It Feels So Good When I Stop Read online

  “It was.” She pointed at me. “You got another one of those?”

  “Of what, beer? Smoke?”

  “Both.”

  “Sure,” I said begrudgingly. As a drinker and a smoker, I knew the code: If your supply is visible—which sadly mine was—you always share when asked. I loosened my grip on the empty bottle and handed her a full one. I didn’t think she was going to pound it on the spot. I watched the beer pass from one receptacle to another, restricted only by gravity and the unfortunate narrowness of the bottle’s opening.

  She swapped the cold, empty bottle for a cigarette.

  “You need a light?”

  “Mmm.” She cupped the flame and leaned into it. The backs of her hands were a multicolored filigree of tattoo ink. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  And then she split.

  My eyes followed the glowing orange tip down the street until it was too small to see. Welcome to Cape Cod, I thought.

  I ARRANGED MY makeshift bed on the barren living room floor, which was covered with a sandy, mange-afflicted gold shag rug. I chose a spot close to a small color television perched on a milk crate that James had set up in the early days of his own separation. I covered myself with a moving blanket and hunkered down.

  I couldn’t sleep, so I started jerking a disinterested dick towards a distant conclusion. I flipped through the wank bank, finally stopping at a love scene starring me and a Bay State Games bronze-medalist pole-vaulter who was in the same Major British Writers study group as me. I couldn’t remember if her name was Catherine or Kathleen, but she went by Cat or Kat, so it didn’t matter. Jocelyn kept crashing the vignette no matter how hard I tried to write her out of it. And then I stopped trying.

  Jocelyn was sitting across from me in an empty bar in Hadley. A torrential downpour was in full swing. It was close to midnight. Our relationship was new. We weren’t even on farting terms yet. We planned on walking through the muddy cornfields beyond the back parking lot, but we never made it. “I’m Your Puppet” was playing on the jukebox. Jocelyn was singing along out of tune. She filled her cheeks with Wild Turkey and motioned for my mouth to meet hers in the middle. When she kissed me, she let some of the booze drain into me.

  As I was coming, it felt almost as good as the real thing. But it had a lonely finish, like a nonalcoholic beer.

  IN THE WINTER OF 1994, I graduated from UMass after four and a half years with a BA in English. I did pretty average; a lot worse than I might have done if I had given the tiniest of fucks about school. I decided to dick around until the summer and not think about my limited prospects, my withering University Health Insurance, and the looming crush of student loan repayment. I picked up three shifts waiting tables at a mediocre Italian restaurant in Amherst called Esposito’s. I ended up working there for almost two years.

  Richie could be charming as all hell, whether he was sober or not. Being decent-looking didn’t hurt. He was decidedly closer to a Dennis than a Randy Quaid. He’d been a waiter at Esposito’s for a couple of years when I got there. I shadowed him my first week. I liked him right of the bat. We both played guitar and were into a lot of t.same music. Neither of us gave a fuck if it was Doris Day or the Frogs. If it was good music, it was good music. On my first night we made tentative plans to do some four-track recording together. He said he had written a ton of songs and already had the best band name: the Young Accuser. He said he’d gotten it from a newspaper article he read about Michael Jackson. All he needed was a band.

  “No shit,” Richie said as he showed me how to fold a napkin into a swan. “I’ve read more books than any professor I ever had.” I never would have made a statement remotely as bold. I knew my education was held together by large fugues and obvious holes. “I’d go toe-to-toe with any of them and win.” Such braggadocio made Richie rub as many people (men) the wrong way as it did (women) the right. I sensed almost immediately that his whole “I couldn’t conform to the bullshit academic mold” claptrap was mostly a smoke screen because he couldn’t hack it. It was one of his flaws that made him approachable to me.

  The owner-chef at Esposito’s was a prick named Lello, whose entire personality can be extrapolated from the following: (1) he loved cocaine even more than he appeared to love himself; (2) literally minutes into my first shift, a black waitress named Suzanne called him on his racist, sexist shit and stormed out. The restaurant was going to be packed because it was Valentine’s Day weekend. Lello was so furious he nearly blew a testicle. He ordered the entire staff into the kitchen, grabbed the biggest, blackest iron skillet off the rack, and screamed, “From now on, whoever calls this pan something other than Suzanne can get right the fuck out.”

  I felt like a real shit for not having the backbone to tell him to fuck himself on the spot. I dusted off the “I really need the money” excuse and fell for it. In the end, when I finally did quit Esposito’s, I merely stopped showing up. In the men’s room there’s a urinal named Kenneth. The one next to that is named after me.

  At the end of the night, after Richie and I performed our setup duties for the next day, we sat at the enormous black marble bar, each drinking an allotted half-priced domestic draft beer. I was still blowing smoke here and there about how much I’d like to tell this Lello character to jam his job up his fat ass.

  Richie made it easy for me to stay weak and still come off like I had principles. “You can’t quit. If you do, the wop wins.” He ordered two neat shots of Jack Daniel’s from the bartender, Rita. Her arms were as hairy as any man’s.

  I pretended to be watching the pour. “Wow,” I said, “those are really something.”

  “Rita knows how to fix a healthy drink.” He slid a ten across the bar.

  Rita winked. “If these won’t get the taste of come out of your mouth, I don’t know what will.” She slid Richie two fives change. He stuffed one of the fives into her tip snifter. We toasted my survival of the first night, then slammed our Jacks. I could feel my esophagus beginning to molt.

  “Yeah,” Richie said, “you can’t quit after one night. Give it a week.”

  With quiet contempt, I searched the dining room for Lello. He was showing a veteran waiter the “real” right way to do something.

  Rita wiped the bar in front of us with her Cain and Abel arms, then disappeared back into the kitchen.

  “Man,” I whispered, “what’s up with her arms?”

  “Arms, nothing.” Richie leaned over the bar to make sure Rita wasn’t kneeling down just out of sight. “I swear to God, her bush is so big and dense. It’s like she’s wearing gorilla panties.”

  I cracked up.

  “It’s like an enormous crown of black broccoli. No, shit, some topiary guy should shape that thing into some low-income fucking housing.” Richie rattled off another few hilarious suggestions for what should be done with Rita’s pubic hair. He was killing me.

  Rita’s head appeared through a window in the swinging kitchen doors.

  “Chill,” Richie said. “She’d be bummed if she heard us.”

  “Really?”

  Rita started restocking the beer fridge. She poked her head over the bar. She could sense something was up. “What the fuck did you do?”

  Richie smiled like a guilty schoolboy whose tracks were pretty well covered. “What are you talking about?”

  “Exactly,” she accused. “With that grin on your face? You must have done something.”

  “You’re paranoid is what you are.”

  “You’d better steer clear of this one,” she said to me.

  “Just do your job,” Richie barked.

  Rita flipped him off, then refilled our drinks when the coast was clear.

  A few of the frazzled waitstaff were reorganizing the dining room at high speed. Patti Smith’s “Frederick” was coming over the sound system. A chubby, middle-aged waiter named Dennis was fitting a matchbook under the leg of a table with polio.

  Richie called over to him. “Hey, Menace. You know the band An
al Cunt?”

  “Sounds yummy,” Dennis said, camping it up for us. He had nico-tinted, thinning blond hair and acne scars on his temples.

  Richie and Dennis were friends. They were big basketball fans and used to go watch UMass games together before the team got good and tickets scarce. I hated basketball. Too much contact with other people’s sweat.

  “They have a tune called ‘Pepe, the Gay Waiter.’ I think you might like it.”

  “Tape it for me.” Dennis meant it. Richie meant it when he said he would. Dennis pushed on the table to gauge whether it had been cured.

  “You think Camby’s gonna go pro?” Richie asked.

  “I would. Why risk millions for a degree from UMass? What if Dr. J had stayed and blown a knee or something?”

  “Bet you’ve blown a few knees in your day, huh, Menace?”

  Dennis chortled, then moved to the next table, also checking it for wobbliness. It was after midnight, just about that time when restaurant people want to get the fuck home, get the fuck drunk, get the fuck fucked, or any combination of the three. Richie took a stolen langos tino from his breast pocket and popped into his mouth.

  “Yeah, you can’t quit yet,” he said. “Stick around. Make a little scratch and rob that fat fuck blind.” He spit out a speck of shellfish, which I could still feel minutes after I’d wiped it from my cheek. “You know anyone who needs to rent a room?”

  A MONTH LATER Richie and I were sharing the second-floor apartment in a melting Victorian on Amity Street. A few more years of student tenants, and the whole house would need to be gutted or demolished.

  When I moved in, my room smelled like a Habitrail cage. The windowsills were coated with a gritty plaque that made my nails black. The light fixture on the ceiling was full of roasted bugs. There was a poster of three shapely women in bathing suits—their six breasts abreast to form the Budweiser symbol—tacked up, alarmingly, at a height corresponding to that of an average man’s crotch. I removed the poster—carefully—revealing a series of steel-toed-boot holes. When I asked Richie if he knew what it was all about, he said the previous tenant, Gary, was trying to hide the booze-inspired damage so that he wouldn’t lose his security deposit. Richie suggested I put the poster back up when it was time for me to move out.

  Gary also left behind a twin mattress because it had been there when he moved in. Perfectly acceptable shit-pit protocol: New Guy inherits Old Guy’s cast-offs, milks them for use, and leaves them behind for Next Guy. I removed the gray fitted sheet. The mattress fabric was stained so extensively, it looked like a batik tapestry hippie girls hang on their dorm walls. I flipped it over, and it wasn’t as bad. That was the side I slept on.

  The bathroom was a dewy terrarium of unplanned growth, and Richie’s room looked like the inside of a fourth-hand customized van he wasn’t planning on selling anytime soon.

  We hung out mostly in the kitchen because it was more spacious than the other rooms combined. It was connected to the rest of the apartment by a dark, lumpy hallway the length of a landing strip at an international airport. My rent was two-fifty plus utilities. I couldn’t see myself being able to afford it for too long.

  The property manager was a guy named Arn who had lived in Amherst most of his fifty-odd years. Arn was marginally sexier than Ernest Borgnine. His family had come over from the Ukraine when he was a kid, but he still spoke with a heavy accent. He lived alone in the casket-sized apartment someone with a flare for architectural discontinuity had added to the first floor.

  “Let’s see if Geppetto wants a hit,” Richie said. We were standing on the failing back porch, getting clobbered by purple-haired bong hits. Richie yelled down to the garage where Arn was working on fuck-knows-what. (He definitely wasn’t milling new crown molding.) A circular saw went mute. Arn’s bloodshot nose—followed by the rest of his bloodshot face—appeared in the garage doorway. Richie hoisted an imaginary broomstick-thick joint to his mouth and took a greedy toke. He knew how to make it look delicious because he meant it. The Arn man almost always cameth.

  We got high as pipers. The kind of stoned where you think you might puke. It was a good thing I was standing, because an all-weather patio chair that had looked so inviting minutes before was starting to resemble a wolf trap.

  “ ‘You’ is a real ball-breaking bitch,” Richie said.

  “Wha?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed the music at all until Richie pointed to the floor. After that it came at me like lasers in stereo. From the apartment below ours, Bono Vox bellowed that he couldn’t live with you or without you. It was a tough spot to be in. And though Bono tried to sound like a man in control of the situation, it was obvious that “You” held all the cards.

  “ ‘You’ should make up her goddamn mind.”

  “What if ‘You’ is a dude?” I asked. “All rock stars like a cock every now and then.”

  “Then ‘You’ should make up his goddamn mind.”

  “It’s definitely a broad,” Arn said, death-row serious. Those were the first words he’d offered up voluntarily, maybe ever. Richie and I weed-laughed. Arn failed to see the humor in any of it. He tried to scratch an itch deep in the geometric center of his head. Richie started imitating him. My chest burned from laughing and coughing. Arn finally left us there when it was clear we weren’t about to stop laughing. He descended the stairs like a deep-fried Slinky toy. Richie kept imitating him after he was gone, rubbing the roof of his mouth maniacally while making increasingly more retarded-looking faces. I begged him to quit it, but he wouldn’t.

  I WOKE UP on my stomach, using my foot to either feel the rug next to me for Jocelyn or defend myself from her. I must have been moving frantically in my sleep because I burned the knuckles on a couple of my toes. I was trying to decide whether or not I should sit up and investigate them when I heard a very un-Brooklyn, all-natural cracking noise. I rolled onto my side. A large maple tree filled most of the picture window, naked in the wind like the Statue of Liberty stripped of her green clothes and skin.

  Fuck New York.

  I wondered if it was possible to avoid it for the rest of my life. A guy can say with some degree of certainty while passing through What’s-his-nuts, Montana, on a bus, that, God willing, he’ll never be back that way. But for him to make that claim about New York City—even if he doesn’t have a wife there—is hubristic.

  I picked at the wound where the carpet had separated from the baseboard. For the time being at least, I wasn’t going anywhere near New York. I had done my part by prying open the lioness’s mouth. There was no way I was going to stick my fucking head in. I rolled onto my back and gave in to my growing hunger for a cigarette.

  The TV was still cooking from the night before. I jacked the volume from zero to full with an unbridled, upward flick of the toe. A long, distorted trumpet blast from an elephant spanked the bare walls of the empty living room.

  “Nooooo,” I pleaded with the TV. I turned the volume down before the set could explode. My eye was caught by a visually pleasing, grainy 1960s nature documentary. The auteur was clearly a fan of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. Some elephants were dancing and laughing as they sprayed muddy water over one another’s wrinkled hulls. An orchestra of piccolos, trombones, xylophones, and tym pani swelled to a crescendo as a calf wading shoulder-deep in the slop vanished beneath celebratory salvos. I was transfixed, like a toddler at his first puppet show.

  In the next scene an alpha male gibbon was about to join his face to the private parts of the monkey of his choice. This was no ordinary prelude to a kiss. The alpha strode in super slow-mo toward his mark. She stood on her haunches, her business end swollen and red like an Italian cherry pepper. The alpha puckered up, advancing with a brutal authority not witnessed on film since Bogie first kissed Bacall. Just before the moment of impact, the editor cut to a shot of a chimpanzee called Henry the Eighth tenderizing a piece of fruit by firing it down at a rock from high up in a tree.

  “C’mon, Henry. C’mon, old boy,” the overdubbed narra
tor cheered.

  An overdubbed chimp’s voice squealed in response. The chemistry between man and beast was so convincing, I could imagine them perched on the same limb or BBC soundstage.

  “I am not an animal,” I said. I had another smoke, then dozed back to sleep.

  When I woke for the second time, my breath smelled like a bum’s pants. I got up and headed for the can. I felt hungover, but I was just decompressing from the bender of having deserted my wife.

  At least Pamela and James don’t seem to hate each other anymore, I thought. By mistake, I opened the closet next to the bathroom. It was empty except for some universally bluish gray floor lint and a coat hanger with a paper-covered fuselage.

  Everything in the bathroom—the toilet, tub, tiles and sink—was a faded pink and well past its prime. Five grand in improvements might have made them fifteen on resale. Pamela said getting rid of the place and moving on with her life as soon as possible were her top priorities. She and Roy moved into a newish two-bedroom condo in Plymouth. She wanted to be closer to our parents, which seemed like a terrible idea to me.

  I owned no property to speak of. I had reluctantly moved from Amherst, Massachusetts, to Brooklyn to live with Jocelyn two weeks before we eloped. All I brought with me was a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar and a soft maroon suitcase. The only remotely durable good Jocelyn and I owned together was a Mini Shop-Vac we’d bought from the Astor Place Kmart. I waited until we got to the front of the line before I gave her my half of the cash. Jocelyn took the money, and it felt like my arm went with it. She handed the checkout girl her Visa, and it came back bloody: our domestic hymen officially torn to shreds.

  The pink paint on the bathroom walls was many shades brighter where a mirrored medicine cabinet had hung. It was a relief not to have to look at myself. I started to feel like a genuine gaping asshole, picturing Jocelyn levitating along Twenty-third Street back to our honeymoon suite, gripping a six-pack and some takeout: She swings the heavy, fireproof door open. I don’t tango naked out of the bathroom with a fresh rubber in my teeth. I don’t glide back from the ice machine with a bottle of champagne rising from the bucket like an emerald swan. Just as my getaway train lurches away from the platform, Jocelyn reads my note and falls off the bone like piping-hot Peking duck.