It Feels So Good When I Stop Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Joe Pernice

  Meat Is Murder: A Novella

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  2009

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Csopyright © 2009 by Joe Pernice

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pernice, Joseph T., date.

  It feels so good when I stop : a novel / Joe Pernice.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-13338-5

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet

  addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes

  any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further,

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  For Laura and Sammy

  This is the place where I made my best mistakes.

  —Elvis Costello

  Part 1

  October 1996

  “I HAVE CANCER from working with boat glue. Lung cancer,” James said, as if telling me he liked toast. Wheat toast. Just like that, thoughts of my troubles with Jocelyn receded.

  “Jesus Christ, James, are you shitting me?” I asked, flicking my smoke to the sandy pavement, inches from the outer reaches of his yellow lawn. I thought, That’s it. I’m quitting.

  “I wish I was, my friend. I wish I was.” He soothed his temples with the tips of his fingers.

  “That’s horrible. Does my sister know?”

  “I haven’t figured out how I’m going to tell her.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I should have taken better care of myself when I was young.”

  “But you’re only thirty-eight, for chrissake.”

  I was thirteen years younger than James, but he could have easily pounded the living shit out of me. He was six feet two and looked like an off-brand version of the guy on the Brawny paper towel package. When he was on the upside of a sneeze, his lungs swelled like those of a whale preparing to dive. He fixed boats for a living. His arms were strung with an overkill of lean muscle. It was embarrassing.

  “Yeah, well, anyway, I should have taken better care of myself. Take my advice”—he motioned with his chin toward the smoldering butt. A Century 21 For Sale sign squeaked in the breeze—“I always thought I’d have more time, you know? Now they tell me I’ll be lucky to make forty.” He leaned, defeated, against the equally terminal baby-blue Chevy Suburban with boat in tow. Both vehicles were still registered in my sister’s name.

  “What are you telling me here? I mean, are you like ...?” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. He touched my shoulder, and it moved me that he, in his condition, was trying to comfort me.

  “Am I what, dying?”

  I nodded.

  He inhaled deeply for strength. “Nah, I’m just fucking with you.” He picked up my smoke and resuscitated it. “Come on. Give me a hand covering this prick.”

  I didn’t need the mind-fuck, but I did need a place to stay; somewhere I wouldn’t have to answer a lot of questions while I got my shit in a pile. If I had to be around someone, James was better than most. He’d rather fake cancer for a laugh than pick your brain.

  “Get on the starboard side,” he barked.

  “Which side is that?”

  “The one opposite me.” A good chunk of his bust stuck out above the trailer-mounted boat. He unfolded a plastic tarp. “Hey, you hear the one about the faggot ensign that got busted down to seaman?”

  “Yes.”

  “He got caught swabbing a rear admiral’s poop deck. Get it?”

  I nodded. With my smoke still burning in the crotch of his fingers, my sister’s soon-to-be ex-husband pointed at me and said, “Seriously, the best advice I can give you is this: Die at the curb.”

  “Isn’t that a Wesley Snipes movie?”

  “If it isn’t, it should be.” He draped the tarp over the Switchcraft, showing as much respect for it as a living soldier would for a dead comrade. A sharp gust blew in from Opal Cove and passed through my hair, making me feel bald. James held down the billowing blue plastic. “Trust me,” he said. “If you’re walking alone along Tre mont Street at two in the morning, and a car pulls up, and some dirtbag tells you to get in or he’s going to shoot, well, fuck that noise. Tell him to shoot. If he had a gun, he would have been wagging it in your face already.”

  “Hmm,” I said, trying to prompt the least passionate response from him. I wanted for us to finish covering the boat and for him to be on his way. I held a wily corner while he laced a nylon cord through aluminum eyelets that had been dulled by oxidation.

  James and my sister Pamela were splitting custody of their only kid, an eighteen-month-old named Roy. I had already seen Roy make the same determined face James was making just then as we winterized the boat he had deluded himself into thinking he could afford.

  “And if by some friggin’ miracle he does have a gun, you’re better off dying at the curb.” James stopped lacing and pointed an X-Acto knife at me. “Because you know that fucker has something worse in mind for you.” He looked into the middle distance and thought on it. “Some sick Viet Cong shit like breaking a glass rod in your cock or stuffing a yard of barbed wire up your ass.” He made an upwardly thrusting motion with his hairy, balled-up hand. The place where his wedding band had been for six years was still lighter than the rest of him. I had hardly been in direct sunlight in the three days since Jocelyn and I got married.

  “You want to be found like that, naked, stuffed in a fifty-gallon chemical drum in a storage shed in Revere? How do you think that would go over with Carl and Lucy?”<
br />
  “Not so good.”

  “Not so good? They’d be friggin’ crushed. Your mother would slit her own throat to kill the pain. And Carl? Well, shit, he’d let her.”

  Since those were my parents he was talking about, I started to gather up a comeback, but I just didn’t have the energy to get into it with him.

  James and I were never exactly friends. He was generally a decent guy. He’d jump in the icy river without thinking and save the drowning truck driver. But, fuck me, if you didn’t agree with him when it came to what was what, he’d go on one of his correction trips and figuratively step on your throat until you declared yourself saved.

  I guess I can understand on one level why Pamela was attracted to James. Older guy. Independent. Something to say—right or wrong—about everything. Physically imposing. Good father specimen. All Pamela wanted to be was a mother. She said so a number of times; said so with surety and—what seemed to me to be—a lack of ebullience. It was as if she’d said, “You know what? I want to take a cruise.” I’m not sure why, but it was embarrassing for me to hear her talk about wanting to be a mother. I told her there were plenty of better things she could do with her life than be just a mother.

  Pamela had barely enough gas in the tank to get through two years at Massasoitt Community College. Since the time she was twenty, she worked as an administrative assistant for the Town of Mashpee. Before she got mixed up with James, she dated electricians or guys who drove snowplows for the town. She was four years older than me, and for most of my life she looked out for me. When I got accepted to a “real” college, I started trying to treat her like I was the older one.

  I faked a loud shiver, hoping it would jar James onto a topic with less spice. It was late October on Cape Cod, and I was underdressed. A shiver was easy to come by.

  As he executed the moves of a complex, nautically themed knot, James said, “That’s my real advice to you. Die. At. Thee. Curb.”

  I started longingly squeezing one of the boat’s white vinyl headrests. As it slowly sprang back to its full size, I replayed one of the many dry-run breakups between Jocelyn and me.

  I had gone down to New York to visit her for the weekend. Sunday was Father’s Day. The holiday was like a giant elephant turd in the room. Even dead, her old man was remarkably good at being a tyrant. She never got the chance to tell him off the way she had no problem telling me off.

  We finally scraped ourselves from bed late on Saturday afternoon. We took the F train from Brooklyn uptown to Second Avenue and had lunch at B&H Dairy. A giant fan drove a vortex of warm air into the room, overwhelming the tiny space. Our napkins kept flying off the counter. The meal started out tenderly enough. We were debating which salad was better, whitefish or tuna. Before Jocelyn was able to convince me that tuna was where it’s at, she ditched the argument altogether. She said she was just as big a hypocritical asshole as me for eating what was once another living thing. I brought up corn, and wasn’t that a living thing? She said she didn’t feel great about killing anything—plant or animal—for food. I told her to give me a fucking break. Things got meaner and more personal very quickly.

  Just because all sorts of shit happens all the time in New York doesn’t mean people don’t like seeing it when it does. A couple fighting in a restaurant is almost as entertaining as a medical emergency or a fire.

  I kept telling Jocelyn to keep her voice down. She told me to grow up. She said people in “adult” relationships yell, and sometimes the yelling takes place in public. I told her to lighten up for once. She slammed some money on the counter and told me to go fuck myself. I told her I’d do just that. She was wearing a white German Air Force tank top and a denim miniskirt with no stockings. As she got up to leave, I could hear the back of her thighs peel off the revolving vinyl seat like a Colorform separating from its glossed cardboard tableau. I finished my bowl of mushroom barley soup, trolling for comradeship in the droopy faces of two old guys speaking Polish.

  I mumbled all the way to Port Authority and caught the next bus back to Amherst. I renewed my often-broken vow to remain broken up. When I got home there were eight messages on my machine from Jocelyn. They ran the gamut, from viciously accusatory to weepy and contrite. She even went as far as confessing to having “hooked up” with a coworker named Geoff; he pronounced it “Joff.” She said it was after the Freedy Johnston gig at Fez. Geoff told her he knew she was spoken for, but he could let himself fall in love with her, no problem. Just say the word. I knew she was probably lying, but I couldn’t help imagining the worst. In her final good-bye, she begged me to make the shrinking remainder of my life remarkable because I deserved no less. She asked me not to call her because I had to let her get beyond me.

  The fuck I did.

  I caught the next bus back to Port Authority and showed up exhausted and crazy at her apartment in Park Slope. She was a beautiful mess. She’d just dyed her hair the bloodiest red she’d worn to date. She looked like a Breathless-era Jean Seberg with a mortal head wound. She asked me what I was doing there. I said I wanted to tell her in person that I knew it wouldn’t make her happy, but if it did, she and Geoff could fuck each other deep into their twilight years. She slapped my face. My glasses came to rest beneath a small red stepladder used for holding potted plants. She broke down. She threw herself into my arms and begged me not to cut her loose. She said she could be good. Just give her a chance. I told her she was good. I am? You’re the greatest. No, you are. I rubbed the back of her neck, twisting the fine under-hairs into forgetful knots. Within two minutes, we were fantastically make-up-fucking each other back into our ever-deepening mess.

  I COULD SEE by the discomfort on James’s face that he could see the discomfort on my own face.

  “I sure as fuck don’t want to live here anymore,” he said. “But you’re welcome to crash until the place sells.”

  I started to feel guilty for thinking he was anything but bighearted.

  Seagulls passing overhead blitzed the partially covered boat. James reached up to strangle any one of them floating high above the spindly treetops. “Friggin’ sky rats.” He wiped the bird shit with the sleeve of his Dress Gordon flannel shirt. “So, Pamela tells me you and Jocelyn got hitched Friday, and you’re already splitting up?”

  “Pretty messed up, huh?”

  He pulled firmly on the nylon cord to test the integrity of his knot. “I don’t know. Marriage and divorce are two of the best things a man can do for himself.”

  IT WAS DARK by seven o’clock. Two months earlier East Falmouth had been a madhouse of vacationers who couldn’t afford to buy or rent farther out on the island. Now the town was nearly deserted.

  Before heading back to his furnished separation pad in Orleans, James slipped out and bought me a case of Miller High Lifes, a pack of Marlboro reds, and an orange lighter.

  “You can’t smoke ’em if you can’t friggin’ light ’em, right?”

  “Thanks, man, but I don’t think I have enough cash to cover all this.”

  “Eh, don’t sweat it. It’s not like I gave you one of my livers.” He swung the case of beer to me like we were members of the bucket brigade. “Welcome aboard.”

  I SAT ON the screen porch in the crisp autumn night and watched a few random lights reflected on Opal Cove just beyond a row of ranch houses and summer cottages opposite my sister’s.

  When I’d bolted from our honeymoon suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I left a note on the floor where Jocelyn would see it. It said, “I’m sorry.”

  I drained a beer and swallowed back a belch. From outer space they can shoot a pimple on a nomad’s bag while he’s taking a leak in the desert. Hiding out on Cape Cod did not exactly qualify me for “off the grid” status. If Jocelyn wanted to find me, she could.

  I lit the next smoke with the end of the last one, then extinguished the butt in the backwash at the bottom of a bottle. I could hear a single boat motor shrinking in volume as its propeller chewed the water’s epidermis, pushing both boat and
contents in the direction of Gay Head.

  I drank another beer, and was about to go inside for the night, when I caught sight of a shadowy form moving up the street. It appeared to be hugging its midsection as if it were privately suffering from indigestion or a knife wound. I wasn’t overwhelmingly compelled to involve myself in anyone else’s trauma, but if whoever-the-fuck- it-was died while I was hiding inside, well, shit, what kind of person would that make me? I’d stay put until it passed out of my airspace. After that, it was someone else’s problem.

  When the body entered the circle of streetlight adjacent to my sister’s driveway, I could tell it was a woman. Her Kelly green track jacket and purple Doc Martens hummed. She stopped momentarily and straightened up when she spotted me watching her from the porch. She slipped back into the darkness, and when she emerged, she was coming up the walkway, straight for me. I was more surprised than anything. I mean, if something happened—unless she had a gun or something—I felt pretty confident that I could take her. I tightened my grip on an empty bottle just in case.

  She came up to the bottom step. I made her to be in her mid-thirties. She had a round face, capped by a grown-out black China-doll bob. Her steamy breath left her in truncated puffs. Both legs of her jeans were wet up to just below the knee, as if she’d been standing on the beach long after the tide had begun to roll in.

  Her voice was raspy, like Brenda Vaccaro’s. “Who are you?” she asked.

  I could tell she wasn’t straddling the peak of Mount Shitfaced, but she was either on her way up or at the corresponding point coming down the other side. I was actually slightly amused. “Who am I?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Who are you?”

  She nodded, like that was a reasonable answer. “Marie.” She pointed in the direction she’d been moving. “From there.”

  I looked at the blemished blackness into which she was headed. “That’s nice.”