Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift

The woman at the next table picks up her plate and moves to a table at the far end of the row. I don’t blame her. Kyle used to be a nice boy, but he’s gotten sour somehow, as Victor told me that first night. If I weren’t responsible for him, I’d probably move to another table, too.

As I’m paying for our meal, I ask Kyle what kind of songs he downloaded on my bitchin’ iPhone, although I’m careful not to actually say “bitchin’” so I can remain fucking loaded.

“Country songs, mostly,” he says.

I stick out my tongue, which I’ll concede isn’t mature. I will have to be careful about such things, since the question of Kyle’s maturity is now such a hot topic.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“I like rock ‘n’ roll better.”

“Well, too bad.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” I say. “We’ll listen to three of your songs, then three of mine, then three of yours, and so on.”

“We just listened to maybe ten of your songs before we got here, so I think we should get to listen to ten of mine before we start going back and forth.”

“That’s not the deal I’m offering you. It’s three of yours, then three of mine, as soon as we leave. That way, I can minimize my exposure to bad music.”

I’m thinking now about when my OCD was out of control and I got in a lot of trouble for writing Garth Brooks forty-nine letters complaining to him that he had ruined country music. The “Garth Brooks incident,” as my father always called it, is what led to my being kicked out of my parents’ house and being put under the care of Dr. Buckley starting in 2000. As it turned out, this was a good thing, as I wouldn’t have met Donna and Kyle if I hadn’t been forced to move, and I wouldn’t have gotten better as quickly as I did with Dr. Buckley. That doesn’t erase the fact that Garth Brooks ruined country music, the detritus (I love the word “detritus”) of which I will now be subjected to, but it’s hard to hold a grudge.

“It’s not bad music,” Kyle says. “It’s so awesome. Like, I got ‘Honky Tonk Badonkadonk’ by Trace Adkins.”

I reach over and flick a piece of pancake off Kyle’s shirt.

“What’s a badonkadonk?”

Kyle giggles. “It’s a girl’s butt.”

“They write songs about girls’ butts? It sounds stupid.”

“Dude,” he says, “it’s an awesome song. It’s the country song answer to ‘Baby Got Back.’”

“The Sir Mix-A-Lot song?” I am impressed that Kyle knows a song from 1992, and I cannot lie.

“Yes.”

“You weren’t even born when that came out.”

“It’s one of my mom’s favorites.”

I don’t know where to begin unraveling this young man. Kyle is in the clutches of terrible music, and it sounds like his mother is helping to drive him there. I will have to hit him with strong doses of R.E.M. and hope they have some kind of cleansing effect. I wish now that I had added some Matthew Sweet—my other favorite musical artist—to my collection. If Kyle is in thrall (I love the word “thrall”) to silly words like “badonkadonk,” there may be no rescuing him with just R.E.M. Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Peter Buck, and Bill Berry are good, but as far as I know they are not miracle workers. Miracles are hard to quantify, anyway. I prefer facts.

At 7:07 p.m., I’m in my sweatpants and a T-shirt, lounging on one bed in our room at the Holiday Inn in Rock Springs. Kyle is on the other bed, watching something on MTV that is called Jersey Shore .

This show flummoxes me.

Kyle tries to explain how it works, that these eight young people—he calls the guys “guidos,” which I guess would make the women “guidesses”—share a house and try to get along with one another, but I watch the show with him and I don’t see much getting along. I see people talking on phones, or yelling at each other, or getting drunk and having sex. In other words, this is quality programming.

I just made another sarcastic joke. I am pretty funny sometimes.

Kyle says one of the guys, someone known as “The Situation,” is his favorite.

“And that one there,” he says, pointing to a very short woman with very tall hair, “that’s Snooki.”

“What’s a ‘Snooki’?” I ask.

“It’s not her real name,” he says. “That’s just what they call her.”

I watch her as she walks up to the “The Situation” and starts yelling at him.

“Look at the badonkadonk on her,” I say.

Kyle giggles.

I was going to propose that we watch the next episode of Adam-12 on my bitchin’ iPhone, but Kyle is having so much fun watching Jersey Shore that I skip it. I’m woefully (I love the word “woefully”) behind on establishing any sort of pattern with Adam-12 , and this both surprises me and disappoints me.

I’m surprised because I’m starting to like the show, even if it’s not nearly as good as Dragnet , and so it stands to reason that I would be eager to view more episodes and become even more acquainted with Officers Pete Malloy and Jim Reed. It disappoints me because a rigorous schedule of show-watching used to be essential to how I went through the day. When I met Kyle and Donna, for example, I was on a strict regimen of watching Dragnet every night at 10:00. I couldn’t even contemplate skipping it. But then work and friends—things I had been without—came into my life, and when my Dragnet tape broke, I stopped watching.

Now, however, I am adrift. My job is gone. My friends live somewhere else. My mother is in another state most of the year. My father is dead. It seems to me that a little rigor in my schedule would do me some good, and yet I cannot seem to muster the energy to impose that on myself.

There’s something else, too. I feel a sense of longing, only I cannot identify what it is I’m longing for, and that is worrisome for someone who values precision the way I do. I am not good at thinking in abstract ways, but I will try to describe this. When I had my job, my best friends across the street, and my house on Clark Avenue, Billings, Montana, was where I wanted to be. It was familiar and it was mine. Now, I am in a hotel room in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a place I have never been before, and, because Kyle is here with me, I do not want this moment to end.

I am scanning through the songs loaded on my bitchin’ iPhone, and I say to Kyle, “How many songs did you purchase?”

“I don’t know. Thirty or so.”

This is not close to being the correct answer.

“Kyle, you purchased one hundred and ninety-three songs.”

“I did?”

“Yes, you did. And at a dollar and twenty-nine cents per song, that comes to two hundred forty-eight dollars and ninety-seven cents.”

“It does?”

“Yes, it does. I think you know that.”

“I do?”

I look over at Kyle, and he is trying hard to keep from grinning, but I see him. I think that I should feel entitled to scold him for spending $218.97 more than his upper estimate of what his songs would cost, but I don’t want to scold him. I want to grin, too. This is a conundrum (I love the word “conundrum”) for me, because it seems to me that part of the problem we’ve been having with Kyle is that we let him get away with such things. And yet, I think that if I scold him over what he has done, he will become angry and make things difficult for me on this trip.

I quickly devise a plan to deal with this.

“How much money did you get from me today because I cursed?” I ask him.

“Three dollars.”

That’s right. There was the buck in Burley, Idaho, when I said “fuck,” and then I had to give him another when I said that the Great Salt Lake looked “pretty fucking awesome,” and finally, I gave him a dollar when I referred to my “bitchin’ iPhone” at dinner. I have to be more careful.