The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 5

“And then, check this out. Mom, Dad, when we get back to the lot I have this brilliant idea. Dad, remember how I had that Walkman in the pocket of my blazer that you were giving me a hard time about? Well, I jump out of the car and show him the Walkman, and I like press one of the buttons like it had been on the whole time, and I say, ‘Look, mister, I just recorded everything you said to me in that car, and that is totally sexual harassment. Not to mention I’m a minor.’ So you know what I made him do? I made him sell me the car for fifteen hundred dollars below list price. I got the Achilles for six and a quarter! Is that awesome or what?”

  Susie laughed with sheer joy and jumped up and down, and she wanted her parents to jump up and down with her, but we were too old and out of shape, and her story was actually pretty depressing.

  Even though I thought it might still emerge that I had abandoned Susie at the door of the salesman’s office, among other things, I feigned happiness, as Jane seemed to be doing, and I said I’d like to take everyone out for a nice celebration dinner, only we’d have to go in Jane’s or Susie’s car because mine was still parked outside the dealership.

  Susie went up to her room, and Jane and I sat down across from each other at the dreaded table in the breakfast nook.

  “What do you make of this?” Jane asked.

  I had my hand over my mouth. I shook my head.

  “Did you meet this fellow, the pervert?”

  I shook my head again.

  “You didn’t see him.”

  “I saw him.”

  “But you didn’t meet him.”

  “Right.”

  “You didn’t really get kicked off the car-hunting team, did you? You resigned, didn’t you?”

  I thought this was it. I saw everything collapsing. “How did you know?”

  “Please,” she said. “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, no,” she said. “I really don’t understand. I believe there’s something . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. She stood up and walked to the window that overlooks our driveway and stared down at Susie’s new car. Then she came back to the table. “Whatever else happened, it’s clear to me that Susie’s story is false,” she said. “Let’s get ready for dinner.”

  I tried to take Jane’s hand and walk up the stairs with her, but she pulled her hand away and went up by herself.

  When I got to the top of the stairs, I heard water running in the bathroom down the hall. Susie was taking a shower, though she had taken one just before we left to buy the car. I have since verified that Susie did indeed pay six and a quarter for the car, but, like Jane, I don’t think it happened the way Susie said it did. Behind the sound of the shower was another sound, a funny noise. I walked down the hall and stood outside the bathroom door and I realized what the noise was. It was Susie sobbing. That means she’s not as good a liar as her father is. Surely this fact alone constitutes a victory for our family.

  DEVOTION

  Adam Langer

  (dĭ-vō’shən) n 1: ardent, often selfless affection and dedication, as to a person or principle; see synonyms at love 2: the act of devoting or the state of being devoted 3: commitment to some purpose; “the devotion of his time and wealth to accumulating a large collection of obscure blues albums”

  I had a fucked-up relationship with my father, but so does everyone, so let’s not get into that. My mother and I get along fine, but she’s no better. Not really.

  Can you tell that I like Springsteen? Did like Springsteen. Can you see me? Cutoff denim jacket, Marlboros in the front pocket, boots. Teachers, they were like “Pass her. Get her the hell out of my class.” Except the one who tried to bone me. Mr. Hull. Wanted to marry me. Kept on pestering me: “Marry me, marry me, marry me.” I only said yes to shut him up. Once we said the vows, I split. I don’t think it was legal anyway, because I lied about my age. He was like, “Where should we spend the honeymoon?” I was like, “Hell with you, pal; I’m honeymooning on my own.”

  It’s about this time that I got the idea that I should hump Bruce Springsteen. I’m not talking about Born in the USA vintage Bruce. I’m talking about Nebraska vintage Bruce. The introspective period—dark songs about killers and the road.

  When I was thirteen or fourteen I had this fantasy that I would marry a killer. Like a Bonnie and Clyde thing. Like a Badlands thing. I used to sit around in my room imitating Martin Sheen: “Suppose I shot ya. How’d that be?”

  I digress.

  We were talking about Bruce. And how I boned him. Not really. That was the fantasy. That was the maturation process—from falling in love with real killers to falling for the guy who sings about them.

  It’s 1983. I’m seventeen years old. And I’m feeling good about my future. It’s summer. I’ve got some money saved up from my job at Friendly’s. They canned me when I told off the manager—this little shit named Scottie Ricket. Scottie was a pathetic little shit with a pencil-thin, blond mustache. He wore those cheap, short-sleeved dress shirts you can see right through after you wash them once, and he’d wear them in colors like sky blue, pale yellow, or beige. Like a beige short-sleeve shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. And stretchy Hagar slacks. And I told him—’cause he was asking for it—because he’d always come in with that real patronizing tone when he was explaining obvious shit. Like he’d tell me “remember to ask if they’ve left room for dessert” or “don’t forget to ask if they want free Coke refills” and he’d always add, “You see why that works?” I’d always say, “Sure, Scottie,” and flip him off behind his back.

  But, I don’t know. I was punchy. So he said some shit. Like “Don’t give ’em extra napkins unless they ask for ’em,” and I didn’t say, “Sure, Scottie.” I said, “Hey listen up you junior college dropout little fuck, if I hear one more piece of patronizing bullshit out of your putrid yap, I’m gonna take this squeeze bottle of syrup and ram it through those Hagar slacks and right up your ass, so why don’t you just keep your sage observations to yourself, motherfucker.”

  So he canned me.

  And I was thankful, frankly. ’Cause to be honest with you, I think I was actually looking to get fired. No, really. But hell, I had my two weeks coming and I had about a grand saved up before I was gonna start up at Princeton.

  Yeah, Princeton. So maybe I lied a little bit. About my test scores and my extracurricular activities and shit like that. It was the ’80s. The era when you could still make up bullshit and not have some tight-ass call you on it and drag you before some investigative committee. The era when you could do a bong hit and people wouldn’t give you that Nancy Reagan “Just Say No” look, the era when you could just go out and bone somebody and not worry that you were gonna die from it. 1983. It was the time of Kajagoogoo, the Tubes, Soft Cell. It was a century ago. People still thought Eddie Murphy was funny. That’s a long fucking time ago.

  But Bruce, man. Bruce was it, man. He was it. And the thing is, I had seen him live a couple of times, like at the Uptown in ’81 and the Horizon when he was starting to do the bigger gigs. And I dug the tunes, but it wasn’t like I was attracted to the dude. Not yet. ’Cause I don’t have that whole starfucker mentality, like Sheila Price who came back one night after blowing Jimmy Page and thought she was hot shit and I was like “Don’t take another step toward me until you disinfect your mouth, ’cause I am not about to breathe in those Led Zeppelin semen germs.” But somehow, the Bruce thing eventually hooked me. It was something about the song “Atlantic City.” The first time I heard it was at the Horizon and when I heard him sing it, I got this weird feeling of what I guess you’d call reverse déjà vu, this feeling that what I was feeling hadn’t happened yet, but it would soon. And that was me humping Bruce Springsteen. Me on top of him.

  Gross, right? Way gross. ’Cause that’s a New Jersey fantasy, a New Jersey mall girl fantasy. I mean I liked guys, but not in a mall girl kind of way, not in a “this gives me validation” kind of way, not in a “boning this guy gets back at my dad” kind of way. I mean, I
told you about my dad. I mean he and I, we’re fucked up, but not like that. It’s just ’cause he’s an asshole; it’s not a sex thing. ’Cause I know chicks like that and it’s like, “Whoa. Your dad’s six foot four and this guy’s six foot four and your dad’s got a beard and this guy’s got a beard and your dad wears Hathaway shirts, too.” Fuck that. I know about that. This is not about that. I’ve boned five or six Chinese guys, so this is not about that.

  I screwed guys because I thought it was funny. And that always intimidated people. I mean, you’d have these guys and I don’t know where they learn this shit, but they’d be turning the lights down low, turning on Marvin Gaye, standing there with two glasses of Chardonnay and body liqueurs. This one guy had body liqueurs; I couldn’t stop roaring. They’d all get those frog-eyed faces going. Eyes all big and sad and dumb and those sexy bedroom voices, saying “I’m so glad we did this.” And I’d be like, “Of course you’re glad; you got a blow job out of it, shithead.” They all were shitheads. There was one cool guy I boned who liked to wear a Nixon mask while we were doing it. But for the most part, shitheads.

  Which is why the idea of boning Bruce Springsteen was so appealing, because you heard those songs on Nebraska and he didn’t sound full of shit. I mean, he probably was, but you figured he was one of those guys who you wouldn’t figure that out about until the fourth or fifth date. Me, I was only planning on one.

  So next thing I know, I’m out on Highway 94, heading north for Milwaukee, driving my girlfriend’s car and I’m playing “Atlantic City” and I’m trying to get to this hotel, this one hotel called, I kid you not, the “Pfister.” I figure this is an omen. It’s where all the rock stars stay. It’s Milwaukee; there’s not much choice.

  Oh, by the way, just as a point of information, can we stop all this muttering about nymphomaniac this and sex addict that? I don’t know where all that got started. Seems to me like some name some asshole thought up to call chicks who slept with everyone but him. Or maybe it was a woman who thought it up. Who knows? Some tight-ass. And well, maybe there are chicks like that, who’re addicted to it, but they shop at Wal-Mart, okay? And well, tell you the truth, they’re probably the ones who want to fuck Bruce Springsteen, too, but you know, Born in the USA Bruce, Tunnel of Love Bruce, “Streets of Philadelphia” Bruce. No one wants to bone “Atlantic City” or Nebraska Bruce. Least of all some dumbshit nympho, if you buy into the terminology. Which, as I’ve already said, I don’t.

  But what the hell; I’m no psychotherapist. I was a West Rogers Park chick with too much energy and too much money in her wallet and nothing to do except follow a fantasy to Milwaukee, so she could get naked and get up on some scrawny folk rock guy with rank cigarette and coffee breath. I mean, he was all right. But naked? Well, not totally naked. Scratch that. I didn’t see him totally naked. I mean, if you see a guy’s dick and balls but he’s still wearing a ratty-ass T-shirt, does that count as naked?

  I better back up.

  It’s no trick to go out and screw some rock guy. I mean, maybe it is, if you’re some nasty scumbag mall chick. I mean, then maybe you’ve gotta content yourself blowing third-rung rockers. Like maybe you can only do Bachman Turner Overdrive or Grand Funk Railroad or Captain and Tennille—I don’t know what the fuck—but if you’re reasonably attractive and if the guy isn’t married or a douchebag, you’re gonna get some play. I mean, you watch that old Beatles footage and you think they’re out boning Nancy Sinatra and Petula Clark and Ed Sullivan, but do you know what rock stars really do? They sit in hotel rooms. They drink whatever’s in the fridge. They watch Batman reruns. They pull their puds. You think there’re a hundred nubile supermodels banging on their doors in Wisconsin? What planet are you from? In general, rock guys are dorks. They’re not poets. They’re not artists. They’re fucking morons.

  I mean, it’s like high school. You’ve got a couple smart ones. But the rest are plodders and dopes. You want to tell me that Paul McCartney’s smart? You want to spend some quality time with Axl Rose? How long is a song, when you think about it? What do you think? About a hundred words? Maybe? So an album’s what? Ten songs? A thousand words? Maybe? Come out with one of those every other year. What’s that? It’s like a word and a half every day. These are not people with a profound range of verbal skills.

  So there’s this potbellied dwarf sitting in the lobby, and he’s wearing a River shirt, and I go up to him and he’s like, “What?” I got right to the point. I said, “I’m here to do Bruce.” He says, “Get a room and come back and see me.” So I get the room and I come back and he’s like, “All right, let me come up and see it.” And I’m like, “What for?” This stumps him. I say, “Look, I’m not screwing you, pal. I’m here to screw your boss, the Boss, so don’t be nosing around sniffing out an appetizer.” He’s like, “But that’s how it works.” So I said, “No, let me tell you how it works. I decide who I screw. I decide when and how I do it. I’m here for Bruce Springsteen and if screwing some zit-faced nineteen-year-old fat shit who spends his spare time fucking his fat, sweaty hands is part of the deal, then you know what? The deal’s off.”

  “Bruce is gonna like you,” he says. “Room 707. He ain’t up there, but he’ll be back for his lunch. He likes having his lunch alone in his room. You can bring it up to him. He’s expecting it at 1:30.”

  “What’s he having?”

  “Turkey and Swiss.”

  He hands me a brown paper bag with mayo grease stains on it.

  “1:30,” he tells me. “Make sure you let him know I got it with the Russian dressing on it, ’cause he always bitches when I forget it.”

  I take the sandwich up to my room and I snarf it down, ’cause what the hell? I’m starved. And his cheap ass should be doing better for himself than turkey and Swiss. 1:30 comes. I knock on the door. Here’s how I’m dressed. Not like a tramp. Well, kind of like a tramp. But I’ve got this innate intelligence that registers on my face when people see me, so what’s trampy on some mall chick doesn’t look trampy on me. I’m not the only one who says this; this is what people tell me. So I’ve got on Levi’s, boots. Black boots. Shirt. White T-shirt. A nice one. Like, a Hanes Beefy-T, sleeves rolled up. I was gonna do the denim jacket, but I don’t want to look like some biker chick.

  So, like, knock knock. Somebody says come on. It’s not Bruce’s voice. I know that. I walk in and there’s some gnarly jagoff in a suit, some stroke, some hanger-on, some pud rock ’n’ roll journalist, I don’t know who it is—someone cut-rate, someone at the bottom of whatever profession he’s in.

  “You have the sandwich?” he asks.

  “I did,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I ate it.”

  He’s dumbfounded.

  “It was rank, too,” I say. “Tell Bruce he wasn’t missing anything.”

  “So what’s in the bag?”

  I take out the slaw and the pickles and the napkin and put them on top of the TV. This guy’s inspecting them, like he’s with the Health Department, picking up the slaw, sniffing it, shifting the pickle from hand to hand, like he wants to know what it weighs. I’m like, “What do you want? And, uh, by the way, who the hell are you?”

  “No,” he says. “Who the hell are you?”

  “No,” I say. “Who the hell are you?”

  “You wanna know who I am?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, “I know who you are. You’re an asshole. That’s who you are. I just want to know who you think you are. I am here to screw Bruce Springsteen. At the very least, I am entitled to a shitty $2.95 sandwich. Now, do I get to screw Bruce or do I get in line behind you?”

  At this moment, the door to the john opens and there he is. I am standing here arguing about a sandwich with some glorified bellboy while Mr. Atlantic Fucking City was sitting on the throne, taking one. And then, he walks out in all his ratty-ass T-shirt, barefoot, dick-swinging-in-the-breeze glory, a folded-up newspaper in his hand. Sports section? I don’t know, maybe. Are you getting the pict
ure? Black T-shirt. Nothing else.

  I have a problem with this. Not even from a hygiene standpoint, which is a whole other issue entirely, but just from a “You’re taking one, you’re reading the sports section, yuck” kind of way.

  “This girl,” the guy tells Bruce, “she ate the sandwich.”

  “A’right,” Bruce says.

  “She left you the pickle and the slaw,” he says.

  “Oh. A’right,” Bruce says.

  “She wants to fuck you,” the guy says.

  “Oh. A’right,” Bruce says. “I don’t really do that kind of thing.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “From the looks of you, you probably don’t.”

  “We could get a meal, though,” he says. “Since you ate the sandwich, we could get a meal.”

  “Sure, why not? What do you have in mind?”

  I am not making this up.

  “There’s a Friendly’s around here, I think,” he says.

  So here I am, at Friendly’s again, which, as you know, is exactly the same everywhere in the country. I mean I’m not talking about the design. I mean the design, yeah, right, all right, the design, I mean, the menus, yeah, right, the logo, yeah, all right. I’m not talking about that. I mean the old geezer with the red St. Louis Cardinals cap eating the Canadian Bacon Deluxe sandwich. The mechanics from the auto shop down the road with grease on their shirts, eating Denver omelets, the little rugrat pair eating muddy cricket sundaes. There is a chick—I kid you not—there is a chick working the tables who is a carbon copy of me. I kid you not. I mean, a little trampier, no doubt. Coulda used a little dental work, I grant you. But fuck, man. Close enough.

  The only thing missing is Scottie Ricket. You know, the little piece of shit, pencil-thin mustache geek manager who canned me? His clone is nowhere to be seen. Until I look at Bruce. Oh my God. It’s Scottie Ricket’s long-lost twin brother. Same height, same build. Holy fucking shit. And I want to screw this guy? I want to screw the manager of Friendly’s? Is this what all fantasies come to?