J. Lennon - The Funnies

It was ten after eight. I knocked on Pierce’s door. I could hear him in there, breathing, and decided to just go in.

“Howdy,” he said with factitious cheer.

“Bitty and Maas are picking us up in twenty minutes,” I said. “Are you getting dressed?”

He was wearing a pair of white boxer shorts, smoking a cigarette and running his hand over his chest. “My skin feels fake. Everything feels fake,” he said. He looked up at me with real despair. “I can’t go. I feel like a fraud.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette of my own. Amanda didn’t smoke, so I didn’t either, usually, but here it felt right. With Pierce, trust was a precarious thing. “How’s it been lately?”

He shrugged. “Not so bad. I’m on these pills.” He gestured in an indefinite direction, away, with his hand. “They get rid of the extra people, but I never feel like myself anymore. My skin is like, numb.”

Pierce did not hear voices, per se, as many people with his illness apparently do, but he had always talked about getting out of the crowd or getting away from all the hubbub when there was almost nobody around. Once, I took the subway back from the Italian Market just as a Phillies game was letting out, and the crowd in my car was enormous and loud, and I immediately thought of Pierce. I figured that feeling was what he was talking about.

“We really have to get moving,” I told him.

He shook his head. “He isn’t going to leave me anything,” he said. “He’s going to yank it all out from under me, I can just feel it. The house is going to get sold and I’m going to be on the street.” He sucked on his cigarette with eerie calm, and the smoke seemed to invigorate him. “I’m not going to fucking Trenton for that.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He ignores me, man. We haven’t spoken in something like a year. I don’t even exist.”

I took a moment to digest this. “You’ve been living together all this time, and you haven’t talked to him? In a year?”

“Nope. Isn’t that nuts?”

I agreed that it was very strange. Pierce said, “Oh, Jesus, this is just worthless. I don’t know why we’re even talking. You should get out of here, really. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

After a minute, I took the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it in the ashtray. Then I did the same with mine. I went to his closet and pulled out the cleanest jeans and T-shirt I could find. I tossed the shirt onto his chest. He just let it lie there. I bent over his feet and started pulling the jeans onto him. Finally, he said, “Oh, fer Chrissake,” swung his legs off the bed like they were a couple of prosthetics, and pulled the jeans on himself. When it looked like he’d gotten things more or less under way, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. The mirror was so thickly stratified with dust that I could barely see myself. I cleared a hole in the grime, the way I would in a clean mirror steamed, and my hand came away greasy and gray.

Pierce walked in yawning while I was washing my hands. He shut his mouth fast when he noticed the hole. He leaned forward until his nose was nearly touching the mirror, and stared at himself for a full minute. Then, having done nothing else, he turned and left the bathroom.

* * *

“You’re wearing that?” Bitty said from the passenger seat, apparently to both of us. I noticed that the clothes I had picked out for Pierce were almost identical to the ones I had earlier pulled from my own bag.

“I wish people would stop asking me that,” I said, too quickly. Bitty was wearing a businesslike dress in sort of an unbleached flour color, and pearls. Mike Maas had a suit on, but no tie. He was about two inches shorter than Bitty.

“Okay, whatever,” she said.

Mike was the kind of bad driver who believes with all his heart that he is the only good driver on the road. This particular type of driver drives fast because he thinks he can do so safely, and does not use turn signals because they are irrelevant and inefficient. Those driving slowly are doing so because they don’t trust their own abilities, which are scant. I’d once had a roommate who explained all this to me. He too was this kind of driver.

A gravel truck was traveling the speed limit in front of Mike and Bitty’s Toyota 4-Runner. Every couple of minutes a piece of gravel clicked off the windshield. After a while Mike had had enough. “This is bullshit,” he said, and moved to pass, accelerating violently, keeping his eyes focused straight ahead. Bitty glanced out the passenger window, presumably for a look at the man who had caused the delay. The man wasn’t looking back. Mike jerked the car over to the right lane, then leaned heavily into his seat like a monarch who has just ordered somebody beheaded.

Trenton hummed dully beneath a hazy hot sun and some half-assed thunderheads that looked like invading UFOs from a cheap sci-fi movie. Mike seemed to know where the parking spaces were; he careened down a maze of one-way streets to a parking meter that might as well have had his name printed on it.

“Got quarters?” he said to Bitty, and she dug into her purse. To my surprise, Pierce produced several quarters from his pocket and passed them to Mike, who stared at them briefly before lunging from the car and plugging them into the meter.

We walked. “You know where we’re going?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Mike Maas. “It’s near my building.”

“So you work in Trenton.”

“Uh huh.”

We walked several blocks in the heat. Pierce didn’t seem bothered by it; he was the only one of us whose forehead wasn’t brilliant with sweat. At an Art Deco building that looked uncannily like an enormous jukebox, Mike pulled open a heavy glass door and plunged inside. Bitty jumped forward and caught the door as it closed behind him, and she held it open for me and Pierce. I thanked her and she raised her eyebrows.

We took an elevator to the sixth floor. The doors opened into a wide carpeted hallway. Before us was an empty reception desk and a padded bench, each covered in the same carpet that was on the floor, a dusty sort of gray. I imagined that it hid dirt nicely. My mother was sitting alone on the bench.

“Mommy!” said Bitty. She sprung from the elevator toward her and planted a noisy kiss on her cheek. My mother’s eyes flapped open and she shied away from Bitty, startled.

“For the love of Christ!” she said.

“Mommy, it’s me, Bitty.”

Mother squinted. “Ah, Bitty,” she said, though it wasn’t clear if this was, finally, recognition, or simply a conversational habit she had adopted to avoid embarrassment.

I went to her while Pierce and Mike loitered before us, their hands in their pockets. “Hey, Mom,” I said. “It’s Tim. Do you remember me?”

“Yep,” she said.

“Okay. Are you doing all right?” I sat down on the bench opposite Bitty, who clutched Mother’s right hand as if it were a baby sparrow.

“They came and got me out of bed,” she said.

“Are you tired?”

“I was, but now I’m pretty much awake.”

“That’s good.”

“So what brings you here?” Her voice was bright, the way it might be for a pleasant but unexpected guest.

“I’m here to hear Dad’s will.”

She frowned. “He was going to leave me that old breakfront. But you know he never did? That really burns me, even to this day. Julia got it, the little hussy.”

Bitty leaned over her and gave me a look. “Why don’t we go in, Mommy?”

“Well, all right,” she said, dragging herself to her feet. She shook us both off. “I’m not infirm, you know.”

But of course she was. She teetered for a moment, like Wile E. Coyote suspended, by the power of his own ignorance, above a yawning chasm, then buckled. Bitty and I caught her by the arms. Her bones pulled against my fingers through her thin skin, and she said, “Ouch.”