels wouldn’t click. We could get demerits. We could go to Juvey, even. The pretty Chersky girl in chains.

The hallway opens on a wide stone room.

It stinks of pickled animal, frog day at Duquesne.

“The Slabs,” says Mona.

She skates off to the far dark behind us.

The dead men here don’t look asleep. They look woken up into picklehood. They are stiff on cots that have skates fixed on. They are swelled up, blued-over, see-through, with black slits for bone to show. There are dead women, too, some the color of Mother, waxed over like hidden ham wax.

You don’t have to touch to know how cold they are.

You don’t need a clock to know how late it is.

Here comes a man in a dirty sky robe. He’s pulling a cot with wheels across the stone.

“You here for this one?” the man says.

Even as I roll over I can see it, the copper money clip, there where the sheet doesn’t reach. It’s sticking out of Uncle Joey’s shoe. “It’s not his fault,” I tell the man. “It’s not. The boy had bad breathing. He couldn’t breathe.”

The man sweeps a hand for the whole stone room, all the slit-shot-caught-a-stroke dead, all the broken-back-mothers-of-dagos dead, all the mick dead and time-of-day dead and which-ones-are-the-kikes-kike dead, all the cut-through Gypsy dead, the kosher-paper-lady dead, the blued-over, see-through, Alleghenian steel-smoke dead, the college-drumsand-money-clip-we-don’t-ask-where-the-bullet-came-from Chersky dead.

The man says, “Bad breathing, huh?”

The man says, “Looks like an epidemic to me.”

Everybody wanted everything to be gleaming again, or maybe they just wanted their evening back. Everybody was from everywhere, had gathered here to hide from the daylight. Some of these people sat around a marble table with straws in their hands. It looked like they were waiting for lemonade. They were trying to get my friend Gary on the phone to get more lemonade. It was early, late, lockjaw hour.

“Is it like this in Geneva?” I said to a man at the table. I was new here, recommended to the straw people by Gary. I felt like the pupil of a great instructor out alone in the dead city.

“Is what like what?” he said.

“Is this like this?”

“I’m from Scarsdale,” he said. “All I can tell you about is Zurich.”

About then the woman with the telephone called out the terrible news.

“Gary’s not anywhere,” she said.

There were moans, whispers, ruminations on fate, hard words for God. People started to shuffle out of the room. A few fell on the coat pile in the corner.

“This is why I hate America,” said the man from Scarsdale. “This brand of bullshit. Where the hell is Gary?”

“He told me he’d be over later,” I said.

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” said the man. “And here comes the fucking sun.”

The man bent his straw into a periscope, poked it over the windowsill.

“The sun, the sun,” he said. “You fiery whore.”

“Maybe I can find Gary,” I said.

“You flame-blown bitch,” he said.

“I think I know where Gary is,” I said.

The man from Scarsdale spun his periscope.

“That’s a good story,” he said. “Work with that story.”

I walked around the ruined sectors of the city and worked with that story.

It was really my story and it went like this: shaky, steady, shaky, steady. I was in shaky right now. I tended to waste a lot of time looking for Gary. It’s difficult to stay the course to steadiness when you’ve got to find Gary all the time. It’s difficult to do anything at all. Sometimes, when I needed money, I stole my girlfriend Molly’s stuff, but the quality goods were running low. To top it off, I was pretty certain I was suffering from that deficit thing. That disorder. Everything flickered a lot, and I never knew which story I was working with.

Take the story of Gary’s thumb. Many years ago, on the eve of manhood, Gary sawed it off with his father’s Black & Decker table saw. Gave it to his mother on an olive dish, or maybe it was a cookie plate.

“You should have seen the look on my mother’s face,” said Gary, back from emergency.

The truth was, you could still see it on her a few days later, there in the bar mitzvah ballroom. That kind of look, it doesn’t disappear, even with all that disco-nagila going, and Gary bouncing high in the chair. Gary’s uncles, men with great bony mouths, slid Gary from his throne into my arms. I held him there, the bandaged hand between us, and under the din of Hebrew synths, I asked him why he did the sawing.

“They wouldn’t let me watch TV,” he said. “The late movie. Now I watch all hours. Anything I want.”

That’s the story how Gary left his thumb and his youth behind, though they did sew the dead thumb back on.

We had years as strangers before I saw him again, but somehow I’ve always been following Gary. What he did to his thumb made him, I believe, a wisdom-giver.

Me, I was never bar mitzvah’d. According to the tenets of my faith, I’m nothing close to a man, though I have a hairy neck and look older.

Walking around now I thought of all the times I used to walk around and see Gary on the streets of this city. It’s funny to see someone down here from your town. You think everyone will stay behind and do everything you did all over again, forever. You picture old geezers in jean jackets doing whip-its behind the plaza.

But I got out and Gary got out. Everybody gets out. Getting out is not the problem.

You can picture what the problem is.

For instance, Gary tried to be a rock star, even trained his bad thumb to squeeze on a guitar pick, but rock was dead.

“Somebody should have mentioned something,” he said.

Next thing, I see him loitering near trust-fund bistros, looking smug and hunted.

“I’m in goods and services,” he said. “It’s the only uncompromised medium left.”