It's a choice between being dead right now or a minute from right now.
What my folks will find after work is a big naked fetus, curled in on itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. The opposite of a kid hanging himself to death while he jacks off. This is the baby they brought home from the hospital thirteen years ago. Here's the kid they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an M.B.A. Who'd care for them in their old age. Here's all their hopes and dreams. Floating here, naked and dead. All around him, big milky pearls of wasted sperm.
Either that or my folks will find me wrapped in a bloody towel, collapsed halfway from the pool to the kitchen telephone, the ragged, torn scrap of my guts still hanging out the leg of my yellow-striped swim trunks.
What even the French won't talk about.
That big brother in the navy, he taught us one other good phrase. A Russian phrase. The way we say, “I need that like I need a hole in my head,” Russian people say, “I need that like I need teeth in my asshole.”
Mnye etoh nadoh kahk zoobee v zadnetze.
Those stories you hear, about how animals caught in a trap will chew off their leg, well, any coyote would tell you a couple bites beats the hell out of being dead.
Hell . . . even if you're Russian, someday you just might want those teeth.
Otherwise, what you have to do is—you have to twist around. You hook one elbow behind your knee and pull that leg up into your face. You bite and snap at your own ass. You run out of air, and you will chew through anything to get that next breath.
It's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date. Not if you expect a kiss good night.
If I told you how it tasted, you would never, ever again eat calamari.
It's hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got in trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital, my mom said, “You didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock.” And she learned how to cook poached eggs.
All those people grossed out or feeling sorry for me . . .
I need that like I need teeth in my asshole.
Nowadays, people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get all quiet and pissed off when I don't eat the pot roast they cooked. Pot roast kills me. Baked ham. Anything that hangs around inside my guts for longer than a couple hours, it comes out still food. Home-cooked lima beans or chunk light tuna fish, I'll stand up and find it still sitting there in the toilet.
After you have a radical bowel resectioning, you don't digest meat so great. Most people, you have five feet of large intestine. I'm lucky to have my six inches. So I never got a football scholarship. Never got an M.B.A. Both my friends, the wax kid and the carrot kid, they grew up, got big, but I've never weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was thirteen.
Another big problem was, my folks paid a lot of good money for that swimming pool. In the end, my dad just told the pool guy it was a dog. The family dog fell in and drowned. The dead body got pulled into the pump. Even when the pool guy cracked open the filter casing and fished out a rubbery tube, a watery hank of intestine with a big orange vitamin pill still inside, even then, my dad just said, “That dog was fucking nuts.”
Even from my upstairs bedroom window, you could hear my old man say, “We couldn't trust that dog alone for a second . . .”
Then my sister missed her period.
Even after they changed the pool water, after they sold the house and we moved to another state, after my sister's abortion, even then my folks never mentioned it again.
Ever.
That is my family's invisible carrot.
Now you can take a good, deep breath.
Because I still have not.
2
Under the next streetlight stands the Reverend Godless, next to him a square suitcase. It's still early morning enough that every color is black or gray. There, the black fabric of the suitcase is scarred with silver zippers running in every direction, a black Swiss cheese of little pockets and slots, sacks and compartments. Reverend Godless with his face—just red-raw meat around a nose and eyes, steak stitched together with thread and scars, his ears twisted and swollen—his eyebrows are shaved. Then, sketched on with black pencil in two surprised arcs that rise almost to his hairline.
Watching him climb up the bus steps, Comrade Snarky fingers open a button of her jacket. Closing the button, she leans close to the tape recorder tucked in the Earl of Slander's pocket.
Close into the little red RECORD light, Comrade Snarky says, The Reverend Godless is wearing a white blouse. A woman's blouse. With the buttons on the left.
In the dim streetlight, his rhinestone buttons sparkle.
Down the next stretch of road, around the next curve, standing outside the circle of a streetlight, standing back in the shadows, waits the Baroness Frostbite.
First her hand reaches in through the open door of the bus, a normal hand, the fingers yellow where she's held her cigarettes. No wedding ring. The hand sets a plastic makeup case at the top of the steps. Then a knee appears, a thigh, the swell of a breast. A waist belted in a trench coat. Then everyone looks away.
We look at our watches. Or we look out the windows at parked cars and newspaper boxes. Fire hydrants.
Baroness Frostbite brought tubes and tubes of lip wax, she said, for the edges of her mouth. For when they cracked and bled in cold weather. Her mouth, it's just
