It Feels So Good When I Stop Read online

  I gathered some foul-tasting saliva to the front of my mouth, spat into the sink, and examined it for blood. During some of our breakups, I had seen Jocelyn do things like bite herself on the back of the hand while crying, pull out keepsake-sized tethers of hair, and defenestrate objects of varying worth from her fifth-floor apartment. I feared this time I might have killed her.

  It’s not your fucking fault. If she kills herself over this, she’s got bigger fucking problems than your leaving her. My conviction was wobbly, like I was the sounding board for a happened-upon old acquaintance who knew I knew he knew he’d always been half a prick in my book. But the dubious logic of my self-directed pep talk seemed to possess the power of temporary exoneration. And although I had neither studied nor pretended to have studied any Zen philosophy, I decided in that bathroom to begin living in the moment.

  I looked deeply “into” the place where the medicine cabinet had been and chanted, “Medi-cine cabi-net. Medi-cine cabi-net.”

  I opened both taps and let the water run from tan to clear, per James’s instructions. I started to wonder how much your average medicine cabinet goes for. Thirty bucks? Forty? Thirty bucks seemed reasonable for a medicine cabinet. I traced its absence many times. I passed my hand through its void. “Medi-cine cabi-net.” I started to wonder who got custody of the medicine cabinet that had once been there. And did they fight over it? The possibility of Pamela and James going to war over a thirty-dollar medicine cabinet made me feel like I had regained consciousness on the concourse of a dead midwestern shopping mall.

  Fuck the fucking Buddhists.

  I peeked under the sink for a razor left behind in the move. A shave might change my world completely. I ran the shower, giving the water time to get clean and hot. I weighed the chances of Jocelyn and me someday being friends. It was un-fucking-likely. She and I were strictly scorched earthlings. If we didn’t get back together this time, I was sure I’d never see her again. I stepped into the shower and brushed my teeth with my finger.

  “Motherfuck.” I clawed what was left of the soap from the soap-dish. It was like a dry sliver of Romano cheese. A small window in the shower wall promised to open on the backyard. When I tried to unlock it, the fixture broke free from the water-rotten sash and bounced around the tub.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  I tapped into the reserve strength in my legs to raise the paint-sealed window. I stuck my head out the window into the brisk sunlight, half expecting the guillotine’s blade to finish me off.

  On the far side of the clothes-dryer vent, against the toolshed, leaned the forlorn Huffy Sweet Thunder bicycle Pamela had gotten for her tenth birthday. I sized it up, encouraged by the legend of the great George Jones piloting a ride-on lawn mower miles into town to score booze. George Jones is a genius, and I am not. It was only fitting that I should have to pedal a child’s dilapidated toy.

  I got out of the shower and began drying myself with my dirty underwear, the only piece of clothing I could spare. When the pitiful trunks could drink no more, I swung them over the curtain rod. If I was going to be there for any length of time, me and Sweet Thunder were going to have to make a run into town for supplies.

  AS I STEPPED OUT into the backyard, I could feel the pores in my face tighten. I took the half bag of cashews from a pocket of my denim jacket. When these nuts were growing on the tree in Iran or Turkey or wherever the fuck it was, did they ever imagine this is how they’d end up? I lifted the bag to my mouth and chugged. The dormant back lawn was as tough as an equestrian brush. The sound of it abrading the soles of my shoes was plangent accompaniment to the crunching in my head.

  I grabbed Sweet Thunder by a handle grip, leaned it toward the ground, and surveyed the damage. Every visible inch of chrome and the pink-and-white color scheme was freckled with rust. The quilted pink vinyl seat was split at the rear, and when I banged it with my hand to see if it was sound, it coughed crumbs of brittle foam. The tires still held some air, but their painted whitewalls were gray and weakened by craquelure. I gave the bike a good hard shake. Nothing fell off, so I fell on.

  My knees banged against my elbows as I pedaled away from the safety of the house’s gravitational pull. The rusted chain moaned like a dolphin tortured to within an inch of its life. The whole machine—myself included—was so shaky, the rear wheel threatened to overtake the front.

  I stopped at the junction where Opal Cove Road, my sister’s residential street, intersected Plymouth Street, the town’s main thoroughfare. During the summer, traffic on Plymouth Street slowed to a crawl. But in the off-season, laid-off house painters, handymen, and half-in-the-bag drywall hangers could do fifty-plus and almost never kill anyone. I turned up my collar and started left toward town.

  There was a Great Atlantic Job Lot supply store a couple miles down the road. They sold everything from heavy-duty steel HVAC couplings coated with neoprene to boxes of counterfeit Cocoa Puffs cereal.

  I was as aerodynamic as a pug-nosed city bus. I must have looked like a lunatic, my body absorbing the tiny bicycle as we moved forward with just enough momentum to remain upright. A cop driving in the opposite direction toasted my effort with a Dunkin’ Donuts medium coffee.

  “Fucking great.”

  I crested a mild incline. As I coasted down the long far side, I opened my mouth and let the nippy headwind inflate my lungs and do some of my breathing for me. My hands and face were freezing, but my torso was damp with sweat. It was like having to take a spectacular piss while dying of thirst.

  To my right, the beach was peaceful and empty, except for the odd bundled-up elderly couple and driftwood-gnawing dog. The late-October sun was still bright enough to soften the color of the water that had already begun to sour toward a winter gray. On my left, marine equipment suppliers, bait-and-tackle shops, scuba outfitters, and rickety, lucrative clam shacks were shut down until Memorial Day. I battled the wind and followed the shoreline for the rest of the trip, past sand-blown beach parking lots with gates locked and signs that read Closed for Season. In the distance on the left, I could see Great Atlantic Job Lot’s giant yellow sign. I bargained with my clamoring respiratory system: You get this bike to that sign, then we smoke.

  WHEN I MET Jocelyn I knew within minutes I was going to either marry her or completely destroy my life trying. It never occurred to me that both things could happen.

  On the morning that kicked off the era known as Mein Jocelyn Kampf, I woke to the smell of perfectly good coffee ruined with hazelnut. As I passed the bathroom, I could hear Richie in the shower, singing Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick.” I had a good idea what constituted a successful night in his mind, and he must have had one because he was singing and retching, instead of just the latter.

  “Hey, cunt-lip, make sure you rinse the tub,” I said, a wishful thought at best even if he could have heard me. “I don’t want your bum chum’s crabby pubes sticking to my feet.” Like most guy friends who live together, Richie and I could sling it pretty raw at home. We meant only about a quarter of it. If what we said in the privacy of our own home was overheard on the outside, we’d be tried as hate criminals.

  I stopped short in the kitchen doorway. An attractive woman I’d never seen before was sitting at our rusty chrome-and-Formica table.

  “Sorry about that. I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

  “So gay bashing’s okay only if the right people hear it?”

  Here we go, I thought. If I had known her, I would have said, Yes, it’s okay. If she had known me, she would have known I was just fucking around.

  “We always talk that way to each other. It was just a joke.”

  “I’m kidding,” she said. “I’m kidding.” She slapped her knee. “Touchy, aren’t we?”

  I liked her instantly.

  “Thanks. Just what I need bright and early.”

  She seemed proud of herself for messing with my head so successfully. She tried to untangle a fuck-knot in her hair. I made sure my T-shirt was covering the
fly of my boxers as I passed her on my way to the sink. The dish-water in the grubby Rubbermaid tub was greasy and orange from a Bolognese sauce Lello had plagiarized from a larger talent. I fished out a spoon and a pink mug encircled by a bracelet of cartoon bunnies going down on each other. I tested the shower-weakened stream for warmth and squeezed onto the sponge enough Palmolive to wash a car. I peeked over my shoulder at her. An unlit smoke swung from her bottom lip.

  “Can I bum one of those?”

  She tapped the top of the pack against the instep of her hand. A low-pitched clang signaled the end of Richie’s shower. She lit two cigarettes and fixed one in the ashtray so its filter pointed to the empty seat across from her. A bottle of Wild Turkey that had been half-empty the previous evening was now completely empty. I poured myself what was left of the coffee and took a seat.

  “So you’re the roommate,” she said.

  “So I’m the roommate.”

  She said her name was Josie—or at least that was the name she went by because she hated her real name.

  “How bad can it be?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  Richie screamed through the last line of the song three times until he got it just right. Then he started coughing violently.

  “Yup, he’s a real trip, all right,” I said with an astonishment-veneered pride.

  “Oh, I’m discovering that pretty quick.”

  A portable turntable hi-fi unit from the seventies sat on a filing cabinet next to the table. A record was still spinning from the night before. I yanked the cord from the wall socket and stopped the record with the fat of my fist.

  “Do you know this record?” I picked up the jacket to Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left.

  “I didn’t until last night. This morning, technically.” She touched her face nervously, aware she’d revealed too much.

  “What did you think of it? Pretty great, no?”

  “Oh, my God, yes. I can’t believe I’d never heard of him.”

  “Nobody has. They never will because the music business is fucked.” Everything I knew about how fucked up the music business was came from a story about Fugazi I’d skimmed in Magnet.

  “Suicide, right?”

  “Pills,” I said.

  “That’s how I’d do it.”

  “Depends on the pills. Imagine trying to overdose on speed.” I’d taken speed exactly zero times, but I was talking like speed and me were old adversaries.

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t do drugs.”

  Smooth move, Ex-Lax.

  “Can I have a look at that?” she asked. I handed her the record jacket. There was a hickey close to her elbow. She touched each title as she read it. “‘River Man.’ That song is so spooky. We listened to it like fifty times in a row.”

  “I know, right? The way the strings start out so legato.” I let the word legato hang out there to lure her into asking me if I was musician. She didn’t bite.

  “Totally spooky,” she said. Then she did something horrible. She started to scat to her tone-deafened interpretation of the melody to “River Man.” It was chilling in its unqualified and grotesque sincerity. And it went on too long. She finally grabbed her hair in frustration, as if the song she couldn’t get out of her head were “Dancing on the Ceiling” or anything by Mike and the Mechanics.

  Richie breezed into the kitchen, still buttoning up his Esposito’s embroidered white oxford. He growled like a he-man when he saw Josie. He pulled her to her feet by her belt buckle and kissed her hard before she could protest. Then she was all his.

  “Mmmmmmm,” they moaned in unison, like they were eating from the neck of the same caribou. While they kissed, Richie’s hands moved up the back of her bare thighs and disappeared in the leg openings of her cut-off shorts. He grabbed two handfuls of ass and lifted her off her feet. She locked her legs around him. The whole scene was fucking gross. I tilted my chair back like a bored chain-smoking sixth-grader.

  “Should I leave?”

  They peeled apart like the halves of a developing Polaroid photo about to reveal the image of two infatuated people fucking.

  “I’m the one who has to leave,” Richie said, all lovey- dovey, still staring into Josie’s eyes. I thought he was going to call her Poopsie or Snuggle Buns. “The wop’s got a hair across his ass for me because two of my tables sent their braciole back last night.”

  “Stupid braciole,” Josie said like a disappointed kindergartner.

  Richie snorted and stared menacingly at her. “But I’ll see you later,” he said, and went for her belt again. She tried to elude him with some over-the-top dance steps. She was an all-too-willing participant in the embarrassing theater of it.

  “Unhand me, you brute. I’ll cry rape.” She swatted the air with Five Leaves Left. “Back! Back!” she said like a lion trainer.

  Richie got serious. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s an original Hannibal Records release you’re holding there.”

  Josie came down. “Sorry.” She surrendered the jacket.

  Richie looked it over, at first for damage, then simply to admire it and the larger idea of Nick Drake. “Man, to play like that, the guy must have made a deal with the devil.”

  “It’s like he was superhuman or something,” Josie said.

  Richie was stunned, like he’d just answered his door-bell to find Ed McMahon standing there with a giant cardboard check. “You know this record?”

  “What, are you kidding?” Josie asked.

  “No. Nobody knows Nick Drake.” He turned to me. “Is this fucking cool or what? I finally meet a hot girl who has halfway decent taste in music.”

  Josie got up and ran to the bathroom. She slammed the door, and the towel rack fell to the floor.

  Richie was confused. “What the fuck?”

  “Dude,” I whispered, “she said you guys were listening to Nick Drake all night.”

  Richie’s face showed a different kind of concern. Either very small missing pieces of the night before were coming back to him or very large ones were not.

  “Did you fuck her?” He didn’t answer. He made the slow, strategizing walk to the bathroom door. I took a cigarette from Josie’s pack and lit it.

  “Is everything okay in there?” Richie asked. No answer. “Josie?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  “Well, I am.” She flushed the toilet.

  Richie waited until it died down. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” The faucet went on, then off. “You should just go to work.”

  “I don’t want to leave you like this.”

  “Go. I’m okay.”

  “You sure?” No answer. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, only if you’re sure.”

  “I am.”

  “But you’ll come by the restaurant so I can see you before you head back?” Josie didn’t answer.

  It sucked for me to witness the whole thing. Richie really was a good guy, but every so often an innocent got chewed up in his gears.

  “Okay? You’ll swing by the restaurant before you go?”

  “Sure,” Josie said.

  Richie had probably been banking on some quick, pre-dinner-rush skull in the alley behind Esposito’s. Now, if Josie showed up at all, he’d have to hide in the walk-in freezer until she left.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you later. I hope you feel better.” He walked back to the kitchen at a noticeably fast clip. He swept his keys up off the table.

  “What about her?” I whispered.

  “Just wait here until her ride shows up, please?”

  “Christ.” Richie dashed out the back door. I could feel the kitchen quieting down, like a placid body of water that had just finished swallowing a cruise ship. I polished off most of the smoke before Josie emerged from the bathroom. Here eyes were puffy, and her nose was pink. She took the seat across from me and started sobbing. I touched her shoulder on the place where her bra s
trap was digging into her skin.

  Her girlfriend knocked on the screen door.

  “It’s open,” I said.

  Josie ran to her girlfriend and gave her a weepy hug. My future wife scowled at me from over Josie’s shoulder. “What the fuck did you do to her?” Jocelyn demanded, holding Josie up so she wouldn’t leak through the floor.

  I LET SWEET THUNDER recover against a chain-link cage filled with empty propane tanks, and went inside the Great Atlantic Job Lot. A true connoisseur of food can take a bite of the house specialty and identify its ingredients. I took one whiff and detected PVC vinyl, rubber cement, mothballs, a hint of tarragon, mesquite wood charcoal, and Absorbine Junior muscle rub.

  A wind-battered elderly woman wearing an airbrush-on-white Robert Goulet concert sweatshirt stood at the only activated register. A tablecloth-sized piece of heavy clear plastic hung by its four corners from the high ceiling and served as a catch basin for whatever was dripping down into it. A length of rubber surgical tubing punctured the amniotic bulge and shunted the liquid out of sight through the “Employees Only” door. I grabbed a shopping cart and got down to business.

  “Hello,” I said to Goulet.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I negotiated the narrow aisles, finding in logical order a twelve-pack of white tube socks; a six-pack of no-name briefs; a seven-pack of no-name T-shirts; a camouflaged knit hunter’s hat and gloves; a gray polyester hooded sweatshirt; a tube of green Close-Up toothpaste with a free, extra-firm bristled toothbrush; a spool of “Jackson and Jackson” dental floss; a bar of Lux soap; and a beach towel that said “Fisherman’s Friend,” with a cartoon depicting a naked-from-the-waist-down fisherman getting a blow job underwater from a fugu. I also picked up two tires and tubes for Sweet Thunder; two tins of salted cashews; a box of toffee popcorn; a can of Wyler’s “Limited Edition” cola-flavored drink powder; a couple of bungee cords, just in case; and a large backpack to carry it all in. I offloaded the cart’s contents onto the conveyor.