Table of Contents
Dedication
Prologue—Simon’s House of Lipstick
A Hot, Dark Yes
Tunica Molesta
The Moon in the Man
Petras
Washing the Buffalo
Feed Me to Your Sister
Celadon
Knee-Deep in Sunday Suits
A Paper Trumpet
The Dinosaur Prayer
Zi Cong Baby Palace
Drownstairs
Brogsma
Epilogue
GLASS SOUP
Jonathan Carroll
To—
Jeffrey Capshew
Martina Darnell
Alice Kricheli
the most wonderful friends
Prologue—Simon’s House of Lipstick
Haden was in trouble again. Big surprise, huh? So what else was new, right? That man wouldn’t have known he had a pulse unless the IRA was closing in, his ex-wife was circling his field with a squadron of divorce lawyers, or a rabid dog had just bitten him on the dick.
When he opened his eyes that morning this is what immediately filled his mind: he had no money to pay the bills on his desk. His car was dying of three different kinds of automotive cancer. He had to lead a city tour today and if he didn’t do it well this time, he would likely be fired.
Earlier in his life it was okay when Haden lost a job because there was always another around somewhere. But now, like the last pair of socks in the drawer, there were no more left. He had to wear this one with the big hole in the toe or else go barefoot, and barefoot meant even more trouble.
Sighing, he threw off the thin purple blanket he’d bought at a Chinese discount store after his wife left him and took everything, including the blankets. But she was right to leave because he was a dog in every way except loyalty. No, that’s not fair. To call Haden a dog was to insult canines. Call him a rat, a weasel; call him a disease with a head. Simon Haden was not a nice man, despite the fact he was a very handsome one.
His face had been the downfall of not only innumerable trusting women, but also onetime friends, used car dealers who gave him a better deal than they should have, and former bosses who were proud for a while to have such a handsome guy working for them.
Why do we always, always fall for good looks? Why are we never immune to them? Is it optimism or stupidity? Maybe it’s just hope—you see someone pretty and the sight convinces you that if they can exist, then things are right in the world.
Uh huh.
Haden used to say women don’t want to fuck me, they want to fuck my face and he was right. But that was history. Now few women wanted to fuck any part of him. Oh sure, sometimes one down at the end of a bar who’d had too much to drink and begun to see double saw two Hadens and thought he looked like a movie star whose name she couldn’t remember at the moment. But that was rare. Now he usually drank alone and went home alone. He was a shallow, self-absorbed middle-aged man with a fading face and an empty bank account, who gave guided tours of a city that was no longer his friend.
Why a tour guide? Because it was mindless work once you got the hang of it. And the tourists he led were so interested in what he said. Haden never got over how grateful these people were. They made him feel like he was giving them his city rather than just pointing out its sites.
Once in a while a good-looking woman would be part of a tour group. They were like an extra tip dropped in Haden’s hand. What a wonderful guide he was on those days! Witty and informative, he knew everything they wanted to know. And what he didn’t know, he made up. That was simple because he had been doing that sort of thing his whole life. His audience never knew the difference. Besides, his lies were so imaginative and interesting. Years later while looking at snapshots of their trip, people would say, “See the dog in that portrait? It lived to be twenty-eight years old and was so loved by the Duke that its gravestone is as big as his.”
A lie of course, but an interesting one.
Maybe there would be a pretty woman today. Gripping the sink with both hands, Haden stared into the bathroom mirror and said a little prayer: Let there be a beautiful female face today in that crowd of blue hairs, hearing aids, and TV-sized eyeglasses. In his mind he saw them all—saw their cream-colored crepe-soled shoes the size of small hydrofoils, the permapressed leisure suits a thousand years out of fashion. He heard their loud voices full of whines and never-ending questions—where’s the castle, the toilet, the restaurant, the bus? Was one beautiful face asking so much? A daughter along for the ride, a nubile granddaughter, someone’s nurse, anything to spare him a day surrounded by the House of Lipstick. He said those words slowly into the mirror, as if he were an actor learning his lines. Today he was guiding a group of people from the House of Lipstick. What was that, a store that sold only lipstick? Or a business that manufactured it? He would know more when he opened the envelope given to him at work, detailing the job.
He smiled, imagining twenty old people with lipstick-smeared lips, all very attentive to what he was saying. Glistening red lips, the color of a clown’s nose or a dog’s rubber ball. Sighing, he picked up his toothbrush and began to prepare for the day.
Because Simon Haden was a very vain man, his small closet was bursting with the best clothes—Avon Celli cashmere sweaters, one-two-three-four Richard James suits, one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar belts. He certainly had good taste and style, but neither had helped him much over the years. Yes, they had enabled him to fool some of the people some of the time. But sooner or later everyone, even the dumbbells, figured Haden out and then invariably he was out: out of a job, out of a marriage, out of chances.
What’s most interesting about people like him, even more than
