Sam Lipsyte - The Subject Steve

"So I put peanut butter in the chili. So what? It's a time-honored thickener. One in a million the bitch would be allergic, and her old man a goddamn state senator, to boot. There's a law named for her now. Ever hear of LuAnn's Law? It's a food safety bill. It's an anti-peanut-butter bill, really. Which, if you look at it historically, the peanut and its uses being the achievement of a black scientist, that would make LuAnn's Law a piece of racist legislation, ask me. But nobody does ask me. Nobody ever asks me. At least to cook for a living. Not anymore. Who'll hire the big bad chili killer? That's when it all started for me. Smack, whiskey, alimony, syph."

"Sounds like a song."

"Oh, it's a song all right. Now get on the stick, Stewboy. Papa's got a brand-new spatula. Spanky-spanky."

Funny how even the nutters get sane enough for the few minutes it takes to spill their guts.

Then it's the redeye back to Batshit Isle.

Today I sat in the trance pasture for a good hour after First Calling. I shut my eyes and made to enter that peaceful ripple of a kingdom Heinrich calls the shit-free zone. It was a nice place to visit until that wife-filcher William started bum-rushing my void.

Scamper, scamper.

I met William in the dorm rooms of higher yearning. He'd wormed a double for himself down the hall, a sumptuous bong chamber tricked out with batiks by spree killers and oil portraits of famous French Marxists he'd painted on black velvet. He fancied himself some kind of conceptualist at the time. Everything was a concept. Every concept was ripe for dismemberment. He liked to trace punk rock back to the age of Luther, don used toupees.

I once asked him who the hell he thought he was.

"A gangster of contingency," he explained.

He was my hero and for my worship I got first dibs on the women he'd bed and flee. My job, as I saw it, was to coddle them back to some sort of flummoxed spite, whereupon they'd jerk me around for a while, the William proxy, then give me the boot.

I thought it a commendable system at the time.

Someday William and his cruel, pretty face would be known to all the world, of that I was also convinced. Artist, philosopher, provocateur, such petty designations would merely constrict his force. I figured I'd best tag along and witness this bloom, be his blasted Boswell: Behind the Scenes with William P; William P: A Life, an Art; The Packed Bowl: The Life and Times of William P.

Other fevers seized him, though.

Next thing, William's scoring callbacks from the leading investment firms in the country.

"Dudes are making scads," he told me, chopping down some crystal on a Baader-Meinhof pop-up book.

He'd taken to wearing twills.

"What happened to contingency?" I said.

"What could be more contingent than money?"

He looked almost priestly there at the snort end of his soda straw.

Make no mistake, I was happy to see him when I spotted him years later thumbing violently through Peruvian flute disks at a midtown megastore. He was a tad pastier now, pinched into some flashy tailoring, maybe a Milanese number. I noticed a kind of bleary epiphany in his eyes when he saw me, as though I were some object mislaid long ago with not a little remorse.

I kissed him, called him Billy, took him home to meet the family.

File it under fuckup, I guess. Warm and defeated as he'd seemed in the megastore, William came to merciless life over linguine and wine. Maryse was in his thrall well before the garlic loaf was out of the oven, and there was Fiona at the far end of the table, making nervous pokes at her head hole.

Poor dear, poor daughter, torn between deadbeat biology and this glad shimmer of a man. William was rich, toothy, world-luminous. He had tales to tell, wisdom to dispense. I was bitter and middling and whatever I dispensed tended to stain my shorts.

It was never much of a contest.

"You're shaking," somebody said.

DaShawn stood over me here in the trance pasture. His tunic was soiled. His goiter looked bigger.

"Shaking with solitude," I said.

"Sorry, then. I was wrong to disturb you."

"How's the merc trade? Kill any Continentals today?"

"Whoa," said DaShawn. "Let's get something straight here. I'm not some nutbin Napoleon. I know who I am and, more importantly, when I am. I have a degree in indigenous studies from Ramapo State College. I just prefer traditional dress."

"I'm sorry, DaShawn. You have to understand that I'm an asshole."

"I do understand."

I started to thank the man for such rare comprehension.

"Shhh. I want to show you something."

DaShawn led me out of the pasture and through some brush. We hiked our way up the hill trail through a steep rise of spruce.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"I told you, I want to show you something."

A burning scent was coming off the mountain, rich and dry, full of campfire cheer. We strayed off the trail and hacked our way up to a great forked elder. There in a clear was a tiny cottage built of thatch and brick. Smoke rifled out the tin flue.

"Ye Olde Mothering Hut," said DaShawn.

"I wonder who's in there," I said.

"Heinrich's in there. And somebody. We never know who it is until it's all over. That way there's no shame."

Now shrieks carried over the clear.

"Damn," I said.

"The Iroquois," said DaShawn, "in fact many of the eastern tribes, not to mention the plains tribes, prided themselves on their ability to bear torture. If you got captured by an enemy, you were already dead and disgraced. Your only recourse was to maintain dignity during the ordeal."

"Stoic."

"Not stoic. They'd go bananas. You motherfucking bear-fucker, your tribe is rabbit shit. Something to say while you're being flensed alive."

"Was this passed down in family lore, DaShawn?"

"I researched it for my thesis. My family passed down a fondness for Ring-Dings."

"We had Devil Dogs," I said.

"Those are good, too."

A man stooped out of the hut. Bits of ash hung in the air about him. He was naked, smeared with soot and blood. A piece of metal poked out of his hand.

We saw a flash, heard a boom, felt something thud into the elder.

Tonight, after pears in syrup, Heinrich stood for a word. He'd showered, looked rested, his wet hair combed back into an impromptu pompadour. There were still a few streaks of ash on his hands, a little scallop of dried blood on his ear.

"People, I have an announcement to make. It concerns our very own Bobby Trubate. Today was an extra-special day for him. You know of what I speak. It's uncertain if we'll ever see him again, but suffice it to say he has finally tasted truth. Trubate. Perhaps name is destiny, after all."

"You hear that, Spanky?" Parish whispered into my ear.

I nodded, spooned up some pear.

Back at the cabin Old Gold was stuffing Bobby's clothes into a duffel bag.

"Did he go home?"

"I don't know," said Old Gold.

"What happened?"

"I don't know. I guess he was no match for mothering fire."

"He's a good guy."

"Avram, has it ever occurred to you that a lot of this stuff might be figurative? That really the idea of life is just to get along as best we can under the circumstances?"

"Oh, you mean like Nazi Germany?"

"Don't pull that Nazi shit with me. I'm a Jew, too."

"Who said I was a Jew?"

"I read it in your story in the Tenets ."

"Maybe I just meant that figurative."

Old Gold left and I lay in my cot for a while. My classical kindergarten education had trained me to always take a few moments before sleep to review my day, ruminate on any schoolyard atrocities the banality of evil or banality may have glossed. Pigtail tuggings. Marble-maimings. Bastard shot at me, was all I could think. My day, for the most part. There was a knock at the door and Heinrich capered in all soft-shoe, twirled a phantom baton.