Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Also, to commence a bombing campaign. Teko insists. No more fucking around! They must have action! Let Yolanda, Tania, Susan, and Joan puzzle out the solution to anatomical supremacy, build their little ship in a bottle, but Teko’s still General Field Marshal.

Though some things have changed. The feminism thing may be total bullshit in theory, but in practice Teko hasn’t tried to hurt Tania in months.

She’d taken a leaf from Joan’s book: pointed a.38 at his head one day when he raised a fist to her and threatened to pop him in the skull. They were alone together, and she bore the full weight of his pedantry. It had been the usual argument. Tania why did you leave the dishes in the sink. Tania what is this mess here. Tania didn’t I tell you to. Her response — insolent contempt — was well within the boundaries they’d established for dealing with each other after the incident in the creamery, but for some reason she managed that day to infuriate him and he’d grabbed a belt from where it was hanging over the back of a chair and made for her. And automatically, without a single moment’s deliberation that she could trace afterward, she lifted her revolver out of her purse and aimed it at his head. He froze, an astonished expression on his face, the belt in his hand swinging limply.

“Better put that down now,” he said.

She just smiled at him.

“I mean it, Tania. That’s an order.”

“Kiss my cunt, Adolf.”

“You couldn’t kill me. What’ll you tell the others?”

“You’ll never know, will you?”

He breathed heavily, looked irate — then backed off. It felt good.

She thinks she’d like to try Boston. Joan’s mentioned it, repeatedly, as the place she’s most likely to go, and Tania would be happy to accompany her.

She talks to Roger; she holds his hand. She wants to plant a seed, put him where he can see the change that’s coming. She’s familiar enough with the routine; she’s always been pretty direct when it comes to breaking up with a boy. But she feels a little guilty in this case: She wants to get rid of him, but she wants to keep him in reserve too. He’s getting all funny over her though. Brings her little gifts, arrives bearing flowers or whatever wearing his paint-spattered overalls. Flecks of paint in his hair, his eyelashes. In Sacramento it was sweet; he was the bright spot to her days in that lonely burg. Here, home, he’s just another person looking to her to heat up the soup.

Boston. She has a stash of two thousand dollars wrapped in aluminum foil in the freezer. She has a stolen BankAmericard and a valid California driver’s license. Anywhere she wants, she can go. For now, that’s enough.

W HEN YOUR BROTHER CONTACTS law enforcement authorities and suggests to them that you have been involved in the commission of a federal crime, elect to smoke a joint.

When your father, in a near — apopleptic rage, begins breaking the camera equipment of hardworking members of the press, though not enough of it to prevent the nationally syndicated appearance of a photograph of the old man, wearing a torn pair of cutoff shorts and an old oxford shirt with holes in the armpits, attacking a tiny woman reporter, combine the over — the— counter analgesic of your choice with the sort of opiate informally offered for sale on a nearby street corner.

When your mother’s blood pressure consistently rises to levels at which her physician feels it prudent to utter diagnoses like “You really should be dead,” prior to placing her on a medication that has hair sprouting from her chest and has her darting through her home at 11 p.m. vacuuming, washing, and waxing the floors, drink a bottle of fortified wine and gently rest your head on a curbstone. (What’s the word? Thunderbird! How’s it sold? Good and cold! What’s the jive? Bird’s alive! What’s the price? Thirty twice!)

When your wife refuses to have intercourse with you, to touch your penis, to let you stroke her breasts, to kiss you on the mouth, to put her arms around you, to meet your eyes when she speaks to you, to speak to you at all unless absolutely necessary, to be in the same room with you except when socially requisite, to spend time in the same state with you, the oft — feared occasion has arrived for you to publish a depraved novena to St. Jayne Mansfield in the back pages of a magazine and then hire a scantily clad woman found walking in the vicinity of Taylor and Pine streets to serve as a “surrogate. ”

When your funds have diminished to nearly nothing, when your friends refuse your phone calls and slam the door at the sight of your face on the doorstep, when you are rejected, rebuffed, and snubbed at every turn, consider eating peyote and then walking, backward, with your eyes closed, on a busy freeway …

Guy sits at a table in Senor Pico’s, waiting for the Galtons to show, keenly aware that this is his last shot. He finally talked to Susan Rorvik after spending weeks chewing his nails down to the quick, and she explained that they needed to meet, to talk. He half expected her to stipulate someplace picturesquely subterranean, a cafeteria on lower Mission maybe, packed with bleak souls, fruitless lives, and botulism. He was pleasantly surprised when she suggested that they meet the next day at Aquatic Park.

By then all the hopeful rhetoric he’d peddled a year ago had turned into a psalm of maltreatment and neglect, the money I spent, the time I wasted, the risks I took.

He told her about his deeply disillusioning experiences with publishers.

He told her that The Athletic Revolution was going out of print and that he’d arranged to buy three thousand extant copies before they were pulped and have them shipped from a New Jersey warehouse to his place on the Upper West Side.

He told her how his landlord there wanted to evict him because he was running a business out of his apartment.

He told her that his mother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and his father was reeling. Reeling.

He told her Randi was about to leave him.

He told her about the legroom problem on the flight from New York.

He told her that the Portland weather was causing a fungus to grow on his private parts.

Great talking to her, and he’d see her tomorrow.

The next day he waited for her at the edge of Fisherman’s Wharf, eating clam chowder from a hollowed-out loaf of sourdough, wearing a Mets cap and a creased corduroy sports jacket with a folded newspaper stuffed into one of the pockets. He looked thin, tired, unshaven, grimy, travel-weary, like a man awakening from uneasy dreams at a YMCA or aboard a Trailways bus. He saw her approaching from the direction of the Wharf, cutely dressed in her waitress costume.

He’d done it. It had been fucking hard to get a decent hearing for a book proposal in the present environment; apparently the field of Symbionese Studies was rapidly growing very crowded. Quite an existing library had sprung up in the last year or so, and firsthand reflections didn’t necessarily mean you’d cornered the market. They might have missed their moment. But he’d done it. He showed up, he sat down, he talked. He ate a lunch that required four separate forks. He pretended he’d read Steal This Book . He shared a cab with a man who rejected Gravity’s Rainbow. There was interest. They’d definitely showed an interest.

They were walking through Fort Mason along a footpath on an embankment overlooking the enormous vacant docks and empty warehouse streets below when Susan had advised him that Teko had changed his mind about the book, again. Just a breezy whim that first blew him to one side of the issue and then back to the other? The money I spent, the time I wasted. “What does he want to do then?”