It Feels So Good When I Stop Read online

  When I was a kid, the suicide hotline signs posted at either end of the Bourne Bridge were sources of quality funning around for my family. My mother said my father and Pamela and I were bad for joking about desperate people, but she was saying it as much for herself. She always ended up laughing with us.

  I was too hungry to bike the ten miles without eating first. I headed over to the Crow’s Nest and stuffed my face. The Crow’s Nest’s patron-attracting hook was that it had once been the galley of an actual ship. But that was about a hundred years ago. Since then there had been numerous sloppy additions and upgrades. There was nothing except a wall of telltale photos and the unusual narrowness of the main dining room to hint at its original gig.

  The Nimitz was the biggest one-stop-shopping breakfast on the menu. I ordered a chocolate malted shake on the side, and drank it right from the stainless steel cup. My waitress could have been a contender for Ms. Off-Season East Falmouth. I closed my eyes, and hers became the tight-pored voice of a girl half her age.

  “Makes you think you’ll never feel hungry again,” she said.

  She was absolutely right. I watched her wipe down the counters while Roger Whittaker sang “Durham Town.” I pictured her and me getting an apartment together and living a life free from turbulence.

  “Makes you think you’ll never feel hungry again,” I heard her say to a couple guys a few tables away. Turns out she had to say it. That was the Crow’s Nest’s slogan. It was printed on the back of her sweatshirt and others like it on sale at the register for $15.95. It figured she was pitching me. I know what it’s like serving people for money and not from the goodness of your own heart. She wrote, “Thanks a bunch, Jeanine,” and drew a smiley face at the bottom of my check. It was an insincere, tip-milking come-on.

  I started thinking about a girl named Jeanine whom I’d had sex with a single, unhappy time. We were both sophomores at UMass. I was a much deeper shade of sexual green than she was.

  I’d met UMass Jeanine a couple of times through our mutual friend Claire, but she was too hyper for me. And she had an overbite I just could not forgive. Claire was driving us back to Amherst after a long weekend in February. It was a rainy Presidents’ Day, and already dark by the time we left Boston. Claire was a small, jittery girl with short, noticeably thinning hair. She dressed like a child. She always wore corduroys that were maroon or yellow or aqua. She downshifted her Dodge Omni into the gear designed for snow and never deviated from it or the right lane. Her bony ass squirmed on a folded towel she sat on for lift.

  Traffic, shitty visibility, and the fact that I am a horribly nervous passenger made the Mass Turnpike a white-knuckle migraine maker. Claire kept the heat cranked because the defroster was fucked. When I wasn’t obeying her short orders to wipe the windshield with a dedicated chamois, I was stabbing the phantom brake pedal on the passenger side. Claire stabbed the real brakes every time the spray plume from a passing truck drenched her windshield.

  A George Michael EP cassette of five different mixes of the tune “I Want Your Sex” never left the tape player. When “Monogamy Mix” came around for the third time, I turned the power off. Claire was curt. She corrected me. She said it was her driving music. It relaxed her, okay?

  For most of the drive I felt like I could be sick at any second. Not Jeanine. She said that since her bulimia was in remission, she refused to not see the positive in everything. I didn’t buy it. She reminded me of an overly bubbly suicide failure pretending to be over it.

  I made a few comments about how a beer at the end of the drive was in order. Jeanine said she could really go for something with Midori in it. That was the extent of our flirting. I was wearing hemmed acid-wash jeans, a gray UMass sweatshirt, and white leather Reebok sneakers; in spite of all that, when we pulled up to her student apartment in Puffton Village, Jeanine asked me if I still wanted that beer.

  We wound up on her Salvation Army sofa. One of the three seat cushions was gone; it broke the ice. We had to sit close. She read me her favorite passage from Sartre’s Nausea—where the main dude almost drops dead from merely seeing a bloated scrap of paper in a puddle. Then she started shampooing me—both of us fully clothed—with beer right there on the couch. She kept saying she’d do anything I wanted. Anything. That all I had to do was tell her what I wanted her to do. She started kissing my throat. She’d put on too much Anaïs Anaïs during her last trip to the can. I could taste it. I asked her if she had any protection. She said if she got pregnant she’d just kill it.

  I GAVE Crow’s Nest Jeanine my standard 20 percent tip and left the restaurant. The sky was an electric-blue monochrome textile interrupted by Magritte-white crowns of cauliflower. It insisted I watch. I straddled Sweet Thunder in the lot and lit a smoke. I felt like getting laid.

  “This is not a fucking pipe.”

  I started thinking about how the French phrase for giving someone head translates back to English as “to make the pipe.” Jocelyn was fluent in both. I could be doing something as sexually arousing as spanking the bottom of a bunged-up toaster, and she’d poke her head in and ask, “Make the pipe?” If I took a rain check—which almost never happened—it was partly because there’d always be more where that came from. Jocelyn was of a different mind. She didn’t take enough things for granted.

  I finished my smoke, went back into the Crow’s Nest, and jerked off into a urinal.

  JOCELYN AND I woke from an afternoon nap and started fucking. She was on top of me. Her face always looked pained during sex. I didn’t think anything out of the ordinary was up until she stopped mid-sprint and started to cry.

  “What is it?”

  “This,” she said. “This.” She opened her arms, presenting the moment and beyond.

  “What about it?” She brushed the hair away from her eyes to make sure I could see a deathlike inevitability in them. “One of these times really is going to be the last time.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I sighed.

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “And guess what? We’re all going to die.”

  She fell onto her side. “I know. We are.”

  FROM WHEN I was about six until I started high school, my parents rented a house in the town of Dennis for two weeks most summers. When we were savvy enough to catch the pun, Pamela and I would crack up as my old man pointed out triumphantly upon approaching it, the sign that read Entering Dennis.

  During one of the energy crisis summers—I must have been eight or nine—they had odd/even days. You could buy gasoline only on an odd day if your license plate ended in an odd number, and only on an even day if your plate ended in an even number. I don’t remember if our Mercury Monarch was odd or even, but it was our day. My old man made an adventure out of it. He got me up at five to beat the rush, and it worked. We lined up at the Arco station behind a short queue. My father nudged me. “We—you and I—are very smart people.” Arco had a sales promotion going back then. If you filled up, you got whichever free miniature Noah’s Ark animal they were giving away that week. It didn’t make sense to me, and I was only a kid. We were in the middle of an energy crunch. People were dying to overpay for gas. They didn’t need a biblical myth to bring in the punters.

  I was sitting on the sofa-sized front seat, feasting on leaded gasoline fumes. My old man stuffed his change into a pocket of his new Bermuda shorts as he walked back to the car. He tossed a pack of Hostess Donut Gems and a plastic animal onto my lap through the open window.

  “It’s a zebra,” he said. “Next week’s its mate.” I couldn’t care less. I’d just seen my dream purchase: A cluster of goatskin wineskins hung on an outdoor rack. Six dollars and ninety-five cents was a lot of cash.

  “Well, it’s your money,” my old man said. When we got back to our rented cottage, my mother looked at the wineskin like it was still bloody. She told me to soak it in soapy water before I used it. After that, every drink tasted like Lemon Fresh Joy. It gave me headaches, so I stopped drinking out of it. I broached the subject of
buying another one with my old man. This time he put his foot down.

  SINCE OPENING IN 1949, Donnelly’s Outfitters had been just over the Bourne Bridge into Cape Cod. We always stopped there either at the beginning or end of our family vacations. It was a tradition.

  Donnelly’s will have a wineskin.

  The building was an army Quonset hut painted to look like a “Go west, young man” - era trading post. The anachronistic-by-design visage was accentuated by Precision Auto-Cad Fabricators, Inc., with which Donnelly’s shared a chain-link fence. When I was a kid coming here to ride the go-karts and rummage through the shelves packed with cool shit, it really seemed like the place was out in the sticks. Like the person who’d buy the bear trap from above the faux fireplace might actually get some local intended use out of it.

  I pulled on the locked door. The lights were on inside, but I couldn’t see any people. The same sad man-sized mechanical flying fish hung on a wire fixed to an exposed ceiling rib. I knocked a few times. Nothing. I followed a mulch path around the side of the building to a side entrance. I could hear someone out back riding a go-kart. I followed the noise.

  The lone go-kart darting around the track was piloted by the original Mr. Donnelly’s son, Mr. Donnelly Jr. He must have been in his seventies. He looked like a dehydrated version of his younger self. His decimated white comb-over stood up like a ragged flap of dead skin. His knees were in his armpits. He was wearing a snowflake-patterned red cardigan I know was from Lands’ End because I got the same one, but in blue, from my mother’s sister Dee two Christmases earlier. Seeing Mr. Donnelly Jr. in that sweater helped me to further rest my case; it was not a sweater worn by a guy my age. Sure, Kurt Cobain made cardigans cool again, but his were beat to shit. I had the good sense to leave the tags on Aunt Dee’s gift, that way I could get more fuck-off money from a used-clothes store in Amherst. Even so, I only got ten bucks for it. Dee lived way up in North Con-way, New Hampshire, and she’s dead now anyway, so no harm, no foul.

  I moved through the chain-link corral that framed the crabgrass infield, the go-kart track, and a small prefab garage that looked new compared to everything else. The asphalt circuit was cracked and worn nearly silver. Skid marks pointed in unfathomable directions. The air smelled of salt, pine sap, and lawn mowers.

  Mr. Donnelly Jr. sneered as he maneuvered the speeding go-kart through a tight chicane. He momentarily went up on two side wheels, then slammed down without even braking. The last time I’d driven a go-kart, I was in junior high, and it was around that very track. They didn’t seem at all dangerous to me back then.

  Mr. Donnelly Jr. noticed me leaning against the fence. He eased off the gas, as if capitulating to the hard reality that his victory at Le Mans was a mathematical impossibility. He raised his be-with-you-in-a-second finger and pulled out of sight into the garage. The engine went quiet off camera. He walked toward me. I felt kind of bad because he looked like he’d been having a good time, and, really, how many good times does a guy his age have left?

  “Didn’t think anyone was coming today.” He was tall and thin. His kneecaps knocked like ball-peen hammer-heads against the inside of his pants. His cheeks were bloodshot and stained with age spots. But it was a kind face. His hands looked kind, too, but you never know. They isolated a key on a large, crowded ring.

  “Sorry to pull you away,” I said.

  “That’s what we’re here for, right?” He was the type of benevolent guy who says “It shows to go you” or, if you’re a kid, pretends his thumb is your stolen nose. He looked out over the empty go-kart track. “I still love riding them, even after all this time.” He didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed by the fact that he wasn’t talking about golf or bowling.

  “I don’t remember them going that fast.”

  “They don’t usually. The one I was driving has no governor on the carburetor. Someone your size”—he looked me up and down—“could do thirty-five, forty easy. Give it a go? You don’t have to open it up all the way if you don’t want.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Come on. Give it whirl.”

  “Maybe another time, thanks.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Another time.” I think he was slightly miffed because he got down to business without making any more small talk. He looked at me, then locked the gate behind him. As we walked back toward the store, I felt like I should offer something to fill the silence, like I owed him that much.

  “I used to come here every summer with my family.”

  “Cape’s a nice place.”

  “I mean right here.” I pointed at the ground.

  “Lots of people been through here.” He bent over and picked up a flattened cardboard coffee cup that had blown onto his property.

  Okay, fuck it, I thought. I don’t want to talk, either.

  Mr. Donnelly Jr. decided to forgive and forget: “Just down for a visit? Good time of year for it. All the loonies are gone.”

  “Sort of. I’m staying with family in East Falmouth.”

  “I like East Falmouth. East Falmouth, Falmouth, Barnstable—they’re more real.” He rubbed some salt of the earth between his thumb and fingers. “Real people. Know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “That’s good.” He laughed. “Because I don’t know if I know what I mean.” His teeth were neat, though not his own. We were friends again. He unlocked the side door and flung it open. The sleigh bells fixed to it chimed. The interior of the store—contents included—looked the same as it did when I was kid, only now I noticed an irrelevance that must have always been there. I overcame an urge to not go in.

  “So, what is it I can do you for?”

  I lied right to his face. “It’s kind of silly, but I bought one of those goatskin wineskins here about twenty years ago—” He snapped his fingers and made a beeline to the correct shelf. “This what you’re looking for?”

  “That’s it exactly.” It came in a cellophane sleeve that was brittle and yellow around the edges. The staple that sealed the package was rusted. Mr. Donnelly Jr. took it from my hand and brought it up to the counter. We both knew my buying it was a forgone conclusion.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “How many of those little Jameson’s nips you got back there?”

  “Let’s see. One, two, three, four. Four.”

  “I’ll take all of them.”

  It was a few days before Halloween. Mr. Donnelly Jr. looked at me like he’d just rung up my bag of apples, and I’d asked him to toss in a pack of razors.

  I GOT BACK onto Route 28. People who had jobs were driving to their lunch spots. I stayed on the thin strip of right-unjustified pavement that separated the white line from a sand-and-scrub-brush shoulder. A couple times I had to stop to avoid veering off the road or into traffic. I wore the wineskin like a shoulder holster against my skin, concealed beneath my hooded sweatshirt and denim jacket.

  I could see the Bourne Bridge in the distance. It was an arc of gray discipline rising from, then dipping back into, the mayhem of trees. It seemed out of place and was as arresting as the sudden appearance of a second, larger moon.

  As I passed a dirt fire road on my right, the speed-trap cop parked in it gave me a choked-off blast of his siren. I stopped. He waved me over to his window. He was shaking his head like he was witnessing a weekend inventor about to test a prototype flying suit.

  “What are you thinking?” he said. He was wearing a baseball type of cop hat and one of those black marksman’s sweaters with the leather rifle-butt shoulder patches. The visible portion of his close-cropped blond hair screamed honorable discharge. He looked like the young leader of a Mormon paramilitary group.

  “Nothing.”

  “Affirmative.” The admitted purposelessness of what I was up to did not improve his opinion of me. I was guilty as fuck of being stupid. He looked at the bike and the four-day growth on my face and clothes. If I had been wearing the wineskin outside my jacket he would have run my license. />
  My license. I felt a jolt of raw nerve panic. I was sure I’d left it on the writing table at the Gramercy Park Hotel. I folded my arms across my chest to flatten any suspicious bulges.

  “Didn’t you read the signs? No Pedestrians includes bicycles.”

  I turned on the respect, but not too heavy. “No, sir, I must have missed them.”

  He was still seated too low and comfortably for me to go into full panic mode. He did some police work. “Where do you live?”

  “Amherst.”

  “Massachusetts?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m on vacation,” I said, careful not to sound flip.

  “And you’re what, just out sightseeing?” I nodded. “On that bike?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where were you planning on going?”

  “I thought I might make it to the bridge.”

  “That bridge?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s not going to happen.” He grew six inches. “Where are you staying?”

  “At my sister’s in East Falmouth. Opal Cove Road.”

  “And you took Twenty-eight? The whole way?”

  I nodded again. He sighed and opened his door without warning. He got out of the cruiser. Turns out he wasn’t much taller than me.

  “I really didn’t know it was illegal,” I said.

  “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Because it’s not warm out, and you’re sweating pretty good.”

  “It’s a hard bike to ride. And I’m out of shape.”

  He looked at the bike and then at me. Both things I said made sense to him. He walked to the rear of the cruiser, opened the trunk, and started shifting things. “There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts just up the road. I’m going to drop you off, and you’re going to figure out the rest from there.”